D&D General DnD cosmology - Which Edition do you prefer?

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

The Wall of the Faithless actually makes this worse, because it actively turns morality into a protection racket. The gods cease to be paragons of values (whether good or evil or anything else), and instead become mafia dons coercing worship out of mortals, with the threat of excruciating pain and gradual soul destruction. Under these lights, it becomes even more totally instrumental thinking: pick the god you will find it easiest to avoid "betraying" (since the False are punished too, just usually in a less horrific way than the Faithless) with an afterlife you can accept, follow them with the minimum effort to fulfill your end of the protection racket, then go to the afterlife you selected.

The fact that the Wall of the Faithless existed and wasn't a part of a grimdark setting as a sort of "look at how awful our setting is, our gods all collectively agree to torment all atheists for eternity for having the gall to not worship them" theme will never cease to amaze me. Like, seriously. Even though it wouldn't be a great fit for the lore of Ravenloft or Dark Sun, it really fits the theme of those settings better than it does the FR.

Any setting that has a wall of eternal torment for atheists (or the equivalent in the setting) and doesn't flavor it as "oh, look at how cruel and narcissistic 100% of the gods are in this setting" is doing something very, very wrong.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Very simply, the World Axis was great (and gave us the Feywild and Shadowfell), but it was still more one-dimensional than the Wheel, which is at least two dimensional, and actually more than that since it also applied to the inner planes who were mostly fused in the World Axis.

I agree that it's easier to explain and less controversial (although it suffered from the inconsistent alignments from 4e, where they tried to keep the words and part of the structure but ended up with an inconsistent mess - one of the only real inconsistence of an otherwise extremely well-built version), but for me it lacks the epic power of good vs. evil and especially law vs. chaos conflict (I was raised on Moorcock then thrived on Planescape, sue me ).

...what?

You do realize that the Bael-Turath/Arkhosia war was specifically because the God of Law, Erathis, was playing both sides because she didn't care which lawful empire took over, she just wanted one of them to do so, and got burned by the fact that they destroyed each other instead...right?

Or how the War of Winter was straight-up a pantheon of chaos (led by Khala), which went up against a loose not-quite-pantheon led by Lawful deities (e.g. Bahamut, Asmodeus, Erathis, and Moradin), and which caused enough damage to the mortal world that the Primal Spirits said enough and kicked them all out....right?

There's TONS of potential and actual L-v-C conflict in 4e. Heck, there's even stuff with deities that otherwise get along just fine, like Kord and Bahamut, potentially having a falling-out that needs outside assistance to fix up (Kord basically hijacks the prototype asteroid ark-ship Bahamut's been building, intending to use it to make the first salvo of the Dusk War before someone else does; Bahamut needs heroes to go put a stop to this and get Kord to wise up that triggering the Dusk War would be a VERY GOOD IDEA, as the TNOmod folks so cheekily put it.) Or the ongoing hatred between Melora, goddess of chaos, nature, and the sea, and Erathis, goddess of law, invention, and civilization.

Not to mention the whole "Asmodeus is secretly building a gigantic soul battery in an attempt to become stronger than all of the other gods combined" plotline for juicy, juicy good-vs-evil stuff. Or anything involving the Abyss, or the Far Realm...

 

[Lyxen]

...what?

You do realize...? []Examples of deities having beef with each other]

These are just deities squabbling together, little to do with massive Law vs. Chaos whether it's Moorcock or Blood War style. I'm sorry, but when you remove the only Lawful alignment is Lawful Good and and the only Chaotic alignement is Chaotic Evil, you remove the Law vs. Chaos conflict, it more or less all falls down to Good vs. Evil.

 

[Aldarc]

...what?

You do realize that the Bael-Turath/Arkhosia war was specifically because the God of Law, Erathis, was playing both sides because she didn't care which lawful empire took over, she just wanted one of them to do so, and got burned by the fact that they destroyed each other instead...right?

Or how the War of Winter was straight-up a pantheon of chaos (led by Khala), which went up against a loose not-quite-pantheon led by Lawful deities (e.g. Bahamut, Asmodeus, Erathis, and Moradin), and which caused enough damage to the mortal world that the Primal Spirits said enough and kicked them all out....right?

There's TONS of potential and actual L-v-C conflict in 4e. Heck, there's even stuff with deities that otherwise get along just fine, like Kord and Bahamut, potentially having a falling-out that needs outside assistance to fix up (Kord basically hijacks the prototype asteroid ark-ship Bahamut's been building, intending to use it to make the first salvo of the Dusk War before someone else does; Bahamut needs heroes to go put a stop to this and get Kord to wise up that triggering the Dusk War would be a VERY GOOD IDEA, as the TNOmod folks so cheekily put it.) Or the ongoing hatred between Melora, goddess of chaos, nature, and the sea, and Erathis, goddess of law, invention, and civilization.

Not to mention the whole "Asmodeus is secretly building a gigantic soul battery in an attempt to become stronger than all of the other gods combined" plotline for juicy, juicy good-vs-evil stuff. Or anything involving the Abyss, or the Far Realm...

It amazes me that anyone would argue that there is no Law vs. Chaos in the D&D cosmological setup that from most conscientously draws inspiration from the mythological Chaoskampf motif, very likely as a result of James Wyatt's seminary education.

 

[Scribe]

Thing is, I don't think that's what people would do. People would live their lives according to their own moral code and then end up on an outer plane that matches, assuming they don't end up in the realm of a god.

Exactly. Alignment isn't a straight jacket. It's not as if the inhabitants of a world would know 'oh this is the NG choice, I need the LN one.'

 

[Lyxen]

Exactly. Alignment isn't a straight jacket. It's not as if the inhabitants of a world would know 'oh this is the NG choice, I need the LN one.'

Exactly, they would might know whether some acts are good or evil, or lawful or chaotic, but they might have difficulty with justifications and its influence just as people in the real world have difficulty with it. Moreover, they would probably have trouble balancing things in the long term and knowing where they stand exactly.

 

[SkidAce]

(I also like 5E's compromise approach of having the "pure" elements eventually collapse into the Elemental Chaos... though I think they placed the Chaos at the wrong end of the layout, it should have been centered around the Ethereal/Material Plane as the raw material of creation.)

I do this.

 

[Voadam]

It's the excuse for the Avatar Trilogy that marked the transition between 1e and 2e (and yes it was an Ao decision).

It has been a couple decades and I no longer own the avatar trilogy novels, but from memory it was about some evil gods (Bane and company) trying to gain major power by taking the Tablets of Fate and Ao throwing a frustrated tantrum over it. From looking at the wiki the Tablets of Fate recorded the roles of the gods and primoridals in maintaining a balance of Law versus Chaos, not Good and Evil, and maintained a barrier between Abeir and Toril. This explanation seems a 4e realms explanation, I don't remember what the 1e/2e transition era novels actually said about the purpose of the Tablets and what balance it supports, just that they were powerful and Bane's crew wanted to divinely advance to greater power with them.

If The Powers That Be (whether Ao or Paladine) are ensuring that there is a "balance between good and evil" then they are ensuring that for all the good you do there must be an equivalent amount of evil done to maintain the balance. What this means is that by doing good all you are doing is prioritising the good of those specifically near you at the expense of those further away from you who suffer the counterbalancing evil. And there's a word for prioritising the good of those near you while knowing that because of it those you can't see are going to suffer - and it's not "good".

Dragonlance's Overgod and the balance of good and evil was never entirely clear to me.

I am not certain on whether the Overgod laid down the triple balance requirements and Paladine was working within those constraints. The introduction of the Overgod and top level cosmology stuff in the 1e Dragonlance Adventures and later materials was a bit weird for me coming off the novels.

The biggest examples of too much good being bad in the Dragonlance setting itself (the Irda and the Kingpriest) seemed more examples of ultimate power and hubris corrupting even those with good intentions.

The Kingpriest as he gained more power tried to do good by exerting more and more power leading to attempted mass thought control and domination to force good and eliminate evil and then to be intolerant of people who are not actively on his crusade and inquisition in the name of good, including eventually the gods.

The extremely powerful Irda try to bite off more than they can chew to exert control and mastery through power to do good which ends up with tragic consequences.

For the most part Dragonlance is in periods of evil ascendance so doing good is pushing to make the world a better place, not inviting evil onto other places to benefit your own. The War of the Lance is fighting for light against overwhelming darkness, not shifting darkness from the local and close at heart onto foreign unseen others.

The Banewarrens had an interesting epic good theocrat's theory of evil cosmology in its backstory. Since the evil planes are infinite destroying evil things simply caused them to reform and manifest elsewhere. This is essentially the setup you mention above but it is a setup of the universe and not a choice of a big guy in charge you can blame. The question for the epically powerful theocrat then is what to do to make the world better. One theory was to bind major evils and imprison them so that they cannot escape and reform but exist concentrated in confinement where they are isolated to minimize their impact.

 

[Vaalingrade]

These are just deities squabbling together, little to do with massive Law vs. Chaos whether it's Moorcock or Blood War style. I'm sorry, but when you remove the only Lawful alignment is Lawful Good and and the only Chaotic alignement is Chaotic Evil, you remove the Law vs. Chaos conflict, it more or less all falls down to Good vs. Evil.

Yeah, they really should have gotten rid of both and just had the factions acting on their own will.

 

[Voadam]

Very simply, the World Axis was great (and gave us the Feywild and Shadowfell), but it was still more one-dimensional than the Wheel, which is at least two dimensional, and actually more than that since it also applied to the inner planes who were mostly fused in the World Axis.

I agree that it's easier to explain and less controversial (although it suffered from the inconsistent alignments from 4e, where they tried to keep the words and part of the structure but ended up with an inconsistent mess - one of the only real inconsistence of an otherwise extremely well-built version), but for me it lacks the epic power of good vs. evil and especially law vs. chaos conflict (I was raised on Moorcock then thrived on Planescape, sue me ).

The 4e divine gods versus elemental primordials seemed one of the strongest cosmological clashes in D&D.

These are just deities squabbling together, little to do with massive Law vs. Chaos whether it's Moorcock or Blood War style. I'm sorry, but when you remove the only Lawful alignment is Lawful Good and and the only Chaotic alignement is Chaotic Evil, you remove the Law vs. Chaos conflict, it more or less all falls down to Good vs. Evil.

With the gods of Good and Evil all working together against the elemental primordials in the Dawn War I would not call 4e cosmological clashes as more or less falling down to Good vs. Evil.

It could be viewed as the biggest manifestation of a Law (astral) versus Chaos (elemental) conflict in a core D&D cosmology.