D&D: Salvaging 4e & PF Lore

Because it's wasted page space. If it's a setting that exists for fantasy adventuring, why waste my time with things entirely irrelevant to the scope of the game?

If they don't contribute anything that I can actually use in a game, then they are pointless.

>If they don't contribute anything that I can actually use in a game
If you can't think of ways for, say, "infinite fire" to contribute to a game, then maybe the problem isn't in pattern completion.

Except they included that in the world axis, only they also made it good for adventuring. Funny how that works.

I bought Races & Classes and Worlds & Monsters as my very first 4e purchases, because they were released before even the HB and I desperately wanted the sneak peek of what was going to be in the PHB.

I absolutely love both of them. I still flip through them (and all my other 4e books) from time to time, simply because 4e did so many things RIGHT in terms of fluff and setting design.

So yeah, why do you ask?

Very good point. Which is honestly more interesting?

The Elemental Chaos, where you can see things like the Riverweb or Gloamnull?

Or the Elemental Plane of Ooze, where, even if you do have "Water Breathing" to avoid drowning, there's literally nothing to see but slime, mucus, bile, tar and chemical muck as far as the eye can see?

>Or the Elemental Plane of Ooze, where, even if you do have "Water Breathing" to avoid drowning, there's literally nothing to see but slime, mucus, bile, tar and chemical muck as far as the eye can see?
Elemental plane of ooze is literally infinite. You could put a whole bunch of ooze wizards and otyughs and weird shit in there. You could center an entire campaign to the place if you had a pinch of imagination.

But the system does absolutely nothing to support you doing that. The setting does nothing to support you doing that.

What you're calling 'a pinch of imagination' is literally just 'writing your own campaign setting which is technically part of an official one'.

>But the system does absolutely nothing to support you doing that. The setting does nothing to support you doing that.
Yes, it does. There are several rulebooks telling you what each elemental plane does have. Just the elemental plane of ooze alone has more perfectly described things than the Riverweb and Gloamnull you just mentioned.

>What you're calling 'a pinch of imagination' is literally just 'writing your own campaign setting which is technically part of an official one'.
But that's the entirety of 4e's "lore" right there. They just wrote a bunch of weak, shallow, nonsensical bullshit about elemental chaos with weird shit in there, that only doesn't manage to collapse on itself because lol chaos, then told you to go in there and do adventures.

The old setting already has that. It's called Limbo. Then it adds a whole bunch of other different and distinct adventure locales on top of that. It's objectively superior.

The old setting was a few detailed, interesting locations and then a fuckton of pointless, empty space that only existed to satisfy the designers pattern completion fetish.

The world axis can easily contain absolutely everything of value that existed in Planescape, without anywhere near as much bullshit to slog through to get to the good stuff.

Infinite is not really a selling point.

Literally every single dumb plane and demiplane also exists in the 4e World Axis. The only difference is how you get there and where, cosmologically, it is situated. These debates are retarded.

>The old setting was a few detailed, interesting locations and then a fuckton of pointless, empty space that only existed to satisfy the designers pattern completion fetish.
Well if you don't think every single elemental plane isn't interesting entirely on their own merit, without even having to add some adventuring locales to them as well - which the books still do, then I guess I have nothing to tell you and we just have to agree to disagree.

>The world axis can easily contain absolutely everything of value that existed in Planescape, without anywhere near as much bullshit to slog through to get to the good stuff.
Sure, by making it a chaotic playground that exists purely for the whim of the player characters and makes little internal sense. It might be all you want, but it's not all I want.

Maybe you could... Why the fuck would you want to? In what possible universe is the existence of an endless expanse of different kinds of slime and muck - the VERY description of Ooze from 2e's "The Inner Planes" - more inspiring than the Riverweb?

Exactly! Most of the Great Wheel was boring empty space with a handful of locations thrown out, all of which can be easily moved into the far more explorable and enjoyable World Axis.

Speaking of which... anons, I'm having a devil of a time tracking down the images from the Elemental Chaos splatbooks; can anyone help me out?

The Positive or Negative energy planes? Places you literally can't go without extreme prep work, and where there's fucking nothing to find anyway? Basically the only thing I've ever heard them used for is nonsensical abuse of the metaphysics.

They both have people living in them anyway. And those people might have quests.

A small number of them, existing amidst an infinite expanse of blinding white light. Why fucking bother?

>Why the fuck would you want to?
Maybe I want to try something different today? Maybe I have this idea of a wizard wanting to drown the world in mud that the party should oppose? Maybe I just think Riverweb is a bunch of bullshit?

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean everyone does. Don't impose your ideas and thoughts to the rest of us.

What the world axis really does is make all those places connected, so you can have an adventure in the Astral Sea or the Chaos like you would an adventure in the material plane. That's it.

So, who here was a fan of the Astral Sea and the Dominions? I thought it was a huge step up from the old Astral Plane whilst still keeping the more interesting parts of it, like floating corpses of dead divinities.

The Dominions were pretty cool, too. I mean, isn't there something symbolic about how entering Hell literally requires you to plunge burning and (potentially) screaming out of the sky to crash upon a barren wasteland of ashen d eserts and broken rock?

Hey, if you don't think that's some cool shit then, again, I have nothing to tell you.

All the cool bits are more accessible and work better included as a bit of the world axis.

Points of Light was a decent setting (to the extent that it was ever actually written,) but it's comically unsuited to the game it was made for. The Nentir Vale is a place where civilization has failed and humanity is doomed, not because of any one calamity, but because of a million systemic forces and a score of powerful competitors for the same ecological niche. It had some of the ancient Norse attitude toward heroic failure. It was nicknamed Points of Light both by the fans and by its own designers to represent how little is left for the PCs to try to protect. It's a dramatic idea, but it was never realized because it needed a game system built for brutal survival, desperate temporary victories staving off inevitable doom. What it got was a game system about high-powered superheroes whose wealth and comfort were assumed to such an extent that they needed a robust magic item economy to function as intended. The Nentir Vale shouldn't even have reliable sources of grain and salt, much less residuum and astral diamonds.

They also make no fucking sense. They're all scattered about for absolutely no reason. There's no order or structure there at all. Sigil isn't even in the middle of everything, it's just sort of awkwardly wedged to the side!

...No? I feel like you're completely missing the point of it.

The points of light were the bits of civilisation that survived, and the setting is fundamentally hopeful- No matter what happens, heroes keep rising to try again. However many times the world falls, people will raise it up once more.

It made perfect sense for 4e.

They make perfect sense. That they don't adhere to the old logic doesn't mean there's no logic to it at all.

They're all situated within the same realm so that you can travel from one to another without the need for planeshifting. Again, this is so that if you wanted to make a campaign about traversing the realms of the gods or whatever, you can just do it. Nothing else needed.

Then explain the sense to me. All I see, all I've ever seen in that, is a big mess, like someone taking all your shit from your room and throwing them all over the floor and being like "There! Now you can find your stuff easily without having to reach the top shelves!"

You could already travel the planes without planeshifting. You had the World Tree, Mount Olympus, River Styx sometimes, elemental vortices, and Sigil doors, just to name a few things. You never needed anything more to traverse to the realm of gods to begin with.

>residuum and astral diamonds.
This was one of the most retarded parts of 4e, and that's saying a lot.

You can have discrete, named locations in the standard Elemental Planes, so I call false dichotomy.

Rephrase: You could explore without needing to go to landmarks which are essentially permanent portals. You can go directly from the City of Brass to the Abyss on foot.

Yeah, but you also have infinite fire with nothing in there! Why would anyone ever go there?

>You can go directly from the City of Brass to the Abyss on foot.
So you can go from anywhere to anywhere - that's your thing?

What if I told you that in my Forgotten Realms homebrew, you can step outside the gates of Waterdeep and immediately arrive to Calimport? Wouldn't that be just awesome?

No, it makes no sense, first because the state of the world doesn't match the rules (regarding the economy especially,) and because if humanoids were that powerful, even a tiny fraction of them, they wouldn't constantly need saving.

Well that's your homebrew and I wouldn't care.

Do you really think Fallcrest is trading in the kind of currencies gods keep in their vaults?

Yeah, but that's your entire argument right there. Calimport and Waterdeep have so much awesome shit in them, so wouldn't it make the game so much better if you could just step from one to the other without having to slog through all the boring shit in between?

you know what you really need to do to fix the problems with both the World Axis and Great Wheel?

remove the material plane completely.

Comparing the distance between two places in the material plane to actually being in a different reality is false equivalency.

Even in the world axis, places can be far apart, but the difference is that they are places you can go directly to.

I always use the world axis in my own games as I really don't like the Great Wheel idea. I tend to run my own worlds, but they are always somewhere in the axis.
The Elemental Chaos is by far the best part of that. I can't stand the eternally dull elemental planes, so the roiling madness of the Elemental Chaos provides a much richer array of ideas for me to work with.

So, in other words, you're a fucking idiot who never even bothered looking at the World Axis lore?

Seriously, the Elemental Chaos is explicitly an infinite plane where all elemental matter originates. That means, much as there are continent sized swamps in the Feywild, there are world-swallowing oceans of muck, magma, mud, tar, amber, salt, liquid ice or whatever you need in the Elemental Chaos.

Plus, the one constant law of the Chaos is Mind Over Matter. You can change the chaos-stuff into whatever you want by having a strong enough will.

So, plans that relied on the "infinite expanse of X" aspect of the Elemental Planes? They still work just the same. Drowning the world in mud is no harder in the World Axis than it is in the Great Wheel.

There was this map of the World Axis in the 3e DMG as an orrery - bowl-shapes above and below as the Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos, World, Feywild and Shadowfell rotating below. Can some user find it and post it? My google-fu is weak and my connection has literally just dipped to the point I can't post images anymore.

Yeah, you could, but the rest of the plane was homogenous and lethal to the point it may as well not exist, because there was no fucking point in visiting except under very, very specific reasons.

Do remember that Planescape itself assumed most of the action would happen in the Outer Planes and Sigil, admitting that the rest of the multiverse thought of the Elemental Planes as just boring backwaters.

Points of Light was pretty much the only thing I liked about 4E, it's a real shame wizards threw it all in the trash just to pander to FR fanboys. If anything I think it would have suited 5E better than 4.

>Even in the world axis, places can be far apart, but the difference is that they are places you can go directly to.
Define "directly".

Because by those means, you could already hike from the City of Brass to the Abyss all on your own. The difference was that you knew what was in the way and could plan accordingly, come up with different paths you could take and choose from. With the World Axis, however, the only one that knows what you'll face is the GM - there will be no planning, unless he has for some reason prepared different routes for you. You're completely at his mercy. You know nothing.

Pardon me if I'll still go with the Great Wheel.

>That means, much as there are continent sized swamps in the Feywild, there are world-swallowing oceans of muck, magma, mud, tar, amber, salt, liquid ice or whatever you need in the Elemental Chaos.
And the GM can come up with a whole bunch of kewl adventures where the party goes from a land of ice to a land of fire without anything in between, then to a land of mud and a land of salt, then to a bossfight, like this was fucking Super Mario Brothers.

>So, plans that relied on the "infinite expanse of X" aspect of the Elemental Planes? They still work just the same. Drowning the world in mud is no harder in the World Axis than it is in the Great Wheel.
It doesn't. There's no consistency to it whatsoever. You don't even know what's out there unless the GM graciously lets you prepare. It's just shit at the GM's whim.

>Sigil isn't even in the middle of everything, it's just sort of awkwardly wedged to the side!

In the World Axis, it's the Mortal World that is at the center of the universe. That's why all the gods, demons, and stranger shit actually give a fuck about it and bother with world domination plots.

In my own games, I run the World Axis like this: "The World" is the Prime Material Plane under a different name.

That means it takes the shape of a universe of stars and planets, if not under the same rules as in our own reality.

Spelljammers, then, exist to facilitate travel between worlds in the Materium. Many are also upgraded with plane-shifting abilities, because you can also use the Feywild and Shadowfell as linkways between different worlds too - it's just not very easy.

Sigil is the metaphorical heart of the multiverse; every plane and every world can be reached from Sigil, if you know how. It's possible to just ride a plane-shifting vessel from plane to plane, but Sigil is THE name in speedy portal travel.

Like, if Planejamming is taking a cruise ship from North America to Australia, then Sigil is like taking a flight from New York to Sydney.

>In the World Axis, it's the Mortal World that is at the center of the universe.
It's the center of the universe in the Great Wheel as well, though. Sigil's just in the middle of the outer planes there.

>Define "directly".
Defined as not having to head to Sigil or some other place with portals or planeshifting services.

>You're completely at his mercy. You know nothing.
You know what your knowledge checks would tell you about plotting that route. You do not, however, flip open a sourcebook to check. That's gay.

Yes, because it's written that way. Even more common goods are absurdly abundant everywhere. A town completely cut off from the infrastructure it once had, with no reliable roads to anywhere else and monster-infested wilderness on all sides, should not be the sort of place where you can reliably buy weapons and armor. If it survives at all, it shoukd only offer the meager produce of those farmers close enough to get there without being eaten by ogres or something. More than that, it shouldn't be as cheery as Fallcrest is always portrayed. If four superheroes showed up and saved them from the current biggest threat to them, of course they'd all throw themselves at their feet in gratitude. But as soon as those superheroes try to move on to the next town, the mood should darken in an instant. The next time something happens, they're on their own, and their one-time saviors were just vagrants after all, providers of false hope followed by crushing disappointment more bitter than if they had never come at all.

It's a heroic fantasy setting. It isn't adhering to your expectations because it never intended to.

>Defined as not having to head to Sigil or some other place with portals or planeshifting services.
Again, was never needed.

Grab the closest elemental vortex from the plane of fire to the material plane. Then find the nearest path to Mount Olympus or Yggdrasil to arrive to the Grey Waste. Cross over Carceri. Bam, you're in the Abyss.

More explicitly, it basically took Sigil's place in regards to what were the outer planes.

So, you're finding places with portals, which is exactly what I fucking said.

Heh, I run things much the same, though with fewer Spelljammers due to fuckery up near the Topaz Gate's ruins fucking up the planar tides.

Actually, on that note, I don't see nearly enough appreciation for Shardminds and the Topaz Gate around here.

And why's that so terrible? In both cases you have to do a bit of a hike: all that's different is the flavor, and of course the fact that there's some manner of consistency and structure to the Great Wheel version.

>walk across three worlds
>Bam!
This is exactly the thing that the World Axis was made to get rid of.

Oh, and Psionics as reality's immune system against the shit flowing in from where the attempts to barricade up the hole where the Gate was failing.

>I bought Races & Classes and Worlds & Monsters as my very first 4e purchases,
Where to download them?
>4e did so many things RIGHT in terms of fluff and setting design.
So true. Points of light and stuff.

This image?

One of the best things about the world axis is the way it simply makes the planes "above" and "below", like a classical Heaven-Earth-Hell trinity. It also distinguishes the central cosmological conflict as that of Law and Chaos.

It's terrible because you probably had to use shit like that to get there anyway, which means pointless backtracking. If your DM is gracious, he'll cover the trip in one sentence and move on. If he's not, well, prepare for your campaign to take another six months.

Or! Or, you could just go where you want to go.

>This is exactly the thing that the World Axis was made to get rid of.
Any good DM would make you walk through about three different adventure locales on your way from the City of Brass to the Abyss, so again, in the practical sense, what's the difference?

Idiot proofing

Didn't stop those dwarves making a ship and SAILING STRAIGHT INTO THE ABYSS just to see how deep it went and if the Shard of Evil was still down there.
Best part is, they are still going strong.

You aren't in charge of what a good DM is or isn't. The only actual point I see you making is that the Great Wheel looks neat and orderly.

Or maybe you could just not cheapen the entire concept of primal elemental planes and the lands of the dead by making it so disgustingly easy to skip through them, like you were in a prancing candyland?

Like, what the hell? Where's the fantasy and wonder to that? Where's the sense of adventure and danger? All removed for the sake of ease and convenience.

You're not supposed to "just backtrack" from basically Hell to another Hell.

Because it's combined with making everywhere you go through interesting locations to adventure in, as opposed to dull monotonous bullshit which does nothing to assist the GM making the journey interesting.

I thin we can at least all agree that the Primordials did nothing wrong.

>Great Wheel looks neat and orderly
And, by contrast, that the World Axis looks like a fucking vomited chaotic mess.

If the two are otherwise identical, why would you not go with the Great Wheel? Are you so offended by the fact that there's a plane of ooze somewhere, and that the book has a page or two dedicated to describing it that you could just skip anyway?

Because a setting for a game should focus on things that are actually interesting and useful. The World Axis did this better than the Great Wheel.

That's exactly it! Thanks so much for finding it.

Well, I bought my copies in print when they came out, so I'm not too sure. 4e PDFs were never hugely popular because of all the backlash from angry grognards.

You can find them legally on DriveThruRPG. But... finding them free? Not sure; maybe one of the PDF archives here on Veeky Forums has them...

I don't see any part of walking through the Elemental Chaos as being a candyland. It is certainly less predictable than going through one of the known portals to other realms.

The World Axis looking like "vomited mess" is an opinion I disagree with. I think it makes a lot more sense at first glance than the Great Wheel does.

Well, once again - if you think crashing through a fire storm into the world, then taking a trip across a gigantic world tree into the grey underworld full of wailing spirits, trekking the poisonous land into a realm of prisons, before finally arriving to the realm of chaos full of demons, is "dull monotonous bullshit", then I have very little to tell you.

A game setting should focus on things that are interesting and useful, yes, but not to the point where its integrity completely collapses into itself. There has to be some internal consistency, and the World Axis does not have it.

Was it not you that said this? "Just going where you want to go" sounds like a candyland skip to me.

>Well, once again - if you think crashing through a fire storm into the world, then taking a trip across a gigantic world tree into the grey underworld full of wailing spirits, trekking the poisonous land into a realm of prisons, before finally arriving to the realm of chaos full of demons, is "dull monotonous bullshit", then I have very little to tell you.

Cherrypicking the few interesting places doesn't really support your point, especially when they're all still options.

>Cherrypicking the few interesting places doesn't really support your point
The initial argument was a trip from the City of Brass to the Abyss. That is the route according to the Great Wheel.

Besides, I still think they're all interesting. Even the ooze land.

>"Just going where you want to go" sounds like a candyland skip to me.
It's not. The elemental chaos is extremely dangerous. You, however, don't have to travel through several different worlds to get to the one you want to go to. Surprise, it's all one world. You may still pass through places like that, but you do not have to plan a circuitous route in order to get to the place you want to go. At least not anymore than you would on the prime material.

Well, what if I want to plan the route? What if I prefer knowing what's up ahead over just a bunch of unpredictable chaos-stuff?

There's actually zero difference between the world axis and the great wheel. You imbeciles.

Just make your knowledge check, man. Hell, the whole party can work on it and you'll know roughly what to expect on your journey. It won't be something you, the player, open a book to find out ahead of time.

Then you make a roll and your GM tells you. Rather than metagaming by opening a book.

Here's what I'm getting from Great Wheel Fag: Straightup autist.

>Prefers predictable patterns.
>The shape of the Great Wheel is very important.
>Is a fag who would probably read the GM portion of a module.

Well, there are structural and metaphysical/thematic differences. The two could honestly be seen as the same universe, one where Order has the advantage in the cosmic battle, the other where Chaos does.

But that's how it always worked. Just because you can just pop open a book doesn't mean your character can. It's just that the GM has something to work with and doesn't need to make it all up on his own - and some GMs can handle it way worse than others.

Ad hominem.

>Ad hominem.
But true

Going away from the cosmological details for a moment, what about monster lore? I know most of it showed up in Dungeon, Dragon and the Wizards Presents books, but still, are there 4e-related bits of monster fluff you like to salvage?

For me, personally, priority #1 is to kick whoever wrote the 5e gnoll fluff in the nuts and use 4e's Playing Gnolls fluff.

Priority #2 is to change Formorians and Cyclopses back to "mad, deformed, evil giants who war against the archfey on equal terms" and "disciplined, organized, loyal giant-kin who have sworn their allegiance to the Formorians for reasons unknown".

...Which I suppose kind of means I need to bring in Torog, doesn't it...

I don't see anything in what you've said that has anything to do with the superiority of the Great Wheel. It's just laid out more because that's what it's supposed to be. By contrast, the World Axis was made to relax the constraints on the planes. They're both doing what they're supposed to.

I think you could boil the whole debate down to this - Law versus Chaos.

Great Wheel is a nice orderly realm where everything's in their place, even if some of those places might be argued to be fucking boring and maybe you'd rather skip over a bunch of them on your way from one place to another. The World Axis is a land of chaos where nothing is the same from one day to another, where you can encounter all manner of strange and probably quite exciting adventures, but where it all also just sort of floats around without any manner of order or consistency.

I think we've all made our picks on which one we believe, and can't ever be shaken off from what we've chosen. It's all just flavor. There's really no point in arguing.

My autism is a superpower that allows me to pour incredible amounts of focus into my game and bring forth detailed campaigns and adventures for my players to enjoy, where everything is fully thought out and nothing is out of place.

I think anyone that's trying to turn it into an insult over the internet is just jealous.

The greatest asset a game setting can give a GM is ambiguity and grey areas.

The sweet spot is having enough detail and interesting locations to strongly define the tone of the setting and give you ideas, while also leaving plenty of things undefined so you have the freedom to fill in the gaps.

To put it in a way relevant to the discussion, the Great Wheel does this by giving you just short of forty different-kind of themed lands - many more than that if you count each planar layer as a different place - all of them quite literally infinite and full of places for you to stick your own things into, so long as you remain within the thematic framework. The World Axis, meanwhile, just gives you a great big playground to just build whatever the hell you want in it with no framework to start up on, but also absolutely no limitations.

Depending on what you're going for, either one can work just fine.

The only effective difference between the World Axis and Great Wheel, besides the difference in volume of published material, is the number of connections on the planar flow chart. World Axis is completely finite and allocated in the same three-dimensional space, and none of it is even that big, so you could in theory travel from anywhere to anywhere else just by walking/sailing. Great Wheel has a lot of infinite and otherwise unwalkable distances that function as invisible walls. This does restrict the players in where they can go, making them dependent on knowing the locatioms and keys to gates to and from Sigil, but that can be useful for the DM to give a little structure to the campaign.

Fomorians (one R) are the misshapen giants. Formians are the ant people. You.seem to have mashed the two together in your head.

Actually... anons? I could honestly use a hand in figuring out how to assimilate various celestials & fiends from Pathfinder into the World Axis. So far, this is all I've got:

* Agathions: Plunk 'em in the Feywild and call them fae. Done. Agathions are non-licensed Eladrin, which pre-World Axis were just seelie fae as angels.

* Guardinals: ...No clue.

* Kami: A "liminal" spirit; technically Primal Spirits, but they originate from areas where the Feywild and the World overlap, so they're as much faerie as they are spirit.

* Oni: Malicious fae spirits, perhaps connected by ancestry or experimentation to the formorians?

* Demodands: Unless my memory failed me, in the Great Wheel, these were native to Carceri? So, in the World Axis, these are the descendants of angels assigned to guard Carceri and the monsters within... and actually not all that evil: they're not *nice*, but they fill a vital role, and this gives them some respect. Imagine going to Arvandor and seeing demodands welcomed onto the Wild Hunt.

* Rakshasa: Devas who became so obsessed with earthly pleasures that it corrupted them, turning them into hedonistic monsters. Rather than a caste system, the different kinds of rakshasa represent different "dark pleasures".

* Kyton: Fiends native to the Shadowfell. Maybe somehow tied to Shadar-Kai who took the "stimulation or death!" philosophy down some very twisted avenues?