D&D 5E L&L 1/7/2013 The Many Worlds of D&D
- Thread starter Blackwarder
- Start date
Klaus
First Post
And pretty much nothing else was said about it. Spells used the Plane of Shadow (shadow walk, for instance), creatures were said to be from there (shadow dragon, bastellus, slow shadows), but other than that, it was a blank slate.
Shemeska
Adventurer
The edition had that idea solidly, but you're correct in that it wasn't connected to the Shadow Plane*, that was indeed a 3e'ism. The deep ethereal was where you jumped between different multiverses/cosmologies in 2e.
*(though it has been a while since I read Ed Bonny's awesome 2e article on Shadow so if he touched on that I apologize)
Shemeska
Adventurer
That's really not correct at all.
The 1e Shadow Plane was a blank slate, but not the 2e (after Bonny's piece in Dragon), and certainly not the 3e version (with coverage in the MotP, Planar Handbook, Dragon magazine, etc).
Klaus
First Post
The Demiplane of Shadow was a blanks slate for all of 1e, was briefly referenced for most of 2e (when shadow magic was introduced; the Dragon article was in 1995, over halfway into 2e's cycle, and didn't have much influence after that), and only got better definition in 3e's Tome of Magic (again, late in the edition cycle, when shadow magic was re-introduced).
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
The bastellus is, if I recall correctly, from Ravenloft.
Likewise, Shemeska is right in pointing out that 2E did a pretty good job of updating the Demiplane of Shadow into being a much more interesting place (particularly since most of the planes in 1E were blank slates). That the article in Dragon wasn't endlessly referenced doesn't mean that the demiplane wasn't used a lot, just that it wasn't used directly. It was still fairly important, from the Forgotten Realms' malaugrym to Ravenloft's shadow fey to novels like The Shadow Stone (even if that was a reskinned novel from Birthright's Shadow World). It wasn't ignored outright.
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Klaus
First Post
Maybe the bastellus is from RL, I can't remember precisely. But the slow shadow was definitely Greyhawk.
But that's the thing: "wasn't used directly". We got things that *came* from the Plane of Shadow, we got spells that *accessed* the Plane of Shadow, but apart from a single Dragon article, the plane was left unexplored. Even Planescape, which focused on planar travel, bypassed it. And RL's shadow fey were from the Shadow Rift that swallowed the drow domain in the core. Even the Shadow Rift got more development than the Plane of Shadow.
Hussar
Legend
And, this, right here, is precisely what I've been talking about.
We're being told that we must adhere to the canon of a single Dragon magazine article from about twenty years ago, that maybe, if we're very generous, one per cent of D&D gamers have actually read. Because that's the established Planescape canon and that must never, NEVER be deviated from.
But, the Shadowfell material, pages and pages of it, lots of rich history and background, filled with all sorts of goodies? Oh, hell no. That must be rejected and never allowed anywhere near 5e. Doesn't matter that three previous editions barely bothered to detail the plane at all. Beyond a couple of pages that very few people have ever read anyway. Even the Tome of Magic doesn't detail the Plane of Shadow. It details the Shadowrift pretty well, but the actual plane? Pretty much silent.
But, at all costs, we must prevent any changes to planar canon from before 4e and must reject all canon after the release of 4e.
Good grief, I though edition warring was a bad thing. This goes beyond edition warring. This is drawing lines in the sand over game lore?
We're being told that we must adhere to the canon of a single Dragon magazine article from about twenty years ago, that maybe, if we're very generous, one per cent of D&D gamers have actually read. Because that's the established Planescape canon and that must never, NEVER be deviated from.
But, the Shadowfell material, pages and pages of it, lots of rich history and background, filled with all sorts of goodies? Oh, hell no. That must be rejected and never allowed anywhere near 5e. Doesn't matter that three previous editions barely bothered to detail the plane at all. Beyond a couple of pages that very few people have ever read anyway. Even the Tome of Magic doesn't detail the Plane of Shadow. It details the Shadowrift pretty well, but the actual plane? Pretty much silent.
But, at all costs, we must prevent any changes to planar canon from before 4e and must reject all canon after the release of 4e.
Good grief, I though edition warring was a bad thing. This goes beyond edition warring. This is drawing lines in the sand over game lore?
My point is that the idea of the Plane of Shadow as a cosmology-breaching transitive plane is not an essential or even especially well-entrenched aspect of that plane. The idea that it is some sort of mirror or reflection of the Prime Material is at least as well established (via pre-MotP AD&D and then 4e).
I agree with this.
I also don't understand why Planescape's riding roughshod over (or reinterpreting, if you prefer) prior AD&D lore is to be embraced, whereas 4e's doing the same thing must be repduiated.
What sort of cosmologies were there in 2nd ed AD&D that weren't located within the "Great Wheel"?
In Gygax's PHB, and in DDG, the ethereal as well as the astral could be used to move between Prime Material Planes. In the MotP, though, this idea was dropped - only the astral permitted such movement. But that was not movement between cosmologies. There was no idea of parallel cosmologies in 1st ed AD&D, only of alternative Prime Material Planes.
Savage Wombat
Hero
No, this ISN'T what you've been talking about. It's just Shemeska pointing out that there was, in fact, some pretty good material on the plane back in 2E. You and Pemerton are the one reading some sort of pro-Planescape anti-4E conspiracy into it.
