Reinventing the [Great] Wheel

Just for fun, I've been converting Planescape to my own personal image of perfection, and next on my to-do list is the alignment exemplars! I am a fanboy of original PS, but not of all the details. I'd like to narrow the exemplars down to nine races that are more thought-through than the canon races, which are mostly the result of D&D's haphazard "We made some stuff up we thought was cool" creative process.


For example, I want three distinctly thematic Evil races instead of 5 (6?) Evil races that can largely be summed up as "Menageries of ugly* anthropomorphic creatures that are sometimes fiery." (I like 4e's elemental-demons, so I'm reserving "Oh, and it deals energy damage" for them.) So I'm making up my own stuff that I think's cool, and I could use your help!

I'm hoping that @Quickleaf, @TarionzCousin, @Shemeska, and other PS fans will stop by to comment.


Here's my strategy: The exemplars of each alignment pole (NE, NG, CN, LN) have a shtick. Evil exemplars have disease/curses, Lawful exemplars have metallic flesh-enhancement (modron-ish), Chaotic exemplars have shapeshifting, and Good exemplars have...I dunno, I haven't worked that one out yet. Any ideas?


Then, the exemplars of each alignment blend (CG, CE, LG, LE) combine the shticks of their 'parent' races. For example, shapeshifting (C) + curse (E) = were-beast (CE)!


* Seriously, why are the evil ones always ugly, unless there's an ugly pimp on some lower plane ordering them about? Evil is selfish, it wants to be beautiful!

Tequila Sunrise said:

Evil exemplars have disease/curses [...] Good exemplars have...I dunno, I haven't worked that one out yet. Any ideas?

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Healing and curing?

[MENTION=40398]Tequila Sunrise[/MENTION]
I like how you're coming at it from an "overarching design concept" as opposed to the piece mail design that often was Planescape and, to a lesser extent, older D&D in general.

That said, I'm not sure the benefits of simplification/consolidation outweigh the loss of diversity/conflict. In other words, I'm not sure you need to take a gigantic red pen to PS to make it playable. I mean, in the context of the Planescape setting, what didnt work about the Great Wheel?

Do we really want bio-mechanical (Lawful) majestic angels (Good) instead of Mount Celestia's archons? Maybe, maybe not.

There was a great article that gets into what alignment really means and explicitly maps it to the D&D Great Wheel. http://easydamus.com/alignmentreal.html
*Definitely* worth a read for what you're doing.

What's peculiar about the model is that it uses 8 motivation markers (conformity, universalism, self-direction, achievement, etc.) that pretty evenly map to alignments, but inserts a 9th - hedonism - that specifically maps to Chaotic Evil. Not sure if that's a really needed distinction as there is already a Stimulation marker, but there it is.

One thing to consider is how the various outsiders relate in terms of age to the planes and to mortals (and potentially mortal belief). I'm in favor of creating the planes and then afterwards populating them with creatures that make sense for the plane and for that cosmology's history.

Within the Great Wheel a lot of this is of course some very much after-the-fact rationalization for scattered, create cool stuff as we go, without a unified vision for all that time method of world creation from 1e to 2e to 3e etc. But I think it's important to take into account. If a particular outsider race predates mortals, do they necessarily need to be linked to any particular concept that easily makes sense to mortal conceptions? Or can you be a little more vague about it?

Is appearance important? Is it more important than motives and actions?

More thoughts on this later.

Quickleaf said:

There was a great article that gets into what alignment really means and explicitly maps it to the D&D Great Wheel. http://easydamus.com/alignmentreal.html

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Holy forking snit, that site is nifty....

Tequila Sunrise said:

* Seriously, why are the evil ones always ugly, unless there's an ugly pimp on some lower plane ordering them about? Evil is selfish, it wants to be beautiful!

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Honestly? Because there's an idea that these are spiritual creatures, and unlike mortal beings, their visage generally matches their true nature. With spiritual entities, what you see is pretty literally what you get.

Don't think bio-mechanical angels, think gloriously silver and gold angels. And what about light/dark or elemental for the neutrals?

GX.Sigma said:

Healing and curing?

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I like.

Umbran said:

Honestly? Because there's an idea that these are spiritual creatures, and unlike mortal beings, their visage generally matches their true nature. With spiritual entities, what you see is pretty literally what you get.

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Sure, that's the "We made some stuff up we thought was cool" explanation, but it doesn't quite square with the rest of canon. The high-up fiends have control over fiendish forms -- which is a concept I rather like -- but it begs the question; why choose to be ugly? Maybe they make the weaker fiends ugly because ugly soldiers are scarier, or just because they're cruel to their own kind, but surely the high-up fiends would make themselves beautiful.

Quickleaf said:

That said, I'm not sure the benefits of simplification/consolidation outweigh the loss of diversity/conflict. In other words, I'm not sure you need to take a gigantic red pen to PS to make it playable. I mean, in the context of the Planescape setting, what didnt work about the Great Wheel?

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Oh, there's nothing at all unplayable about PS canon; it just offends my personal sense of aesthetics.

Quickleaf said:

Do we really want bio-mechanical (Lawful) majestic angels (Good) instead of Mount Celestia's archons? Maybe, maybe not.

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Personally I like Savage Wombat's suggestion for celestials better than the archon zoo.

Quickleaf said:

There was a great article that gets into what alignment really means and explicitly maps it to the D&D Great Wheel. http://easydamus.com/alignmentreal.html
*Definitely* worth a read for what you're doing.

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I like the honorable/practical/independent and the humane/realistic/determined divisions that the blogger suggests. Though honestly, I hadn't planned on even mentioning alignments in my final product. I don't think they need to be an in-game thing -- just an homage to traditional PS that I'm using as design inspiration.

Shemeska said:

One thing to consider is how the various outsiders relate in terms of age to the planes and to mortals (and potentially mortal belief). I'm in favor of creating the planes and then afterwards populating them with creatures that make sense for the plane and for that cosmology's history.

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Ah yes, I am perhaps designing the outer planes backwards. My problem is every time I think of the planes, I think of the exemplars. I figure there might be an ur-race hidden here or there, but if so mortal souls have largely taken the spotlight on the outer planes. I do know that I'm going to end up with nine outer planes rather than 17, and only some of them are going to resemble PS canon.

I'm a big fan of symmetry, so I know for example that Mechanus will be as it is in canon, while Limbo will be more like Ysgard: a multitude of varied landmasses floating and crashing through an endless sky.

Shemeska said:

If a particular outsider race predates mortals, do they necessarily need to be linked to any particular concept that easily makes sense to mortal conceptions? Or can you be a little more vague about it?

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Maybe an ur-race doesn't need to be strongly linked to a mortal concept, but I do want each one to have an easily describable theme, so that I don't just end up with menageries of ugly anthropomorphic fiends again. (Or other canonical themes that I find unsatisfying.)