D&D General Which was your favourite Forgotten Realms Cosmology?

[Henadic Theologian]

Word Axis, by far.

Why?

 

[jmartkdr2]

I generally prefer the World Axis for DnD cosmologies... but for FR in particular I like the World Tree in particular, since it was built with FR in mind and matches the themes better (I feel).

 

[Alzrius]

Very much the original Great Wheel. It's highly evocative, is very detailed, makes for great gaming at the table, and is the one that Ed Greenwood originally set the Realms in back when he decided to turn his writing into his AD&D campaign world.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I'm surprised that the 5e Great Wheel is so unpopular compared to the original and the World Axis and I'm curious why that is?

I mean I get the World Tree is unpopular, they sprang it on people with no explaniation and far too little support (it needed a Manual of the Planes of its own).

But its the only one unique to FR so FR really got to shape it in a way it didn't with the othet two.

It was tough between the 5e Great Wheel and the World Tree.

I think it came down to the great wheel not being as well thought out as I remember it. OG GW feeds on nostoligia then good design.

Gehenna, Pandomium, Archeron, Bytopia, Arcadia just lacked depth and sense of purpose. The best were Hell, Abyss, Arborea, Mount Celestia, Mechanus, Limbo, Ysgard, Beastlands, Carcari and the Outlands because they had clear purpose and seeds for adventures and an identity of their own.

 

[Corinnguard]

I mean I get the World Tree is unpopular, they sprang it on people with no explaniation and far too little support (it needed a Manual of the Planes of its own).

That was a missed opportunity on WoTC's part. It had a number of interesting planes that could have been talked about in a MoP style book. World Tree cosmology

 

[Alzrius]

I'm surprised that the 5e Great Wheel is so unpopular compared to the original and the World Axis and I'm curious why that is?

I mean I get the World Tree is unpopular, they sprang it on people with no explaniation and far too little support (it needed a Manual of the Planes of its own).

But its the only one unique to FR so FR really got to shape it in a way it didn't with the othet two.

It was tough between the 5e Great Wheel and the World Tree.

I think it came down to the great wheel not being as well thought out as I remember it. OG GW feeds on nostoligia then good design.

Gehenna, Pandomium, Archeron, Bytopia, Arcadia just lacked depth and sense of purpose. The best were Hell, Abyss, Arborea, Mount Celestia, Mechanus, Limbo, Ysgard, Beastlands, Carcari and the Outlands because they had clear purpose and seeds for adventures and an identity of their own.

I think it's because no one really liked the compromise. People who weren't fond of the Great Wheel didn't find the tweaked version any better, while people who liked the original didn't see the need for the additions.

Personally, I'm not adverse to having a Great Wheel cosmology that includes additional planes than the classic thirty-eight (seventeen Outer Planes and eighteen Inner Planes, plus the Astral, Ethereal, and the Prime Material). Like, having Shadow be its own plane, and the Far Realm as being some sort of "where reality breaks down" area, are both cool for me.

But I think the best major expansion of the concept came in Zombie Sky Press's Along the Twisting Way: The Faerie Ring Prelude (affiliate link), which introduced an "add-on" to that entire cosmology by way of a new group of planes: the Preternatural Planes.

That was the category for planes that weren't defined by an element, a philosophical ideal (i.e. an alignment), and weren't "transitive" in nature (like the Astral or Ethereal). That was where you grouped the Faerie Plane, Purgatory, the Plane of Dreams, etc. I found it to be a very handy add-on, one which was only "recently discovered" by planar travelers used to the standard Great Wheel cosmology.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

If I ran a FR game where the planes came into play, I'd probably use the World Tree. Also, for the record, I prefer the pre-Deities & Demigods version of of the Great Wheel for Greyhawk.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Why?

because it was designed to be interacted with at a relatively low level; its an actual gameplay element, while the others are more theorical concept of worldbuilding. The Great Wheel is a great reading piece of esoterical cosmology, but I dont think it interact all that much with your day to day D&D.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

True. My idea of a single elemental plane being an echo of the Prime was drawn from the Elemental Plane in the World of Warcraft MMORPG. In that game, the Elemental Plane is a three-tiered realm with the plane of air being the sky, the planes of earth and water in the middle, and the plane of fire existing below the world's surface. It's a prison plane for the Elementals.

The Elemental Chaos is basically a super-sized version of Limbo.

I think you could potentially make this work if you reshuffled the Feywild and Shadowfell slightly then.

The Feywild would become more specifically fairy-land, with less focus on being a place bursting with untamed life and more just a place bursting with magic. The Shadowfell, meanwhile, would lose a little bit of its emphasis on illusion, becoming a bit more like the Discworld concept of knurd.

Your new plane, which I'll call the Elder Tangle, would take on these removed bits. It isn't strictly a magical place, that's the Feywild's job. And it isn't strictly a dread place, that's the Shadowfell. Instead, it's a place where life is at war, in several senses. Dense jungles, thick marshes, hordes of wild beasts, nasty predators stalking everywhere, barely any settlements at all because of the constant encroachment of life...and also because of the pummeling of natural disasters.

The only real problem is, with exclusively natural things, and those natural things getting destroyed all the time by disasters, you're gonna struggle to come up with ways to make it playable. It falls prey to that same "ooh, this sounds like it fits" problem that I see all over the place in the Great Wheel: it's a philosophically interesting or "symmetrical" option, but all it really brings to the table is that tidy symmetry and philosophical interest. Unless you have other things you intend to do with it?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

because it was designed to be interacted with at a relatively low level; its an actual gameplay element, while the others are more theorical concept of worldbuilding. The Great Wheel is a great reading piece of esoterical cosmology, but I dont think it interact all that much with your day to day D&D.

Indeed, I would argue that 85% of the Great Wheel is completely irrelevant to most campaigns. There are 17 outer planes, of which at most maybe five will matter, and few groups will ever visit more than two. The 18 further elemental/energy planes effectively can't be visited in most senses, and...don't really have anything worth visiting to begin with, especially once you include the Shadowfell (which absorbs both the Plane of Shadow and the Negative Energy Plane) and the Feywild. And, as noted, the Ethereal is something that I doubt even half of Great Wheel fans could explain--it serves essentially no purpose.