D&D 4E Turning 4e Cosmology into the Great Wheel

[Klaus]

Easy as pie:

- Material Plane, Feywild and Shadowfell remain as is.
- Astral Sea remains as is.
- All divine dominions are connected, instead of floating separatedly. Portals link the Great Wheel to the Abyss, so that it is effectively a part of it (even though it is still the drain of the multiverse.
- The Elemental Chaos remains as is. Where it approaches the Material Plane and its mirrors, the elements lose cohesion. This region is the Border Ethereal.
- Inside the Elemental Chaos, four sections are dominated by the classic elements.
- Below everything (or inside everything, the sages argue about these semantics), is the Abyss, draining away to the shard of entropy known as the Negative Plane. Some speculate of a Positive Plane floating beyond the Great Wheel.

 

[Halivar]

I think I would take more of an Amber approach: In the center is the Material Plane, with increasing variations occurring as you "walk" the spokes of the Great Wheel, two of them being the Feywild and Shadowfel. Each spoke ends in one of the divine realms. One could "walk" the outer perimeter of the wheel through the divine realms if you had the ability, but it would take possibly thousands of years, while taking the spokes through the Materium would be much faster.

Because I've fallen in love with the Astral Sea, however, I would like to add that in. When you leave the spokes inside the wheel, you exist in the Astral Sea. The Astral Sea is vaster by far than the domains that circumscribe it, so it's the slowest of all travel, with the spokes of the wheel being like "highways" to go to and fro. Creatures travelling from one region of the Astral Sea to another are constantly looking for "on-ramps" onto the spokes.

Beyond the wheel are the totally alien places, like the Elemental Chaos, or the Far Realms.

 

[avin]

- The Elemental Chaos remains as is. Where it approaches the Material Plane and its mirrors, the elements lose cohesion. This region is the Border Ethereal.
- Inside the Elemental Chaos, four sections are dominated by the classic elements.

I would do:

- The Elemental Chaos as a plane is gone.
- Elemental Planes are back.
- There is a vast region where all Elemental Planes collide and bleed over each other. It's called by some "Elemental Chaos".
- Demons aren't Elemental anymore.
- Elementals are primarly pure... some rarer forms are mixed.

 

[harlokin]

I would do:

- The Elemental Chaos as a plane is gone.
- Elemental Planes are back.
- There is a vast region where all Elemental Planes collide and bleed over each other. It's called by some "Elemental Chaos".
- Demons aren't Elemental anymore.
- Elementals are primarly pure... some rarer forms are mixed.

I played with the Great Wheel Cosmology for a long time (particularly in Planescape), but I prefer what they came up with in 4e.

- I found the Elemental Chaos far more interesting than the Elemental and Para Elemental planes (a plane of nothing but fire......fun).
- I much prefer Demons as corrupted Elementals, it gives a rationale as to why are different to Devils.

 

[avin]

A matter of preference.

Planes should not be "interesting places for adventuring". The sun is not a place like that, but it's there as a background. As should, IMHO, elemental planes be.

As for elemental nature giving rationale to fight devils, I don't see why... humans should fight every Treeant around? As humans we fight for beliefs, religion, territory, resources... I would rather not limit my RPG games to a racial reason.

But I understand some people like it that way and respect their reasons, for sure.

 

[Kaodi]

I think that the Feywild and the Shadowfell need to be renamed. The terrible 4E naming scheme is one element that has to go. Just call them Faerie and The Gloom.

Bring back the Ethereal Plane as the misty space between realms (maybe call it the Ethereal Mists), and have it link the Material Plane, Faerie, and The Gloom to the Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea. Bring back the old Astral Plane as the Astral Mists, and have it be a misty realm inbetween the Astral Sea and the Dominions.

Restore the Abyss as a Dominion, and if you want to give it an elemental feel, use the 4E story in reverse, sort of: When the Dark God tried to seed the Elemental Chaos, the gods threw threw him directly from there into the Abyss, an act which drew some of the substance of the Chaos along with him.

In this model, the Ethereal Mists exit onto a vast island at the centre of the Astral Sea. Sigil is somehow nested at the centre of this island, unapproachable because anyone attempted to travel through the Mists will always find themselves on one of the Inner Planes, not at the edge of Sigil. How this works is, of course, a huge mystery.

The Far Realm exists somewhere far across the Astral Sea. Unlike in some previous editions, " Far " is not just a name for it. It really is " Far " and thus incursions into the Material Plane are extremely rare, not a perennial plot point.

Retain the Primordials somehow. Maybe those that were corrupted were sent to the Abyss as well, and those that were not remained trapped at the bottom of the Chaos.

 

[harlokin]

A matter of preference.

Planes should not be "interesting places for adventuring". The sun is not a place like that, but it's there as a background. As should, IMHO, elemental planes be.

As for elemental nature giving rationale to fight devils, I don't see why... humans should fight every Treeant around? As humans we fight for beliefs, religion, territory, resources... I would rather not limit my RPG games to a racial reason.

But I understand some people like it that way and respect their reasons, for sure.

Well let's agree to disagree.

To clarify, my preference for 4e Demons is that there is an attempt to make them meaningfully different to Devils with a mechanism other than them being a slightly different flavour of evil.

 

[Klaus]

I would do:

- The Elemental Chaos as a plane is gone.
- Elemental Planes are back.
- There is a vast region where all Elemental Planes collide and bleed over each other. It's called by some "Elemental Chaos".
- Demons aren't Elemental anymore.
- Elementals are primarly pure... some rarer forms are mixed.

Your #1 point contradicts the #3 point... And your #2 and #3 points are what I described.

Remember than even in 1e and 2e, the Elemental Planes had an enormous ammount of "elemental pockets" of other elements, so they weren't exactly "pure".

And in the Great Wheel cosmology, the Abyss has spiraling "infinite" layers (some say 666), and no one truly knows where it leads. It could easily lead to the "shard of entropy" at the bottom of creation.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Do we have to bring back the Great Wheel? It was kind of fun having it gone, even if its absence did sucker me into buying a planar book that I didn't particularly enjoy or get much use out of...

Honestly, I'm much rather see an effort by WotC to disassociate the game from any particular planar flavor rather than make another planar system hard-coded into the rules and core flavor text. It would be more interesting to see wildly different alternate cosmologies or pieces of cosmologies that can be fit together, rather than having just one.

Still, at the very least, the Elemental Chaos is way better than the old Elemental Planes. The former is exciting and has literary precedent, the latter is fairly dull and nonsensical. Also, the less obsessing there is done over demons, devils, and positive and negative energy, the better.

 

[Alzrius]

Easy as pie:

- Material Plane, Feywild and Shadowfell remain as is.
- Astral Sea remains as is.
- All divine dominions are connected, instead of floating separatedly. Portals link the Great Wheel to the Abyss, so that it is effectively a part of it (even though it is still the drain of the multiverse.
- The Elemental Chaos remains as is. Where it approaches the Material Plane and its mirrors, the elements lose cohesion. This region is the Border Ethereal.
- Inside the Elemental Chaos, four sections are dominated by the classic elements.
- Below everything (or inside everything, the sages argue about these semantics), is the Abyss, draining away to the shard of entropy known as the Negative Plane. Some speculate of a Positive Plane floating beyond the Great Wheel.

I'm honestly not sure what you're going for, here. Are you trying to re-integrate the 4E cosmology with the Great Wheel cosmology? If so, it's an appreciable goal - particularly in light of 5E's desire to unify the fan-base - but I don't think it can be done (at least not in a way that's worthwhile).

As a fan of the Great Wheel cosmology, it looks to me like what you're proposing is essentially keeping the 4E cosmology and trying to apply a coat of paint (that is, some minor changes that are mostly cosmetic) to make it resemble the way in which the planes were arranged in the Great Wheel.

If that's the case, why don't we go with the following:

- The Material Plane remains as is, and the "Shadowfell" is a rarely-used term for the Plane of Shadow, and the "Astral Sea" is a rarely-used term for the Astral Plane.
- The "Feywild" is an alternate Material Plane where the fey are the dominant creatures.
- Godly realms are subsets of the planes that they're located on, but have "borders" that make them difficult to access.
- The Elemental Planes are distinct from each other, but where they border is known as the "Elemental Chaos."
- The Abyss remains part of the Great Wheel, but is speculated to have infinite layers because of it being a "drain" on the multiverse; this has no actual effect on planar structures, but is a popular theory.

As a Planescape fan, I like this one much better.