Planar Configurations; How Do You Design The Multiverse?

Aebir-Toril said:

As the title says, I want to know how others organize their planes. Do you use The Great Wheel, are all of your planes alternate versions of the Prime Material, do you have other planes? I wish to know what you have done.

I have used a few different planar arrangements, The Great Wheel, a Myriad selection, a sci-fi style arrangement of planar 'moons', a simple system with only a few planes, and a world where all of the traditional planar locales were on the same 'plane', with the Ethereal Plane, or Atmos Ethereae, as an atmosphere.

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Elderbrain said:

Because all the monsters assumed the 4e cosmology and fluff.

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Elderbrain said:

In 4e, Giants were created by the Dawn Titans, the Dawn Titans were Evil, therefore all Giants were made Evil, including traditional good-aligned Giants such as Storm Giants (who couldn't be Chaotic Good anymore anyway, since 4e eliminated that alignment outright, along with Chaotic Neutral. If you had the word "Chaotic" in your alignment in 4e, you were Evil, period.

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Elderbrain said:

Likewise, if you had the word "Lawful" in your alignment, you were Good. Lawful Evil and Lawful Neutral didn't exist in 4e, at least, no more explicitly then those alignments exist in, say, GURPS. There were creatures that behaved in what we would call a Lawful Evil manner - Devils, for one - but as a game mechanic the alignment didn't exist and wasn't recognized.) The Metallic Dragons all ceased to be good and became unaligned.

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Elderbrain said:

Demons became Elementals and gained elemental resistances because the Abyss was moved to the bottom of the Elemental Chaos. Eladrin became a type of Elf rather than Celestials (or High Elves became Eladrin, depending upon how you want to look on it.) You get the idea. And it was completely unnecessary - the Eberron book for 3.5e, for instance, had a new cosmology without killing off the old one. The 4e writers could've taken their cool new ideas and released a new campaign setting for 4e that incorporated all these ideas, without putting them in the core rulebooks and literally changing the cosmology of other campaign settings to match, i.e. the Forgotten Realms.

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dave2008 said:

OK, so all the stuff you can completely ignore (more true in 4e than ever) Not a big issue IMO.



If by Dawn Titans you mean primordials. This is incorrect. Most are unaligned I believe, regardless there are unaligned and good primordials.



Not quite right. Chaotic good is included in "good", just like Lawful evil is included in "evil." Also, alignment is not hard coded in 4e, you can make the alignments of anything whatever you want. I know we had "good" metallic dragons in our campaign.



They didn't kill off the old system, you can easily use the great wheel in 4e, nothing is hard coded. That is what we did mostly, though we liked the addition of the Feywild, Shadowfell, Dawn War (and Primordials) and kept those. We used the traditional cosmology otherwise, which was mostly irrelevant as it had no affect on our game. Like I said before, Cosmology never came up at all.

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Elderbrain said:

We're gonna have to agree to disagree on most of that. However, you are correct in stating that there were some Unaligned, non-evil Primordials (what I called Dawn Titans): The four Elemental rulers (often treated as deities) Grumbar of Earth, Kossoth of Fire, Ishtishia of (Water?) and the Air one, that (I think) first appeared in 1e and later because associated with the Forgotten Realms (because they were worshiped there, not because they were FR-specific). Plus there was one other Primordial (a new creation for 4e) that was Unaligned, but if I think he died? I didn't find any good-aligned ones, and I had the Elemental Power book for 4e with a list called the "Roster of Known Primordials" (loved that chart) - if you know his/her/its name, please post? I know that in 5e one Primordial, a volcano-fire related one called Megaera (?) got stats and was non-evil. Since 5e does incorporate elements of 4e, I'd love to see more of these uber-elementals and some of the Star-related big bads named in the 4e material (A couple got 4e stats, right?) Have the being your Pcs Great Old One Pact Warlock gets his powers from pay a visit - or maybe the thing his rival gets his powers from!

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