[ Cordant Planes > Pangaea ]
[ Conditions | Locations | Powers | Animal Lords | Factions | Bestiary ]
The Factions in Pangaea
Despite all the challenges associated with the prehistoric plane, several factions and sects have set up kips in Pangaea, among them the Sinkers, the Dustmen, the Signers, the Wylders, and the Historians. The Wylders require little explanation for why they are drawn to Pangaea, and the Historians heard the chant of Pangaea being the original Beastlands and have come to perform research—but why the Dustmen and Sinkers? The dark of it is that the supercontinent called Pannotia interests them both. As the oldest part of Pangaea it holds darks of which few cutters are aware, such as it being the graveyard where species from throughout the multiverse come to die out.
The Doomguard
It should come as no surprise to learn that the Sinkers have a vested interest in the Great Extinction, for they are best known themselves for destroying and killing. However, the Sinkers who’ve come to Pangaea aren’t the destruction kind. Now that’s not for a lack of trying. The Destroyers have tried many times to enter Pangaea, but every time they do so they get themselves lost in the wilderness, with their machines of entropy turning into tree trunks, weird stone contraptions, and their precious swords turned to pointy sticks. But whenever one of the berks gave up and decided to go back home to Sigil, suddenly they’d find travel really simple. They started to suspect that in the sam way the Beastlands has some kind of inherent intelligence, so too does Pangaea.
Why then do the Sinkers have enough of a presence here to be worth mentioning? The dark of it is that not all Sinkers are obsessed with destroying things. Many, sure, but not all. These so-called Regulators watch entropy from a distance, they don’t assist the decay in any form, they know it’s inevitable, so why help? These Sinkers travelled to Pannotia to watch the extinction of animals from all across the multiverse. It’s something truly sombre and sobering to behold. The great animals of the past, and the lesser-known ones who may not even have names, all follow their instincts to continuing their kind, but they know when their time is up. That is the Regulators’ kind of entropy: the long game of the cosmos.
The Sinkers have established a kip in Pannotia called the Final Stretch, little more than a few dirt huts in mounds with wood to keep them stable. The Decay Knight Utan Longsight (planar quaggoth barbarian/knowledge cleric of Zivilyn [he/him] Doomguard / NG) is the cutter who’s been in Final Stretch for the longest. He’s seen all sorts of horrible fates befall his kin, but he’s not like most of them, he’s free and thinks. Some don’t take Utan seriously as a philosopher, because he barely uses language at all, but he understands actions far more than he lets on. He just hates that he can’t speak with the same fluency that he thinks.
The Heralds of Dust
The Dustmen have a vested interest in Pangaea, which might be confusing to the clueless. See, these cutters believe in something they call the True Death, the idea that a body can only truly die once they have no remaining connections to life. The Great Extinction has, supposedly, concentrated the corpses of ancient animal lords in Vaalbara, the oldest part of Pangaea. What the Dustmen are doing is figuring out whether these beasts, once sentient celestial animal lords, can experience the True Death.
While they might be the embodiment of animals, they nonetheless think, feel, hope, and live like any sapient cutter. So can animals experience True Death? The answer may lie in the Beastlands, the resting place for animals—but normal animals don’t have spiritual have connections like mortals, so are they even eligible for True Death? The Heralds of Dust need to know the answer.
They’re currently sharing a kip with the Sinkers in Final Stretch.
Verdant Guild
The Verdant Guild’s the best known sect that operates in Pangaea. They were the first to settle the Primal Forest. Only a few Wylders are active here, mind. The leader of this local chapter of the Verdant Guide is Jorval Ironskin (petitioner orc-wererhino barbarian [he/him] / Verdant Guild / CG), a petitioner of Indrik.
In life Jorval was the toughest orc in his clan, not the strongest perhaps, but the hardest to hurt, for he had been cursed with lycanthropy that made his skin tough. When he realised there was nothing more for him to learn from his clan he turned his life to adventure as a barbarian, and he would use his curse as a blessing. He worked tirelessly to combine his rage and his curse to work together, and after many years he succeeded. As he succumbs to barbaric rage he turns into his hybrid were-form and uses his lycanthropic condition to his advantage. Jorval became something of a local champion of the region, but he still felt there was something missing. He felt something calling him into the wilderness, and encountering a witch doctor from a rival orc tribe. Setting aside his ingrained enmity, Jorval gradually gained their trust, and before long, he was a student of shamanism.
However, he was not a gifted pupil. Always over-eager to try the next thing, Jorval embarked on a spirit-rope ceremony before he was ready, and ended up writing himself into the dead-book after mistaking one toxic herb for another. Next thing he knew, he found himself in Pangaea, in the presence of Indrik. Since then he’s wanted to protect extinct nature, and when he heard news of the Wylders arriving in Pangaea and struggling to cope with the local wildlife, Jorval joined and soon became the splinter group’s leader.
So far there haven’t been that many poachers turning up here yet, but the Wylders are vigilant. It’s likely that many berks who come here looking from trophies from ‘extinct’ creatures meet a sticky end anyway, for Pangaea is a far more deadly place to hunt than the Beastlands.
Sign of One
Chant goes the Signers were actually the first of Sigil’s factions to discover Pangaea—and of course this went to their heads. “We believed an ancient version of the Beastlands must exist, and so it did”—and all that humbug. Either way, when they learned of the sorry tales of the prehistoric creatures of the plane, they began to imagine the multiverse should have more of them. It was impossible to judge how effective this intervention was from outside the plane, though. A few of the most dedicated Signers, began to relocate to Pangaea. The first group met Wylders caring for the dying animals. Spotting an opportunity when they saw it, Wylders encouraged the Signers to believe in the resurgence of all kinds of extinct creatures. The influence of Pangaea on all of these new arrivals has been slow but inexorable. The Signers who’ve remained on the plane for years have utterly forgotten their former metropolitan lives in Sigil and embraced the ancient plane. Now shamans and hunter-gatherers, they are led by Amaen Lifegiver (planar shiere eladrin druid [she/her] / Sign of One / CG) and call themselves the Ghost Dancers, and have combined their philosophy of changing the multiverse by willing things into existence with ceremonial dancing and invocation of ancestral spirits. And what do you know—it seems to be working.
Revivalists
A small sub-sect of the Historians have a scholarly interest in the Primitive Epoch, particularly the chant that claims it’s older than the Beastlands. If true, then the Beastlands should be returned to its rightful place as a layer of Pangaea, according to their dogma. However, before this can be achieved, the Historians need to determine whether it’s actually correct, and so Zal’Vadrin (planar githzerai diviner [she/her] / Revivalists / CG) has taken the lead on seeking out the real dark. Zal’Vadrin has long sought to re-unite her people into a single gith race once more again. It was this goal that led her to the Revivalist sect in the first place. However, everything she learned caused her to become more frustrated by the implacable hatred between the githyanki and githzerai. Zal is old now and has all but given up on that naive dream. When she heard the rumours about this plane being the original afterlife for animals rather than the Beastlands, this rekindled her interest in planar philosophy—and she embarked on an adventure in Pangaea to find the truth.
Source: SGreen, Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: † from the Pathfinder setting; ‡ Homebrew. All of the Planes of Cordance and the concept of the Splinterlands are homebrew and non-canonical. Expanded from Greg Jensen’s original conception, more information on his Planes of Cordance can be found here. Ghost Dancing was a Native American religious movement from the late 1800s which taught that the proper practise of the dance would reunite the living with the spirits of the dead.