Love of Portals

25 Jun, 2026

I just finished the game Control, and I think it's a solid 6 or 7/10 game,¹ but there's one aspect of the game that really fascinates me, which is the way that the game portrays otherworlds. One concept which repeatedly comes up is the Astral Plane, which is a pretty common trope in certain kinds of genre fiction. In Control, the Astral Plane is supposed to be kind of a nexus for mankind's collective unconscious. It mostly is just an explanation for some of the weird anomalies that occur in the game, but the main character communicates with this giant black pyramid ("The Board") that basically assists or even manages the game's version of the SCP organization.

Additionally, and easily my favorite part of the game, is that there's a couple instances in which you can travel to the Astral Plane and fight this giant bug-like monster that has no connection to The Board and seemingly nothing to do with the rest of the game. I find this concept of an otherworld which is vast and just Weird really fascinating, and I think I've always been attracted to this notion. Another good example of this kind of thing is Corbenic from the SCP Wiki, which is this bizarre afterlife similar to Lovecraft's dreamlands. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something about this idea of vastness, that a world beyond our own or even an infinite number of worlds beyond our own are accessible to us. There's a Tagore poem that always stuck with me that starts with "On the seashore of endless worlds," and while I think it's probably just a poetic way of referring to a coast, I can't help but imagine an ocean cascading into nothingness, on the precipice of another plane of existence.

Something I think would be kind of interesting and fun is to create a campaign which revolves around portalling between different dimensions, not necessarily in a Planescape or Spelljammer sense, but in a more surreal way, like planes that are entirely located within someone's dreams. I like the idea of a 1001 Nights style campaign where players can journey between vastly different genres and end up several layers deep, so to speak, like in the distant past of another planet from the dreams of a creature living in fairyland. It would also be a neat way to get more mileage out of your RPG backlog, chaining together a bunch of modules that are very different but all have portals in them. Certainly something that merits further thought.