Ingress and Egress For Adventurer's Bags

Question

In Are These Adventurer's Bags Unbalanced?, I was able to finalize the properties of an Adventurer's Bag except for one issue Taejang pointed out about being able to stow creature's inside such a Bag:

"This answer does highlight a serious problem. If someone is tortured to an inch of death, and put in a bag, they are left to feel that pain for who knows how long. These bags would become interrogation devices. On the flip side, an injured person could be put in and safely taken to a doctor, even if it takes months to get there. If you want to keep the bags' ability to store living creatures, perhaps the creature can leave the bag at will, regardless of who owns it? Otherwise, they will become prisons, brothels for pimps, slave quarters, and worse."

Obviously, this is a problem, but how do I fix it? I want Bags available to stow creatures, to save or contain them, but to balance that I need to make sure that exiting the bag is possible for someone or something inside it, for the reasons above.

The Answer Must:

1. Take account for the fact that Adventurer's Bag are bags, basically medieval hiking backpacks, and therefore are relatively shapeless unless filled;
2. Take account for the fact that the inside of a Bag is a piece of the Abyss, which functions as a extradimensional 'blank space' where objects are stored, with minimal impact on the Bag's shape and rigidity (when a Bag is filled to capacity, it appears and acts like a bag filled to capacity);
3. The entrance-exit will be an opening in the bag, which may be covered by a flap (and held closed by the ordinary methods for holding a bag's flap closed) or come with buttons or a zipper (which exists due to the efforts of the Engineering class).
4. When one is inside the Bag, one is inside a small Abyss and therefore cannot interact with the walls of the Bag;
5. People and creatures can move freely inside the Bag, allowing them to potentially push the bag (if it has a flap) open and escape. This also allows those inside the Bag to use the items inside with them for escape attempts;
6. Creatures and items inside the Bag can be sacrificed (read: shunted) to the (main) Abyss to pay towards a Bag upgrade, which serves as a last resort for criminals jailed inside a Bag; as no one knows what happens to what is sacrificed, people avoid this fate at all costs.

If I missed something, please let me know, I appreciate your input. Thanks and good luck!

Answer 1

The abyss is home to a great many things, some are minor imps, others great demon lords, and some are Elder Gods with world-shattering power, who don’t quite follow the usual rules of time and space.

Some of these beings can travel from the main abyss to the minor abysses used in bags of holding. They follow rules and codes of conduct both alien and occasionally incomprehensible, and may be capable of forming pacts with other creatures they come across. The most common of these pacts is the one that forms the bag of holding in the first place, which lays down rules like ‘nobody will steal from the bag of holding’ and ‘sacrifices to the greater Abyss get you X extra space’.

These beings don’t typically interfere with the operation of the bags of holding, but if they smell out an opportunity for furthering their power they will take it, while abiding by the strict rules of the terms and conditions that already bind them.

So when a tortured, unhappy soul capable of signing pacts with Elder Beings is thrust into the abyss, you can bet your ass that some Great and Terrible Power will make a pact with them, stripping away their suffering, giving them great power, and potentially freeing them from the minor Abyss they were trapped in in the first place. What’s that? They shouldn’t be able to escape the bag of holding? Didn’t the previous owner of the Bag explain subclause IIV.XXI.VI on the handling of creatures in possession of a Soul and assistance they may be offered in escaping the Abyss?

This makes stuffing living creatures Willy-nilly into a bag of holding a very tricky proposition. The person you stuff in there might come out a very different (vengeful) person indeed, with Eldritch Power to boot. They might not, of course, if they don’t want to enter into a pact with an unknowable force of darkness, but after an eternity of suffering (and bearing in mind some of these beings aren’t strictly bound by time like you or I), are you really willing to risk it? Hell, depending on the exact nature of the pact that formed the bag and the pact your prisoner formed while contained therein you could get all sorts of odd effects going on, like the imprisoned person being thrust out of the bag by a giant tentacle, or the flap of the bag turning into an extradimensional portal.

Of course, if they’re a willing passenger then they’ll politely refuse the Otherworldly Entity’s advances (Right??), and you never have to worry. If they’re not you might find yourself facing a horde of ravening demons pouring out of your knapsack in service to one very, very pissed off, newly minted warlock.

Or a passing Angel could pluck them out of their own personal hell while on an interplanar jaunt, no strings (or demons) attached. That’s the problem with stuffing living creatures into a timeless void outside normal reality: There’s no telling who they might meet.