I have no fight in this game I never played 4e played 3.5 once and 2e a few times everything I played was D&D and A&D1e and a lot of the lore that started coming out was based on Dragonlance they even introduced the Kender Race. Coming from old schools there are a lot of races and classes that did not exist the original stuff was like fighting men; magic user; cleric they expended in the expert and master editions (Which is what i starter with) and the lore changed going into 1e and changed mid stream with unearth arcana (which I loved) and then the Dragonlance explosion. Lore from my point of view who cares it has changed many times over and will change again.
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D&D 4E D&D Fluff Wars: 4e vs 5e
- Thread starter QuietBrowser
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Tony Vargas
Legend
What could you mistake one for? A sussurus? A adventurer with way too many ioun stones? ("Dude, this an intervention, y'gotta get off the stones, man, they're run'n your life, we don't even know who you are anymore...")
That's Classical, as in the ancient Greeks. Of course, their creation myth also featured the world being drawn from those Elements in Chaos, and a War between the Titans and the Gods at the Dawn of Time.
Have you ever thought about reconciling the World Axis & the Great Wheel?
(That's rhetorical, 'cause I'm gonna go on about doing just that, right now. OK, and maybe I'm going to project a little of the WoD 'Umbra' onto it, too.)
So, some seconds after reading words to the effect of "...the Lattice of Heaven was destroyed..." I thought, 'hey, the alignment-structured/segregated Outer Planes, the rim of the Great Wheel, could've been the Lattice of Heaven.' OK, not really, because the Lattice of Heaven connected Divine Domains, but then we hear Erathis is trying to re-build the Lattice /or something else to put in it's place/. Hmmm...
So, what if, say, leading up to or after a hypothetical Dusk War that re-shapes the multiverse, Erathis compromises with some of the various deities who have gone all cliquish (maybe Moradin and Kord had a falling out, and Kord is getting all angsty and claiming to be "Good, but Chaotic - y'guys just don't understand me! whatever! I'm going to my mountain!") or who no one wants to live right next to anyway ("I won the Dawn War for you, and this is the thanks I get?"-A), and instead of facilitating travel in the new order, divvy things up. Each moral/ethical faction gets their own mega-domain that's an exclusive club. (Of course, once that criteria's set, all the gods are like "Yeah, well, I'm Chaotic-Neutral-with-good-tendencies, and I'm not sharing my room with Kord!" "Well, if I have to live with him, I'm bringing my Eladrin with me!" OK, fine. "Yeah, and I'm Lawful, so I should room with Bahamut - 'Evil?' that's all relative... fine, but I'm Lawful Evil, no way I'm putting up with Zahir's lizard-stank.")
Eventually it all shakes out and everyone's happy with their assigned echo-chamber/alignment-plane. In gratitude, they murder Erathis and purge her name and memory from reality. Because, really, she was one stuck up-
Who was?
IDK, what were we talking about?
Oh, yeah, the World Axis and the Great Wheel. OK, so the above isn't so much reconciling them as humorously writing one out of existence with extreme prejudice.
Seriously, though, you could reconcile them, too (I'm gonna get all Mage: the Ascension, now, so fair warning). One way to look at the Great Wheel is as a philosophical construct. It groups morally & ethically like Powers, it needn't mean they /literally/ exist in stacks of shoeboxes arranged in a ring around the outer edge of the multiverse. Just that you can treat 'em that way, y'know, so your head doesn't explode. There might be other ways of keeping your brains in you skull. So, depending on your beliefs or your place in history, you might go to the Astral Sea and follow wisps of color about until you pass through a veil into a Domain ('cause that's totally epic somehow?)... or, you might leave your body tethered by an Astral Cord and then 'shift' into an outer plane where you make youself a new body (or something, it's been a while). Point is, either way, you're getting from A to B, and how you draw the map of imponderables is prettymuch up to you (and, of course, if you're from Sigil, that includes putting your home town at the center of the universe, because, hey, what else is there that matters, right).
Parmandur
Book-Friend
[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] shardminds are...not very iconic. And while the Tiefling 4E rework is definitely better for corporate art direction, seems a flat reason for gamers to prefer it over what was established in tabletop and major video games for years (Tieflings and Aasamir were core in Never winter Nights, one of the main onboarding routes to D&D this century).
Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app
Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app
Tony Vargas
Legend
Oh! I thought you meant not very distinctive in appearance. Yeah, how iconic can a pile of crystals be, really? But, hey, it was a chance to mention the obscure sussurus, and take a dig at ioun stone abuse. How could I resist?
Couldn't care less.
I just found the big overlong tails lame, and the 3.5 Tiefling cute:
QuietBrowser
First Post
So, I said I would go into why I liked the World Axis cosmology over the Great Wheel, and I finally found the time to try and put my scattered thoughts in order. I have actually touched upon different aspects of this in my last two rants, so, apologies, but some points might be repeated.
Where to begin... I think I can start this by saying that what really made me understand just how much I loved the World Axis was a topic I read elsewhere. The opening poster asked a simple question: if you had to boil down your extraplanar cosmology to just 5 planes beyond the material plane, what planes would those be? Immediately, I answered that I would use the five planes of the World Axis cosmology - Astral Sea, Feywild, Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos + Abyss, and Far Realm - because these five planes contained absolutely everything I could ever hope to need in a planewalking campaign. Then I stopped, and I looked at what I wrote, and what I'd actually said finally sunk into me.
The Great Wheel is an enormous piece of work. The most iconic parts of it, the Outer Planes, number 17 planes in total, covering the 9 core alignments and the 8 intermediary alignments (Lawful Good/Neutral Good, Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral, and so forth) - and the only reason we didn't end up with even more is because TSR couldn't figure out how to squeeze at the least the four Neutral Intermediary Outer Planes (Neutral Good/True Neutral, Neutral Evil/True Neutral, Lawful Neutral/True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral/True Neutral) into that grind, having just run out of ideas. On top of that, you've got the 21 Inner Planes, consisting of 16 Elemental Planes, the 2 Energy Planes, the Astral Plane, the Ethereal Plane, and the Shadow Plane.
And yet, somehow, despite all that... the Great Wheel is boring. 37 planes, and none of them really manage to be interesting. There are interesting locations, plenty of those, but they're spread over so much territory that it ultimately spoils the whole affair.
I've used this term before, and I'll use it again: what the Great Wheel boils down to, overly, is "grid filling". It's a rather sterile way of looking at a project, believing that gaps have to be filled just because they exist, and is the biggest issue I have with the cosmology as a whole. Leaving out alignment's role in the whole mess, it's quite obvious even from a glance that the Great Wheel was made to fill out a list of checkboxes, and that just gives the whole thing a sterile sort of feeling.
This is particularly noticeable when one gets to the Elemental Planes. I've brought this up before, but a huge issue with the Elemental Planes is... well, they're homogenous to the point of being dull and dishwater. Way back in 1st edition, each Elemental Plane was effectively nothing more than an infinite 3-dimensional expanse of its chosen element. Even TSR realised just how boring this was and started sneaking in bits and pieces of other elements, so you could have things like the famous City of Brass on the Plane of Fire. Even then, it's still a blatant fact that the Elemental Planes are mostly "gotcha!" fuel - the City of Brass, the most interesting place I can name from the Plane of Fire, is an enormous city-state of white-hot brass with parks of burning trees and fields of ash amongst lakes of ocean. A stunning vista... and immediately fatal if you don't just happen to have the magical trinkets needed to survive here.
The World Axis doesn't have this problem.
As a whole, the World Axis cosmology is built from the ground up to serve a singular purpose: being fun. "Is this a place you can realistically go and adventure?" is the defining question asked repeatedly through the development of this cosmology, and you can tell, because it works. There's a breathing, organic nature to the whole affair, resulting in a cosmology that's easy to grasp and vistas that inspire and excite.
Ironically, even though the Great Wheel actively said that real-world pantheons had their various city-state dominions across the multiverse, the World Axis feels more like an actual mythos that people would really come up with. You have the primordial chaos that separates into the worlds of Spirit (Astral Sea) and Matter (Elemental Chaos), you have the Land of the Fae (Feywild), the Land of the Dead (Shadowfell), the Realm of Evil (Abyss) and the Place That Should Not Be (Far Realm). It's a simple, elegant formula, with so much potential to explore and practically calling out to be fleshed out.
Let's start somewhere fairly close to home. The best part of the Feywild and Shadowfell combined, in my eyes, is that they make the material plane so much more magical. Portals to everywhere in the cosmos is Sigil's schtick, and I'm comfortable with that (or with whatever multiversial metropolis I replace Sigil with, if I feel there's too much baggage to put up with this time), but the World Axis brings to life the idea of planar rifts and gates and weaves them into the very fabric of the landscape. The materium of the World Axis is a world where you can enter a shining, faerie-haunted wood just by stepping through a ring of mushrooms or walking under an ancient tree whilst whistling a woodcutter's song. It's a place where you know that if you have the courage, you can smear a handprint of your own blood on the first headstone in the cemetery, close your eyes, and open them to find yourself in the land of the dead. It's a place where shining cities can rise from the banks of frozen rivers in the deepest winter, vanishing with the first dawn of spring, and where the dead may hold midnight revelries in the dark woods.
The Feywild is such an obvious fit for any fantasy setting I'm baffled how D&D didn't have it before. Then I remind myself that it did, it's just the "land of the fae" concept was shared over at least three planes, Elysium, Arborea and Ysgard, and so I never had the clearest "picture" of how to fit it together. It's a wondrous place, where beauty, terror, glamor and madness all boil together into a single glorious whole. It's a land where shining cities of magical elves fight desperate battles against hideous formorians, promoted by this edition into magical and masterful giants whose deformed minds and twisted bodies don't stint their ambition. It's an untamed wilderness in which the most primordial beasts roam, even those that have long passed from the world of mortals. The Isles of Dread and of the Ape lie here. Formorians plot to conquer the lands of faeries and mortals alike from their subterranean fastness of Mag Tureah. The great Murkendraw, a swamp big enough to swallow cities, sprawls for unchecked miles, its shadowy depths home to warring tribes of goblins and plotting covens of hags. It's a strange land, an alien land, full of whimsy and lunacy - and it can be just a step away from the mortal world.
The Shadowfell, meanwhile, fills another obvious gap that the Great Wheel didn't have: the mythical Land of the Dead. Unlike its closest counterpart, the Negative Energy Plane, this is not a "gotcha" world, where stepping in is death. Nor is it a simple "the mundane world, but unrelentingly dark" like the Shadow Plane. This is the material world cast in a darkened looking glass, a place of gloom and the macabre, but also not without its charms. Cities of the undead, marching legions of souls moving with absolute silence towards their judgement by the Lord of the Dead and their progression to the next stage of their afterlives, dark metropoli full of lunatics and monsters, all of these can be found here. It can be a place for horror, or a place to let your Tim Burton fan out. The sample locations here are intriguing enough - The House of Black Lanterns; an ancient roadside inn in the depths of the Shadowfell, the Plain of Sighing Stones, the Nightwyrm Fortress that guards secrets and treasures until the end of time, Moil, Letherna, and the fantasy expy of Dark City that is Gloomwrought - but it's also just begging for new locations and creepy events to encounter. Especially since it's eaten the concept of the "Domains of Dread" used in Ravenloft.
If I want to run an expy of Cold Stark House, a Warhammer short story revolving around an isolated mansion full of lunatics who endlessly plot against each other, loving and murdering and scheming, all of them victims of a curse that draws unwitting guests to become puppets in the eternal melodrama of the depraved undying noble who watches the madness and laughs from his bed, I can. Far more easily than I could have done in the Great Wheel. Maybe there's a plane I could have put it on, I'm not sure. In the World Axis? It fits the Shadowfell like a silken glove.
The Elemental Chaos! Oh, how I love it so. When elemental matter all swirls together without rhyme or reason, the most fantastic vistas are born. Forests of silver trees with crackling lightning dancing amidst their boughs growing on the banks of a lake of liquid ice, as an island volcano that spews liquid metal drifts majestically through the skies above. The Elemental Planes of old had always been forced to have some admixture to make them remotely interesting; the Chaos simply accepts that mixing them altogether works out best. The Brazen Bazaaar, a traveling caravan of efreeti merchants that roams the planes, that's something that would have fit the old Plane of Fire. But Canaughlin Bog, a continent-sized island covered in swamp where hillocks of ice and stone jut from waters that swirl in physics-defying currents over caustic mud? Nowhere in the old Elemental Wheel could I have that - oh, I wish I could post its picture from "The Plane Below"; a deep, dark swamp, where normal and crystal-encrusted trees stand amongst lush, green water with icy mounds bobbing merrily across its depths. Gloamnull, the perfect place for a fantasy noir story; a cursed city of genasi doomed by a pact with Dagon, a giant floating city locked under eternal rainstorms that drifts eerily across the sky. The Riverweb, a multi-layered web-like structure of free-floating waterways that stretches in all directions - I couldn't have this in the old Elemental System, and this is much cooler than just an infinite expanse of water that goes in all three dimensions. And, even with all of this, the Elemental Chaos is no "gotcha!" world. There are places where magical protection is necessary, but the odds of dying just by stepping through the portal aren't 100%. Plus, the elemental molding attribute, the ability to reshape the elements around you through sheer force of will, that's awesomely flavorful. The Elemental Chaos is a world where a sage can turn a pebble into a tree and freeze a fireball solid... to me, that just screams fantasy.
The Abyss? Well, it hasn't really changed, beyond being literally at the bottom of the Chaos, and I honestly like it that way. I'll touch on the whole mess with demons and devils later in this rant, but the idea of the Abyss as this very literal sinkhole of creation, an infected wound in reality itself that is trying to devour all things above it and spread until it has consumed everything in its own putrescence... that's a powerful image, to me.
The Astral Sea. Perhaps my favorite of the reimagined planes. The old Astral Plane was... well, honestly, it was just kind of dull. I know, it had all the dead gods floating in it and the githyanki raiders and stuff, but still, it never came off as more than a glorified speedway around the Great Wheel. The Astral Sea, on the other hand, just has so much more of an epic feel to it - and I think that's because it uses itself to house the best parts of the old Great Wheel. If I want to go to Mechanus, I can - I sail the Astral Sea, enter what looks like a mere tower or floating city from the outside, and inside is an entire world of clockwork gizzards. Gears the size of continents rotating through their endless cycles, everything that made Mechanus of old interesting, but allowed to explore itself as something more. The Astral Sea is still the way to get to many other planes, but since there's no longer a grid to fill, I can flesh out the Astral Sea with all the dominions I want there to be.
Straying from the cosmological map, the redrawing of the cosmology echoes into subtler effects.
First and foremost: the Blood War. I hated the Blood War in AD&D. It was pretty much the Big Thing of Planescape, almost equal to Sigil and its portals in prominence, and I thought it was absolute rubbish. The basic idea of demons fighting devils was, in itself, interesting, but the setting gave it far too much importance. The worst part of it was the portrayal of the Blood War as the one thing that made the infinite Upper Planes, the bastions of goodness and right, as infinite in numbers and equally powerful if not superior to either type of fiend, tremble in their little white darned socks because they knew they'd fall if the Blood War ever stopped and the fiends could assault them.
Really? Seriously? Legions of frothing mad lunatics that can barely coordinate their own thoughts, never mind with their allies (demons) marching alongside selfish nihilists who want to stab everyone else in the back for their own profit and advancement (daemons) marching alongside a brutal tyranny divided near equally between mindless drones, treacherous underlings willing to thwart their own goals to make their immediate bosses/rivals look back, and paranoid tyrants doing their best to get rivals and skilled underlings alike killed off (devils). These are the Enemy. Standing against them, the united forces of Good - you know, the embodiments of cooperation, tolerance, friendship, camaraderie and unity? And, somehow, the united forces of Good, who cooperate with their fellows like it's second nature and who work together for the greater good, are supposed to be doomed to fail in the face of a horde of Evil that probably spends more time fighting amongst itself than fighting them? Pull the other (censored) one!
It's not as if the Blood War doesn't still exist in 4e. Demons hate Devils, who despise them in turn, and Daemons don't care who's winning so long as they get to butcher everyone else. It's just not the only damn thing in the meta-political newspapers. The Blood War sometimes goes cold as a result of the cataclysmic casualties it inflicts on the two races... that honestly makes more sense to me. It's not like it keeps me from using the "Blood War is raging" plothooks. Hell, it just means I can now use the "ceasefire is coming!" and "the Blood War is going hot again!" campaign hooks.
Speaking of Demons and Devils, I really like the changes to their overall lore. If alignment works for you, I get how they might have been fine before, but to me, they were always pretty interchangable - there's a reason that, prior to 4e, my homebrew settings would basically dump Abyss and Baator alike for the Infernum, a 3rd party setting who presented a far more interesting and compelling fiendish race than any of the three canon D&D fiends. But, 4e actually made me take an interest in them, as it finally presented very clear, non-ideology-based, differences between the two.
Devils are Fallen Angels. Corrupt angels who murdered their patron god and who have been punished by the other gods for it. They want to harvest mortal souls, using sin and suffering to fuel war machines to break their ancient bonds and take revenge on the heavens, enslaving all reality.
Demons are Corruption Elementals. Avatars of entropy and corruption manifest, living errors in reality that want to befoul everything pure. They are the virus invading the cosmos' bloodstream, and they won't stop until they have brought everything that exists to share in their own ruination.
Now, I know there are people who felt the Lawful Evil/Chaotic Evil before characterized them just fine. But, to me? This does the job far more clearly, far more elegantly, and far more interestingly.
...And, unfortunately, or fortunately I suppose, that's where my stream of thought has run dry. Maybe if I go back over my planar sourcebooks for 4e, I can draw up more to talk about, but after hours of work, this is all I have to say on just why I love the World Axis, and I'm sorry I can't do it more justice.
Where to begin... I think I can start this by saying that what really made me understand just how much I loved the World Axis was a topic I read elsewhere. The opening poster asked a simple question: if you had to boil down your extraplanar cosmology to just 5 planes beyond the material plane, what planes would those be? Immediately, I answered that I would use the five planes of the World Axis cosmology - Astral Sea, Feywild, Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos + Abyss, and Far Realm - because these five planes contained absolutely everything I could ever hope to need in a planewalking campaign. Then I stopped, and I looked at what I wrote, and what I'd actually said finally sunk into me.
The Great Wheel is an enormous piece of work. The most iconic parts of it, the Outer Planes, number 17 planes in total, covering the 9 core alignments and the 8 intermediary alignments (Lawful Good/Neutral Good, Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral, and so forth) - and the only reason we didn't end up with even more is because TSR couldn't figure out how to squeeze at the least the four Neutral Intermediary Outer Planes (Neutral Good/True Neutral, Neutral Evil/True Neutral, Lawful Neutral/True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral/True Neutral) into that grind, having just run out of ideas. On top of that, you've got the 21 Inner Planes, consisting of 16 Elemental Planes, the 2 Energy Planes, the Astral Plane, the Ethereal Plane, and the Shadow Plane.
And yet, somehow, despite all that... the Great Wheel is boring. 37 planes, and none of them really manage to be interesting. There are interesting locations, plenty of those, but they're spread over so much territory that it ultimately spoils the whole affair.
I've used this term before, and I'll use it again: what the Great Wheel boils down to, overly, is "grid filling". It's a rather sterile way of looking at a project, believing that gaps have to be filled just because they exist, and is the biggest issue I have with the cosmology as a whole. Leaving out alignment's role in the whole mess, it's quite obvious even from a glance that the Great Wheel was made to fill out a list of checkboxes, and that just gives the whole thing a sterile sort of feeling.
This is particularly noticeable when one gets to the Elemental Planes. I've brought this up before, but a huge issue with the Elemental Planes is... well, they're homogenous to the point of being dull and dishwater. Way back in 1st edition, each Elemental Plane was effectively nothing more than an infinite 3-dimensional expanse of its chosen element. Even TSR realised just how boring this was and started sneaking in bits and pieces of other elements, so you could have things like the famous City of Brass on the Plane of Fire. Even then, it's still a blatant fact that the Elemental Planes are mostly "gotcha!" fuel - the City of Brass, the most interesting place I can name from the Plane of Fire, is an enormous city-state of white-hot brass with parks of burning trees and fields of ash amongst lakes of ocean. A stunning vista... and immediately fatal if you don't just happen to have the magical trinkets needed to survive here.
The World Axis doesn't have this problem.
As a whole, the World Axis cosmology is built from the ground up to serve a singular purpose: being fun. "Is this a place you can realistically go and adventure?" is the defining question asked repeatedly through the development of this cosmology, and you can tell, because it works. There's a breathing, organic nature to the whole affair, resulting in a cosmology that's easy to grasp and vistas that inspire and excite.
Ironically, even though the Great Wheel actively said that real-world pantheons had their various city-state dominions across the multiverse, the World Axis feels more like an actual mythos that people would really come up with. You have the primordial chaos that separates into the worlds of Spirit (Astral Sea) and Matter (Elemental Chaos), you have the Land of the Fae (Feywild), the Land of the Dead (Shadowfell), the Realm of Evil (Abyss) and the Place That Should Not Be (Far Realm). It's a simple, elegant formula, with so much potential to explore and practically calling out to be fleshed out.
Let's start somewhere fairly close to home. The best part of the Feywild and Shadowfell combined, in my eyes, is that they make the material plane so much more magical. Portals to everywhere in the cosmos is Sigil's schtick, and I'm comfortable with that (or with whatever multiversial metropolis I replace Sigil with, if I feel there's too much baggage to put up with this time), but the World Axis brings to life the idea of planar rifts and gates and weaves them into the very fabric of the landscape. The materium of the World Axis is a world where you can enter a shining, faerie-haunted wood just by stepping through a ring of mushrooms or walking under an ancient tree whilst whistling a woodcutter's song. It's a place where you know that if you have the courage, you can smear a handprint of your own blood on the first headstone in the cemetery, close your eyes, and open them to find yourself in the land of the dead. It's a place where shining cities can rise from the banks of frozen rivers in the deepest winter, vanishing with the first dawn of spring, and where the dead may hold midnight revelries in the dark woods.
The Feywild is such an obvious fit for any fantasy setting I'm baffled how D&D didn't have it before. Then I remind myself that it did, it's just the "land of the fae" concept was shared over at least three planes, Elysium, Arborea and Ysgard, and so I never had the clearest "picture" of how to fit it together. It's a wondrous place, where beauty, terror, glamor and madness all boil together into a single glorious whole. It's a land where shining cities of magical elves fight desperate battles against hideous formorians, promoted by this edition into magical and masterful giants whose deformed minds and twisted bodies don't stint their ambition. It's an untamed wilderness in which the most primordial beasts roam, even those that have long passed from the world of mortals. The Isles of Dread and of the Ape lie here. Formorians plot to conquer the lands of faeries and mortals alike from their subterranean fastness of Mag Tureah. The great Murkendraw, a swamp big enough to swallow cities, sprawls for unchecked miles, its shadowy depths home to warring tribes of goblins and plotting covens of hags. It's a strange land, an alien land, full of whimsy and lunacy - and it can be just a step away from the mortal world.
The Shadowfell, meanwhile, fills another obvious gap that the Great Wheel didn't have: the mythical Land of the Dead. Unlike its closest counterpart, the Negative Energy Plane, this is not a "gotcha" world, where stepping in is death. Nor is it a simple "the mundane world, but unrelentingly dark" like the Shadow Plane. This is the material world cast in a darkened looking glass, a place of gloom and the macabre, but also not without its charms. Cities of the undead, marching legions of souls moving with absolute silence towards their judgement by the Lord of the Dead and their progression to the next stage of their afterlives, dark metropoli full of lunatics and monsters, all of these can be found here. It can be a place for horror, or a place to let your Tim Burton fan out. The sample locations here are intriguing enough - The House of Black Lanterns; an ancient roadside inn in the depths of the Shadowfell, the Plain of Sighing Stones, the Nightwyrm Fortress that guards secrets and treasures until the end of time, Moil, Letherna, and the fantasy expy of Dark City that is Gloomwrought - but it's also just begging for new locations and creepy events to encounter. Especially since it's eaten the concept of the "Domains of Dread" used in Ravenloft.
If I want to run an expy of Cold Stark House, a Warhammer short story revolving around an isolated mansion full of lunatics who endlessly plot against each other, loving and murdering and scheming, all of them victims of a curse that draws unwitting guests to become puppets in the eternal melodrama of the depraved undying noble who watches the madness and laughs from his bed, I can. Far more easily than I could have done in the Great Wheel. Maybe there's a plane I could have put it on, I'm not sure. In the World Axis? It fits the Shadowfell like a silken glove.
The Elemental Chaos! Oh, how I love it so. When elemental matter all swirls together without rhyme or reason, the most fantastic vistas are born. Forests of silver trees with crackling lightning dancing amidst their boughs growing on the banks of a lake of liquid ice, as an island volcano that spews liquid metal drifts majestically through the skies above. The Elemental Planes of old had always been forced to have some admixture to make them remotely interesting; the Chaos simply accepts that mixing them altogether works out best. The Brazen Bazaaar, a traveling caravan of efreeti merchants that roams the planes, that's something that would have fit the old Plane of Fire. But Canaughlin Bog, a continent-sized island covered in swamp where hillocks of ice and stone jut from waters that swirl in physics-defying currents over caustic mud? Nowhere in the old Elemental Wheel could I have that - oh, I wish I could post its picture from "The Plane Below"; a deep, dark swamp, where normal and crystal-encrusted trees stand amongst lush, green water with icy mounds bobbing merrily across its depths. Gloamnull, the perfect place for a fantasy noir story; a cursed city of genasi doomed by a pact with Dagon, a giant floating city locked under eternal rainstorms that drifts eerily across the sky. The Riverweb, a multi-layered web-like structure of free-floating waterways that stretches in all directions - I couldn't have this in the old Elemental System, and this is much cooler than just an infinite expanse of water that goes in all three dimensions. And, even with all of this, the Elemental Chaos is no "gotcha!" world. There are places where magical protection is necessary, but the odds of dying just by stepping through the portal aren't 100%. Plus, the elemental molding attribute, the ability to reshape the elements around you through sheer force of will, that's awesomely flavorful. The Elemental Chaos is a world where a sage can turn a pebble into a tree and freeze a fireball solid... to me, that just screams fantasy.
The Abyss? Well, it hasn't really changed, beyond being literally at the bottom of the Chaos, and I honestly like it that way. I'll touch on the whole mess with demons and devils later in this rant, but the idea of the Abyss as this very literal sinkhole of creation, an infected wound in reality itself that is trying to devour all things above it and spread until it has consumed everything in its own putrescence... that's a powerful image, to me.
The Astral Sea. Perhaps my favorite of the reimagined planes. The old Astral Plane was... well, honestly, it was just kind of dull. I know, it had all the dead gods floating in it and the githyanki raiders and stuff, but still, it never came off as more than a glorified speedway around the Great Wheel. The Astral Sea, on the other hand, just has so much more of an epic feel to it - and I think that's because it uses itself to house the best parts of the old Great Wheel. If I want to go to Mechanus, I can - I sail the Astral Sea, enter what looks like a mere tower or floating city from the outside, and inside is an entire world of clockwork gizzards. Gears the size of continents rotating through their endless cycles, everything that made Mechanus of old interesting, but allowed to explore itself as something more. The Astral Sea is still the way to get to many other planes, but since there's no longer a grid to fill, I can flesh out the Astral Sea with all the dominions I want there to be.
Straying from the cosmological map, the redrawing of the cosmology echoes into subtler effects.
First and foremost: the Blood War. I hated the Blood War in AD&D. It was pretty much the Big Thing of Planescape, almost equal to Sigil and its portals in prominence, and I thought it was absolute rubbish. The basic idea of demons fighting devils was, in itself, interesting, but the setting gave it far too much importance. The worst part of it was the portrayal of the Blood War as the one thing that made the infinite Upper Planes, the bastions of goodness and right, as infinite in numbers and equally powerful if not superior to either type of fiend, tremble in their little white darned socks because they knew they'd fall if the Blood War ever stopped and the fiends could assault them.
Really? Seriously? Legions of frothing mad lunatics that can barely coordinate their own thoughts, never mind with their allies (demons) marching alongside selfish nihilists who want to stab everyone else in the back for their own profit and advancement (daemons) marching alongside a brutal tyranny divided near equally between mindless drones, treacherous underlings willing to thwart their own goals to make their immediate bosses/rivals look back, and paranoid tyrants doing their best to get rivals and skilled underlings alike killed off (devils). These are the Enemy. Standing against them, the united forces of Good - you know, the embodiments of cooperation, tolerance, friendship, camaraderie and unity? And, somehow, the united forces of Good, who cooperate with their fellows like it's second nature and who work together for the greater good, are supposed to be doomed to fail in the face of a horde of Evil that probably spends more time fighting amongst itself than fighting them? Pull the other (censored) one!
It's not as if the Blood War doesn't still exist in 4e. Demons hate Devils, who despise them in turn, and Daemons don't care who's winning so long as they get to butcher everyone else. It's just not the only damn thing in the meta-political newspapers. The Blood War sometimes goes cold as a result of the cataclysmic casualties it inflicts on the two races... that honestly makes more sense to me. It's not like it keeps me from using the "Blood War is raging" plothooks. Hell, it just means I can now use the "ceasefire is coming!" and "the Blood War is going hot again!" campaign hooks.
Speaking of Demons and Devils, I really like the changes to their overall lore. If alignment works for you, I get how they might have been fine before, but to me, they were always pretty interchangable - there's a reason that, prior to 4e, my homebrew settings would basically dump Abyss and Baator alike for the Infernum, a 3rd party setting who presented a far more interesting and compelling fiendish race than any of the three canon D&D fiends. But, 4e actually made me take an interest in them, as it finally presented very clear, non-ideology-based, differences between the two.
Devils are Fallen Angels. Corrupt angels who murdered their patron god and who have been punished by the other gods for it. They want to harvest mortal souls, using sin and suffering to fuel war machines to break their ancient bonds and take revenge on the heavens, enslaving all reality.
Demons are Corruption Elementals. Avatars of entropy and corruption manifest, living errors in reality that want to befoul everything pure. They are the virus invading the cosmos' bloodstream, and they won't stop until they have brought everything that exists to share in their own ruination.
Now, I know there are people who felt the Lawful Evil/Chaotic Evil before characterized them just fine. But, to me? This does the job far more clearly, far more elegantly, and far more interestingly.
...And, unfortunately, or fortunately I suppose, that's where my stream of thought has run dry. Maybe if I go back over my planar sourcebooks for 4e, I can draw up more to talk about, but after hours of work, this is all I have to say on just why I love the World Axis, and I'm sorry I can't do it more justice.
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Mecheon
Sacabambaspis
As a bit of a zoology nerd, it probably would be necessary. Most apex predators today are camouflaged. Tigers, orcas, sharks, lions, leopards...
Camouflage is something you have to do as an apex predator
thanson02
Explorer
Actually, it is a shame that 4E got dropped when it did. I thought the World Axis model they presented was perfect for Planescape adventures. The fluidness of the realms and how they flowed together really made for real dynamic environment. Also with the introduction of the archipelago's that swarmed around different realms in the Astral Sea, one could have easily set up specific campaign adventure guides in each of the realms in both the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos.
One thing I'm thinking about doing one of my players hit the right levels, is used to Dark Sun campaign guide to set up the atmosphere and the layout for the first level of the Abyss since from what I read in the Manual of the Planes, they're almost identical in atmosphere and vastness of size.
Lots of potential........
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QuietBrowser
First Post
All too true. The entire point of the World Axis cosmology was that it was built from the ground up constantly asking itself "Is this fun? Can a DM reasonably hope to run adventures with it?" And, if you don't throw a tantrum over the fact it's not the static, rigid cosmology from 2e, it really does pay dividends.
Honestly, the worst thing about the World Axis is that it no longer makes Sigil the absolute be-all, end-all last name in planar traveling, now you can literally sail the Astral Sea and travel to the Dominions. Even then, it's still a hugely advantageous nexus-point and, really, you could technically portal directly from plane to plane in 2e. The Outer Planes just weren't as easy to get between as the Astral Dominions are.
Parmandur
Book-Friend
Meh, matter of taste. World Axis didn't fly for most people, they already put the best parts in the 5E synthesis.
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Tony Vargas
Legend
Stop assuming you speak for most people. WotC actually did do some polling about edition preference, and the result they claim to have gotten is that the majority don't have a strong edition preference, but like D&D in general - that it's the h4ters and 4vengers that were distinctly in the minority.
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