Redpill me on the World Axis. Why is it, apparently, so inherently bad as a cosmology?

Redpill me on the World Axis. Why is it, apparently, so inherently bad as a cosmology?

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It's like a stumbled step between two very different concepts.

On one hand, you have the 4e mantra of "Everything for the sake of game" that produced the oversimplified PoL setting and the Feywild/Shadowfell duality that's essentially "Want more grim? Shadowfell. Want from fantasy? Feywild."

Immediate, but shallow, and largely mindless with no real heart to any of it. But, it would work for 4e, because 4e didn't need a complex universe.

On the other hand, you have the remnants of the Planescape setting, a gigantic multiverse of lore that includes things so esoteric and remote that the players might never encounter even a full 1% of all the fragments of stories floating around in it.

It was teeming with style, but was something that had a hard time making its way into games, requiring lengthy exposition and explanations that involved intertwining ideas heaped with amateur philosophy, and wasn't supported by the shifts that 4e took with alignments and character abilities.

So, we have them slammed into each other, and we get this awkward mix of planescape but without its foundational identity, and 4e simplified view of the universe but with some random junk stapled onto it.

I've never played 4e so I don't know what all went into 4e's cosmology, but I always figured it was grognard whining and Planescape fans crying. Good to know it's actually got some real flaws.

I can't really say as I agree with you. I found Planescape's "esoteric" lore to be mostly pretentions and hot air, and the strict adherence to alignment as the basis of the multiverse hurt the cosmology far, far more than it helped.

I actually found the World Axis more intuitive to grasp and easier to assimilate material into or build stories from.

What he described IS just grognard whining/planescape fans crying. The 4e "multiverse" is already too large for any given campaign.

Planescape is a setting and content for people who like to read lots of source books and argue over minutia, essentially just the most hardcore of fans.

The cosmology for 4e was designed to be simpler because they realized most players have little contact with all that stuff and so they made it easier to understand, and more importantly, more flexible and playable for both GMs and PCs. There is still a huge amount of room for planar adventures and fun, it is just less rigidly codified. This all works much better for a basic system and setting to get people into it, there is very little in your way of using a different cosmology if you'd like.

That is grongards who can’t stand the fact that only they took the time to buy and read all the plan escape books instead of playing.

Here's the real red pill: it's not. It's the best cosmology D&D has ever had.

I have never seen someone say so little with so many words. All you basically said is "it isn't planechase so i dun like it".

Heck, didn't the 4e Manual of the Planes devote a whole page to saying "want to use the Great Wheel? Make the following changes, but if you need to know how this functioned in past editions, you'll have to look at past edition stuff"?

The only thing I really have any problem with regarding it is that I think the the names "feywild" and "shadowfell" are dumb.

It's not bad. It's just that it was 4e, so neckbeards hate it by default.

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.

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This is true, but it's also only the best because D&D has bad writing.

I suppose that is one way to look at it, but I found most of the Outer Planes to be, personally? Quite dull. The mish-mash of real-world religions and fictious material ended up diluting the whole.

As for the Astral Sea beings "Points of Light esque", again, technically true. But there is nothing to stop a DM expanding it. Ravenloft, for example, has long been a source of complaints that its lands are far too small and sparsely populated to make sense with all the monsters present. The Astral Sea easily expands to accomodate what you need.

Personally, I could not care less about the existence of real-world deities in my cosmology - I find it prompts far less hassle from my players when I leave real world mythology as much out of the game as I can.

As for the eladrin & faerie pantheons... that's literally the reason why the Feywild was split; because "faerieland" was divided as a concept across multiple different planes in the Great Wheel. So, all the Fey plothooks are supposed to be tied to World Axis Arvandor and the Feywild respectively, because that's why those realms EXIST.

Oceanus? Pointless except as an Upper Planar counterpart to the River Styx.

The divine graveyard is a cool concept, I'll give you, but easily placed on its own; it has no need to be mashed into Arvandor just because.

Literally everything you say you can do with the Wheel's Outer Planes, you can do with the World Axis. There's just far greater freedom.

Also, I'm pretty sure that Samsara was actually a pretty minor element in Planescape. Petitioners did ultimately merge with their planes, but apart from Fiends being transformed from larvae, I don't recall Celestials having the same origin.

>I suppose that is one way to look at it, but I found most of the Outer Planes to be, personally? Quite dull. The mish-mash of real-world religions and fictious material ended up diluting the whole.
I agree with you: they are dull. The execution was bad for the vast majority of them, and places like Acheron and Bytopia are especially poorly-executed. I think that many of them have brilliant concepts, however, so I take those concepts and apply my own execution.

>As for the Astral Sea beings "Points of Light esque", again, technically true. But there is nothing to stop a DM expanding it.
The Astral Sea's setup specializes more in "disparate city-states across a wilderness," much like Points of Light itself, whereas I am looking more for "discrete nations with their own provinces and cities."

>Personally, I could not care less about the existence of real-world deities in my cosmology
I trim down real-world pantheons, take the basic themes, give them my own twisted spin, and then search Danbooru for anime pictures of those mythological gods. This formula has served me well so far. If you look closely, Planescape actually has some interesting reinterpretations of mythological gods, like Bast being a goddess of sleep and dreams, because cats sleep a lot, so obviously they dream a lot too; Bast actually controls some of the finest oneiromancers in the planes, the Dream Hunters, as per Planes of Chaos.

>As for the eladrin & faerie pantheons... that's literally the reason why the Feywild was split; because "faerieland" was divided as a concept across multiple different planes in the Great Wheel. So, all the Fey plothooks are supposed to be tied to World Axis Arvandor and the Feywild respectively, because that's why those realms EXIST.
This is why I blend the Positive Energy Plane with the Feywild, so that I can have unaligned fairy-types there, and more celestially-inclined and energy/passion-themed "fairies" in Arborea.

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>Oceanus? Pointless except as an Upper Planar counterpart to the River Styx.
On its own, yes, the Oceanus is dull. When connected to planes and used as defining points for those planes, it gets more interesting, like how Elysium and Arborea both hold different sections of the Oceanus, and yet interpret it in vastly different ways due to their differing ideologies.

>The divine graveyard is a cool concept, I'll give you, but easily placed on its own; it has no need to be mashed into Arvandor just because.
Placing it in Arborea raises a fair bit of interesting questions and mysteries, like "Why is this in Arborea specifically, and how is it tied to the rest of the Arborea?"

>Literally everything you say you can do with the Wheel's Outer Planes, you can do with the World Axis. There's just far greater freedom.
I could say something similar about my particular blend, except that I prefer structure to freedom.

>Also, I'm pretty sure that Samsara was actually a pretty minor element in Planescape. Petitioners did ultimately merge with their planes, but apart from Fiends being transformed from larvae, I don't recall Celestials having the same origin.
Saṃsāra is a major component of the setting, as per On Hallowed Ground. Every single one of the Outer Planes has petitioners that come from deceased souls. This includes the Upper Planes. Most archons come from petitioners, for example. The other six Upper Planes likewise have many petitoners. Elysium's guardinals and Arborea's eladrins are not petitioner-born, though in my games specifically, I like to make them so.

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This thread is far more interesting than I thought it'd be.

Oh? Why's that?

Dumb MtG fag.

I'm torn. On the one hand
>the World Axis
I'm genuinely enthused about sharing my favorite official cosmology for actual play with anyone new

on the other hand
>redpill
You need to lurk more before you crossboard.

>the strict adherence to alignment as the basis of the multiverse hurt the cosmology far, far more than it helped.
This was my biggest problem with The Great Wheel, and one of my favorite parts of World Axis is that it did away with it. Good/Evil and Law/Chaos is... it doesn't work so good for much of anything except when used as a framework for the much messier concept of ethics and morality, but baking it literally into the cosmology as inalienable cosmic truth strongly encourages people to always use alignment, and to always use it wrong.

The world/axis, while similar changes Good/Evil and Law/Chaos INTO Genesis+Chaos/Structure+Rules and Life/Death... which is really fucking close but just... better for actual storytelling and gameplay. Life isn't necessarily "Good" and death isn't necessarily "Evil" and chaotic genesis vs deific order is a much more cosmic conflict that doesn't care about mortals and their "morality" much at all.... and the cosmic conflict of the universe beyond the purview of mere mortal men.... shouldn't care about mortal morality. PC ethics and morality should be about decisions and judgement calls, not checking where your temperature is on the 8-pronged-morality-tricorder. GRANTED, Great Wheel and the classic 9-box alignment chart CAN do it that way when done right (COUGHPlanescapeTormentCOUGH,) but so much about the cosmology encourages sooooo many tables to do it soooo wrong, and the little changes and simplifications in world-axis encourage new tables to do it right.

It also discourages little shits from thinking their character should have advantages because they themselves spent hours memorizing planescape/great-wheel cosmology that their characters would have no way of knowing... fucking pricks.

>I'm genuinely enthused about sharing my favorite official cosmology for actual play with anyone new
So which books should I read to get a good idea of the World Axis?

I think you and I have had this same discussion several times. You'd definitely given me a greater appreciation of the Wheel with the Samsara concept, but I still stick with the World Axis over the Great Wheel
>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."

I still prefer this. As it gives good reasons for ghosty stuff as well as quests to go find and talk to dead people (or steal them back!). Also it is just a waiting room, we don't know what happens after they fade from the Shadowfell, and reincarnation until one transcends (or descends perhaps) to something else suits me just fine.

Or not, the thing that interests me the most of cosmology for more RPG's is how playable it is, and I don't study every book like I used to and see clearly now that most other GM's and players don't either. So I'm happy with the vagaries and openness of the 4e cosmology, it provides for a more interesting game in play for a wider group of people in my opinion.

>the strict adherence to alignment as the basis of the multiverse hurt the cosmology far, far more than it helped.
This I will agree with as well. Alignment is best used as a vague descriptor, not as cosmic hard lines. When the cosmology is set up according to these hard lines it is clearly pushing the game in that direction.

I agree with you: alignment is silly. That is why, strange as it my sound, I run the Great Wheel with World Axis touches while discreetly shoving alignment into the background. This has worked surprisingly well, and the Outer Planes remain cohesive if one writes up a list of "themes" and emphasizes those rather than alignment.

The list of "themes" I use for the Outer Planes are as follows, though I have had to apply some stretches and creative liberties here and there:
• Mount Celestia, the Perfected Peaks: Self-refinement and virtuous codes
• Bytopia, the Industrious Mirrors: Diligence and prosperity
• Elysium, the Wanderer's Eden: Altruism and travel
• The Beastlands, the Wu Wei Wild: Beasts and instinct
• Arborea, the Fervent Verdure: Liberty and passion
• Ysgard, the Proving Ground: Competition and proving of worth
• Limbo, the Ever-Changing Chaos: Imagination and spontaneity
• Pandemonium, the Lunatic Tempest: Madness and whimsy
• The Abyss, the Death of Restraint: Savagery and wantonness
• Carceri, the Green-Eyed Gaol: Bondage and envy
• The Grey Waste, the Destroyer of Ardor: Megrims and negativity
• Gehenna, the Mercenary Furnaces: Ambition and avarice
• Baator, the Iron Eye: Domination and tyranny
• Acheron, the Art of War: Strife and warfare
• Mechanus, the Clockwork Operating System: Rules and stability
• Arcadia, the Unity Under Storms: Community and solidarity
• The Outlands, the Concordant Opposition: Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis

I also implement 4e's Dawn War, though I use the vaati and the obyriths as a stand-in. It is a bit inverted in that elementals are now the ones on the "structure and rules" side while their opponents are on the "genesis and chaos" side, but it has worked reasonably well as a bizarro Dawn War.

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>I still prefer this. As it gives good reasons for ghosty stuff as well as quests to go find and talk to dead people (or steal them back!).
This is why my take on the Great Wheel merges the Negative Plane, the (Demi)Plane of Shadow, and the Shadowfell into a single "spooky place of death, shadows, and entropy" while still giving it a niche as an Inner Plane.

Many of my plotlines involve troubleshooting "malfunctions" in saṃsāra. The existence of naturally-occurring undead is perhaps the single greatest saṃsāran "malfunction" in the multiverse. Helping undead pass on to their proper afterlives is an evergreen plotline I use time and again.

>Also it is just a waiting room, we don't know what happens after they fade from the Shadowfell, and reincarnation until one transcends (or descends perhaps) to something else suits me just fine.
This is also the case in the Great Wheel. Nobody knows what *really* happens to outsiders when they die. The most common understanding, as per On Hallowed Ground, is that they merge with their home plane, but different factions have different theories. The Believers of the Source and the Dustmen, for example, both posit a constant cycle of reincarnation.

>Or not, the thing that interests me the most of cosmology for more RPG's is how playable it is
Planescape, as written, is awful to actually play through and run as a GM. That is why I do not run it as written.

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Associating Tharizdun with the Abyss was probably one of the better things 4e did, as both the agency and intelligence of that plane was directly in for the same endgame Tharizdun desired for the planes himself.

Elemental planes may have been better if they actually got the old stuff and popped it in before they did what they did, It's not like the evil Elemental Princes weren't untapped potential or anything, Cyronax is literally a Blue Demogogron, and you could've easily gone fullblown Warcraft with that dude.

I prefer to equate Tharizdun with Pandorym instead.

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>• Bytopia, the Industrious Mirrors: Diligence and prosperity
A little more than just diligence imo. Shurrock is one part of everyday life of the farmer or miner that they must brave but another part of the prospector's paradise. Shurrock is for the woodsman, the outdoorsman, a brave new frontier where a self made man finds himself a new life. A Teddy Roosevelt land.
>• The Beastlands, the Wu Wei Wild: Beasts and instinct
Remember, the beastlands are more good than neutral and equally chaotic and neutral. Instinct and the circle of life is a large part of it but there is also the focus on the peace of the wilderness, the true ease one feels when among nature and by themselves is when they can let their innerself be free. You could call that instinct but i'm not totally behind that.
>• Arborea, the Fervent Verdure: Liberty and passion
Also self-improvement to lesser extent.
>• Limbo, the Ever-Changing Chaos: Imagination and spontaneity
I'm not sure how I feel about those words in particular since they carry a generally positive connotation while Limbo is a great risk and opportunity. More than just going mad one can just get swept away in the chaos of crap like the ground changing to pudding beneath you.
>• Pandemonium, the Lunatic Tempest: Madness and whimsy
I'd say tempestuous instead of whimisical but sure.
>• Carceri, the Green-Eyed Gaol: Bondage and envy
Treachery rather than envy.
>• Acheron, the Art of War: Strife and warfare
Fit in the abuse of power somewhere in there and sure.
The rest are mostly fine.

>Outer Planes are made of ectoplasm,
Could've sworn it was Incarnum, and the pieces of the material plane that the Spellweavers discovered the Deities blew the fuck up to metasize things as to keep the faith train/exploitable enterprise going
The reason why he actually went double-nuts is because he had the Salient ability to read the mind of people who were insane everywhere- don't get me wrong, he was already crazy- but a down to earth sort of crazy- Then the events of Firestorm peak went down and he probably had a total meltdown because he was basically having a chat with just about everything in the Far Realm, back when it was a cosmic layered complex dynamic space onion and not a fucking door every living thing seems to know about which defeats the purpose of that place being the Epic-level secret Extra boss zone area when it came to scaling adventures or quests around it. To note, there is a great deal of subtext which supports the notion of H.P Lovecraft's Pantheon skirting about the Outside of the atypical D&D setting, trying to get in by undermining core forces that keep things working in there, so at the moment the Elder Elves punched a fucking hole lightyear away in space to find planes undiscovered Tharizdun literally immediately started talking to every Outer God and Great Old One at once- which explains why in a parralel world bordering the one the present are occurring in- he succeeded, blew everything up, alignment and the Cerulean Sign with it and literally shed his divinity and became a Great Old one- so yeah- there is that.

>but another part of the prospector's paradise. Shurrock is for the woodsman, the outdoorsman, a brave new frontier where a self made man finds himself a new life.
This does seem like "diligence and prosperity" to me.

>Remember, the beastlands are more good than neutral and equally chaotic and neutral.
I am generally fine with the Beastlands being the "least good" of the Upper Planes, if only due to its large population of neutral petitioners (animals) and its neutral animal lords. Generally though, I ignore alignment.

>Also self-improvement to lesser extent.
I assign self-improvement primarily to Mount Celestia, and think that that plane handles the theme more aptly and more viscerally than Arborea does, what with the "rules" for choosing a path up the mountain as per Planes of Law.

>I'm not sure how I feel about those words in particular since they carry a generally positive connotation while Limbo is a great risk and opportunity.
A fair point. What words would you use instead?

>I'd say tempestuous instead of whimisical but sure.
I try to play up Pandemonium as a dark fairyland, primarily due to the insanity and the fact that the Unseelie Court's goddess lives there. "Tempestuous" is a good word though, since it also captures the wind.

>Treachery rather than envy.
I prefer envy rather than treachery because of the reasons cited here: archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/57176638/#57179577

>Fit in the abuse of power somewhere in there and sure.
I have never quite gotten a sense of "abuse of power" from Acheron, any more than Baator. Could you please explain your reasoning?

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>Could've sworn it was Incarnum
You will note that that is my personal take. I like to implement a duality between the Outer Planes and the Inner Planes wherein ectoplasm is the spiritual "generic building block," whereas protomatter is the more material/elemental "generic building block." It helps create contrast between the Astral Plane and the Ethereal Plane (which, as you will note, is also the Elemental Chaos in my take).

>Far Realm
I generally implement a more "benign" interpretation of the Far Realm that ties into the Plane of Shadow (merged with the Negative Energy Plane and the Shadowfell in my take). Namely, there are many other multiverses, and their inhabitants can transition into the Wheel via the Plane of Shadow. However, some of them get "mistranslated" into aberrations, simply because their home multiverse's laws are vastly incompatible with the Wheel's laws.

To these "mistranslations," the cosmos of the Wheel is an utterly terrifying place so far removed from their native reality, and even worse, they have been mangled into grotesque forms. In their confusion and frustration, they are wont to lash out at the Wheel's natives. I have it be such that it is fully feasible to establish communication with these aberrations, understand where they are coming from and where they come from, and help send them back home.

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Probably because these "explain to me why thing is actually bad!" threads are virtually always just transparent attempts to start tired arguments, and Veeky Forums's mythical tendency to take trolling and worldbuild interesting stuff out of it leaked out of the board something like half a decade ago.

But this actually turned into a calm discussion about interesting points of both settings. People are actually talking about stuff they like, instead of focusing only on why other stuff is shitty and anyone who likes it is wrong.

It's just 2hu being autistic.

>A fair point. What words would you use instead?
I think one of them deserves to stay to reinforce that a skilled mind, like the Githzerai, can control the place for some time but tumultuous seems a little fitting.
>Unseelie court
Always forget those bastards.
>Envy
Didn't know that fact. My gut is uneasy but brain is calling the two at least equal.
>Abuse of power
A little more to do with the gate town, Rigus, than acheron itself honestly. Baator and Ribcage have a hierarchy because it makes shit work for their causes, Acheron and Rigus have a hierarchy so that a commander can tell a trooper to jump off a tall building without being questioned. Where the visitor can be deceived not just in spirit but in the word of the manner as well and press ganged for any conceivable reason. A devil won't back out of the document they made, even if they will try to fuck you with the lettering. Its not the tyranny of devils, its the tyranny of goblins. A bunch of crude, small, pitiful creatures who are constantly scrabbling for the top of the heap so they can make themselves feel important rather than those already strong looking for a crew to serve their interests capably.

>I think one of them deserves to stay to reinforce that a skilled mind, like the Githzerai, can control the place for some time but tumultuous seems a little fitting.
Perhaps "imagination and tumult"?

>Didn't know that fact. My gut is uneasy but brain is calling the two at least equal.
I am trying to limit the Outer Planes' themes to two key words or phrase. Perhaps I could designate Carceri as "envy and treachery"? Bondage could merely be viewed as the physical metaphor, much like Mechanus has gears and Gehenna has volcanoes.

>Abuse of power
Which between "strife" and "warfare" would you drop in favor of this? Also, as strange as it may sound, I deemphasize Acheron's goblinoids and orcs in favor of playing up its bladelings, chronotyryns, rakshasas (Planes of Law: Acheron has a rakshasa illustration, there are zakya rakshasas as footsoldiers, and ak'chazar rakshasas inherit the hassitor's necromantic traditions), and glooms (they do fit as terrifying exemplars of Ocanthus).

Ocanthus is my favorite layer of Acheron, because it can be interpreted as the layer where all the shadowy wars of intrigue, espionage, and assassination take place. It is also, as per Dragon Magazine #358, the endpoint of the River Styx. Additionally, I like the general aesthetic of vorpal blades of dark ice floating around in the darkness, some so long and wide as to host whole nations.

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Strife and some synonym for corrupt so that it comes off not as metaphysical.

It doesn't really have any flaws. Its just not very detailed or complex.

Unless, y'know, you read the seven splatbooks dedicated to fleshing it out - Manual of the Planes, The Plane Above, the Plane Below, Demonomicon, and Heroes of the Feywild, Shadowfell and Elemental Chaos.

mysidia org/Planescape/OldDM/A%20Player's%20Primer%20to%20the%20Outlands%20CD/TSR/

>It's not bad. It's just that it was 4e, so neckbeards hate it by default.
I think people had more of a problem with it being bolted on to existing settings that previously had a different cosmology than with the cosmology itself.

It's boring! I loved the idea of rings in rings.

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It's more "4e was doing its own thing, but dragged the old thing along with it, pleasing no one."

Except, wow, most of those planes that made up the rings managed to be a whole heaping helping of nothing substantial. It was like eating plastic fruit.

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Manual of the Planes is the go to, Planes Above/Planes Below/Heroes of Shadow/Heroes of the Feywilds for more detailed looks into each plane.

I do not think the Ordial Plane exists or *should* exist, really, because its present would dilute the themes of the Astral and the Ethereal.

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Anybody who cares this much about Forgotten Realms deserves to suffer.
The impact on Eberron and Dark Sun is minimal.

Its not inherently bad.

Personally I dislike it for shitting over the cosmology from when I started. Its a pity it wasn't a new world rather than forgotten realms.

Didn't it in fact tie in with both much better than the Great Wheel, so they needed negligible changing from the "default" cosmology in 4e.

Forgotten Realms was the only real problem 4e had, and they kind of deserved it for wasting so much effort on it. They could have put one generic book then ignored it, but instead obsessed over it with even their living campaigns. They focused their energy on the setting that 4e suited worst and the conversion fans liked least.

>"Elemental Keyword: Demon"

Is there a point here or just "whaaaa, it's different!" "not muh D&D!"

>Fey and Shadar are elementals

Ooookay. How does that work for related spells? Does conjure elemental grab fey too? can woodland creature grab fire elementals?

I do not use 5e to begin with.

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If the shadowfell is where people reincarnate when they die, is the feywild where you live before you are born? Is that why fey have a childlike innocence/cruelty to them?

Fine, equivalent spells in system of your choice. Point is you're changing relevant keywords, or there's a discrepancy between mechanics and your lore, and either way it needs a solution.

Demons aren't elementals?! At least not anywhere except 4e where they decided players were too stupid to keep up with multiple kinds of extraplanars so they simplified it to "not okay to kill" angels and "okay to kill" everything else, now an evil elemental of some sort.

I do not use systems with creature type keywords for my take on the Wheel.

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"elemental origin" does not mean what you think it means.

What do you use then, Fate or something? Every DnD edition has had keywording, whether official and overt or subtle and implicit.

PbtA hacks and Strike! hacks, for the most part.

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Here's the thing: D&D cosmology was always dumb.

But, and this is a big but, Planescape was super cool and interesting. It was still super dumb, and in some ways made an already dumb cosmology even dumber, but it was super cool so who gives a fuck?

World Axis is still pretty shit. He'll I'd say it's largely as shit as the Great Wheel, only streamlined. The debate comes where people equate the Great Wheel with Planescape. The two are not one and the same. Planescape took something that didn't make a whole lot of sense, and in some ways actively stopped creative ideas and concepts, and made it cool. That doesn't mean it was any less stupid, just that a few creative people found a way to make a stupid thing work.

World Axis is still pretty bad. Maybe it's better than the Great Wheel, but if so, only marginally. But it doesn't have Planescape. So now you just have a dumb thing with nothing to make it cool or interesting. And this is where the hate kicks in, because people look at the dumb thing without the cool thing they used to like and they see how fucking dumb it is. World Axis is an ugly girl cosplaying a character from a shit anime, while Great Wheel is Jessica Nigri cosplaying an equally horrid anime waifu.

Elemental Chaos is pretty much as stupid as the Elemental Planes ever were (I mean, what's the point of having a place in your setting where everything is on fire all the time? There's very limited potential there because it's just ALL FIRE ALL THE TIME).

is right. "Elemental Origin" means that demons originate from the Elemental Chaos region of the multiverse, they still have the Demon racial keyword.

Besides, is describing a demon as an "elemental embodiment of madness, corruption , degeneration and evil" really that uncharacteristic?

Depends, is Evil an element?

If it is, the hwoo dawgy can I simplify DnD's damage types, cosmology, and spell tags quite a bit.

If it's not, then we've got issues.

>Is there a point here or just "whaaaa, it's different!" "not muh D&D!"

Patronizing greentext is not an answer.

Is Evil a quantifiable substance in DnD, such that an elemental could be made of it? Is that what Necrotic/Negative energy is? Are spells with the Good and Evil tag actually elemental in nature, like Fireball and Lightingbolt?
Yes or no.

"Elemental Origin" in 4e means "born in the plane called Elemental Chaos".
The Abyss is in the elemental chaos, for various reasons detailed in the setting's cosmogony.
The demons come from the Abyss.
Ergo, the demons have the elemental origin.
What "elementals" were in other editions has no relation to this.

If I remember right, the story is that the mad god Thrazidun threw a massive chunk of Evil aligned astral matter into the Elemental Chaos creating a massive zone of Evil corrupted elemental matter called the Abyss.

Demons in 4e are the elemental being made out of this corrupted elemental matter.

>4e
>Spells with "good" and "evil" tags

You know, reading a book before posting would make you look like less of a moron.

Points of Light was great though.

Here's a redpill: the red pill was a metaphor for Wachowskis' transitions

Did I specify 4e?

e
>>Spells

there's your bigger problem.

in 4e martials and mages both used weaboo fightan magic.

Your bait is so weak, you deserve an anime fanart motivational poster.

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>"not okay to kill" angels
Wow, you didn't even read a single book.

>Did I specify 4e
>In a thread about 4e's cosmology

World Axis can comfortably sit inside the Great wheel and not lose ANYTHING, just like every other setting that has/had it's own defined cosmology.
Always could have, always can.

I don't see how this is a good thing for the GW.

>Redpill

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Not in 4e, the "elemental" aspect of demons is actual, proper elemental type as we've always known it. Demons are essentially corrupted elementals, not "elementals built of evil" but once were proper elementals twisted and reshaped by evil and bad, ickyness. This makes complete sense if you stopped to read the basic ideas behind the World Axis cosmology.

You mean like how the World Axis shows how you can fit the Great Wheel into it without even needing to bring back Alignment as the basis of everything?

Honestly, demons being elementals of a kind is actually more mythologically common than D&D's retarded idea of "they're literally blobs of evil". Which makes sense for 4e, because 4e's cosmology is heavy flavoured by classical mythology (i.e. the gods didn't create reality, they killed the real creators and usurped them, bringing an orderly state to Creation).

And really, this still comes down to bad because different.

Not entirely correct. Demons are made of "elemental substance", in that corruption and madness are an elemental substance in the World Axis like thunder, lightning, fire, earth, water, ice and so forth, but actual elemental beings turned into demons are their own unique sub-breed of demons, the Blightborn.

Man, I just want a cosmology where the planes are actual planets.

it's about comparing 4e Nentir Vale setting cosmology to the cosmology of every other edition.

Which is why 4e cosmology feels like Exalted.

Why? That would be awful. When you die your soul is sent to the Kepler Belt, but still also exists as an ethereal ghost on earth because lol why not?? Angels are aliens from Venus, Demons come from Mars?
Nah dude.

>When you die your soul is sent to the Kepler Belt
Homestuck dream bubbles.

>Demons are from Mars
pic related

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I don't know what made you think they had to be the planets of this solar system friendo
It's called Spelljammer mate

So Hell is Draugr 2300 miles away. What's the difference? only now you'll never actually get there and they might as well be completly normal alien species, they're not even neighbors.

Because then you've entered L Ron Hubbard territory.

Planescape/Great Wheel is too big for it's own good. Too much going on, too many words wasted on minutiae of a supposedly infinite afterlife.
And it still manages to be better than the elemental planes, which were totally stupid.

4e elemental chaos was perfection. Same with the shafowfell. Feywild and Astral Sea could have used some extra passes, but they still were actually playable.

>mad god Tharizdun

Tha-RIIIIIIZ-DUUUUUUUUUN
THE MANIC GOD, THE MANIC GOD

I dislike the Great Wheel a lot. Two many useless planes that exist just to fill a slot. What real difference between Elysium and and Arcadia? Why are Hades and the Nine Hells two different places? What kind of adventures can you have the Etheral plane that you can't have in the Astral plane? Who the fuck cares about the elemental planes?

If planes can be theoretically infinite, why are they split up into so many useless and cluttered variations?

That being said, Pandemonium is dope.

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Ethereal is where incorporeal undead have one foot in and the other in the material.
You can see things happening from the prime material from inside the ethereal. It's more like a veil over top it.

Meanwhile the Astral is more like the blind eternities between Alignment planes.

As for Hades, Abyss, and Baator, they're the home of Yugoloths, Demons and Devils.respectively.

My bigger issue is why are there so dang many. You only actually need one for each of the 9 alignments. Instead they go full 16 point compass, so Evil-Chaotic-Evil (Carceri), Chaotic-Chaotic-Evil (Pandemonium), and True Chaotic Evil (Abyss) are all separate planes. Because even though you gave bad supporting examples, there really is a ton of them a lot of thematic overlap and

As for the elemental planes, how granular are we talking? Fire, water, earth or ooze, vacuuum, salt? The first kind, a decent amount of people. The later, literally only players exploiting them for profit. Personally I'd go with one unified elemental chaos plane with four regions ruled by a Primordial Lord (and their evil Prince), and the Quasi and Para elemental effects are on the borders between them.