This from the book, though, agrees.
"Eberron is part of the Great Wheel of the multiverse, as described in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide. At the same time, it is fundamentally apart from the rest of the Great Wheel, sealed off from the other planes even while it's encircled by its own wheeling cosmology."
Being sealed off means nobody gets in or out. So no teleporting there, no knowledge that gods are real, no nothing other than Eberron as it was in 3e.
Except that if one were to have a character moment where they commune with the ghost of Syberis, or the nascent spirit of Eberron, or the seething Will of Kyber, and are given a vision of the reality of the cosmos, what that character learns is quite different. Unless we also reduce the progenitor wyrms themselves to clueless "berks".
I can't be sure because of the medium, but when you say "shape the cosmology takes" implies to me that either I am not explain my point well (most likely) or you are not understanding. There is no shape to the Great Wheel. Is is simply a name used to provide an organization in the minds of those who use it. It is really nothing, it does not have the "shape" assigned to it. So, Eberron being "in" the Great Wheel is the same as Eberron being "outside" the Great Wheel. The Great Wheel is not a thing, it is a way of understanding a thing, albeit poorly.
I was saying exactly that "what shape the cosmological model takes" is not the point.
So when one says: Eberron is within the Great Wheel cosmology. That doesn't mean it is physically within the Great Wheel (since the GW is not a thing), it simply means: It means I understand the relationship of Eberron to the rest of reality within the context of my understanding of the Great Wheel.
Well, no, not quite. Officially, Eberron is within the Great Wheel because it is explicitly part of the same cosmology, regardless of how that cosmology is described.
A locked box is within whatever building it is stored in. Describing it's contents as separate from the rest of the building doesn't change that. Describing the building differently doesn't change that. In the universe wherein Tiamat is trapped on Avernus and an aspect of her is a the primary deity of evil with a different name in a specific crystal sphere, there is a crystal sphere that can be reached, but not breached, via the same means that one could go from the crystal sphere of Toril to that of Oerth. The only difference is that you can't get into Eberron's sphere unless your DM decides there is a crack in it, or you're a Planeswalker or whatever trick Vi is using to go back and forth.
That is fundementally different than all three settings being separate universes.
I think doc is trying to say that the shape of the cosmology (or the lack of shape) is not the issue.
Exactly.
So Fernia in the Eberron setting... which is essentially the Elemental Plane of Fire for Eberron..
No, it isn't.
. isn't actually a part of the Elemental Plane of Fire, but instead just a pocket of hot gas within the Prime Material plane that "sages" from other Prime worlds say aren't the same? Who gives them the authority to make that declaration? That their opinion on how the "inner" and "outer" planes are set up is the "true" way the universe/multiverse is set up? I mean it seems to me that Fernia is just as much the same "plane" as the Elemental "Plane" of Fire... it's just a metaphysical space of intense heat. They are one and the same from a conceptual point of view of the people in these worlds who are observing them.
Except that not everyone in a setting is stuck on the planet, and many are powerful enough to actually examine the cosmology around them.
And no amount of pretending that metagaming is some sort of sin is going to stop player knowledge from impacting how a character is played, how a world is viewed, etc. Knowledge creates filter through which every decision is made. It isn't the only set of filters, but knowledge based or informational filters are a very significant set of filters.
And combining worlds like this makes it harder to get poeple to understand that the planes of Eberron are not renamed versions of Great Wheel planes, but rather oftentimes
very different planes that have their own fleshed out nature and features.
"No one is taking your books away" is a common refrain we hear regarding this kind of stuff. But what it really should be is "No one is changing your corner of the D&D Multiverse". You can make your corner however the heck you want, and NOTHING anyone else ever says, declares, re-writes, invents etc. etc. etc. in the past or in the future will ever change that.
Okay? What has this to do with what anyone but you is talking about?
My point is that if you are think of cosmologies as shapes you are in the wrong mindset.
No one is thinking of them as shapes.
To put it simply, the D&D "multiverse" isn't actually a multiverse so much as it is a finite collection of planes. It was closer to what is more popularly understood as a multiverse during the 3E and 4E era.
Exactly. And every benefit of a unified cosmology also existed in 4e. You just had to move between universes to travel from FR to Eberron, which allowed them to be completely different.
This is just not correct. Even in 5e, eberron has it's on pantheons and cosmology, and by default the rest of the multiverse can't affect it. Players will always have assumptions, and that's okay. It's our job as DMs (In my opinion) to adjust their expectations with the world we are using/building and acomodate when possible and give alternatives when not possible.
It's still part of the Great Wheel. Magic still comes from Mystra, Elves are either descended from Correllon via the Feywild or the Progenitor Dragons copied Correlon when making them (goodbye any mystery as to why this alternature universe you've traveled to also has elves and dwarves that speak the same languages they speak in your home universe), etc.
@doctorbadwolf as a follow up, I want to understand what the "Great Wheel" is to you? Is it basically as
@Hexmage-EN described in
post #569?
Basically. The Great Wheel is two things. One, is a diagram. I don't care about the diagram at all. The problem would be the exact same if the diagram was a world tree or a world axis or a flow chart or if there was no diagram and it was just an alphabetical list of planes with their descriptions.
The other thing the Great Wheel is, is those planes and their descriptions. It's The Nine Hells, Astral Plane, Planes of various prime elements, Sigil, and all the things contained within those planes and locations. In 4e, the City of Brass is in the Plane of Fire if you're playing Greyhawk. You just have to use old material because no new stuff was published. In Nerath, an AU version of the City of Brass is in a hot area of the Elemental Chaos that combines fire and air, possibly other elements, to create a pocket of stability rules over by genies. In FR, IIRC it is similarly placed but has some different history, and stronger ties directly to the world in the form of the politics of Calimshan. In Eberron, I don't recall if there even is a City of Brass in 4e, but if there is it was placed somewhere that fit Eberron's cosmology.
Fernia is not a renamed plane of fire, it is much more complex than that.
5E Eberron's cosmology is just a segregated subset of the default 5E cosmology, meaning that all the gods and lore that are mentioned in the Forgotten Realms are equally true in the cosmology of 5E Eberron. Even if the rest of the 5E default cosmology is arbitrarily cut-off from it (which raises the question of why the designers even put Eberron and its entire cosmology inside of the canon 5E cosmology in the first place), as of 5E Eberron is in a bubble and separated from the real Outer Planes and the true gods that exist just beyond that bubble.
Yep. And that has implications for the cosmology, even if a campaign that never digs into the cosmology isn't affected by it.
Not by default. Rising from the last war is pretty clear on this point.
""Eberron is part of the Great Wheel of the multiverse, as described in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide. At the same time, it is fundamentally apart from the rest of the Great Wheel, sealed off from the other planes even while it's encircled by its own wheeling cosmology."
If it's sealed of from the other planes, Mystra can't access Eberron
And it also says, IIRC, that if there is a crack in the crystal sphere (did Eberron have one of these before? it certainly didn't in 4e), those gods could and would affect things in Eberron.
All the gods and planes of Eberron are equally true in the cosmology of Faerun then. As are all the gods and planes of Greyhawk true in the Realms and Eberron. And Dark Sun. And Mystara. And Theros. And Nerath. And Exandria. Everything is true, everything is real.
But the only people who know this for a so-called "fact" is US... all the players of D&D outside of this D&D multiverse. We see it as true purely from a meta level. But no character within any of these worlds knows any of this stuff as "fact". So truth does not matter. Everything is true and nothing is true for these fictional characters within these fictional worlds. And if we non-fiction players are getting our egos bruised because our fictional characters thus don't know the "real truth" of the worlds they live in... we really need to get over ourselves.
trying to frame it as about ego is pretty gross. It's just a cheap way to try to delegitimize the arguments others are making.
I still don't get this "demoted" stuff. Eberron is still Eberron, in the same exact way. Other parts of D&D cosmology can only appear if the DM wishes them to. Nothing has changed in Eberron, it's just meta stuff.
It's not just meta stuff. Maybe your games don't interact much with the cosmology and the nature of the universe, but mine sure do.
I kind of agree with this, not because I think it will make other cosmology lesser or anything like that. But because choosing to make ONE TRUE REALITY in such a rich multiverse seems so boring to me...
Absolutely. Regardless of the issue being argued endlessly here, it's just boring. The universe is more interesting if Eberron's cosmology is wholly independant, and Dragonlance has it's weird intersecting spheres, and FR it's multiple paralel Astral Planes, and Nerath it's World Axis, and each is independent of the others, because it provides a much clearer message to players and DMs that thier DnD world can be whatever they want.
I've already run into people who have trouble understanding that I don't have to include any of the DMG planes in my dnd setting, or that there is no rule against my Space Fantasy setting making the "planes" into regions in a galaxy not too unlike our own except that there is Aether that can be breathed in space, and can be harnassed to make fuel for crystal-powered devices and ships, but between stars the Aether thins out to the point where you have areas that function exactly like mundane space. My buddy has a world where the place demons come from, and wherever angels come from, and the ethereal, are the only planes outside the physical world. Everything else is just places in the world, like Eberron's manifest zones. So, it's not like my group has any issue making up different cosmologies. But having a unified cosmology per canon changes the nature of player expectations, and limits what official material can establish about the worlds of dnd.
The great wheel is the positioning of the planes in the cosmology.
No, it's the nature of those planes, how they interact with eachother, and what they contain.
This is exactly how I read Eberron’s current status quo. Part of, but untoucheable and independent. To me the changes just give a possibility of connection, not an official ranking of cosmologies
It's a bubble full of demiplanes. That is inherently less than it being it's own universe independent of any other universe. It's even worse if we imagine that Fernia is part of the Plane of Fire.
And indeed
, Crawford and Permins constantly echo the DMG in saying precisely this.
Feel free to show us where they have said that the Nine Hells don't necessarily have the layers described in official lore, or that Avernus isn't necessarily a broken battlefield, or that fire elementals don't necessarily come from the plane of fire. That is what the Great Wheel actually is, not the damn diagram being used to visualize it. You could use a flow chart, and it doesn't change anything.
Or just do it like always and say that their planes are just areas upon the known planes. Just like D&D did almost always.
Which is also bad, for exactly the same reasons.
www.enworld.org
