D&D 5E The cosmology of the Wheel and the Aether

[doctorbadwolf]

In my own take on space D&D, we made a gas called Aether that accumulates around gravity wells and certain other celestial phenomenon, which most creatures can breath, and which even a normal airship can sail in.
Between worlds is mostly just space, but there are Starlanes that act as FTL superhighways, and could easily be replaced with The River Stix and The Infinite Staircase, or whatever.

If y’all like that take, I’ll do a more detailed post on what we have so far later.

 

[Marandahir]

In 5e, a lot of that breaks down. Demons are fiends regardless of coming from the Elemental chaos, and devils are fiends regardless of coming from the Astral Sea. All effects that are different depending on the being target creature type, irrespective of origin.

So, all spell effects can tell us about demons and devils is that both are fiends. It would be easy for a mortal scholar to incorrectly conclude that demons and devils come from the same place and share an origin.

Agreed, but that's something they'd have to build into a "Conquest of Nerath" campaign sourcebook - how fiends are different in Nerath's World Axis. That's not impossible to do. As 5e goes, there's barely a nod to Nerath, and the nods there are are usually irreconcilable with the Nerath we know (ex: The Raven Queen of MTF is incredibly different from The Raven Queen of the World Axis Pantheon in the 5e DMG and in EGW, as is her lair, and her Shadar-Kai servitors, as are the Sorrowsworn of her Shadowfell demesne).

This is as opposed to Forgotten Realms, where the devils of the Nine Hells went from being Outsiders (Baatezu, Evil, Extraplanar, Lawful), then Immortal humanoids (devils), then Fiends (devils), all in the span of approximately a century. These are noticeable effect-target changes within a setting.

Yes, it all breaks down, and in 5e Nerath, Demons would likely just be considered Fiends as they are in the MM, but their intrinsic relationship to the Elemental Chaos would be undermined by doing so, and likewise the Devils intrinsic relationship to the Astral Sea and the Gods and Angels.

I'm talking about how cosmological interpretations across editions can change, but also about how cosmological interpretations across settings can be different, and these concepts sometimes overlap and sometimes do not.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Agreed, but that's something they'd have to build into a "Conquest of Nerath" campaign sourcebook - how fiends are different in Nerath's World Axis. That's not impossible to do. As 5e goes, there's barely a nod to Nerath, and the nods there are are usually irreconcilable with the Nerath we know (ex: The Raven Queen of MTF is incredibly different from The Raven Queen of the World Axis Pantheon in the 5e DMG and in EGW, as is her lair, and her Shadar-Kai servitors, as are the Sorrowsworn of her Shadowfell demesne).

This is as opposed to Forgotten Realms, where the devils of the Nine Hells went from being Outsiders (Baatezu, Evil, Extraplanar, Lawful), then Immortal humanoids (devils), then Fiends (devils), all in the span of approximately a century. These are noticeable effect-target changes within a setting.

Yes, it all breaks down, and in 5e Nerath, Demons would likely just be considered Fiends as they are in the MM, but their intrinsic relationship to the Elemental Chaos would be undermined by doing so, and likewise the Devils intrinsic relationship to the Astral Sea and the Gods and Angels.

I'm talking about how cosmological interpretations across editions can change, but also about how cosmological interpretations across settings can be different, and these concepts sometimes overlap and sometimes do not.

Yeah I prefer to not worry about things from one edition to another, beyond using whichever interpretation I prefer.

I don’t think that I would ever have the nature of a creature change because we changed editions.

 

[Marandahir]

Yeah I prefer to not worry about things from one edition to another, beyond using whichever interpretation I prefer.

I don’t think that I would ever have the nature of a creature change because we changed editions.

Nor would I. Though playing RAW, 4e changed that nature. We can pretend 100 years passed without much to say in FR, and just gloss over the Spellplague years, but it happened, and FR gave rationalizations for the changing rules.

Meanwhile, Eberron introduced the Feywild Spires to handle the new 4e cosmology but then mostly stuck to its own original cosmology in 4e. It didn't want to change the nature of its denizens of Khyber, which include creatures that other settings might have called demons or devils or elementals or other dark things. This did not align with the Nerathi World Axis cosmology, and that's okay. But what it means is that Eberron doesn't fit into the Nerathi Material Plane at the center of the World Axis. It's a separate Material Plane with its own planetoid planes of influence and Siberys and Khyber affecting it in a local planarly way.

This is irreconcilable with both the Great Wheel and the World Axis, because Eberron wasn't built to be part of a one-size-fits-all cosmology. It was built to showcase what the D&D rules of 3.5e could do with a setting build from the ground up with few of the sacred cows carried over from past editions. It also came into its own in 4e as a perfect example of a setting 4e works well in, despite having a significantly different cosmology from the core rules assumed setting. Keithh explores this pretty eloquently in an article on his blog here: Dragonmarks: Reaching For The Stars

So to bring it back to the Multiverse of planes, Eberron and its 12 attendant moons and planes would be in their own "crystal sphere" as it were, which would encompass its whole cosmology, not just its material plane, unlike 2e Spelljammer. This of course leads us to the question, "why include it at all if you're just going to say its silo-ed off?

I think again Keith says it best in the article above, and I quote:

"By canon, Eberron is the only planet in its material plane. Between the planes and the demiplanes of Khyber, there’s ample opportunity for adventurers to explore strange new worlds, and deep space exploration was never planned as part of the setting; we don’t need to have alien invaders come from a distant planet when we already have alien invaders crawling out of Xoriat. Nothing’s stopping the DM from going full Spelljammer and breaking through the wall of stars. But by default, that’s not the story Eberron was designed to tell."

So we CAN have an inter-dimensional, multiverse-hopping adventure. At that point, though, Eberron is a waypoint on a larger field of planar stories, and that cannot be the focus of any Eberron-centric book or article, by definition.

Similarly, Magic the Gathering stories are built around their set's plane. But crossing between planes is a larger metagame story that explains both the players having cards from other sets in rotation and also explains the newer-ish planeswalker cards/characters, and how these characters ended up in a different set's world. But the sets themselves are not about the planar travel between them, and neither can books such as MOT or GGR focus much on that element of the MtG mythos.

That is the purpose of a setting like Spelljammer, as opposed to a setting like Planescape - it is explicitly about travel between settings, rather than exploring the assumed cosmological setting of the core rules of D&D. So if we ever get Spelljammer as a 5e book, I would expect extensive revisions to the setting's concepts of Crystal Spheres, so as to better allow for breathing room of different campaign settings' cosmologies.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Nor would I. Though playing RAW, 4e changed that nature. We can pretend 100 years passed without much to say in FR, and just gloss over the Spellplague years, but it happened, and FR gave rationalizations for the changing rules.

Meanwhile, Eberron introduced the Feywild Spires to handle the new 4e cosmology but then mostly stuck to its own original cosmology in 4e. It didn't want to change the nature of its denizens of Khyber, which include creatures that other settings might have called demons or devils or elementals or other dark things. This did not align with the Nerathi World Axis cosmology, and that's okay. But what it means is that Eberron doesn't fit into the Nerathi Material Plane at the center of the World Axis. It's a separate Material Plane with its own planetoid planes of influence and Siberys and Khyber affecting it in a local planarly way.

This is irreconcilable with both the Great Wheel and the World Axis, because Eberron wasn't built to be part of a one-size-fits-all cosmology. It was built to showcase what the D&D rules of 3.5e could do with a setting build from the ground up with few of the sacred cows carried over from past editions. It also came into its own in 4e as a perfect example of a setting 4e works well in, despite having a significantly different cosmology from the core rules assumed setting. Keithh explores this pretty eloquently in an article on his blog here: Dragonmarks: Reaching For The Stars

So to bring it back to the Multiverse of planes, Eberron and its 12 attendant moons and planes would be in their own "crystal sphere" as it were, which would encompass its whole cosmology, not just its material plane, unlike 2e Spelljammer. This of course leads us to the question, "why include it at all if you're just going to say its silo-ed off?

I think again Keith says it best in the article above, and I quote:

"By canon, Eberron is the only planet in its material plane. Between the planes and the demiplanes of Khyber, there’s ample opportunity for adventurers to explore strange new worlds, and deep space exploration was never planned as part of the setting; we don’t need to have alien invaders come from a distant planet when we already have alien invaders crawling out of Xoriat. Nothing’s stopping the DM from going full Spelljammer and breaking through the wall of stars. But by default, that’s not the story Eberron was designed to tell."

So we CAN have an inter-dimensional, multiverse-hopping adventure. At that point, though, Eberron is a waypoint on a larger field of planar stories, and that cannot be the focus of any Eberron-centric book or article, by definition.

Similarly, Magic the Gathering stories are built around their set's plane. But crossing between planes is a larger metagame story that explains both the players having cards from other sets in rotation and also explains the newer-ish planeswalker cards/characters, and how these characters ended up in a different set's world. But the sets themselves are not about the planar travel between them, and neither can books such as MOT or GGR focus much on that element of the MtG mythos.

That is the purpose of a setting like Spelljammer, as opposed to a setting like Planescape - it is explicitly about travel between settings, rather than exploring the assumed cosmological setting of the core rules of D&D. So if we ever get Spelljammer as a 5e book, I would expect extensive revisions to the setting's concepts of Crystal Spheres, so as to better allow for breathing room of different campaign settings' cosmologies.

With respect...I just can’t bring myself to read all of that. It’s too much.

I read the first couple paragraphs, and I do want to say that IIRC demons and devils aren’t affected differently by very much in 4e, so I’m not sure the 5e mechanics actually necessitate any change whatsoever to the cosmology. They can be fiends and be from the Elemental chaos and the astral sea. 4e devils weren’t celestials, and 4e demons (IIRC) weren’t elementals, by any mechanics (ie keywords and the like).

 

[Hoffmand]

I never liked then concept of elemental chaos. That’s sort of what the material plane is, the area where all the elemental planes converge. I guess I can see elemental chaos as the area surrounding the material plane. But I still use all the paraelemental and quasi elemental planes. With all the material planes in the center. Basically one astral plane and outer planes and all the material planes in the center. But either way it doesn’t mess up anything I do. I don’t have to rewrite monster stats, personalities, and backgrounds over this stuff. I generally stick to the planescape idea. They are all clueless. Sorry Eberron, athas, nentir vale, you think you know how it works but u are in the dark. And the game runs fine.

 

[dave2008]

Sorry Eberron, athas, nentir vale, you think you know how it works but u are in the dark. And the game runs fine.

They are all in the dark in my mind (including FR, Greyhawk, Krynn, etc.) None of the "models" are correct, they are just the perspective of some mortals who lack the ability to truly understand the nature of the multiverse

 

[Hoffmand]

They are all in the dark in my mind (including FR, Greyhawk, Krynn, etc.) None of the "models" are correct, they are just the perspective of some mortals who lack the ability to truly understand the nature of the multiverse

Oh I agree. The residents of planescape and sigil are just as clueless as the others. And like them they they don’t know it and think they are right.

 

[Hoffmand]

Oh I agree. The residents of planescape and sigil are just as clueless as the others. And like them they they don’t know it and think they are right.

I hate dogma lol

 

[Marandahir]

With respect...I just can’t bring myself to read all of that. It’s too much.

I read the first couple paragraphs, and I do want to say that IIRC demons and devils aren’t affected differently by very much in 4e, so I’m not sure the 5e mechanics actually necessitate any change whatsoever to the cosmology. They can be fiends and be from the Elemental chaos and the astral sea. 4e devils weren’t celestials, and 4e demons (IIRC) weren’t elementals, by any mechanics (ie keywords and the like).

Ah, no worries. I realise I got a bit long-winded. Demons were elementals, but devils were not celestials. Celestial was a concept that wasn't in 4e - Immortal was, which included devils, angels, gods, and a few other things I can't quite recall. The Immortal has very specific features that elementals do not have. Though 4e doesn't really do the "detect elemental" or "detect good and evil" thing of other editions.

I was speaking more to the how the settings aren't designed for inter-setting storytelling, other than Spelljammer by definition. They've all got their own settings, and for many of them, that extends to their planar systems, and trying to force settings that would naturally eschew the Great Wheel into "oh, they just interpret the Great Wheel different" causes some real weirdnesses.