Yes, I stick with the Plane of Shadow and Plane of Faerie being mirrors of the Prime, with the Ethereal encompassing the birth of the multiverse, Inner Planes, dreamscapes, etc, and the Astral encompassing the Outer Planes, and the death of things (gods, etc).
D&D 5E L&L 1/7/2013 The Many Worlds of D&D
Yes, I stick with the Plane of Shadow and Plane of Faerie being mirrors of the Prime, with the Ethereal encompassing the birth of the multiverse, Inner Planes, dreamscapes, etc, and the Astral encompassing the Outer Planes, and the death of things (gods, etc).
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
I'm conflicted by all of this. I love Planescape -- own a complete collection -- but the D&D4 cosmology was just so elegant. I will miss the Astral Sea something fierce. Maybe they'll drop back to AD&D1 for inspiration and bring back the Plane of Concordant Opposition and its empty expanse. The Outlands were never well developed beyond a bunch of isolated points of interest in any case. Might as well make them floating islands.
I kind of like the elemental rings but hope they retain D&D4's internal consistency and use concentric rings of intensity throughout the cosmology if that's the direction they choose to go, even if it means kissing the Sea goodbye. It was the internal consistency that made D&D4's setting so attractive -- as amazing as Planescape is, it is very cobbled together.
I have no objection to the logic that makes the Feywild and Shadowfell bridges to the energy planes (again, hope they make them all rings), but I sincerely hope Mike's use of the name Ravenloft was a slip -- no one in-universe has ever called the Demiplane of Dread "Ravenloft," not even the Barovians.
As much as I love Spelljammer I'd just as soon see the developers not waste their time with a non-transitive version. Space travel isn't much fun without ports of call. Of course, part of me is pretty convinced that all the setting name-dropping at the end of the article is for naught anyway -- I suspect the goal is to make D&D5 /compatible/ with all of those settings and sell old PDFs, not actually publish new material for any of them.
Still folded into the astral, I hope. It's always been redundant, and far less interesting than its Githyanki-infested cousin.
I kind of like the elemental rings but hope they retain D&D4's internal consistency and use concentric rings of intensity throughout the cosmology if that's the direction they choose to go, even if it means kissing the Sea goodbye. It was the internal consistency that made D&D4's setting so attractive -- as amazing as Planescape is, it is very cobbled together.
I have no objection to the logic that makes the Feywild and Shadowfell bridges to the energy planes (again, hope they make them all rings), but I sincerely hope Mike's use of the name Ravenloft was a slip -- no one in-universe has ever called the Demiplane of Dread "Ravenloft," not even the Barovians.
As much as I love Spelljammer I'd just as soon see the developers not waste their time with a non-transitive version. Space travel isn't much fun without ports of call. Of course, part of me is pretty convinced that all the setting name-dropping at the end of the article is for naught anyway -- I suspect the goal is to make D&D5 /compatible/ with all of those settings and sell old PDFs, not actually publish new material for any of them.
Still folded into the astral, I hope. It's always been redundant, and far less interesting than its Githyanki-infested cousin.
1) That's not true at all, there is even an accessory detailing the Outlands.
2) Never been redundant, the Ethereal plane is where other planes are born, the elements, ideas, dreamscapes exist, etc, nothing like the Astral.
Some speculate the Demi-Plane of Dread/Ravenloft (a demi-plane deep in the Ethereal) could one day become an Outer Plane.
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
...You mean the CD? Because that thing is super fun, but not... what's the word... oh. Useful.
And it's still just about isolated enclaves on the low-detail poster map that came in the original boxed set.
Seriously, why a ring of gatetowns? The Outlands are supposed to be infinite, so why is there a border of gatetowns an arbitrary radius from the Spire? What's beyond the ring? Does anyone bother going out there? Why would you?
Put the gatetowns on floating islands. Let them drift on paths determined by the will of the cosmos.
Also, spelljammers docking at Sigil's inner ring is an awesome image.
Hey, I wanted a Sigil and the Outlands boxed set as much as anyone, but it never happened. IT'S ASTRAL SEA TIME.
Going to have to completely disagree with you here. Two transitive planes. One has githyanki pirates, fortresses built on the corpses of dead gods, astral goddamn dreadnoughts, and oh, yes, /action/. The other has purple haze, skeletal platypi, and THIS GUY:
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/MM35_gallery/MM35_PG104.jpg
I know which one captures /my/ imagination.
The ethereal exists exclusively to contain demiplanes. It's the cosmological greasy newspaper wrapped around the fish and chips. And there's no reason why we couldn't just put the demiplanes in the Astral (or in any plane to which they were tangentially related).
1) Very useful to my ongoing campaign of 8 years.
2) As you seem to have a limited view of the Ethereal, is is not just the Insubstantial Plane.
Shemeska
Adventurer
The answer to that question was one of the cooler things regarding the Outlands. It was only mentioned a few times, but beyond the ring of the Gatetowns it gets strange. No matter how far out you go, it's always a relatively short period of time to get back to the Gatetowns, and the landscape is generally fluid and unmappable. Beyond the Gatetowns are lost and forgotten places, manifest ideas and philosophies that don't fit anywhere else on the planes. That's just awesome.
Not a fan of mixing SJ and Planescape. The atmosphere was very different IMO. But if it works for you, go for it. PS has a enough weirdness already, I'm not sure it needs SJ added in, especially if they're trying to make something acceptable to a broader audience.
One of them is an endless empty silver expanse with the occasional githyanki fortress and dreadnought. The other is a misty realm filled with the manifest dreamscapes of mortals, empires of marauding Xill, wandering ghosts, all of this sitting atop an endless ocean of the ethereal deep where demiplanes drift like bubbles, swirling ether gaps promise entry to dead and alternate timelines, and things haunt the deep: castaways from other, tangential realities, each a bubble drifting on the same ocean of raw potential just as the Great Wheel is.
I know which one gets my imagination going more.
They're both cool, they both have reasons to exist, and a substantial amount of traction as elements of D&D for decades. It would be a mistake IMO to remove either of them.
Tovec
Explorer
On the one hand, I liked when 4e combined the two as they do share some common traits. Making them two parts of the same general plane makes SOME sense. They both are transitive as you said. Having one be the shallow part and the other be the deep part of the same plane made sense in that regard. That is about it though.
On the other hand, they are not similar in a few key areas. It is like comparing fog to outer space, as they are as dissimilar as a planes of air and vacuum. You can see buildings/walls/terrain, hear (or not depends on edition I've read) and see people, and experience spells on the ethereal. On the astral you .. don't even see the prime world in most cases. It isn't there, usually having to find a portal or a piece of stable rock in a swirling sea. Heck on the astral you don't even pass through walls like you do on the ethereal. There may be more or at least different denizens in the astral, but that's about it.
Now, with all that said, they can be related. On our planet there is a sphere of air surrounded by vacuum. But they are NOT the same thing. The air is where the people are, it has objects and life. Space might be faster to travel and might connect a lot of things; just like several interpretations of the astral. There might be a plane(t) of "vulcans". You travel in space/astral to get there but you go TO the world to adventure. That world has certain properties, like the ethereal (walking through walls) and other connections to other planes. At the end of the day you might transport/teleport back and live on the spaceship .. in space. But I doubt you would confuse the two if you experienced them.
Also, either way I don't really care about what WotC does. I have a cosmology I've put a lot of work into and I'm not going to change it just because they are releasing 5e. Mine is big enough to accommodate whatever they come up with and it keeps the best pieces of key lore intact.
Klaus
First Post
And there's little reason why they can't be the same plane: an infinite starry sky, sometimes foggy, sometimes crystal clear, where the manifest dreams of mortals, the husks of dead gods, floating fortresses of archmages and the entrances to the realms of the immortals.
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
I feel it's a cop out. The plane is infinite. Essentially what they've done is drawn a circle around the "center" of an infinite plane, painted a bug-eyed lizard outside the circle, and labeled it "Here There be Monsters."
Keyed portal travel, astral conduit travel, and color pool travel are not, collectively or individually, less weird than planeshifting galleons.
I know which one gets my imagination going more.
::laughs:: Fair enough, #Shemeska. We'll just have to agree to disagree. I will say that you convinced me to dig out my Guide to the Ethereal Plane and see what all the fuss is about.
Cool and traction are not sufficient reasons to keep setting elements, and I honestly do disagree that they both have reasons to exist. I feel strongly that only one transitive plane should exist in the new cosmology, but I will say that it should not be the Ethereal or the Astral -- it should combine the best elements of both.
Listen to this man, he knows his stuff!
