D&D General Which was your favourite Forgotten Realms Cosmology?

Which was your favourite Forgotten Realms Cosmology?

  • Original Great Wheel

    Votes: 35 47.3%
  • World Tree

    Votes: 7 9.5%
  • World Axis

    Votes: 18 24.3%
  • 5e Great Wheel+

    Votes: 14 18.9%

dave2008

Legend
Great Wheel

View attachment 360173

World Tree

View attachment 360177

World Axis

View attachment 360179

5e Great Wheel
This may be wrong. I was finding it hard to compare the original wheel to the new wheel and it was saying that they added the new planes from Planescape at some point. I thought I would find a better picture.

View attachment 360221

I do like this one of the inner planes though.

View attachment 360223
The top image is actual the Great Wheel + of 5e. You can tell because it notes the "elemental chaos." That name was not used in the traditional great wheel. It also has the shadowfell which was not part of the og Great Wheel.

What you listed as the 5e great wheel had the outer planes from the og Great Wheel and then you show the inner planes from the 5e great wheel (minus the elemental chaos which is further out).

Here is the og great wheel (from 1e Deities and Demigods):
The cosmos:
1714295977388.png


Inner Planes:
1714295925852.png


1714296005651.png


The outer planes:
1714296029871.png
 
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EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way
The World Axis, because it was actually designed with intent to give us things that were worth playing in and which were motivated by classic tropes and myths, not just random pseudo-systematic BS that only exists to fill grid boxes and create a fundamentally modern and scientific worldview rather than a properly medieval or even renaissance one.

Half the "evil" planes of the Great Wheel are essentially indistinguishable, and so are several of the "good" ones. The elemental, paraelemental, and quasielemental planes are utterly superfluous 99% of the time, and the 1% that actually matters can easily be replaced with something better. I doubt even half of Great Wheel fans can explain what the Ethereal Plane is even doing. Etc.

Meanwhile, the World Axis has just five planes, all of them worth visiting (plus one scary bad un-place), all of them interesting and vibrant and mythically resonant. Mortal plane, Astral Sea (which contains both heavens and the Hells), Elemental Chaos (which contains the Abyss), Feywild (fairyland of magic and enchantment), Shadowfell (plane of death, undeath, and darkness), Far Realm (un-place of madness, corruption, and the unmaking of existence.) Comprehensive, effective, parsimonious, and significantly more like how the actual cosmology of Antiquity, the Medieval Period, and even parts of the Renaissance would view things.
 

EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way
Whichever one we encountered first. Might as well ask "what year did you start playing D&D?"
I technically started playing in 2e, "grew up" playing 3e, and then finally got converted to 4e when I read the books and realized how much I had been deceived by both others I had trusted, and by my own foolish beliefs.

So by your standards I should definitely only like either the Great Wheel or the World Tree, since the former was 2e and the latter was (technically) 3e, even if most folks ended up sticking to the Great Wheel in 3e IME. Yet my actual preference is, as stated, the World Axis, because it is simultaneously much more like an actual mythic cosmology, and infinitely more playable than the painfully artificial "a place for everything and everything in its place" Great Wheel.
 

Aldarc

Legend
I technically started playing in 2e, "grew up" playing 3e, and then finally got converted to 4e when I read the books and realized how much I had been deceived by both others I had trusted, and by my own foolish beliefs.

So by your standards I should definitely only like either the Great Wheel or the World Tree, since the former was 2e and the latter was (technically) 3e, even if most folks ended up sticking to the Great Wheel in 3e IME. Yet my actual preference is, as stated, the World Axis, because it is simultaneously much more like an actual mythic cosmology, and infinitely more playable than the painfully artificial "a place for everything and everything in its place" Great Wheel.
Yeah, I started at the very beginning of 3e. I first encountered the Great Wheel. The cosmology of the Realms that I first knew was the World Tree. On the whole, the D&D cosmologies that I preferred were the 4E World Axis and Eberron's Orrery, both of which felt more organic, interesting, and playable than the Great Wheel, which felt like inorganic, grid-filling.
 



One thing about the World Axis cosmology that I did find interesting was the concept of the Feywild and the Shadowfell being echoes of the Material Plane. The Feywild was depicted as a world untouched by civilization. The Shadowfell otoh was depicted as a dead and dying world filled with ruins.

One tweak I would make to the World Axis cosmology is an Elemental Plane that is also an echo of the Prime. Imagine a world that is constantly beset by natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes/hurricanes, etc.).
 

EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way
One thing about the World Axis cosmology that I did find interesting was the concept of the Feywild and the Shadowfell being echoes of the Material Plane. The Feywild was depicted as a world untouched by civilization. The Shadowfell otoh was depicted as a dead and dying world filled with ruins.

One tweak I would make to the World Axis cosmology is an Elemental Plane that is also an echo of the Prime. Imagine a world that is constantly beset by natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes/hurricanes, etc.).
That's covered by the Elemental Chaos. It is, quite literally, constantly in flux. Some distant part of it might be a nigh-infinite ocean of fire or the like, but most parts of it that aren't being actively stabilized (such as the City of Brass) are in varying degrees of "constant natural disaster" upheaval.
 

That's covered by the Elemental Chaos. It is, quite literally, constantly in flux. Some distant part of it might be a nigh-infinite ocean of fire or the like, but most parts of it that aren't being actively stabilized (such as the City of Brass) are in varying degrees of "constant natural disaster" upheaval.
True. My idea of a single elemental plane being an echo of the Prime was drawn from the Elemental Plane in the World of Warcraft MMORPG. In that game, the Elemental Plane is a three-tiered realm with the plane of air being the sky, the planes of earth and water in the middle, and the plane of fire existing below the world's surface. It's a prison plane for the Elementals.

The Elemental Chaos is basically a super-sized version of Limbo. ;)
 

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