World Axis vs. Great Wheel

So... why was the World Axis such a terrible, horrible cosmology for D&D to adopt anyway?

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Seriously, what's so bad about a setting where we can get creatures like attached out of it?

Because not everyone has the same opinion.

Some people like the logical, structured, pattern heavy Great Wheel.

Personally, I prefer the more abstract, mythical feeling World Axis.

Neither is better or worse, I just think the latter works better for my purposes, since it feels purpose built for an adventure rather than being this grand, abstract philosophical mess.

I never heard many bad things about the World Axis. The only ones who disliked it were the most extreme of the grognards. It was pretty great.

I wish 5e had kept it.

>inb4 grognards
>inb4 complaints about grognards
>inb4 some smug shit uses the phrase "sacred cow"
>inb4 >dnd
>inb4 3rders vs 4thers argue only stopping to yell at PF players

Meh. I was never wild about either of them. I much prefer building my own cosmologies.

Well, to be fair, I like both cosmologies, but the Great Wheel reminded a lot of the hackneyed medieval maps that scholars and philosophers created based off misconceived logic.

For example, the Great wheel assumes that the cosmology is based off of one's soul's alignment. But, like medieval maps that put Jerusalem at the center of the world based off of it's spiritual importance, I like to entertain the idea that the Great Wheel is inaccurate, but used only because it makes the most sense to the philosophers of the multiverse.

Hell, even Planescape implies this assumption with the 'Center of the Multiverse' axiom, which admits that anywhere can be the center of the multiverse since it's infinite.

5e did keep the Feywild and Shadowfell at least, AKA the actually useful versions of the PEP and NEP.

Adventures in the Astral Plane were so much more fun than just portal'ing everywhere though.

>the Great Wheel reminded a lot of the hackneyed medieval maps that scholars and philosophers created based off misconceived logic.
It was supposed to.

It just removed most things you could actually do with them.

I'm 12 and what is this?

The World Axis was the cosmology used in the default setting of 4th edition, consisting of the Prime Material Plane (or "The World"), the Feywild (a mirror plane inhabited by fey creatures), the Shadowfell (a mirror plane where the souls of the dead congregated for moving on to their next destination), the Astral Sea (realm of the gods) and the Elemental Chaos (the foundational plane of elemental matter and energy).

Or do you mean the picture? It's a fanciful portrayal of how the planes of the World Axis fit together.

Which is why the Astral Sea actually redesigned the Astral Plane to be more like sailing through a sea of starlight to explore the realms of the gods, ancient battlefields from before time began, and stillborn worlds.

So how is the World Axis different to the great wheel?

Because they remove Alignment from the planes.
Also I think Planescape is a missed opportunity because as much as I like certain things about it, instead of having an infinite number of weird planes, you have a few planes that fit into the Alignment system as objective heaven/hell for everyone. It makes worldbuilding in D&D actually harder since you have to answer how your setting treats the afterlife/great wheel, rather than having it be mysterious or letting you build your own.

In a nutshell? The Great Wheel was comprised of multiple "layers" of reality.

Starting with the Prime Material as the center of the map, you had the Inner Planes stretching out from that; Ethereal, Elemental, Astral.

The Elemental Planes consisted of Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Positive Energy and Negative Energy. They also formed a hypercube of Paraelemental Planes (meeting of Earth/Air/Water/Fire), Positive Quasielemental Planes (meeting of Earth/Air/Water/Fire and Positive Energy) and Negative Quasielemental Planes (meeting of Earth/Air/Water/Fire and Negative Energy).

Beyond that, you had the Outer Planes, which were embodiments of all possible alignments. So you had the standard nine grid, plus one intermediary plane between each of the "spoke" planes - so there was a plane between Lawful Good and Neutral Good, and another plane between Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral.

Or, here, check out 1d4chan for more info: 1d4chan.org/wiki/Great_Wheel

>the more abstract, mythical feeling World Axis
The thing that gets me is that most cultures had mythological cosmologies much closer to the Great Wheel than the World Axis. There was always an underlying structure that was used to explain the way that the world is.

And the World Axis has that? But those structures were often more simple or abstract, rather than the rigid and complex Great Wheel.

I prefer four distinct Elemental planes.

Why? What does that possibly add to have infinite masses of one sole elemental substance?

Sure, they serve as the equivalent of Gauntlet's monster-generating pits, but what can you do with them outside of that?

The most interesting parts of the Elemental Planes of old were ALWAYS the "bubbles" where you could have things like aquatic cities, or floating islands, or the City of Brass. Otherwise, they're just boring.

They didn't remove it, not really. They just made alignment based on the planes instead of the other way around.

>What does that possibly add to have infinite masses of one sole elemental substance?

I just like the concept of four distinct elemental planes. I like the idea of a Plane of Fire, a Plane of Air, a Plane of Earth, and a Plane of Water - though, let me clarify that I specifically like 5e's take on it, where the Elemental Planes are relatively like the Prime Material "close" to it, and simply become more and more of their pure Element the "further" you venture from the Prime Material.

But I like the idea of a plane consisting of endless, luminescent water in all directions, free of the constrains of gravity so that it's never forced together, with the occasional pockets of air or giant rocks or corals around which great cities are built. And I like the equivalents in the other planes.

I don't innately mind the idea of there being a place in the middle of the four Elemental Planes where the four Elements mix together into a chaotic morass. I'd just prefer it if that place in the middle was called the Prime Material Plane, not be some kind of distinct elemental chaos. And I certainly don't want the Elemental Chaos to entirely replace the four distinct Elemental Planes, such that the City of Brass becomes a mere bastion of Fire against a roiling sea of fire, air, earth, and water. I don't like the roil. For that matter I don't like necessarily mixing in the Elements with Chaos. The Elements should be distinct from the alignments.

But the question was, what do they actually add to the setting? What sort of adventure hooks does infinite fire/air/water/earth grant you?

I find it bland. There isn’t any real character or distinctiveness to it; it’s just Generic Fantasy Setting #4309. It lacks the inventiveness and originality of the Great Wheel— and, I suppose, its playfulness or whimsy.

This is a matter of taste, obviously. But I genuinely don’t grasp what’s so compelling about the World Axis.

>I don't like the roil. For that matter I don't like necessarily mixing in the Elements with Chaos. The Elements should be distinct from the alignments.

They are. While it's chaotic, 4e doesn't really have 'X plane is alignment tied'.

For me, the big thing is that everywhere in the World Axis is a location you can adventure. It's built as a roleplaying game setting, with a focus on giving the GM tools to run fun adventures and go to interesting places.

The Great Wheel is conceptually interesting and has a lot of stuff in it, but it also has a lot of boring filler stuff and huge amounts of pointless empty space that only exists to make it pointlessly huge.

>But I genuinely don’t grasp what’s so compelling about the World Axis.

It feels more like something that would be made by mythology. The Great Wheel gets incredibly overcomplex with Paraelemental, Quasielemental etc and starts to feel more like they were designing pokemon with 'Ok, we need X + Y, make a thing!'

Basically, what I'm saying is that I can imagine setting an entire campaign in Elemental Fire as it is described in 5e. It has its own distinct flavor and appeal. The players can hang out in the City of Brass, they can explore the Cinder Wastes on ash-skimmers, they can try and dispose of a artifact in the Fountains of Creation, etc. It's nice, concise, organized, with its own dependable rules. It's an exotic locale, like Arabia or something.

But I can't imagine getting anything useful or meaningful done with the roil that is Elemental Chaos in 4e. It's just a confusing morass of Limbo, the four Elemental planes fighting each other, and at the center of it, the Abyss for some reason. It's not an exotic locale, it's a place where you're probably going to get crushed by a rock or raped by a slaad.

>originality
>"Hey bob, let's just make a plane for every alignment"
>"Wow bob, what a creative and original idea"

When you call the place the Elemental Chaos and then stick the Abyss smack dab in the center, certain assumptions are going to be made.

While I find it more the other way. The Elemental Planes are 'Either you've got protection and that means the elemental qualities don't matter' or 'You die'. The Elemental Chaos has a lot more places where you won't die horribly and places where the two overlap in interesting ways without being an entire plane just for that overlap.

As an aside: The City of Brass still exists in 4e. Heck, I'm playing someone from it in a game.

>originality
>"Hey bob, let's take the great wheel and mash most of the the planes together so there's less of them, without any real rhyme or reason."
>"Another brilliant innovation for 4e, bob."

Chaos and Law are not really major alignments much any more in 4e. It's more good vs evil based and the elemental chaos is equally both (Heck, so is the Astral Sea. Evil gods are there too)

Without any rhyme or reason? The top image shows how they fit together smoothly. Astral Sea, Elemental Chaos, Shadowfell, Feywild and in the middle is the Prime Material.

2-axis alignment missed the point of alignment
The great wheel was 2-axis alignment + 滥竽充数

The top and bottom of the world axis are overdone tripe
But you can reach the left or right on foot
Which makes them largely interchangeable with fantastic locations in one world
Which is pretty hard to do badly

I did specify 5e, user. In 5e, you don't necessarily need protection from fire in Elemental Fire. The place is hot, sure, but it's not literally made out of fire anymore, at least not until you get to its furthest extremes. Very close to the Material Plane, there's even water on it. Humans can live in the border zones and even within the City of Brass without any elemental protection whatsoever, though they probably stay inside at noon given that the temperatures do rise pretty high there - but even then, not any higher than, say, Baghdad in July or August.

>The City of Brass still exists in 4e

As a bastion of Elemental Fire in a sea of chaos. This is rather distinct from its traditional position as the center of the grant Efreet Sultanate the presides over most of Elemental Fire.

As with the Forgotten Realms, it basically got fucked for no other reason than to be contrarian. "I'M 4E, LOOK AT HOW DIFFERENT I AM! WOWEE!"

>2-axis alignment missed the point of alignment

Sucking?

>As a bastion of Elemental Fire in a sea of chaos. This is rather distinct from its traditional position as the center of the grant Efreet Sultanate the presides over most of Elemental Fire.

It's still the center of a grand Efreet Sultanate, just one that's a bit more spread out/actually interacting with other elemental groups.

I have been fucking with my settings interpretation of the planes, and wanted to know if this order/layering makes sense for the purposes of what the spirit of Planescape wanted. Or possibly if this is what Planescape is,
my comprehension is quite fuzzy.

I figure this has to be the best thread to ask it in.

You ever read any Wuxia? It's like the 黑白factions. A binary 'us or them' label.
It's not who you get along with, it's who you share common enemies with.

>actually interacting with other elemental groups.

The efreet always interacted with the other elements. They allied with the dao, quarreled with the djinn, and hated the marids. And the Genies are the lords of each Elemental planes.

We're talking about creatures that can plane shift at will. They don't need physical borders with the other genies to have interaction.

As for the other elemental creatures, why does there need to be constant interaction and roil between them? What does that add to the setting? Elemental Chaos can be most closely likened to a Star Wars-style asteroid field, like what we saw in Empire Strikes Back, except that each asteroid is one Element. I can imagine having a few adventures there, sure, but the idea of setting an entire campaign there, when asteroids are constantly moving and shifting around, colliding with and destroying one another, and the best thing to do is to fine a large asteroid that's unlikely to break apart? That does't sound fun at all. That sounds like it would get real old, real fast.

...I'm pretty sure that's not actually how it worked in 4e.

Demiplanes are still a thing, user.

>滥竽充数
>黑白

Pretend for a moment that most people on an English-language board don't understand, nor do they want to understand, the stupid, nonsensical-since-whenever-they-first-encountered-alphabets Chinese writing system, and try again.

Seriously, though, why does every language not create or adopt an alphabet? I'm not even saying it should be the Roman alphabet. Chinese can use Cyrillic or make its own or whatever. Just ditch the nonsensical logograms, they do nothing but make the language needlessly difficult to learn to read and write.

Great Wheel...

Well, that's what I got from my original read-through of the 4e DMG, but I'll admit that was back in 2007 and I haven't touched it since. Unfortunately (Ha! That's a lie, I don't find it unfortunate at all) I currently only have the 4e PHB as a pdf and so can't double-check.

But that was my impression based on the description: a roiling sea of Elemental motes, some of them a few feet across at most, some of them miles across, all of them roiling around the whirlpool that was the Abyss, some of them in relatively "stable" spins, others careening around randomly.

It sounded awful. But then, it was 4e.

Also...

Yeah, nah, fuck that. The axis is much more smoother and more mythological.

>"more mythological"
Are you simply totally unfamiliar with Norse and Hindu myth? Because their cosmologies are a lot more similar to the Great Wheel than the axis.

If the World Axis were mythological, then there wouldn't be separate "planes" at all. Heaven would be a place you could physically reach by going high enough. Hell would be a place you could physically reach by going deep enough. The City of Brass would be a location in a deep desert somewhere in the world. The Sun would literally be a chariot or barge or naked scarred man or something.

Both the Great Wheel and the World Axis have more in common with more modern scholasticism and astronomy than anything else.

I’d say 5eg and pfg are better bets

Did you swap the of "Astral" and "Ethereal" on purpose, or was that a mistake?

In the Planescape cosmology, the Astral Plane connects the Prime with the Outer Planes, and the Ethereal Plane connects the Prime with the Inner Planes. (There's also a hypothetical "Ordinal Plane" which serves as a shortcut between the Outer and Inner planes, which is never officially statted out but is strongly implied by the "symmetry of 3s" theme that the rest of the planes have going on).

In 3e, the Ethereal Plane and Shadow Plane are only connected to the Prime, and the Astral is a sort of "cytoplasm" which connects to EVERY plane.

And I'm pretty sure that in 4e, the Feywild, Shadowfell, and Ethereal Plane are all tied directly to the Material Plane.

As an old-timer, who's never played with the world axis, I actually agree with you (at least in theory, which is all I have to go on). The great wheel always felt contrived to me. Then again, I've never like the idea of alignments as objective cosmic forces, and having planes based on alignments (an in-between alignments even, for an added level of autism), never appealed to me.

>Swap the POSTIONS of...

See here for a more in-depth discussion of the hypothetical Ordinal/Ordial Plane:

mimir.net/mapinfinity/ordial.html

I generally prefer to take things from an angle of using the Great Wheel as a base, then adding in elements from the World Axis, somewhat like 5e, but not entirely.

My usual configuration is something like this:

• The Region of Dreams, also known as the Veil of Sleep or the Phlogiston: This is a new plane that exists between the crystal spheres of the Prime Material Plane, which are in turn sandwiched between the Ethereal Plane and the Astral Plane. Whenever a sentient or sapient creature sleeps and dreams (in my cosmology, all sapient creatures require at least two hours of sleep each day, both of which are dreaming sleep), their mind/soul transfers to this plane and creates a dreamscape out of the protomatter drifting from the Ethereal Plane. Within that dreamscape, the creature's memories copy themselves, crystallize into memory cores, float into the Astral Plane, and gradually ferment into ectoplasm, which subsequently forms the Outer Planes.
The Outer Planes are made of ectoplasm, which is fermented from two primary sources: the memory cores that drift up from dreams, and the memory cores of the dead as they travel through conduits in the Astral Plane, onwards to their afterlives.

• The Ethereal Plane: The Deep Ethereal is also known as the Elemental Chaos, and is much like the 4e plane of the same name.

• The Inner Planes in General: The Para-Elemental Planes and the Quasi-Elemental Planes no longer exist as true planes. They exist as border regions of the six Inner Planes; the Fire/Positive border, for example, is the Border of Radiance. Just like in 1e, the Inner Planes are reflections of the crystal spheres of the Prime Material Plane. Any given crystal sphere corresponds to a section in each of the Inner Planes.

Yeah, you could get to the Feywild through faerie rings and crossroads.

• The Negative Energy Plane: This is also known as the Plane of Shadow or the Shadowfell, and shares many traits with those planes. Like any other Inner Plane, elemental pockets are in abundance here. It is inhabited not only by negative energy elementals (also known as "entropic" elementals or "nightshades"), but also by many other undead, many of which rally under the banner of the Union of Eclipses. Atropus dwells here as well. For mysterious reasons, this is the one plane that connects to other multiverses, and so alien creatures from other cosmologies and from the many Far Realms wind up here as well.

• The Positive Energy Plane: This is also known as the Plane of Faerie or the Feywild, and shares many traits with those planes. Like any other Inner Plane, elemental pockets are in abundance here. It is is inhabited not only by positive energy elementals (also known as "vivacious" elementals or "spiritovores"), but also by the multiverse's largest concentration of fey. Ragnorra lives here too. This plane is home to the soul fonts which provide the souls for all newborn sentient and sapient creatures in the multiverse. A mix of non-fey positive elementals and fey positive elementals inhabit the soul fonts. The two greatest and most influential soul fonts are the Bastion of Unborn Souls and the Garden of Unborn Immortals.

Why do I handle it this way, compared to using the World Axis as a basis?

The main reason is that 4e's cosmology downplays one of my top three favorite aspects of the Great Wheel: Saṃsāra.

One of my favorite aspects of the Great Wheel/Planescape is the idea that when people die, they reincarnate as petitioners in an appropriate Outer Plane, with much of their personality intact but very little of their memories. Many petitioners go on to evolve into various types of outsiders, like archons in Mount Celestia, baatezu in the Nine Hells, and tanar'ri in the Abyss.

I like the idea of a mortal finding new life as a celestial or a fiend and evolving through myriad dazzling forms. It is possible that they might become curious about their old lives and go to lengths to investigate what they were previously, just for the sake of closure. It is also possible that they might join one of the factions that study reincarnation in-depth, such as the Believers of the Source and the Dustmen, and possibly seek nirvana/moksha/kaivalya and ascension towards the Source/True Death.

I love the idea that, given the right RPG system, someone could actually play one of these reincarnated souls and explore many a roleplaying opportunity based on such a thing.

While Planescape: Torment did not actually address the standard petitioner reincarnation cycle, it did address reincarnation in a different yet equally interesting way, and that was fascinating too.

The World Axis has some of this with the exalted and the outsiders in the Astral Sea, the deva race, and the Keeper of the Everflow epic destiny, yet it is not quite such a central facet of the setting. After all, if most people wound up as exalted and outsiders in the World Axis, then the Shadowfell would lose much of its point.

Page 48 of the 4e Manual of the Planes stipulates that "[the Shadowfell] is the domain of the dead, the final stage of the soul’s journey before moving onto the unknown."

Page 34 of the Plane Above states, "Only a few of the mortals who are fervent worshipers of their deity become exalted. Many other mortal souls spiral out of the Shadowfell and past the dominions of the gods into unknown fates or are born again in new bodies with no memory of their previous incarnation. Other mortal souls might remain in the world among the primal spirits as ancestor spirits or guardians."
A soul definitely does not travel to the Shadowfell only to become an exalted or an outsider in the Astral Sea, oh, no. Nobody but the Raven Queen knows where that soul goes, and maybe not even her.

Out of personal preference, what I am looking for is a setting wherein, in 4e terms, the vast majority of souls go on to become exalted in the Astral Sea's various dominions. That is a significant departure from 4e's cosmology, however, at which point I would prefer to use another cosmology as a basis for my setting needs.

The secondary reason why I handle things this way is because, out of personal preference, I run games mainly set in the Outer Planes. I need all the diversity and nitty-gritty subcategorization I can get. The seventeen Outer Planes each have their own layers, individual species, signature "dominant species" (e.g. archons in Mount Celestia and guardinals in Elysium), and city-state-like divine realms. The Outer Planes are effectively grand empires and nations unto themselves, each with their own subdivisions and independent polities.

I could, in theory, run something similar in the Plane Above: The Astral Sea, but it would not quite be the same. This is because the Astral Sea is Points-of-Light-esque: astral dominions are effectively city-states with a tiny few exceptions (e.g. Baator). I would prefer to have more areas clustered together into thematic "nations" with shared cultures and societies.

To me, the Wheel's Outer Planes are like seventeen star systems in a space opera setting, each with many inhabited planets that comprise their own self-sustaining society with thematic links to each other. In contrast, the World Axis's astral dominions are more like a space opera setting where there are no star systems and every planet is a "standalone world" with a cluster of asteroids around it, which is not quite what I am looking for.

As an example of what I mean, consider that in 2e's Great Wheel, Arborea is home to most of the Greek pantheon, most of the elven pantheon, many other gods (e.g. Nephthys and Sune), all the eladrin under the Court of Stars, and the headquarters of the Society of Sensation. It is one of the three usual home bases of the Seelie pantheon of the fairies.

Arborea has three layers each with different topographical themes, the second layer is the endpoint of the Oceanus, the third layer is a graveyard of titanic gods who held the secrets of the True Words/Language Primeval. It is a plane of freedom and compassion, but it is also a plane of incredibly intense emotions both positive and negative, so its locals often get into trouble because of heart-throbbing love or uncontrolled indignation.

That is just *one* plane, and the politics and plot hooks within it alone stand out immediately to me.

Now, I could recreate that in the World Axis's Astral Sea by pulling together various astral dominions together into a makeshift "astral dominion cluster" to recreate Arborea. Better yet, I could section off a region of the Feywild to do the same, particularly given the eladrin similarities. At that point, however, I should save myself the work and use the original Arborea altogether if it is going to be the same thing anyway.

I hope all of this makes sense for why I use the Great Wheel as a basis and add in World Axis elements, rather than the other way around.

I think I did it by mistake, but given the weird nature of what the Astral and Ethereal planes are for, I constantly jumble them up. The idea I'm building for is the Thought/Abstract vs. Matter/Concrete theme between the empty physicality of the Inner Planes (which is why the Shadowfell falls in that direction) and the high-minded power of ideas that the Outer Planes have. (I also played way too much PS:T.) Admittedly the Astral and Ethereal don't gel perfectly, especially when, as I see it, 'Space' exists in the physical world, not on the Astral Sea.

It's basically an amalgamation of what I like about Great Wheel, 4e, and the 5e composite that I'm trying to square-peg-round-hole.

You funny.

Diversity of environments was a huge reason for me.

The Elemental Planes of old are monolithic; depending on which edition you look at, the Plane of Fire is either an infinite 3d expanse of flames, or composed entirely of things that are either on fire, made of fire, or are somehow inflammable that got dumped here from other worlds.

The Elemental Chaos, however, lets you play around with elemental matter in whatever way you can imagine. Want to fight against a blizzard dragon resting in a palace of ice and frost-magma at the heart of a raging firestorm? Want to climb a mountain made of intertwined lightning bolts to commune with the sages whose temple lies at its peak? Want to do battle with the vengeful incarnation of a stillborn planet? You can do all that in the Elemental Chaos.

The Feywild is THE land of faerie, completely sheered of any and all hippy-dippy cutesy "fey are goodies!" bullshit. No more scattering faerie elements across Arcadia, Arborea and Ysgard; now there's one single magical place, where goblin kings hold their chaotic courts in magical labyrinths, where fey shepherds tend to flocks of moving hills, forests walk and rivers talk and hags scheme.

The Shadowfell is the place where death comes from. It's not an infinite, kill-you-instantly void like the Negative Energy Plane, it's a world of death and decay, where the souls of the dead gather for their final judgment.

The Astral Sea is the heavenly realms made accesible. Walk with the gods themselves in their home realms, battle alongside or against angels and devils alike, explore battlefields from before the dawn of time and plunder the ruins of worlds long dead.

If that doesn't seem fantastical to you, then I really can't help you.

There are actually a bunch of mythologically-inspired alternate cosmologies in the 5e DMG, most of which are frankly more fun and interesting than the Great Wheel/World Axis.

>Want to fight against a blizzard dragon resting in a palace of ice and frost-magma at the heart of a raging firestorm?
Why would a blizzard dragon live in the center of a eternal raging firestorm? Just sounds really inconvenient. like what if he gets hungry, he cant go into the firestorm to hunt for obvious reasons.
Its like if someone with a peanut allergy living in the middle of a peanut field.
feels like someone only thought "Wow" and never "Why".

Most of those were described in greater detail in 3.0's Manual of the Planes.

For my own part, when I was dicking around about a year ago and making a Mesopotamian pantheon, I created a Mesopotamia cosmology, which (not coincidentally) also could serve rather well as a Biblical cosmology with only some minor tweaks:

>Ki. The mortal world, the Prime Material Plane. The Mesopotamians envisioned it as a disk (not a sphere) many miles thick, though your world may have a different shape to it. Some versions of Mesopotamian cosmology divide Ki into two realms, the surface and the underground of Apsu, from which fresh water flows (the Mesopotamians believed that fresh water came from beneath the Earth, whereas salt water came from the seas and Nammu).

>An. The Firmanent, or Heavens. The Fimament is a hard, metallic substance and holds back the waters of Nammu (see below), though occasionally those waters leak through and fall to Ki as rain.

>Irkalu. The Underworld, buried beneath the crust of Ki (and Apsu, if the cosmology includes it) and the domain of Ereshkigal. Everyone goes to Irkalu after dying regardless of social status or the actions performed in life. Neither a punishment nor a reward, the dead in Irkalu are weak and powerless ghosts, for whom dust is their food and clay their nourishment; they see no light and dwell in darkness.

>Lil. The atmosphere, the air and the domain of most of the gods. The brighter parts of the Lil are the sun, moon, and stars. Some versions of Mesopotamian mythology expand on Lil by stating that there are three heavens within Lil – the lowest being the atmosphere immediately above Ki which mortals live and breathe, the higher atmosphere of the Sun and Moon; and on top, the atmosphere of the stars.

>Nammu. The primordial sea beyond An, a vast, dark ocean of Chaos within which ancient and primordial monsters lurk.

>GAME EFFECTS
>Celestial beings in a Mesopotamian setting come from Lil, the atmosphere. Simply replace Celestia, Arborea, or whatever other plane you like with Lil. Lil is not infinite in size, though it is larger than Ki.

>Fiendish beings in a Mesopotamian setting have no home plane. Instead they tend to come from some vague direction – the east, the south, and so on, while others may come from underground (not Irkalu, though), and still others Lil (see below). While some may hail from Nammu, particularly the chaotic evil tanar’ri, the vast majority are actually native to some location on the Prime Material (Ki), and spells that banish them will simply return them to that location.

>Beings of Chaotic planes, like Slaadi, most probably hail from Nammu. Lawful beings, meanwhile, almost certainly would hail from one of the layers of Lil, likely the second.

>Water elemental beings could hail from either Nammu, or else the oceans of the material plane. Fire Elementals might come from volcanos, or from the Sun itself. Earth elementals exist buried deep in Ki, though not down to Irkalu. Finally, Air elementals reside in all levels of Lil.

>The Ethereal Plane is replaced by Lil. In a setting that uses the three layers of Lil, it is specifically the first layer. This means that the Ethereal Plane is coexistent with the Material Plane. The Plane of Shadow, meanwhile, is replaced with Irkalu, beneath Ki, while the Astral Plane is replaced by Nammu, the primordial waters.

>In a Mesopotamian setting, it is strongly recommended that you make it impossible to bring the dead back to life. A central tenant of Mesopotamian religion is that eternal life is reserved for gods and only gods, and so only the direct intervention of the gods themselves should be able to return a dead mortal to life – if even that. Ereshkigal jealously guards the spirits that dwell in her realm.

>Basically, what I'm saying is that I can imagine setting an entire campaign in Elemental Fire as it is described in 5e. It has its own distinct flavor and appeal. The players can hang out in the City of Brass, they can explore the Cinder Wastes on ash-skimmers, they can try and dispose of a artifact in the Fountains of Creation, etc. It's nice, concise, organized, with its own dependable rules. It's an exotic locale, like Arabia or something.

I always liked the Elemental Chaos because it gave a reason for stuff to actually interact.

But- most importantly- they aren't on an infinite plane. That means that the Cinder Planes are a finite place that has to compete with the Isle of Dread and motes of Ice. There's reason for fire and water and ice and other elementals to interact with one another and come into conflict.

I used to wonder why the fuck an Efreeti would ever want to leave their infinite realm of fire that they're perfectly adapted to, with infinite resources, infinite space, infinite everything, just to go muck around some hostile world in search of limited stuff.

Same for the Astral Sea. Usually all the deities and outsiders live on their own infinite planes with unlimited resources and wage pretty much pointless wars across the infinite heavens for purely idealistic reasons.

However, when the realm of the LG guy and the realm of the CE villain are on the same plane and have to use the same space and resources, it makes sense why they fight.

The great wheel cosmology reminds me of a world where every single culture/nation is on it's own infinite sized continent with all the sustenance, wealth, and shit they could ever want and where the atmosphere is deadly to anyone but them, and yet they still go around fucking with each other.

>Are you simply totally unfamiliar with Norse and Hindu myth? Because their cosmologies are a lot more similar to the Great Wheel than the axis.

Not really. They have higher and lower realms that are divided up into smaller individual worlds (often in layers), but they don't really have a massive chain-link of totally different worlds where the only way to get from A world to E world is by passing through B, C, and D.

Because, as a powerful elemental creature, he can will the firestorm to open a pathway to let him through when he leaves or returns?

That's the reason they call it the Elemental Chaos: beings of sufficient power can reshape the world around them by willing it.

Still, a poor example, you're right. M' sort of fried.

My basic point was, the Elemental Chaos can have much more interesting shit in it that you could fit into the Elemental Planes.

Seriously, tell me where I'm supposed to fit any of these Chaos-locales into the Elemental Planar Wheel?

>The Body Luminous is an enormous mass of lightning-lit thunderheads, miles in diameter, that streaks endlessly across the Elemental Chaos. Those who pierce its depths find a nucleus of chalky stone filled with fossils and petrified artifacts. Sages whisper that it is a vestige of some apocalypse that will strike the World in the future, hurled back in time through some cataclysmic upheaval.

>Canaughlin Bog is an enormous swamp of magical nature, in some places normal, in others more fantastical. Dngerous as it can be, it is also very valuable, for it contains portals to swamps across the multiverse, from marshes in the World to the Murkendraw of the Feywild to moors in the Shadowfell to the mudflats of Minauros. During the Blood War, Canaughlin Bog serves the devils well as a means for invading the Elemental Chaos or maneuvering between the planes.

>Gloamnull, also known as the City of Rain, is a fortified genasi trade city that takes the form of a huge citadel atop a floating island. Cursed by some dark magic, an eternal rainstorm lashes the city, blotting out all light and drenching it in a torrential downpour of tainted water. Driven to survive, the genasi natives have been forced to swear a pact of servitude to Dagon in order to sustain their home, and now terrible demons breed in the flooded tunnels beneath the blighted city.

>Seriously, though, why does every language not create or adopt an alphabet? I'm not even saying it should be the Roman alphabet. Chinese can use Cyrillic or make its own or whatever. Just ditch the nonsensical logograms, they do nothing but make the language needlessly difficult to learn to read and write.

Same reason every language doesn't use phonetic spelling or the simplest possible syntax, or do away with masculine/feminine words. etc.

>The Body Luminous

Sounds like it would be comfortably in Elemental Air, or into the Astral Sea, in either 5e or 3e.

>Canaughlin Bog

The Plane of Shadow in 3e, the Shadowfell in 5e. Or the border between Elemental Earth and Elemental Water in either.

>Gloamnull, also kown as the City of Rain.

Its own Demiplane in 3e; or perhaps on the border of Elemental Water and Elemental Earth. In 5e, it could just be in Elemental Water.

Norse Mythology?
>Niflheim - Land of the Dead
>Muspelheim - Land of Fire Giants
>Asgard - Land of the Gods
>Midgard - Land of Mortals
>Jotunheim - Land of Giants/Monsters
>Vanaheim - Land of the Other Gods
>Alfheim - Land of Elves
>Svartalfheim - Land of Dwarves
>Helheim - Land of the Damned Dead
Any of which can be reached from anywhere else by climbing onto Yggdrasil. I was going to say this actually reminds me more of the World Axis, but I can see some slight resemblance to the Great Wheel now...

...Just what the hell makes a magical swamp sound inherently tied to "the mirror plane of the world where all the lights are turned off"?

The World Axis is designed to be used by players and DMs, versus being something you read about in a book, but scarcely use, on top of being intentionally open enough for the DM to put whatever they want in it without having to worry about stepping on some devs toes.
It falls into my rub with a lot of material from later 2e into 3.5: it is someone telling you "what it is" without leaving much open ends for the DM or the players to either leave a mark or modulate things to fit their campaign. It is exactly what so many people on this board have decried: Someone who tried to make their campaign their book, instead of a campaign.

>The World Axis is designed to be used by players and DMs, versus being something you read about in a book, but scarcely use, on top of being intentionally open enough for the DM to put whatever they want in it without having to worry about stepping on some devs toes.
>It falls into my rub with a lot of material from later 2e into 3.5: it is someone telling you "what it is" without leaving much open ends for the DM or the players to either leave a mark or modulate things to fit their campaign. It is exactly what so many people on this board have decried: Someone who tried to make their campaign their book, instead of a campaign.
...The fuck? How does the first part correlate to the second part?

>...Just what the hell makes a magical swamp sound inherently tied to "the mirror plane of the world where all the lights are turned off"?

The fact that it's a swamp? A place where things die and rot in muck? Not to mention that at least since 2e, the Plane of Shadow has been seen as a possible portal to other Material Planes or alternate realities, an alternative to Spelljammers or Sigil.

I don't really like either of them. World Axis is way too small and limited, while the Great Wheel has far too many redundant planes where there's nothing to do (has anyone had an adventure on Bytopia? Ever?)

>...The fuck? How does the first part correlate to the second part?
Why I prefer the World Axis to the Great Wheel.

>hating on Bytopia

There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, but like all changes made within 4th edition it received hate that was initially just the standard "they changed it and now it's ruined" you see of every new edition, vastly amplified by the fact 4th edition fans had to be a pack of smug fucks that shat on everything make their choice of game seem better.

You can still see this latter tendency in act where they act like 4th edition was the sole good thing to come out of D&D, and the fanbase was just too stupid to appreciate it.

...Except, the way you've written it, that post reads like you're saying the second paragraph applies to *the World Axis*. That it's the *World Axis* that tells you "what it is" and leaves no open ends for DMs and players.

>滥竽充数
That's an idiom that came from super-compressing a story down to 4 syllables. China has lots of those.
That one means using quantity to hide a lack of quality.
>黑白
Black and White.

>4th edition was the sole good thing to come out of D&D, and the fanbase was just too stupid to appreciate it.
Not the sole good thing.
You also have Rules Cyclopedia, early 2e, and I'd toss a bone to 5e.
And yes, the fanbase that came from 3e were too stupid to see that 4e was the best version of D&D in maybe decades at being a game and making sure the game part WORKED, and let the DM+players hash out the rest to their own satisfaction.
My bad.

>And yes, the fanbase that came from 3e were too stupid to see that 4e was the best version of D&D in maybe decades at being a game and making sure the game part WORKED, and let the DM+players hash out the rest to their own satisfaction.
People buy products so they don't have to make those products themselves.

That has no actual relevance here, a poor argument when you compare rules in D&D.
>hint: most editions are actually relatively rules light

Except it didn't even work all that well.

- Padded sumo wrestlers is in full effect.
- Minions, while good in theory, create this weird dissociation were players make decisions based on whether or not an enemy is a minion, as though they have minion-detection HUDs.
- Monsters were stripped not only of non-combat abilities, but even combat abilities. The theory is that monsters only last five or six rounds and so only need five or six abilities. In practice, however, you'll frequently meet the same type of monster more than once (in which case having some variety in what the monster can do is valuable). As well, it ignores the fact that monsters need to be able to react to the unexpected actions of the PCs (in which case having a wider array of tactical options is valuable)
- Also, due to the "padded sumo wrestler" thing, non-minion monsters can often last much longer than 5 or 6 rounds.
- The system was designed to reduce encounter complexity...but it did the opposite. In 3rd Edition you might have a battle with 8 ogres, but they'd all have the same abilities. In 4th Edition you might have a battle with 8 ogres, but they'll have five different stat blocks.
- 4e dived headfirst into buffs, making keeping track of them incredibly annoying. Worse, they're largely situational: +1 for each ally adjacent to your target; -2 for being marked; +1 to a particular skill check if you're within 5 squares of one character; -2 to a different skill check if you're within 6 squares of another one. So combat is more complicated.
- The 15-minute adventuring day "nova cycle" is still in full effect. It's arguably worse.
- Skill challenges simply DID NOT WORK as written when 4e was published. Even when errata'd, it still had numerous problems.
- Different kinds of monsters had abilities with the same name but different effects; for example, the Evil Eye ability of the cyclopses. This is needlessly confusing.

I could go on for some time, you know.

All those locations you said are in the Element Chaos.

It isn't Limbo.

I’ve always loved the Ordial, the purely theoretical plane that nobody knows anything about.

I don’t know why the Abyss is in the Elemental Chaos.

Fantastical, sure. Granted.

But— and I know how reductionistic this sounds— don’t the latter three (the Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the Astral Sea) sounds an awful lot like Heaven, Hell, and the nebulously-defined-but-nonetheless-present faerie realm that you encounter in a lot of stories?

This doesn’t seem striking, or exciting, or new. Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about the World Axis resembling real-world mythology?

At the risk of coming across as an insufferable hipster (although I don’t know why that term would make sense in this context): the last book to impress me in the same way Planescape did was Fire on the Velvet Horizon.

>Its like if someone with a peanut allergy living in the middle of a peanut field.
I am deeply amused by the mental image of this fellow, the saddest peanut farmer in the world. Every day, he looks out towards his fields and thinks, “Why? Why did I think this was a viable career path? Why didn’t I listen to my high-school guidance counselor?”

Yes, and I could waste time with your post, but I'll distill it to something simple: you are shit, and your games are shit, because shit games have the problems you listed.

>This doesn’t seem striking, or exciting, or new. Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about the World Axis resembling real-world mythology?
This is exactly what I meant when I said "Makes a better book, rather than something DMs are supposed to apply, and possibly warp, to use in their campaign".
You aren't supposed to read about it, you are supposed to use it, manipulate it, have the pcs do shit in them. It reinforces the undercurrent that people on Veeky Forums don't play games, just read the books like they are stories, and get mad when the books are about how to play a game, not tell a (usually poor) story.

Yeah, and 4e has those problems.

It's by no means dissimilar, however.

>All those locations you said are in the Element Chaos.

Yeah, but scattered all over the place without rhyme or reason. The City of Brass at any given time might be floating in the air or surrounded by water. It's awful.

>- 4e dived headfirst into buffs, making keeping track of them incredibly annoying. Worse, they're largely situational: +1 for each ally adjacent to your target; -2 for being marked; +1 to a particular skill check if you're within 5 squares of one character; -2 to a different skill check if you're within 6 squares of another one. So combat is more complicated.

3.5 had WAY more buffs than 4e did. 4e's ones also tended to be 1 round rather than 'for the next 8 hours' so you had less of them active at once.

>At the risk of coming across as an insufferable hipster (although I don’t know why that term would make sense in this context): the last book to impress me in the same way Planescape did was Fire on the Velvet Horizon.

Mind you, the VAST majority of the planes in 3.5 were 'We blatently stole X from mythology'. I mean, the whole 'Mountain you go up in the lawful good afterlife' is literally taken from an existing faith.

>diversity of environments
>based on every trope of every simplified setting ever
Guess you don't read too much then.

R8 my autistic attempt to combine the best aspects of the Great Wheel and World Axis. I also renamed some of the planes.

The city of brass is surrounded by a sea of fire.

Sure there may be something else once you cross that, but that can happen in the elemental plane of fire too anyways (Such as the paraelemental planes).

This screencap was made personally for you.

>Yeah, and 4e had those problems.
ftfy

4e had issues on launch, but basically everything you bitch about was either fixed, or wasn't perceived as a bad thing by groups who enjoy the system.

I'll never understand why people keep posting this. It doesn't make any compelling argument or contain any actual evidence. It's just a random assertion and blame being placed on the smaller group who spent most of their time being attacked when the edition war was actually a thing.

Do you actually think it means anything, to just keep reposting that out of context?

I like this one.