D&D General Sir Plane "Not Appearing in this Cosmology"

[grimslade]

I mean, people in real life love California, and they've got the same climate.



It's a refrence to Dante

Yes, except it is not Asmodeus, D&D Lucifer stand-in, chewing cinders at the bottom of Hell is it?
As for California, you prove my point. California has Death Canyon and the Bay Area, Mount Shasta, and Redwood National Forest. It is not a homogenous land. That is Arizona.

 

[Haplo781]

Because DIFFERENT BANE is BETTER BANE!

Oh.... you weren't talking about Harley Quinn.

....nevermind.

I JUST WANT MY PASTA MAKER BACK!

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

It's a refrence to Dante

And? That doesn't make it be well-designed for D&D.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I actually find the 4e Bane really interesting, which is an odd thing for me to say, because I don't generally find war gods interesting and Bane Classic is even less interesting. Bane in 4e is both very tactical and actually valued by the other gods, even those who are good, because he's extremely effective. Getting him on board during the Dawn War was a HUGE help to the deities, and the War of Winter (where Kord's mother, Khala, tried to take over the world by locking it in an eternal freezing night invoked with her consort Zehir) would have gone disastrously for the opposed deities if Bane had chosen to join Khala instead.

4e Bane is great. And there's a reason Mercer's using D&D cosmology in Critical Role

Cutting you off there for space. That's a lovely idea, one I might even steal at some point, but I don't really understand why it needs an infinite expanse of fiery nothing (even if that "fiery nothing" does in fact have liquid fire oceans and fire-sand beaches and literally breathable fire skies) in order to work. Indeed, this obsidian tower set with a ruby that can control fire whales sounds like it would be even better in something like 4e's Elemental Chaos. There, you have an overall absolute mess, but there ARE seas of fire and rivers of molten glass and planes of ice that stretch for leagues in every direction. There, the obsidian tower is not "okay well why isn't it just more fire," it's something built from the clash of fire and earth nodes, or a rocky promontory in an otherwise mostly fire-and-air region of the Elemental Chaos.

In 5e cosmology of course the elemental planes are contained within the Elemental Chaos. There's a huge amount of made for 4e cosmology (starting with the Feywild and Shadowfell) in 5e.

The problem with the planes, both elemental and alignment, is that their whole premise is to force us to pay attention to all those boring non-places. The Plane of Earth is literally an infinite extent of solid rock and soil. That's boring!

Absolutely agreed.

The outer planes....you basically have to really, REALLY love the alignment grid, because it reifies alignment hardcore and pushes it up from "a personality classification system of debatable usefulness" to "literally the core conceit of reality." For one setting, e.g. Planescape, that's a neat conceit, giving as you said a new edge to political intrigue and subversive efforts (whether evil or good--subverting a hell fortress is an interesting idea that I may also steal.) As a general thing that is part of a Great Wheel cosmology forced onto every setting and campaign? It's really frustrating.

Absolutely agreed. My take on the Great Wheel is that what's actually there is the Astral Sea. with many heavens/hells/locations and many of them have short paths to many others. However there's one particularly famous and well-trodden route that goes round most of the biggest ones in order of alignment. This is the Great Wheel - but there are other routes, some well trodden and some not so much. (And if you do that the only non-4e cosmology left is the Etherial Plane).

Edit: And the actual paths on the Great Wheel do change. The people in Nirvana managed to engineer their own replacement with Mechanus on the wheel because they didn't like all the tourists and messengers tramping through.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

4e Bane is great. And there's a reason Mercer's using D&D cosmology in Critical Role

In 5e cosmology of course the elemental planes are contained within the Elemental Chaos. There's a huge amount of made for 4e cosmology (starting with the Feywild and Shadowfell) in 5e.
View attachment 268380

Absolutely agreed.

Absolutely agreed. My take on the Great Wheel is that what's actually there is the Astral Sea. with many heavens/hells/locations and many of them have short paths to many others. However there's one particularly famous and well-trodden route that goes round most of the biggest ones in order of alignment. This is the Great Wheel - but there are other routes, some well trodden and some not so much. (And if you do that the only non-4e cosmology left is the Etherial Plane).

Edit: And the actual paths on the Great Wheel do change. The people in Nirvana managed to engineer their own replacement with Mechanus on the wheel because they didn't like all the tourists and messengers tramping through.

An interesting notion. It does beg the question why alignment is so deeply baked into the Great Wheel and almost irrelevant in the World Axis though.

 

[Bohandas]

Yes, except it is not Asmodeus, D&D Lucifer stand-in, chewing cinders at the bottom of Hell is it?
As for California, you prove my point. California has Death Canyon and the Bay Area, Mount Shasta, and Redwood National Forest. It is not a homogenous land.

Which is the point. Just because a place is perpetually on fire doesn't mean it has to be homogeneous

 

[Neonchameleon]

An interesting notion. It does beg the question why alignment is so deeply baked into the Great Wheel and almost irrelevant in the World Axis though.

Because with my approach

There is a tendency for similar planes to be connected - and similar includes alignment. This means connections on the Wheel are generally easy to find.

The Great Wheel is the work of people within the setting trying to order things. And whoever in-setting came up with it used alignment while people took it up because it was useful.

The Wheel is therefore the Mercator projection of cosmologies - pretty unrepresentative looked as a whole, but useful in close up, doing an impossible task (mapping 3d to 2d and not leaving gaps) and a de fact standard by being early with no one definitely better option

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If anything Planescape is the only version of the Great Wheel that is boring. Because the Great Wheel cosmology has tons of interesting locations, but Planescape expects you to ignore those and just stick in the one that can be summed up as "New York, but with London accents"

(edit: and neither of those traits in a good way)

I mean, obviously that's not true, so that's a profoundly weird claim to make, but I guess "the internet".

 

[Bohandas]

I mean, obviously that's not true, so that's a profoundly weird claim to make, but I guess "the internet".

Obviously it's not literally based on New York, but it's an unpleasant port city that's undeservedly treated as if it were the most important place in the cosmos