Level Up (A5E) A Level Up Cosmology

[RangerWickett]

View attachment 145589

What is that bit in the middle?

Oh, the Waking is one term used for what we're more used to calling 'the Material Plane.' It's the solid physical reality that, depending on whom you ask, either is made up of energies from all the other planes, or is itself the wellspring of all the energies that differentiate into the rest of the planes of the multiverse. Was the difference of earth and water inherent to the cosmos, or did those planes only appear after mortal minds emerged that could conceive of stone and surf as being distinct things?

(And the tiny little dots overhead are example demiplanes, pocket dimensions, and the like. One fun innovation we have is, in order to make supplies matter more in overland journeys, bags of holding and the like needed to not be a valid way to carry months of food. The solution we came up with is that most tiny pocket dimensions were created by mortal magic, and while they might be a space you can put things in, they lack the divine spark needed to support life, so any food or drink you put in them is quickly contaminated by energies bleeding in from the rest of the multiverse. And you definitely don't want to stick the halfling in your bag of holding to try to squeeze one more person in when you teleport.)

 

[Steampunkette]

Okay... I have to say that this is one sexy cosmology.

I also like the idea that worlds can "Slip Free" from the cosmology and drift toward the Far Realm or the Gyre.

I also like that Space and Time are on there as different things.

Is the Bleak Gate a shadow-world where souls travel between the Waking and their Afterlife? That seems really fun, to me... Definitely something I can play with in SotSA...

 

[Faolyn]

Is the Bleak Gate a shadow-world where souls travel between the Waking and their Afterlife? That seems really fun, to me... Definitely something I can play with in SotSA...

I'm guessing it's their version of the Shadowfell. I would definitely use it as either you used it or as a Hades/Dolurh afterlife myself.

 

[Faolyn]

Speaking of the Gyre. Only knowing what @RangerWickett said about it, I'm getting incredible vibes of it being an incredibly surreal landscape with a technicolor sky and an almost post-apocalypse feel to it. Anything can be found there, if you look hard enough, but at the same time, and new things arrive during reality quakes when new worlds appear, but everything is also decaying.

 

[Staffan]

Speaking of the Gyre. Only knowing what @RangerWickett said about it, I'm getting incredible vibes of it being an incredibly surreal landscape with a technicolor sky and an almost post-apocalypse feel to it. Anything can be found there, if you look hard enough, but at the same time, and new things arrive during reality quakes when new worlds appear, but everything is also decaying.

I'm thinking something like the Void from the Loki series, but more mechanical.

 

[Faolyn]

I'm thinking something like the Void from the Loki series, but more mechanical.

I don't get that service, so I sadly haven't watched it. I'll look it up, since there's probably screenshots.

 

[Staffan]

I don't get that service, so I sadly haven't watched it. I'll look it up, since there's probably screenshots.

Loki spoilers:

Spoiler: Loki Spoilers

The show is centered around the Time Variance Authority, an organization that exists outside of time and whose job it is to find timelines diverging from the "Sacred Timeline" and "prune" them, by disintegrating them (it is somewhat unclear if they only disintegrate the variant stuff which then causes the rest of the branch to merge back into the Sacred Timeline, or if that whole universe gets destroyed). The TVA enforcers also employ hand weapons with the ability to do this to a single person. In a late episode, it turns out that things don't so much get disintegrated as sent to the Void, which is the end of the universe. This in turn turns out to be a "junkyard planet" where all the stuff the TVA gets rid of ends up for a while, before it is consumed by a cloud monster.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Upper Planes and Lower Planes map to the same planes like Abyss, Gehenna, etc? Or different?
What are the purple areas between the elemental planes and the fundamental (what are you calling those planes?) planes of Life/Death/Time/Space?
Also, can you expand on this concept?

The ethereal plane is like the space between your eyes and the page, and the astral plane is the version of the map that exists in your mind.

 

[tetrasodium]

Upper Planes and Lower Planes map to the same planes like Abyss, Gehenna, etc? Or different?
What are the purple areas between the elemental planes and the fundamental (what are you calling those planes?) planes of Life/Death/Time/Space?
Also, can you expand on this concept?

The spoiler in this post might shed some light on that first bit. You could probably say those are the ones they were carved off of if you want or could say that it's so far back into the distant past that it doesn't matter even if you do. Alternately like you could probably choose to declare they are something more interesting than those from the great wheel/planescape & entirely unrelated.

Spoiler: Here are some names

1 – Jiese, plane of fire.
2 – Caeloon, plane of air.
3 – Av, plane of dreams.
4 – Ostea, plane of water.
5 – Urim, plane of earth.
6 – Mavisha, plane of journeys.
7 – Ascetia, plane of time.
from here

 

[RangerWickett]

Level Up does not specifically use the planets of ZEITGEIST. They're one example of how planes can manifest, but aren't inherent to the rules.

There aren't specific upper planes or lower planes mentioned, mostly for space reasons, but also so we don't contradict adventures that you might run that have assumed planes. While we appreciate that Wizards of the Coast is supporting Level Up by publishing A5E-compatible adventures, we don't think they ought to have to run their setting ideas past us. If you want to use Descent into Avernus, you can find a place for it in our cosmology. (Probably in the Lower Planes.)

The purple stuff is a representation of an elemental chaos. Certain areas within that chaos can be firmly codified as representing one primary element, and doing so in a physical form that mortals could explore, but there are expanses where physical matter gives way to pure energy of that type, and at some point those energies mingle and roil with other elemental energies. Most of those places are incompatible with beings of flesh and blood.

As for the ethereal and astral, nearly every world has its own ethereal plane, which is a sort of meta place, where it is possible to exist and observe but not interact with physical reality. Then there's the astral plane, where existence itself is harder to quantify, and ideas matter more than, well, matter. If you go use the right magic to go to the astral plane, it's possible to send your mind to other worlds simply by imagining yourself there.

Again, that's more detail than we really go into in the Adventurer's Guide appendix. I think my word count limit was about 3000.