Hey Veeky Forums, how does cosmology work in your setting?
I've been trying to figure out the history of my custom setting, but I can't really figure out how all the planes should work or how they came into being. I'd like to come up with something other than "A super god made all the planes before fucking off somewhere" which is what most settings seem to do.
Say what you will about WoW's writing, but I always did admire how fleshed out their setting was. Everything floats in the twisting nether, the emerald dream is the blueprint of azeroth, the elemental planes were built by the titans to imprison the elemental lords, etc. Most settings don't really have a reason for elemental planes existing other than the fact that they were just always there.
I really dislike planes. The world should just be 'the world' and anything beyond that is basically too mysterious and far off to understand.
Or better yet, if you go for mythic fantasy, all other realms of existence are reachable through the world. For example if you climb a really high mountain you can find a gate into heaven, or go really deep into the earth to find hell, etc.
I actually really like that idea. Keeping the cosmology a mystery has a pretty nice feel to it. I mean honestly the planes don't really matter in a game unless the adventure involves plane-hopping, which most don't. The only issue would be when the players start summoning fire elementals or jaunting into the astral plane with certain spells. but even that can be handwaved away I guess.
A setting I find really interesting is the one of the Old Kingdom books by Garth Nix.
Initially you just had The Old Kingdom above the Wall and Ancelstierre, an interesting implementation of the relatively generic 'fantasy and modern kingdoms side by side' thing.
But later in the series things have gotten weirder and more interesting, to the point that the two nations might actually be separate but adjoining worlds.
Especially since after exploring the far north of the world the characters discovered the obliterated remnants of a prior world across a great chasm, a land bereft of life, magic and even breathable air. A relic of a previous cycle of existence that was nevertheless physically adjoined to the world they currently lived in
Weird as fuck, but rather cool.
Been working on a Final Fantasy rip-off, er, inspired setting.
There's three planes of existence: the main world, and two others based around mist and magic.
Mist is the concentrated form of magical energy, existing as a gas-like substance floating through the world.
Mist either originates from, or has created a realm dubbed the Feymarch by most civilizations. The Feymarch is a kind of larger than life forest of gigantic trees whose roots and branches all join together until it's impossible to tell where one exists and one ends.
Here live the Espers: nature spirits, angelic beings, magical otherworldly beings, and such. They occasionally intrude into our world when the mist thickens, but otherwise they must be summoned by sorcerers to exist.
The other plane is the Void.
When mist lies in one place for too long, not moving, it stagnates, turning into miasma. This toxic substance dampens light, chokes breath, and saps strength. And anything that dies within the miasma is likely to reanimate as the undead.
Like the espers, the miasma can give life to beings, called fiends. This collection of monstrous beings was imprisoned within the void -- along with a vast quantity of miasma.
Here they've made homes on islands floating in nothingness, all descending in a great spiral to the lowest depths: The castle Pandemonium.
The fiends can only escape their prison when the miasma thickens just enough, making gaps in the world; or when summoned by foolish mages.
Mist can also be condensed, formed into solid crystals of magical power, typically called Magicite or just magic stones. The world is stabilized by four immense crystals associated with a particular elemental force.
I'm definitely a sucker for oldschool rpg settings. They were always so simple but mystical in their design. Honestly I adore the old Light world/Dark World cliche. FF3 (japanese 3), and it's warriors of light and darkness, and more recently a link between world's hyrule and lowrule.
I suppose you could easily adapt that to one world drifting in the positive energy plane and one in the negative.
Are you using D&D planes in a custom setting? Why?
Thanks, and yeah, the idea would be the Feymarch is the equivalent of the Positive Energy Plane, the Feywild, and the upper planes (complete with subdomains where the godlike Eidolons who rule the Espers dwell.)
The Void is for the lower planes, Shadowfell, and Negative Energy Plane, and any of the floating rocks there may have buildings, settlements, or other potential dungeons.
And for old school points, I figured a plotline could be having the king of demons (Chaos) attempting to corrupt/destroy the elemental crystals, spreading miasma, and generally trying to break open the walls between the Void and the world, allowing him freedom.
Grimwyrd is pretty standard
High above is the ascendant perfection of high energy; celestial beings live here
The plane of magic is next, where the high energies of magic twist, raining from above like liquid stars.
The earth we tried upon taps into magic, in various forms, for sorcerers and the like. Beside this realm is the Verdant Kingdom, or the Magic Night where the Get reside.
Below this is the spirit realm where souls reside. All great ancestors live here. All fathers and mothers.
And in the deep, the darkness behind worlds. The eternal entropy and dissolving of all. The burning black. The void. The nothing.
Well that's kind of the point of this thread. Most dnd games I've run have used the dnd planar system, but I've found them kinda bland and uninvolved. I wanted to hear some variations on fantasy cosmology so I can make mine more interesting, personal, and tied to the game world itself.
that sounds kinda cool. I imagine the crystals are basically like bouys/weights, keeping the world aloft to prevent it from sinking down to the lower planes while weighing it down and keeping it from drifting to the upper ones. Removing/corrupting them would throw the world out of wack and cause it to be engufled by either realm.
Does a cosmology need to be determined?
Does it need to be organized or can there just be these things wherever I like?
What about having the possible planar locations instead just being in one world? Places like the elemental planes in actual locations in the world? Or maybe a great forest that's like the Feywild in nature, twisting and turning with illusions? Maybe far, far ,far deep beneath the earth is the mouth to the Underworld and the great Hells, and beyond them, the deep and twisted Abyss.
Does anything break if I do this?
What's a cosmology that facilitates adventure? Something that's also kind of abnormal too?
There's only three planes, possibly four depending on how you count.
There's the earth, the heavenly court, and a sealed plane where some elemental lords live, along with God's schizophrenic offshoot.
Also possibly a void of some sort.
Why not look to actual myth?
So why was the Twisting Nether created?
And if the elemental planes were created to imprison the elemental lords, does that mean that the lords are the source of the elements, and thus reality, or was there only aether before the lords were imprisoned?
I have humans be the children of angels, essentially. Two of the twelve guardians created by God had children, who eventually became humanity.
I also have all magic, except for Druidism come from variations of breaking God's seal on the elemental plane, meaning mages are prosecuted as heretics.
Multiple contradictory myths in-game, maybe if youre extremely dedicated in finding forgotten old tomes and sifting through bullshit you might get a sentence or two of truth about the fundamentals of the world. Maybe.
I hate how "worldbuilding" is gormlessly giving out information that should be unknowable or extremely rare and forbidden knowledge to ingame characters
I reject planes because they have no real function or reason to exist. Everything you put on an elemental plane, which the players will, to put it bluntly, never visit, you can also put in the real world.
The Twisting Nether is the bit where Light and Dark meet and clash. It's where the Burning Legion (Demons) come from and the source of Fel Magic. Each World in the Great Dark Beyond (Space) has its own Elemental spirits, not all of them are confined to Elemental Planes like they are on Azeroth. The only reason the Titans imprisoned them is because Azeroth is holding a Titan within it, asleep and not yet born. The Dark (Void) is seeking to control Titans because they will allow the Void to win in its battle against the Light, so it shoots out parasitic monsters called The Old Gods. These Old Gods are giant organic lovecraft-lite monstors that are tunnelling through Azeroths crust to reach the Titan within and corrupt it. The Titans tried to stop these Old Gods, who had enslaved the Elements of Azeroth to fight for them. The Titans thus constructed the Elemental Planes to imprison said Elements so that they could have a throw-down with the Old Gods themselves. The Elemental Lords on Azeroth are only the most powerful ones on Azeroth, not the entire universe.
...
So who made the elemental planes of dark and light?
Source on this please? I've seen it before and I can't remember where it's from...
D&D
I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but the Classic World of Darkness's various Umbras were kind of interesting, even if they got confusing as all fuck.
High Umbra - The Astral Planes, with high Platonic concepts and stuff like that. (It also overlaps space; I try not to think about that.) Territory of Mages, though mages being powerful cheaters, they can go pretty much anywhere.
Middle Umbra - The Spirit Realm, where the various spirits that can govern and inhabit all things live. Werewolf territory.
Low Umbra - the Underworld, the lands of the dead. The various continents each have a different 'kingdom' of the dead, and everything's super-depressing, but still makes for a fun dark fantasy game. Wraith territory.
(There's also the 'Near Umbra', which is basically just a filter you see the real world through, but it's complicated so can be tossed aside easily enough.)
Then you have the Dreaming, which is the realm of imagination - not just human, even things older than humanity have dreams for the purposes of this setting. This is Changeling territory.
New Chronicles of Darkness has a different system, but somebody else can go over that one.
Chris Metzen.
Specifically, the big poster map in the box set of Planescape.
So make them easier to visit. Dimensional travel is easy enough at high level.
In my world, the material plane is a sphere floating in the Astral Sea, 7 "moons" surround it, spining at different rates & paths. One shines, & brings light to the darkness, it is the equivalant of the sun. Called Brightmoon, or just the Sun, many cultures have different names.
The gods (called Lord or Lady, such as the godess of cold & evil fae is called the Lady of Winters) either sit in these realms or sit on the material plane, some of them just float in the Astral Sea or way off into the Far Reach, (place of the Lord of Night)
The moons are,
Brightmoon
Feymoon
Tidemoon
Madmoon
Bloodmoon
Goldmoon
Silvermoon
Each has a different influence on the material realm. Also hell exists within the material realm as a prison for offenders & is the prison the Lord of the Demonhost, the warden of his gaol is the Lord of Stone. I have pages of texts on this stuff but id rather not dump it unless you guys want it.
My setting, part 1:
It's in a stupidly big hollow-Earth-style plane (think so utterly enormous that a continent on the other side of the hollow sphere looks about as big as a speck of dust). It's mostly cold and dark, because the only light comes from a number of miniature, magical suns that orbit about 10km above the surface, and project massive forcefields around themselves that prevent most of the heat from leaking out. These suns move at a fairly fast speed, and with the exception of a few that orbit giant monoliths embedded in the ground, move along enormous orbits around the centre of the sphere. Areas directly under a nomadic sun are always extremely hot deserts, while areas further out are more temperate, but have plant life that grows and dies very quickly. Areas around tethered suns are more normal. In areas with no light but plenty of heat, often deep underground, vast forests of fungi grow.
Part 2:
Because of the nomadic nature of the suns, most of this setting's inhabitants are nomadic themselves, the exceptions being humans, elves, dwarves and some halflings. Most of the areas around tethered stars are ruled by singular human empires and kingdoms, or are a collection of feuding city-states, though a few are owned by the elves, who have turned them into forests and jungles. Both human and elvish empires tend to be xenophobic, as desperate nomadic groups have been known to ally together and attempt to invade unprepared kingdoms, though city-states are more welcoming, as they see each other as more of a threat. The dwarves are the only race that live outside the areas touched by light, as their stubbornness and pride will not allow them to abandon their underground fortresses. Instead, they use magic to generate vast amounts of heat, which they use to cultivate bioluminescent fungi for light and food, and prevent themselves from freezing to death. They also maintain vast networks of tunnels, and act as a go-between/transport network for anyone willing to pay enough. The halflings of this setting are indistinguishable from children or short humans, depending on the sub-species, and many of them act as scouts, spies and sleeper agents for the dwarves.
What kind of religions/cosmology would a setting like this have?
(I'm really unsure as to how to do this part)
Have you tried the World Axis cosmology instead of the tired old Great Wheel? 4e D&D specifically designed its cosmology both to feel mythic - you have The Heavenly Realm (Astral Sea), The Land of the Faeries (Feywild), The Land of the Dead (Shadowfell), The Primordial Chaos (Elemental Chaos) and The Place Of Evil (the Abyss) - and to actually be playable, rather than filling out a grid.
Im trying to decide or an Orrery or an orbit of Moons for cosmology of my setting. There are seven bodies in the system, Locus is the main world, with six orbiting spheres that represent the elements of reality, Mind, Body, Earth, Fire, Air, and Water.
I go with that whole "a super god made all the planes before fucking off somewhere" idea, but instead, it was a bunch of super gods who made one plane, made a bunch of smaller gods to keep things working, then fucked off to their own plane where they spend eternity just making random shit to see how it works, kind of like a test server.