Soldiers of the Blood War

Ratskinner said:

enh? This seems to be a characteristic of any proponent of any even remotely controversial bit of D&D fluff, and is certainly not a peculiarity of Planescape fans.
/snip

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I think the difference here is just how pervasive the Planescape and Great Wheel flavour is. We're not talking about a single race in the PHB, like Dragonborn. After all, we can just not use Dragonborn. It's not like the game radically changes if you don't.

But this infects every single aspect of any planar elements of the game. Not just demons and devils. The elementals get sucked into this, as do all outsiders of any stripe. After all, they all have to get slotted into their properly balanced plane/demiplane/pocket dimension with their exact opposite counterpart sitting on the other side. It's ludicrous.

If it was limited to a single setting and series of books for that setting, I'd have zero complaints. But this affects every single game played. After all, any cleric or divine caster gets roped into the Great Wheel. Every summoner gets sucked in as well.

And, because it affects PC's, and the DM's setting, it's a royal PITA to excise or ignore. Sure, hate the changes to Forgotten Realms. Ok, I'm down with that. But, the only thing those changes actually change are Forgotten Realms. Bringing back the Blood War and all the baggage affects every single game table.

So, why do I suddenly have to do all the work, again, of stripping out all this unwanted (by me) flavour? Why not keep the Planescape stuff contained to Planescape and give me a fairly generic core with a couple of suggested cosmolgies without any real reference to any of them in the core books?

Hussar said:

So, why do I suddenly have to do all the work, again, of stripping out all this unwanted (by me) flavour? Why not keep the Planescape stuff contained to Planescape and give me a fairly generic core with a couple of suggested cosmolgies without any real reference to any of them in the core books?

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I certainly second your sentiment about keeping it separate. However, I can't say I find that the Planescape stuff had any special "pervasiveness" in my eyes. 2e (1989) was around for 5 years before Planescape (1994). I certainly can't see how it retroactively "infected" 2e's core rules.

Although, you seem to be conflating the Great Wheel cosmology (from 0.5e) and Planescape.

Wikipedia Plane (Dungeons and Dragons) said:

Great Wheel cosmology


This standardized layout of the planes was presented for the first time in Volume 1, Number 8 of The Dragon, released July 1977. It was presented again in the original (1st edition)* AD&D Players Handbook, published in June 1978, and expanded upon in the original Manual of the Planes, released in 1987.<sup class="noprint Inline-Template" style="white-space:nowrap;">[date missing]</sup> It was the core cosmology in both editions of AD&D and the 3rd and 3.5 editions of D&D.

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*emphasis added

Planescape was just a campaign setting that rode on top of that cosmology. I ran a 2e campaign that got up to 8th-ish level and it never really came up or hindered anything, even though demons etc. were fought. Now, I'm not a big fan of the Great Wheel (or the 9 alignments, for that matter), and I'd willingly join any campaign or sign a petition to keep any particular cosmology out of the basic rules. However, since the Great Wheel is a part of D&D which is literally older than 1e, I wouldn't have high hopes of success. (Although, since 4e had a different one, maybe there's hope.)

All that said, I've participated in plenty of games with alternate cosmologies and I can't really say I've found that it was particularly difficult to re-work things. There are plenty of other aspects (both mechanical and flavor) which I have found both harder to change and have received more resistance from players.

Thing is, the Great Wheel, as presented in the core of 1e, was what? A couple of pages of text with a funky diagram. That was about the sum total of the Great Wheel cosmology for 1st edition. Some named demons or devils had made a paragraph of flavour and that was about it. There was more text devoted to rolling initiative than there was to the cosmology.

And, in 2e, that cosmology largely went away in core because 2e removed all the demons and devils from the game until MC 8 and we got beaten over the head by the Blood War. That was 1991, so we had about three years of 2e before that came along. And then, every single published setting suddenly had to be slotted into that specific cosmology - didn't matter what the setting was.

So, yeah, the Great Wheel might have been there at the beginning, but, Planescape didn't come along for quite a while, and the Great Wheel wasn't really much more than a minor blip until the Manual of the Planes. Which, again, wasn't core and could be completely ignored.

Hussar said:

Thing is, the Great Wheel, as presented in the core of 1e, was what? A couple of pages of text with a funky diagram. That was about the sum total of the Great Wheel cosmology for 1st edition. Some named demons or devils had made a paragraph of flavour and that was about it. There was more text devoted to rolling initiative than there was to the cosmology.

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Well yeah, but 1e initiative was.....interesting. Also, I just wanna be clear that I'm not trying to a jerk or anything. You're suggestion about Planescape just threw me for a loop, is all.

Hussar said:

And, in 2e, that cosmology largely went away in core because 2e removed all the demons and devils from the game until MC 8 and we got beaten over the head by the Blood War. That was 1991, so we had about three years of 2e before that came along. And then, every single published setting suddenly had to be slotted into that specific cosmology - didn't matter what the setting was.

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Its been a few years, and I've sold off the books, but I don't recall (outside of Planescape Campaign Setting products, anyway) Dark Sun, Krynn, or really anything but some FR products being affected terribly. (FR being the "kitchen sink" setting for 2e made it the dumping ground for a lot of things.) Much like Spelljammer, it was there if you wanted to delve into it, IME. I certainly didn't feel obliged to retrofit my non-Planescape campaigns.

I guess I'm just not seeing what makes Planescape special/insidious in your view. Could you give me an example of how you might have had to adjust or rework something in a campaign that wasn't PS-aware? What was it about Planescape that made it different from Spelljammer? Was it just that Planescape was more popular, and thus had more product-weight eventually? In what way did Planescape not fit the model we both agree should be followed for Next?

I mean, I see things like the Four Classical Elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and the tic-tac-toe alignments as far more insidious because they are (often) written right into the rules. If anything, they are what ends up "constructing" the Great Wheel and the Planescape setting. If you want to run D&D and change those things....you've got a lot of work to do: editing spell lists, rewriting rules about vulnerabilities/immunities, etc. Without those two cosmological constructs, a good portion of the game (at least most editions) doesn't make sense anymore.

Hussar said:

So, yeah, the Great Wheel might have been there at the beginning, but, Planescape didn't come along for quite a while, and the Great Wheel wasn't really much more than a minor blip until the Manual of the Planes. Which, again, wasn't core and could be completely ignored.

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Other than Planescape Campaign Setting products (though there were quite a few of them), I don't remember much being forced or leaking onto other campaigns setting. Certainly Planescape wasn't core. Heck, it got dumped for 3e (aside from Sigil being added to the Great Wheel.)

Regarding a Manual of the Planes...well I've got a book from WotC called Chessboards: The Planes of Possibility for an old "game" called The Primal Order. Its much more what I would expect/want, basically giving you everything you need to generate your own cosmology. Of course, The Primal Order was about playing gods.

Another thing that I loved about the 4e cosmology was how the Abyss is pretty much the Black Hole of the cosmology, with the Heart of the Abyss tainting and corrupting everything around it. It makes the Abyss' "spiraling" look (that dates back to 1e, at least) make thematic sense.

Ratskinner said:

Other than Planescape Campaign Setting products (though there were quite a few of them), I don't remember much being forced or leaking onto other campaigns setting. Certainly Planescape wasn't core. Heck, it got dumped for 3e (aside from Sigil being added to the Great Wheel.)

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Well, MC8 would be a prime example of dumping Planescape into the laps of every setting. After all, the introduction of demons and devils (and various other goodies) into 2e came part and parcelled with the Blood war. Product after setting product started mentioning this or that bit of Planescape. You mentioned Spelljammer and it was just the other side of the same coin. Fortunately, it wasn't terribly popular, so, you didn't get a whole lot of Spelljammer stuff leaking into other settings.

But, looking at modules and whatnot, all sorts of Planescape stuff creeps in.

Plus, every single demon or devil entry basically has to mention the place these creatures take in the Blood war. Never minding any other evil outsider, which also has to get it's proper location in things. 'loths? It's not good enough to just be mercenary demons. No, you have to be mercenary demons in the Blood War. Sigh.

Hey, I'm not saying Planescape was all bad. It wasn't. There's some seriously cool ideas. I just don't want any of it in core. The same way I don't want Krynnish minotaurs or gnomes in core, Mythal in core or cannibal halflings. Keep setting specific stuff to an absolute minimum and keep it as generic as possible.

Hussar said:

Hey, I'm not saying Planescape was all bad. It wasn't. There's some seriously cool ideas. I just don't want any of it in core. The same way I don't want Krynnish minotaurs or gnomes in core, Mythal in core or cannibal halflings. Keep setting specific stuff to an absolute minimum and keep it as generic as possible.

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A lot of what you're objecting too predates Planescape as a setting. It was only focusing on and expanding upon what was at that point, and had been for some time, the default for the game.

And for excluding bits of flavor, at what point do you have to say however, keep setting specific flavor out of my monsters versus keep iconic D&D default flavor out of my monsters? And at what point does removing a lot of that flavor make something so generic that it's no longer anything more than a statblock?

The Blood War has been around a very long time, prior to Planescape, and it stayed around well after Planescape. A lot of the flavor that 5e looks to be reintroducing to monsters has, like it or not, assumed an iconic position of "this is how these function in default D&D, and specific settings may vary from it, but it's the common point to start from". I'd argue that's the case with the Blood War, and that it's the case with the general relationship between demon, devil, and 'loth.

If the Blood War had been mentioned in the 1e MM would we even be having this discussion? At what point does something become iconic for D&D? It's been around more than two decades now. That strikes me as pretty iconic. The Great Wheel itself has been around more than three decades. To me at least, that's a baseline aspect of D&D at this juncture (with the caveat of specific settings may deviate, but those again aren't ever considered to be defaults to the game as a whole).

Klaus said:

Another thing that I loved about the 4e cosmology was how the Abyss is pretty much the Black Hole of the cosmology, with the Heart of the Abyss tainting and corrupting everything around it. It makes the Abyss' "spiraling" look (that dates back to 1e, at least) make thematic sense.

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Sorta kinda not exactly? For me at least. Because at the same time it breaks the thematic symmetry that was there from 1e-3e, with the Outer Planes based on manifest alignment/belief/ideas and the Inner Planes based on Elements/Substance. By trying to redefine demons -the iconic representation of Chaotic Evil- as corrupt elementals, you break rather radically from the thematic dichotomy present in D&D and replace it with a similar dichotomy of Astral Sea versus Elemental Chaos/Abyss but lacking the thematic justification of why it's all there - especially when that cosmos removes some, but not all alignments and then doesn't really explain it.

I preferred the spiral of the Abyss as a representation of a metaphorical descent to horrific infinity. A drain implies that it's going somewhere, that the horror of the Abyss ends at some point. Except it doesn't, it never will; it's infinite. Similar to watching the optical illusion produced by two mirrors reflecting into one another and watching them descend off into infinity, spiralling off, but compounded by the screaming horrors wailing and gnashing their teeth in each and every iteration of that reflection.

The "drain" of the Abyss does go somewhere: to The End. It's the cosmic incinerator, happily burning away all things (replacing a similar place given to the Negative Material Plane in 2e Planescape, as a place of entropy). The "World Axis" reflects the 4e alignment structure: it's a river that flows from the Eternal (at whatever lies on the far side of the Astral Sea) to the Everchanging (the Elemental Chaos) to the Entropic (the Abyss).

Shemeska said:

If the Blood War had been mentioned in the 1e MM would we even be having this discussion? At what point does something become iconic for D&D? It's been around more than two decades now. That strikes me as pretty iconic. The Great Wheel itself has been around more than three decades. To me at least, that's a baseline aspect of D&D at this juncture (with the caveat of specific settings may deviate, but those again aren't ever considered to be defaults to the game as a whole).

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Yup, we'd still be having this conversation. I hated the Blood War when it was introduced in 2e (I'm not aware of it appearing before that - although I believe there's a rather lengthy article in early The Dragon) and have always associated the Blood War with Planescape. I didn't actually realize they were two separate things.

The Great Wheel is needlessly symmetric, but, I can live with it, mostly because the original was so basic that it didn't paint in any of the picture. That's the sort of thing I'd like to see in core. Sure, gimme a basic framework, and then stand back and let me fill in the details.

The demons and devil writeups in the original Monster Manual have it about right. I don't want any more than that. Heck, we don't get any more than that for any other creature. Dragons don't have any mention of larger issues whatsoever. Humanoids get a local view and that's it. Giants and whatnot barely have anything resembling a larger story. Heck, other than worshipping Llolth, Drow got virtually nothing in 1e or 3e, in core.

Why do Demons and devils have to come pre-packaged with all this extra campaign specific material? What makes them special? Like I said before, we don't shoe-horn all orcs into a specific, campaign spanning meta-plot. So, why give this treatment to outsiders?