Sage Advice: Plane and world hopping (includes how Eberron and Ravnica fit in D&D cosmology)

[Coroc]

Honestly I cannot see the advantage of making it all fit with each other. Even in the DM Guide they offer different world philosophies, e.g. Heaven Hell Prime (shadow) for something very basic,
Great wheel, Axis etc.

The only time you really need something logic is when you are doing the following:

1. And precondition: You are a DM who sticks to the published material (mostly) true to the letter, especially on things like canon

2. You decide to connect two or more official primes (Or planescape) in a campaign.

For every other scenario NOTHING has to be done, Eberron works fine with its own philosophy of the planes (Better eventually than with some shoehorned great wheel), Dragonlance works well with its Philosophy and any of the primes of the official settings are far easier to shoehorn into a homebrew plane arrangement - aka axis instead of wheel - than to be implemented into the planescape universe which is a great setting, but on its own, and not as an INTERPLANAR SUBWAY of some sort.

Btw [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] help me out here, I am not at home and cannot look it up: Tiamat / Takishis was put into one of the nine hells layers as far as I can remember, ?whereas in Dragonlance 1e she was from the abyss? I think they also did change her alignment from CE to LE at some point for that? Am I correct?

 

[Hussar]

/snip

Btw [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] help me out here, I am not at home and cannot look it up: Tiamat / Takishis was put into one of the nine hells layers as far as I can remember, ?whereas in Dragonlance 1e she was from the abyss? I think they also did change her alignment from CE to LE at some point for that? Am I correct?

That's pretty much right. There was always some question as to whether Tiamat and Takhisis were actually the same being. DL Adventures certainly doesn't agree, for example, where Takhisis is actually an incredibly powerful god (for 1e) and would pretty much chew up and spit out any other previously published god.

The 1e Monster Manual has Tiamat in the First Plane of Hell where she spawns all evil dragonkind. IOW, it really depends on who you ask whether Tiamat and Takhisis are the same being. And, AFAIK, the official line is pretty much, who knows?

But, again, this is pretty much my point. Is Takhisis Tiamat? Well, why should they be? What advantage is gained by making them the same thing. Sure, agreed, Takhisis is obviously inspired by Tiamat, but, if you try to force them into the same mold, neither of them actually works.

 

[Aldarc]

It does, and it's why I've been constantly bringing up the postmodernism of that setting. As that's generally a Postmodern idea that no-one has the truth or that the truth is subjective.

For a setting that supposedly exhorts subjective truth, it does have a nasty habit of imposing the hegemony of its truth on others. I also find it exceedingly odd for a setting of "no-one has the truth or that the truth is subjective" that it preserves, upholds, and defends the status quo of pre-existing power structures for D&D's Great Wheel and its associated cosmology. That approach is antithetical to a lot of postmodern and deconstructionist thinking. It's a shallow reading of postmodernism that takes the internet level of "truth is subjective" while not adopting any of the means or ends of deconstructionism. /shrug

I suppose that is why I never really found Planescape that liberating or deep.

The 1e Monster Manual has Tiamat in the First Plane of Hell where she spawns all evil dragonkind. IOW, it really depends on who you ask whether Tiamat and Takhisis are the same being. And, AFAIK, the official line is pretty much, who knows?

But, again, this is pretty much my point. Is Takhisis Tiamat? Well, why should they be? What advantage is gained by making them the same thing. Sure, agreed, Takhisis is obviously inspired by Tiamat, but, if you try to force them into the same mold, neither of them actually works.

And in Eberron, Tiamat is the Daughter of Khyber imprisoned beneath the draconic continent of Argonnessen.

 

[Coroc]

[MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] well you just found out that the great wheel existed before Sigil (issue date wise ) and maybe that also had an impact on how it was constructed in game, at the only logic point the center of the wheel. Of course there might be a faction in Sigil woth the Credo that logic is an illusion

Did not know that one about Tiamat and Eberon, is that official canon?

 

[Aldarc]

Did not know that one about Tiamat and Eberon, is that official canon?

Yes. She is regarded as the "true daughter" of Khyber, the Dragon Below. She is not considered a proper "god," but, rather, as an overlord fiend. She is the voice of evil that seeks to corrupt dragons, with chromatic dragons being particularly vulnerable. She was sealed during the Age of Demons, though her devotees, the Talons of Tiamat, seek to liberate her.

 

[Imaro]

Nope, not officially. None of the Ravenloft stuff is actually canon in Dragonlance. It's one take, but, sorry, no, Soth never left Krynn according to DL. Krynn was never part of the Great Wheel. That was stuff that was bolted on later. In Krynn, Takhisis is the Queen of the Abyss. There are no other greater beings in the Abyss than Takhisis. At least in that setting. And Hell, and Gehenna and all the rest, never actually existed in the setting. They are never referenced, never appear and are completely absent until retconned in later on when TSR decided to smash all the settings together.

So basically you ignore all the other references and connections that were made between DL ,other settings, and the Great Wheel (which you keep confusing with Planescape)... well except for the ones you don't want to ignore... seems pretty selective to me, especially when Dragonlance is much more prominent in Spelljammer and Ravenloft than in the Planescape Campaign setting where it's barely if ever mentioned.

Fun story. Not canon. As easily ignored as a couple of mentions of orcs in some of the earlier books. And, even then, who's to say that this is the same Demogorgon that appears in other settings? There's no reason why it would be, unless, of course, you insist on smashing all the settings together.

So now you're determining what is or isn't canon for Dragonlance... I'm failing to see why Planescape is giving you such issues. Can you actually cite where Planescape is mentioned in DL or where DL is mentioned/subverted/changed by the Planescape campaign setting? Your complaints just feel like alot of hand wringing from someone who hasn't really read the Planescape setting, and who tends to get it confused with the Great Wheel cosmology (which existed way before Planescape did and was already being used to tie TSR's settings together... though as shown above you seem to have no problem selectively ignoring the earlier connections).

But, it's never presented that way. It is always presented as fact. And it infects every other setting.

Sure it is... Belief shapes the multiverse is one of the fundamental themes of the Planescape setting... and one of the biggest differences between Planescape as a setting vs. The Great Wheel as a cosmology.

Thank you for proving my point. You can't actually have devils living under the mountains unless it's mountains in Hell. Which forces every setting to actually HAVE a Nine Hells, whether that setting should have that or not.

I was being facetious. For a more serious answer... in Planescape if enough people believe Devils all come from beneath mountains it will become true. And again Great Wheel vs. Planescape, you don't seem to be grasping the difference. These settings were assumed to be tied together through the Great Wheel before Planescape came along... yes their individual sourceboos give their take on the cosmology but that's true even today however the wider realm of early D&D books, stories, magazine articles, etc reference them as being part of the same multiverse. Now you can chose to ignore, claim they aren't canon, or whatever but that doesn't change the fact that these connections existed before Planescape.

At this point in time, the two are indistinguishable. The Great Wheel IS Planescape. Has been for decades

For the purposes of the discussion around when a cosmology was imposed on a particular setting the difference does matter... and no I don't agree. The Great Wheel is a cosmology, Planescape is a campaign setting with it's own tropes and themes that aren't necessarily a part of the Great Wheel cosmology when take by itself.

And that's fantastic. Great for you. I totally understand loving a setting. Wonderful. Just please stop trying to shove your preferences down my throat. You can have your Planescape. Just keep it out of anything that isn't in the Planescape line of products.

Lol.... No one is shoving their preferences down your throat. IMO other settings... FR, DL, GH, etc. don't share the themes or tropes of Planescape and they've never been forced on them. Now if you don't like the GW cosmology cool but it's been here since 1e and well they've made it pretty clear it's not going anywhere because people either like it and/or it can be easily ignored.

Or, well, I'll just keep doing what I've always done and completely ignore all the Planescape stuff, which means all the planar material for D&D, and thankfully now I can simply rely on 3pp to give me what I want. I have to admit that PS means that I can easily tell whether or not I want to buy a product. I know that something like Mordenkainen's is a product I will have zero use for, so, I won't buy it. Easy Peasy.

That's cool vote with your dollars if you want change and we'll see if there are enough like you who despise the Great Wheel cosmology enough to enact change...

 

[Imaro]

For a setting that supposedly exhorts subjective truth, it does have a nasty habit of imposing the hegemony of its truth on others. I also find it exceedingly odd for a setting of "no-one has the truth or that the truth is subjective" that it preserves, upholds, and defends the status quo of pre-existing power structures for D&D's Great Wheel and its associated cosmology...

Where is it's "truth" imposed? It uses the GW as the assumed cosmology... but that's no different from any other setting that assumes their cosmology is correct. But I'm unsure since the campaign setting makes it pretty clear belief can change nearly anything (including the structure of the multiverse) how it preserves, upholds and defends the status quo of the pre-existing power structures. What it does is give you a baseline and says go at it... It's almost like you want them to enact the changes for you and that IMO would be missing the point... the point is for your Players to enact said change through their PC's... not for them to script said changes out for you.

...That approach is antithetical to a lot of postmodern and deconstructionist thinking. It's a shallow reading of postmodernism that takes the internet level of "truth is subjective" while not adopting any of the means or ends of deconstructionism. /shrug
I suppose that is why I never really found Planescape that liberating or deep.

Well I think you've got Planescape as a setting wrong as I stated above but even if you don't... not sure as a child picking up Planescpae I necessarily wanted it to be that deep... if I want postmodernism on that level I'll play Unknown Armies, while with Planescape I get the tropes and themes with a much higher level of accessibility due to the familiarity they keep by using the GW as the assumed cosmology.,.

 

[Coroc]

[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION]
I really love planescape, Torment was one of the best CRPGs and in back when it came out I was playing in a 2nd ed. campaign.

I also do get along with all the asumptions it makes, GW etc etc.

But I love PS as a setting, not as a rulebook for other settings. If I would DM a PS campaign my players would visit all the various strange planes (heavens hells and in betweens) eventually - and maybe but only very maybe they would make a trip to some prime like Oerth or Faerun for something special, but not really necessarily.
Why is that? Because that makes it different from adventuring on some prime, it is the cool thing about it. Send a 1st level party to the Abyss? Almost instant death or slow TPK for any standard prime campaign world, but if you apply the rules and principles and tone of a PS campaign it is another thing and totally survivable.

With a DL campaign it is totally different. What planes do you need? NONE until you have driven Takishis back to the abyss. What planes do you need then? None if that's the finish of the campaign. ONE if the campaign goes on with chasing Takishis inside the Abyss. You do not need a great wheel, rules for spelljamming or big fluff around portals, you probably take the same portal Takishis used to withdraw and which might be stable or not or whatever.

The same goes for many FR campaigns and most Greyhawk campaigns. Most official material does not require planar framework, it is totally meaningless for most types of prime campaign.
If there is some campaign where Demons or Devils invade from some outer plane you need that plane but not every other.

Even assuming your point of view, PS and GW harmonize very neat with FR, especially since it became kitchen sink extreme with 5E, and they work along quite well with Greyhawk.
With DL: not so much. With Eberron: not so much at all. With DS: even less. With Ravenloft: irrelevant you will not leave unless the powers let you which is unlikely.

 

[Imaro]

[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION]
I really love planescape, Torment was one of the best CRPGs and in back when it came out I was playing in a 2nd ed. campaign.

I also do get along with all the asumptions it makes, GW etc etc.

But I love PS as a setting, not as a rulebook for other settings. If I would DM a PS campaign my players would visit all the various strange planes (heavens hells and in betweens) eventually - and maybe but only very maybe they would make a trip to some prime like Oerth or Faerun for something special, but not really necessarily.
Why is that? Because that makes it different from adventuring on some prime, it is the cool thing about it. Send a 1st level party to the Abyss? Almost instant death or slow TPK for any standard prime campaign world, but if you apply the rules and principles and tone of a PS campaign it is another thing and totally survivable.

With a DL campaign it is totally different. What planes do you need? NONE until you have driven Takishis back to the abyss. What planes do you need then? None if that's the finish of the campaign. ONE if the campaign goes on with chasing Takishis inside the Abyss. You do not need a great wheel, rules for spelljamming or big fluff around portals, you probably take the same portal Takishis used to withdraw and which might be stable or not or whatever.

The same goes for many FR campaigns and most Greyhawk campaigns. Most official material does not require planar framework, it is totally meaningless for most types of prime campaign.
If there is some campaign where Demons or Devils invade from some outer plane you need that plane but not every other.

Even assuming your point of view, PS and GW harmonize very neat with FR, especially since it became kitchen sink extreme with 5E, and they work along quite well with Greyhawk.
With DL: not so much. With Eberron: not so much at all. With DS: even less. With Ravenloft: irrelevant you will not leave unless the powers let you which is unlikely.

The thing is I don't think Planescape is a rulebook for other settings. I think it utilizes the D&D cosmology, The Great Wheel (which has been the multiversal cosmology since 1e) but as a setting is it's own thing rarely if ever touching the other settings in any way that affects play in them. The inhabitants of those settings see their cosmologies the way they do and unless you have them visit Sigil (or any other city from another published world with a different cosmology) or meet someone from Sigil (or from any other published world with a different view of the cosmology) they won't question anything. Now admittedly I haven't read the entire catalog of Planescape material but besides throwaway references I've never encountered much of Planescape interacting with other published worlds but I'd love to see some examples.

My games were much more like yours, with the slight difference being the focus was mostly Sigil, it's politics, factions, and intrigue leading to adventures on the planes. Very rarely (I actually am having a hard time remembering a sibgle time with the exception of a semi-railroad into Ravenloft) did my PC's choose to visit other published worlds. I just don't think this was the norm for a Planescape campaign. Which is why I keep asking for ewxamples where Planescape intruded on other settings as oposed to the Great Wheel cosmology which had been intruding on numerous settings since the 1e days... way before Planescape.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

For a setting that supposedly exhorts subjective truth, it does have a nasty habit of imposing the hegemony of its truth on others. I also find it exceedingly odd for a setting of "no-one has the truth or that the truth is subjective" that it preserves, upholds, and defends the status quo of pre-existing power structures for D&D's Great Wheel and its associated cosmology. That approach is antithetical to a lot of postmodern and deconstructionist thinking. It's a shallow reading of postmodernism that takes the internet level of "truth is subjective" while not adopting any of the means or ends of deconstructionism. /shrug

It establishes that the Great Wheel is the established cosmology in the way there's an established truth.

The idea that there's 17 Outer Planes, a bunch of Inner Planes and just an Ethereal and an Astral is based on categorizing and analyzing countless journeys from thousands of planewalkers, from the myths of billions of people from a untold number of worlds. So far they got a system that works with what they can catalog, though the names of planes get revised a bunch of time, and that are things can be something that throw the system off. Whether it be the Far Realm and whatever it might posit, or the Mirror Realm (used by the Rilmani in that library of theirs and Kenmarel who were banished their), "Demiplanes" or Pathways that might be bigger than previously thought (Shadow being a demiplane in 2e, and then becoming a full-fledged plane in all the later editions), that Dreams themselves might be more significant on a planar scale, or that the Element Planes do often blur the lines. Now many of these things like the Far Realm have come after Planescape was published, but they already present challenges to how thin

On smaller scales Outer Planes have proven to be mutable, layers of planes which are infinite universes that are parts of certain planes have shifted, such as one of Arcadia's layers becoming a part of Mechanus, Divine Realms and Planar sites moving around from one plane to another, and even certain layers such as Pelion seeming to fade away or being theorized as being very different eons ago. A collection of Realms and Sites does make for ones definition of a plane, and what makes a layer a part of a plane (beyond thematic grouping) or a place a Demiplane is often arbitrary.

The Great Wheel as the established cosmology is like many of the prevalent scientific theories of this age. They aren't that controversial at all among scientists as they've been peer reviewed countless times, that they are established truths. But there are things out there that do put some of them in doubt, that go beyond some non-scientist who disapproves because it goes against their interests. Like how there seems to be more mass out there than one can observe, despite the theory that gravity is supposed to work in a certain way.

Now unlike scientific theories though, Planescape has already stated though that things can change if enough people among the billions and billions of souls out there see things differently. It has happened before, even if it's in small ways that don't really challenge the prevailing theories.

I suppose that is why I never really found Planescape that liberating or deep.

It's deep in there's many things about Planescape that can go beyond simplistic "you wander into a dungeon, you fight things and take stuff" or more complex "is this king better than that king". There's factions that ask questions like: Is the entire multiverse really just the afterlife from some True Reality? Or is it all the imaginations of one being such as myself? Or is everything just meaningless?

It's liberating in that there's many mysteries out there, and most of the setting can be all homebrewed settings with just a basic guideline out there, though it's an adjustable scale if one wants going to something like 90% published and 10% homebrewed to 10% published and 90% homebrewed. Even Sigil itself can have various neighbourhoods never even mentioned in any of the published material. And if one wants there to be the realm of a Three-faced Mechanical Monkey God in the Planescape setting, than a DM can certainly place one where they want.