D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[jabelincoln]

But, as we've seen with Planescape material, we are not allowed to make any changes. Every Planescape element must be preserved in its entirety throughout editions and every change is critiqued, not based on whether the change is interesting or not, but whether or not it follows what came before.

But has not the PS setting, and the creatures within changed in significant ways all along its progress? Yes, I will grant you that the Great Wheel as a concept has been basically the same since 1e's Manual of the Planes, however, inside that concept things have swung wildly. Factions have changed and altered, Landscapes have planar concepts have shifted to make them easier to traditionally adventure within (usually a mistake I believe), Modrons and others have disappeared and reappeared. Ancillary planes come in and out of existence all the time and 4e did its whole own thing. What about a monster or setting changing over editions makes it preferable to remaining static anyway? Is it that you percieve (perhaps rightly for all I know) that PS fans tantrum across the forums? How does that effect the usefulness of the monster on the page?

And i really don't understand why. Why is it perfectly fine for dragons to go from relatively small monsters with minor spell casting ability, if any spell casting ability at all, to virtual demi-gods equivalent to arch mages? But if we change a succubus from a demon to a devil, or futz about with Yugoloths, the pitchforks and torches start coming out.

See, no, there aren't alternative systems. Not in D&D. If I want different orcs, I have all sorts of inspirations I could draw on. If I want different halflings, I could use core D&D, Dragonlance, Eberron, whatever, and have everything from hobbits to cannibals to kleptomaniacs. But a Type 1 Vrock must always be a Type 1 Vrock in every single setting, in every single source book and can never, ever vary from the baseline. We must never have an adventure book featuring a demon and a devil conspiring together, because that would violate the flavour of the Blood War. Every Eladrin must be an Angel Elf and to vary from that is verboten.

THAT'S my beef here. If there were all sorts of options out there, and Planescape was one of them, I'd be a perfectly happy camper. But, if I buy a supplement about the planes, it will ALWAYS be a Planescape supplement. If I buy an adventure that features anything off the Prime Material, I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it will always follow Planescape flavour. Heck, The Savage Tide, a spin off of the Isle of Dread, followed, to the letter, Planescape elements. The last three or four modules might as well have had Planescape emblazoned across the banner. Why? These are Greyhawk (or rather Paizohawk) adventures. They certainly didn't start off as Planescape adventures. But they sure as heck ended as them.

Oh, that's right, anything to do with the planes that was published in Dungeon or Dragon in 3e HAD to follow Planescape flavour. No variation. No exceptions.

I would dispute that things always have to be Planescape, as stated previously, 4 e did not support that vision at all, and had plenty of ideas for how to turn those concepts on their ear. 5e has gotten rid of the inner plane structure of PS entirely, and kept the Feywild and Shadowfell. None of which do I like, but none of which bothers me. I'll change things as every DM does as I see fit. What I'm getting at is I still don't understand if you want to use creature stats and wrap around a completely different ascetic and narrative, why planar stuff is any different to other monsters; I still run dragons like 2e dragons and always will. If you need inspiration for what to do with your planes and you perceive that DnD doesn't provide it, theirs so much in so many other sources and we have google now, something my 13 year old self would've done, well, let's just say "things" to have. As to the references in other modules, you don't seem to be objecting to references and encounters in the planes so much as a single idea of the planes spread out through different modules. If that's correct, then what's the alternative? If they reference a new planar structure every time they have to explain it anew every time and you'll still have change most of them to fit with whatever you choose.


Cheers

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not sure that I'd necessarily call either one an innovation, but rather a focused expansion on something from 3e for the former and an amalgamation of things from prior editions for the latter.

If I have to choose between innovation and good execution, execution wins. Every day. Twice on Sunday. A good innovation is great, but uncommon. Otherwise, innovation purely for its own sake is for the birds.

The 4e Shadowfell was just the 2e/3e Plane of Shadow fused with elements of the 1e/2e/3e Negative Energy plane and random aspects of Ravenloft. I found it thematically muddled in that it forced together a lot of things that IMO worked better as their own thing.

Whereas, I always thought that one of the greatest weaknesses of the Great Wheel was its repetition; the notion that themes that are identical need multiple expressions throughout the cosmology. I found that the 4e Shadowfell brought together a lot of things that stood out oddly and always had me scratching my head wondering why they weren't all united in the first place.

I was never a fan of 4e very much, but one of the things that they did do quite well was consolidation of a bunch of BS in the Multiverse, bringing it all together in a way that made a lot more sense, and made it a lot more useful and useable. Setting design was not 4e's flaw, it was it's one strength.

 

[Desdichado]

In short, having to "suffer" through a handful of Planscape references (especially when using planar material (!)) doesn't seem like it should be cause for as much bellyaching as I'm hearing. Where were the cries of "foul!" when 3e featured the Greyhawk pantheon? If just having ANY campaign-specific material in core rulebooks is bad, that ought to have irked people like Huzzar at least as much as the Planescape references - yet I heard not a peep from him on that account!

EVERY D&D player/dm has to put up with references and material that he/she doesn't like, every edition. None of us get to "opt out" of having to endure stuff we don't like. That's just life. I'm not that big a fan of the Forgotten Realms, yet every edition it gets preferencial treatment over other campaign settings, because it's popular. The 3.e books had a Red Wizard prestige class right there in the core rulebooks, if I recall correctly. Should I have bitc- I mean, COMPLAINED, about that?

Were you posting 14-15 years ago when 3e launched? There was complaining, believe you me. It's just really old news now.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Just for the sake of clarity: the 4e cosmology esablishes clear stakes. It doesn't prescribe how the PCs address those stakes. Which is to say, the players are free to form their own conceptions of what counts as a heroic response to the world on fire.

For instance, in my own 4e game one PC is a deva servant of Erathis, Bane and several other gods who wields the Sceptre of Law; and another is a chaos sorcerer and Emergent Primordial, devoted to Corellon and to Chan, the Queen of Good Elemental Creatures. A third is a Marshall of Letherna and fanatical devotee of the Raven Queen.

These characters have different conceptions of how to respond to the stakes that the 4e background establishes: one wants to rebuild the Lattice of Heaven and establish divine order; another wants to overthrow Lolth, free the drow and allow the mortal world to continue in an equilibrium of order and chaos; the third wants to uphold and extend the Raven Queen's power over the fates of mortals.

I'm sure there are a lot of other feasible PC concepts and goals, too, that engage with the stakes of a world on fire.

I don't think we're really disagreeing: ultimately, the 4e cosmology reflects the conflicts in the 4e implied setting (a big one being gods-vs-primordials, with its inherent good law vs. destructive chaos overtones, as Greek Myth has), and it does so much better than the Great Wheel does.

And I think that you shouldn't have had to fight against 5e's default Great Wheel assumption to get this cosmology back, if you decided to play 5e.

 

[The Shadow]

My own take is that I've despised the Great Wheel ever since I first saw it in the AD&D DMG appendix.

I was a bookish lad and very fond of mythology, and the Giant Dinner Plate (as my group disparagingly refers to it) has no mythic resonance whatever. (YMMV, and so on.) And the names!! At least they took out Nirvana and the Happy Hunting Grounds, but they left Limbo. What the name 'Limbo' has to do with a swirling chaos inhabited by frog-creatures, or indeed 'Chaotic Neutrality' in general, I have never been able to figure out. (And never mind that it's a theological term just as connected to real-world religion as the other two I just mentioned...)

In my view, the Great Wheel is simply typical Gygaxian completionism, done in a hamhanded way. For that matter, the 'ethereal' and 'astral' planes are simply ripped off from Spiritualism, and lie down very weirdly with the medievalish setting otherwise. (But I put up with them because they are a useful model for a bunch of spells.)

So no, Planescape was never my cup of tea.

My point is, I've had to rip things out of D&D and reshape them to my tastes from day 1. Nothing new to see here. I can go on about this at vast length (I've only scratched the surface of my problems with D&D cosmology) but will spare you all.

The cosmology was one of the few things I actually quite liked about 4e. It was a breath of fresh air, and made much more sense to me than anything that had gone before. I'm glad some elements from it have survived into 5e, and the border elemental planes fading into pure elements then into the Elemental Chaos make me want to don a tinfoil hat - I had a very similar idea years ago.

So I'll probably keep 5e's Inner Planes, and totally rework the Outer Planes, like usual.

 

[Aldarc]

I dislike the Great Wheel. It feels stale, inorganic, claustrophobic, overly mechanical, and disconnected from real world mythologies. I actually did prefer 4E's cosmology, because the Feywild felt like a mythic Otherworld of the Fey found in other mythologies and the Shadowfell felt like Hades, the Underworld, and other such similar planes. Plus, the deities vs. primordials felt like it harkened more to a wider variety of myths (Mesopotamian, Greco-Roman, Norse, etc.). I'm sure that people feel differently from me on that issue, but that doesn't somehow invalidate my feelings on the matter.

I dislike having the different D&D settings connected. I dislike vehemently how Planescape has increasingly dominated the core assumptions of planar materials. So I certainly can't stand when assumptions about Planescape and a D&D Multiverse keep bleeding into the default assumptions about the game. Sure it's a matter of preference, but I also generally dislike many default assumptions of plot and setting regarding monsters and cosmology. One of the reasons why I liked Eberron was that it had its own cosmology that was separate from the Great Bore. It felt self-contained. I would prefer planar materials (and those dealing with outsiders) provided a greater range of alternative models and was open enough in its own right to not assume that there is some great Blood War between demons and devils and masterminded by yugoloths.

 

[Elderbrain]

Two points.

First, The Great Wheel of Greyhawk and The Planescape Setting are not the same thing. The latter uses the former, but the former also exists without the latter. And you can probably have the latter without the former. So they haven't been the same thing always.

In fact, the only e in which they were sort of the same thing was 2e, and that was only true after the Planescape setting got published. To a certain extent in 3e as well, though it was much more The Great Wheel and much less The Planescape Setting (aside from a few faction-based locations scattered around the Manual of the Planes and such).

Campaign material bled into the core rulebooks, but it was Greyhawk campaign material, which is not the same thing as Planescape.

The second point is that while campaign material has always bled into the core books, it has never actually been fully welcome there. D&D has never been about Greyhawk or FR or any one particular setting in practice, it's always been about multiple settings, and that should include multiple cosmologies.



People got their own preferences. Not sharing them doesn't mean there's not good reasons for 'em.

... Er, yes, Greyhawk material is not Planescape material... but then, I never said it WAS! I was talking about events having to do with Oerth appearing in the core rulebooks, nothing to do with the Great Wheel. (I never considered the Great Wheel to be "part of" Greyhawk. Greyhawk may ASSUME and USE the Great Wheel, but that does not make Great Wheel references Greyhawk references.) I was taling about things like mentioning that Fraz Urb'luu was imprisioned for a time on Oerth, the Hand and Eye of Vecna being in the DMG, etc. The point I was getting at is that if someone didn't like Greyhawk, they nevertheless had to put up with numerous Greyhawk references and/or material right in the core rulebooks. Why is that any less onerous than having, say, a reference to the Blood Wars in the monster manual? So, if somebody hates Planescape, the books must be sanitized of any reference to such, yet Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms references are perfectly o.k.? No offense, but a monster manual edited in such a way as to avoid stepping on anybody toes would have to be incredibly bland and tasteless. You couldn't say ANYTHING about a monster that might possibly "prevent" some DM somewhere from using the monster in a different capacity in their campaign.

Example: "WHAT?!? Vampires are listed as UNDEAD? But, but, in MY campaign they're alive! NOOOOO!!! How could they DO this?!? What do you mean, I can just change it? But, I shouldn't HAVE to change it, they should be listed as alive right there in the books! This is SO UNFAIR..."

See what I mean?

 

[Elderbrain]

See, different preferences. The tone of PS is not one of a world on fire in desperate need of heroes, it is one of an ongoing war of competing ideologies, where heroism depends on what one thinks of the flag you're waving, where no hero is pure and no villain is monolithic, where the players enact change throughout reality and where the ideas they champion become more legendary than their own names.

It is totally fair to prefer a more heroic light-vs.-darkness / civilization-vs.-chaos kind of vibe for your D&D game, and you should be able to have a cosmology that supports that first and foremost rather than having to cleave to the Great Wheel or anything.



Well, in the first place, it isn't perfectly fine for a lot of people, those people are just perhaps less numerous than PS fans.

But mostly because it's like taking Lord Soth and describing him as some sort of misunderstood antihero who had a talking badger animal companion that cracked wise about Takhisis.

Or like taking Drizz'zt and describing him as a heartless guerilla revolutionary who burns orphanages and raises schools in his effort of leading a revolution.

Or like taking Iggwiliv and imagining her as a comically idiotic character who succeeds despite her own incomptence.

In other words, it's inauthentic. Regardless of if the new story is good or not, it's not true to the stories that people love about the critter.

But all this can be avoided if the core books just imagine that yugoloths and succubi and whatever aren't The Definitive X, but rather that the story one tells about them is just one story. 5e doesn't seem to be following this track, but they do seem to be taking a light touch. Most of the story info in 5e is easy to ignore. Your Intellect Devourers don't have to be creations of the mind flayers, and it doesn't change much about 'em. Your succubi can be devils and it'll be fine.



I think it'd be a mistake to conflate PS with the Great Wheel. These things are not the same things. The development that PS gave the Great Wheel might be welcome sometimes, but other times it might not be, because the setting has its own tone and style it brings into the game.

Right now, for instance, I'd say that 5e has the Great Wheel, but it's not very PS-y. It is bound to concepts like alignments though, and presents them as equal rather than having a clear hierarchy as in 4e, which might mean it's harder to run a 4e style "heroes of ordered light against the roiling destructive chaos" style game in core 5e. Or an Eberron-style "Xoriat is waxing and chaos is rising!" kind of game. Which is kind of a shame.



My case is more that I think there should be no truly default cosmology.

That way, someone who develops a shinto-esque setting, or someone who develops, say, a setting based on the path of the Sun like Egyptian myth, isn't someone who has to climb uphill against the default assumptions. Maybe Grazz'zt isn't a demon in the abyss, maybe he's an oni from the decadent south. Maybe he's a force of darkness in service to Set who seeks to stop the sun from rising.

Clearly, the devs didn't really want to explicitly support that assumption of "no assumptions" for PC's. And it doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to change, which is good. But I bet in most games, Grazz'zt is gonna be a demon from the Abyss on the Great Wheel, just 'cuz that's what the game already says about him. Which is less awesome than it could have been.

In what sense, though, would Grazz't remain Grazz't if you change him into something different and just keep the name? (Leaving aside the issue of where he dwells.) Why not just leave Grazz't what he has always been and create your own oni or force of darkness with its own name, instead of appropriating Grazz't's? If Grazz't can be ANYTHING, anything at all, he has no definition. He's nothing. How ridiculous would it be for WOTC to say, "There's this evil guy named Grazz't, but we can't tell you what kind of creature he is or where he lives because then his nature would be fixed in stone and somebody couldn't use him in another manner. So here's some bland, flavorless nondenominational stats that you can use, however."

 

[Hussar]

... Er, yes, Greyhawk material is not Planescape material... but then, I never said it WAS! I was talking about events having to do with Oerth appearing in the core rulebooks, nothing to do with the Great Wheel. (I never considered the Great Wheel to be "part of" Greyhawk. Greyhawk may ASSUME and USE the Great Wheel, but that does not make Great Wheel references Greyhawk references.) I was taling about things like mentioning that Fraz Urb'luu was imprisioned for a time on Oerth, the Hand and Eye of Vecna being in the DMG, etc. The point I was getting at is that if someone didn't like Greyhawk, they nevertheless had to put up with numerous Greyhawk references and/or material right in the core rulebooks. Why is that any less onerous than having, say, a reference to the Blood Wars in the monster manual? So, if somebody hates Planescape, the books must be sanitized of any reference to such, yet Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms references are perfectly o.k.? No offense, but a monster manual edited in such a way as to avoid stepping on anybody toes would have to be incredibly bland and tasteless. You couldn't say ANYTHING about a monster that might possibly "prevent" some DM somewhere from using the monster in a different capacity in their campaign.

Example: "WHAT?!? Vampires are listed as UNDEAD? But, but, in MY campaign they're alive! NOOOOO!!! How could they DO this?!? What do you mean, I can just change it? But, I shouldn't HAVE to change it, they should be listed as alive right there in the books! This is SO UNFAIR..."

See what I mean?

True, but, by and large, the Greyhawk references are largely contained in proper nouns and don't really refer to anything else. For example, Fraz Urb'luu isn't mentioned in the core books AFAIK, which means he's in supplements, where I'm MUCH more flexible about references. Sure, the Eye and Hand of Vecna is in the DMG, although now Vecna is a god, which already departs from Greyhawk quite a bit anyway. But, we're talking about an artefact here. It's not like it's going to be appearing in many campaigns. It's pretty easy to ignore.

Try ignoring every single extra planar creatures that's intelligent and was mentioned in 2e Planescape. Every single one of them gets shoehorned into their Planescape iterations and no variation, other than variations that occurred in the Planescape setting material, is allowed. Modrons, for example, have varied over time, true, but, only through Planescape canon. If I want to buy a supplement about Modrons or Mechanus, it will always be 100% PS compatible. That's certainly not true of other creatures. I can buy all sorts of supplements for orcs that range from barely sentient beast men to highly advanced warrior races.

But your example is rather extreme don't you think? Changing a succubus from a demon to a devil is hardly on the same level as deciding that the most iconic undead monster in the game is suddenly not undead.

 

[Hussar]

In what sense, though, would Grazz't remain Grazz't if you change him into something different and just keep the name? (Leaving aside the issue of where he dwells.) Why not just leave Grazz't what he has always been and create your own oni or force of darkness with its own name, instead of appropriating Grazz't's? If Grazz't can be ANYTHING, anything at all, he has no definition. He's nothing. How ridiculous would it be for WOTC to say, "There's this evil guy named Grazz't, but we can't tell you what kind of creature he is or where he lives because then his nature would be fixed in stone and somebody couldn't use him in another manner. So here's some bland, flavorless nondenominational stats that you can use, however."

And that's fantastic. At least I think that's fantastic. Why does Grazz't have to be a single vision of the creature?

I guess my question is, is the defining characteristic of Grazz't that he's a demon lord that lives in such and such a plane in the Abyss, or is the defining characteristic of Grazz't his personality and behaviour. I'd argue the latter. Changing him into an Oni from the South to fit within a given setting better because the setting doesn't have an Abyss, makes the material more versatile.

I mean heck, Tiamat can be a god, a demon or just a big honking dragon. She's the Queen of the Abyss in Dragonlance. How is that any different than making Graz'zt an Oni of the South? You are banking on the previous associations (big honking dragon, queen of dragons, lives in the abyss) to make the connections to the new setting (Queen of the Abyss, Goddess of evil dragons, countered by Paldine (a reflavored Bahumut).

The more tightly you link flavour to a particular element the less flexible that element becomes. Why do all yugoloth have to be mercenaries in the Blood War? Why does every daemon write-up have to reference their place in the Blood War.

I'm with KM on this. Let's not have a default cosmology, but rather present a number of sample cosmologies and let individual tables sort it out, exactly the same way we do for every other part of the game. Why does every D&D setting have to be linked to the Great Wheel even when it doesn't fit for that setting? And because they're linked to the Great Wheel, they become linked to Planescape because Planescape basically absorbed the Great Wheel setting. Why on earth would a demon in Ravenloft possibly give the slightest toss about the Blood War? Or in Eberron?

The value in the game of a Glabrezu, for example, isn't it's position in the Blood War but that it's a tempter demon, out to grant Monkey's Paw style wishes to bad people. If there is no Blood War then why does the Abyss need armies? And, if there are no abyssal armies, then maybe we can change a Marilyth from general to something that likes to set itself up as a god to local peoples. So on and so forth.