A plane hopper is a person who travels often to different planes/universes/what have you.
So, what's with this Plane Hoppers' Alliance? Not eveyone who travels like that is a member, are they?
No, but many of them are. There's a difference between a plane hopper and a Plane Hopper. Plane Hoppers belong to the Alliance. Plane Hoppers are all plane hoppers, but not all plane hoppers are Plane Hoppers. Get it?
So, what's this alliance do?
A secondary function is to serve as a way to get together a bunch of people with various talents at short notice, when a certain member needs to get something done or needs some help now! It's an enormous pool of people, easily reached.
Oh, yeah- they have a vested interest in platinum. They know a way to create magic/psionically endowed rings that enable someone who normally can't open/find/create portals/wormholes. So, if you want their attention, offer them platinum. They also like to have it around since it's such a compact currency..
PHILOSOPHY
As everyone knows, whenever a group forms, some distinctive things come out as in their collective personality. Members of the PHA do a lot of heavy-duty philosophizing, especially on the subject of gods and men and what's the point of it all. After all, when you see all the religions of hundreds of worlds, as well as knowing where most of those gods whom they worship live, well, you have to find some way of dealing with it.
The Plane Hoppers have two main ways of dealing with it:
a) None of these 'divinities' are actually gods, or
b) All of them are.
Alright, some definition is required. To a Plane Hopper's way of thinking, you have to make a break between what is a god (omnipotent, unreachable, etc.) and what is just somebody/thing that happens to be worshipped. A minor demon may be worshipped, but it's not a god, to their thinking. It's just a demon.
So, a divinity is somebeing/thing that is worshipped, no matter how powerful or weak, and a god is what everyone thinks of when they think of a god- the center/creator of the universe, etc.
There are also those who say that one of the divinities is a god and the rest are all just playing at it, perhaps to serve that god, to work against him, or whatever. Of this camp, the most numerous are the Christian Plane Hoppers.
Well, you have the usual.. luck, fate, and authors.
Authors?