D&D Beyond: Rise of the Eladrin

[Parmandur]

I like the fallen, tragic past element here: nice Tolkienian touch of pathos. And the grand unified theory of Elves is a nice touch, you, provides a good baseline.

 

[Jer]

I think they plan on dealing with settings that have different cosmologies at least in part by making their crystal spheres far more distant. ... Mystara,

Yeah - anything about Mystara having a crystal sphere is going to get ignored (by me and likely by anyone else who uses Mystara as their primary setting for D&D). Mystara sits in a galaxy that is part of a universe in an alternate prime material plane. The stars in the sky aren't points of light on a crystal sphere, but distant stars that other planets revolve around. You can actually go into Outer Space and visit other solar systems, and the Immortals (and sometimes high-level PCs) do just that. I even hate the retcons that have moved the FSS Beagle from being a starship from somewhere else in the galaxy that crashed on Mystara thousands of years ago to being a starship from a parallel universe that came through a wormhole into the Mystaran solar system. Sure they're canon, but why?

Crystal spheres and phlogiston are fine for some of the old AD&D worlds - I'm fine with it for both Krynn and Toril. But it was kind of dumb for Greyhawk (which also has connections to high tech visitors from outer space) and really doesn't fit at all with Mystara. Better to have parallel universes for the prime (which was the original conceit of the multiple gameworlds IIRC) than to force them all to have the same cosmology like that.

(Alternate universes also solves the planar problem - each world has its own set of Outer and Inner planes, arranged in whatever fashion you like. Some, like Eberron, don't fit the concept of "outer" and "inner" at all. Others have the Great Wheel or the World Tree or whatever configuration you like. Keep the worlds separate and let PCs travel between them like the Flash visiting between Earth-1 and Earth-2. I've always preferred that approach to trying to unify everything into one cosmic mishmash.)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah - anything about Mystara having a crystal sphere is going to get ignored (by me and likely by anyone else who uses Mystara as their primary setting for D&D). Mystara sits in a galaxy that is part of a universe in an alternate prime material plane. The stars in the sky aren't points of light on a crystal sphere, but distant stars that other planets revolve around. You can actually go into Outer Space and visit other solar systems, and the Immortals (and sometimes high-level PCs) do just that. I even hate the retcons that have moved the FSS Beagle from being a starship from somewhere else in the galaxy that crashed on Mystara thousands of years ago to being a starship from a parallel universe that came through a wormhole into the Mystaran solar system. Sure they're canon, but why?

Crystal spheres and phlogiston are fine for some of the old AD&D worlds - I'm fine with it for both Krynn and Toril. But it was kind of dumb for Greyhawk (which also has connections to high tech visitors from outer space) and really doesn't fit at all with Mystara. Better to have parallel universes for the prime (which was the original conceit of the multiple gameworlds IIRC) than to force them all to have the same cosmology like that.

(Alternate universes also solves the planar problem - each world has its own set of Outer and Inner planes, arranged in whatever fashion you like. Some, like Eberron, don't fit the concept of "outer" and "inner" at all. Others have the Great Wheel or the World Tree or whatever configuration you like. Keep the worlds separate and let PCs travel between them like the Flash visiting between Earth-1 and Earth-2. I've always preferred that approach to trying to unify everything into one cosmic mishmash.)

And it's literally just not confusing or unfamiliar for new people, at all.

Multiverses are common in modern pop culture. I'd say that what they're building here is more confusing, exactly because it doesn't present the universe as a set of alternate universes.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

People aught to be familiar enough with alternative cosmologies. They see one often enough in the opening credits of Game of Thrones.