D&D (2024) Check Out The New Map Of D&D's Planes!

Snapped from the Barbarian video.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

What is Arborea? Heard the name before but thats it...

The Olympian Glades of Arborea (i.e. the pure CG plane).

Home of the Ancient Greek pantheon (as one might expect) and the Elven pantheon, among others, as well as the old celestial version of the eladrin, back before the Feywild gobbled them up in 4e.

I'll add the first Layer also has the city of Brightwater, the city of Sune, Sharess, Llirra, Tymora, Waunkeen, and briefly Ilmater weirdly.

The second layer is a giant ocean with islands, a playground for Sea Gods.

The third layer is a desert filled with ruins with connection to the Mulan Gods.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Seems, really bad? I mean I know not everyone enjoys the Great Wheel, but this looks boring as hell?

Welcome to my world. Half the evil planes are completely indistinguishable unless people dive deep into the lore. Acheron is probably the only one that really unequivocally stands out from the rest.

Elysium, the Beastlands, and Arborea also look literally identical here. Not that I could have told you anything about the differences between them, because those differences have literally never mattered once in my life.

The Great Wheel is incredibly profligate solely to be profligate. You really don't need 17 motherglubbin' planes. Mechanus, Limbo, the Abyss, the Nine Hells+Acheron (make Acheron's cubes the "shores" of hell, perhaps?), Celestia, Elysium, and Beastlands+Arborea+Ysgard, with Sigil and the Outlands as the "hub" between them, would be plenty. That's less than half the planes shown in the above thing.

And most of the cool stuff from the other ones...can just be part of the many layers of the above planes. After all, the Abyss is nigh-infinite and most of its layers have never been discussed. If you really need it, smush Carceri+Hades+Gehenna together--the battlefield over which the Blood War is fought, where prisoners are kept, where the land itself is warped and twisted by the horrorshow happening day after day, year after year, century after century.

 

[Scribe]

Welcome to my world. Half the evil planes are completely indistinguishable unless people dive deep into the lore. Acheron is probably the only one that really unequivocally stands out from the rest.

I mean...this could be done far better. I did it myself with the AI image generators. This is just weak, poorly realized. The style seems like...I dont know some retro game, the detail doesnt exist, no direction.

Real bad lol

 

[Staffan]

The Great Wheel is incredibly profligate solely to be profligate.

Nowhere in D&D is Gygax's obsession with box-checking more obvious than the planes.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Welcome to my world. Half the evil planes are completely indistinguishable unless people dive deep into the lore. Acheron is probably the only one that really unequivocally stands out from the rest.

Nah, Gehenna is floating volcanoes in a void, and Carceri is a string of red orbs, so they can be quite different. For some reason they didn't indicate those differences in this (admittedly very stylized) map.

 

[Scribe]

For some reason they didn't indicate those differences in this (admittedly very stylized) map.

I dont even know what trendy retro/minimalist game this style is emulating, thats how out of touch I am with the current media landscape.

I hate it lol.

 

[Parmandur]

Snapped from the Barbarian video today, I think.

I think this is indicative of the art style too.


View attachment 368464

Thanks for that, I was listening rather than watching and mainly just looked over to catch the Subclass images.

Some very fun details there, like the hollow earth setup in Bytopia and the Dwarven mining shaft in Arcadia.

 

[J.Quondam]

Hmm. Not a fan of the art style. And some of the planes looking samey is kind of intrinsic to the Great Wheel. A lot of the planes are very similar.

To me, it's vaguely reminiscent of a pie chart in PowerPoint, with some fancy D&D theme option turned on.

.

 

[Yaarel]

So this is moreorless what the floating islands look like, when traveling on a spelljammer thru the Astral Sea. One can see these islands buoyant within the empty mists.

The Astral Sea is a mindscape. The islands can appear together in this arrangement, if "alignment" per se is the organizing principle, thus the associated alignment concepts cluster together. But when other principles are organizing the experience of the mindscape, an island can appear by itself, or even only part of an island, and be part of a conceptual cluster of islands unrelated to alignment.

Because of spacial distortions within the mindscape one can never arrive at Sigil directly. It is infinitely high. If navigating directly toward Sigil, one either ends up at the base of the Spire, or else away from the Outlands entirely. Similarly Mount Celestia.

An island is bigger on the inside than it is the outside that appears when approaching it from the Astral Sea, sometimes infinitely so.


I view Elysium as a realm of utopias. Many successful social experiments play out successfully here. It especially orients around the Human species and its diversity, but other species can be members these Human cultures. In this context, I visualize Elysium as about half urban environments and half wilderness environments. More specifically, about a third being a solid urban ecumenopolis and a third being remote wilderness where wildlife thrives. The other third is a buffer between the two, where suburban civilization integrate harmoniously with wildlife. These zones are obvious from a distance to the Astral Sea traveler, similar to the way a satellite image of the United States at night can easily distinguish luminous urban areas from dark wilderness areas. Elysium is the alignment of True Good, where all things including Law and Chaos work together for the sake of Good. Good takes priority over any conflict. Features of both Law and Chaos are very much present in Elysium. Generally the utopias find ways to juggle the needs both Law and Chaos. The utopias are significantly advanced and especially high tech, whether magitech or supertech. Elysium is a kind of Dao of Good.

It still bothers me that "Hades" means the same thing as Shadowfell. For this reason, I will always refer to the plane as the "Waste", or Gray Waste. Its inhabitants are "Wasters", who lay waste to others, and the result is bleak. The True Evil of this plane is nihilistic and devasting, where psychopaths are predators who juggle back and forth between Lawful groupism and Chaotic individualism, to find any self-serving exploit. I am leaning toward the Farrealm and its Aberrations when True Evil are a deeper layer of this alignment plane of Waste. Yugoloth are a kind of Aberration.

I dislike the name "Ysgard" because the plane appropriates reallife Norse ethnicity in a disparaging way, as if literally less Good than Greeks. Significantly, the disconnect from the natrual world of the Material Plane is alien to Nordic cultures who tend to revere nature. It is probably ok to call this plane "Ys". In Norse, ysr is a rare term that means thronging crowds, along with their commotion. In this sense, it seems an appropriate term for extreme individualism, where crowds of diverse persons are working together, each in ones own way. It works for the Chaotic alignment. Otherwise all of the Norse heritage content, including æsir and jǫtnar, needs to be animistic and part of the D&D Primal power source of the Ethereal Plane along with its Fey and Shadow. It feels ok if destructive forces like Norsesque Fire Giants are aspects of Shadowfell, similar to the Unseelie Fairy Folk being so. Still some individual Fire Giants can be more Positive thus Fey, and many are miscibly part of the Ethereal Plane proper. All Norsesque creatures overlap the Material Plane. Any in the Deep Ether, or Deep Fey or Deep Shadow, are rare.

I view Bytopia and its Gnomes as the "Protestant work ethic" with the joy of hard work in an effort to accomplish something that one loves. The upper plane is infinite resources, and the lower plane is an ideal version of Medieval Europe and anologous cultures around the world. In the map, on the top surface of Bytopia, are those agricultural fields? It surprises me, but I like it. It would be the prosperous farmers that orient around one of the bourgeous towns.

Carceri is a prison world. I am ok with its representation in this map.

Arcadia is world made out of shopping malls, namely architectural "arcades".

Arborea literally means "tree place". It is entirely forested. In the map, I would make its mountains green, covered in forests. I visualize some of its regions as aerophytes floating in the air, where motes form out of entangling roots, but without soil. It is weird that the Elf species relates to it, despite most Elves having no alignment affiliation with it. I deal with this dissonance awkwardly. D&D makes Mount Olympus Chaotic Good, but really the Greek Olympus is Lawful Neutral, Order and Patriarchy. It is similarly dissonant. With regard to the Chaotic Good alignment plane, every one of its domains should be some manner of striving to balance the needs of each individual with the overall impulse toward altruism. CG especially seeks to do Good by encouraging each individual to be ones best version of oneself.

The other alignment planes look fine.

 

[Weiley31]

Eh, I prefer the old 5E Cosmology and 3.0/3.5 in terms of feel and art.