D&D General The D&D Multiverse: Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die

[Voadam]

In the early days, people not only incorporated Star Wars stuff into their game, they used D&S to play Star Wars.

I had a friend in my D&D group in the 90s who said he used Cylons in his D&D campaign because everybody was using Stormtroopers and Sith in theirs.

Same group I remember a story about a fight from before I joined the campaign between a high level fencer, someone playing Hagar the Horrible, and Vader, with Vader ignoring most of the critical hits against him from the fencer who kept piercing his cybernetics.

In the campaign we eventually came across Sith who combined psionics and tech. One of our group's PCs reincarnated into a Sith psionicist.

Same campaign my viking merchant prince character was in diplomacy talks with Elric while visiting drowesti elven Melnibone, it was a lot of fun even though Stormbringer killed his wife right in front of me and almost slaughtered everyone including me and all the present PCs.

Other variant famous things in that campaign that I interacted with included Mordenkainen but a female elf, Moorcock and Warhammer Chaos, Vlad Tepes as ancient vampire ruler of Dacia I did diplomacy with, Middle Earth's seven walled city (which I did not recognize as such when encountering it in game), Lankhmar gods, Moorcockian gods and demon lords including a lot of Meerclar great cat cult followers as a major religion, a former PC illusionist named Lord Blackstone, and the Isle of Roke with archmage wizards running an extraplanar D&D wizard school.

 

[Chaltab]

I'd say another thing that contributed to the ossification and de-weirdening of D&D over the years is the business side.

1. As D&D got more popular they needed to be more careful about including explicit references to things they don't own, and, 2. marketing loves easy genre classifiers and 'everything' is not a genre.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'd say another thing that contributed to the ossification and de-weirdening of D&D over the years is the business side.

1. As D&D got more popular they needed to be more careful about including explicit references to things they don't own, and, 2. marketing loves easy genre classifiers and 'everything' is not a genre.

One could argue this is another reason to adopt a handful of powerful catch-alls, rather than a singular bucket for everything (as the "infinite multiverse" easily becomes) or a restrictive classification (as the Great Wheel very quickly became).

With enough distinct chunks, people can get a feel for what things are and where they go, "genre" as you put it, without the classification becoming rigid and exclusionary. Most folks get the idea of Fairyland or the Shadow Realm, even if there's dozens of totally distinct ways to cash out each one. Which, I think, is a pretty big reason why that part of the World Axis was adopted almost totally wholesale into the neo-Great Wheel. The Feywild and Shadowfell are just too useful to ignore; they capture what you've called genre without being particularly exclusionary.

Now, if only we can persuade folks to do the same to the inner and outer planes!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It is not presented as such in 4e, however, and wasn't in the post to which I responded to either. So again we are talking about preference there. You at least are making an actual counterpoint.

It always seemed to me that it was presented as being open. The World Axis is just...well, it's nowhere near as extensive, precise, or specific as the Great Wheel. That is, it could be objectively true that the World Axis exists, and that something pretty close to the actual Great Wheel also exists. Or maybe it doesn't! That the books asserted the World Axis doesn't mean they contradict the Great Wheel, especially since Sigil officially exists in the World Axis and is considered the zero point of the axis, the cosmological center of the universe, just as it is in the Great Wheel.

Just because it's not explicitly said to allow many different interpretations does not mean that it can't allow many different interpretations. The Great Wheel emphatically DOES NOT allow multiple interpretations. It isn't just presented as the one and only correct cosmology, it objectively IS what reality is and how it works.

Simply put: Whether or not the World Axis is true, something very very like the Great Wheel we're familiar with could be true. If the official, specific Great Wheel as presented in 3.x were true, the World Axis explicitly could not exist, period, end of discussion.

The World Axis loosely catalogues a handful of things. The Great Wheel explicitly and definitively catalogues everything. You can't recover anything like the World Axis if you start from what is asserted by the full Great Wheel, not even partially. You can recover something 99% identical to the Great Wheel if you start only from what the World Axis asserts.

 

[the Jester]

The Great Wheel is more rigid. It specifies that these are the 17 Outer Planes, 4 elemental planes, 4 para-elemental plantes, 8 quasi-elemental planes, 2 energy planes, 2 transitive planes, and none others. You can have some wiggle room on the borders between them as well as with demi-planes in the Ethereal, and you can fit a lot of stuff in these infinite planes, but these are the ones you have.

I disagree. The notion that you can't have other planes in the Great Wheel is- well, it doesn't hold true in my experience. Just because there are so many planes of a certain type that we know of doesn't mean there aren't others, or haven't been others.

The para-elemental planes are set up differently in the 1e Deities and Demigods, for example; we have Vapor, Heat, Ice, and Dust as the planes between the elemental planes. Oriental Adventures implies additional elemental planes of Metal and Wood (one of which was later developed in the 3e MotP as an optional plane). In 2e, which was still married to the Great Wheel, we saw the addition of the Far Realm in the Illithiad. There is no reason you can't add more; in fact, if you look at the logic of the Outer Planes that don't correspond to a pure alignment, such as Pandemonium being a plane of CE/CN, there is an implication that there are missing planes between Concordant Opposition/the Outlands and each of the four planes of Limbo, Nirvana/Mechanus, Elysium, and Hades.

Heck, the text of the shocker suggests an unknown plane of Electromagnetism. Yes, this is later retconned into being either a demiplane or the quasiplane of Lightning, but there's no reason it has to be so.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I disagree. The notion that you can't have other planes in the Great Wheel is- well, it doesn't hold true in my experience. Just because there are so many planes of a certain type that we know of doesn't mean there aren't others, or haven't been others.

It absolutely does in mine. Devils always and only come from the Nine Hells, and no other plane looks or works like the Nine Hells. Modrons always and only come from Mechanus, and no other plane can ever be clockwork-y because if it were it would just be part of Mechanus in the first place. Anything with a fire-elemental origin somehow traces back to the elemental plane of fire, or to one of the hemisemidemiplanes sprouting from it.

The Great Wheel is where interesting cosmology goes to die. New planes don't exist; planar cosmologists know the exact list and general content of every single inner, outer, and interstitial plane, without exception. No new elemental planes will ever be discovered. No new aligned planes will ever be discovered. Anything that isn't one of those--by process of elimination--must be "merely" another Prime Material plane.

The para-elemental planes are set up differently in the 1e Deities and Demigods, for example; we have Vapor, Heat, Ice, and Dust as the planes between the elemental planes. Oriental Adventures implies additional elemental planes of Metal and Wood (one of which was later developed in the 3e MotP as an optional plane). In 2e, which was still married to the Great Wheel, we saw the addition of the Far Realm in the Illithiad. There is no reason you can't add more; in fact, if you look at the logic of the Outer Planes that don't correspond to a pure alignment, such as Pandemonium being a plane of CE/CN, there is an implication that there are missing planes between Concordant Opposition/the Outlands and each of the four planes of Limbo, Nirvana/Mechanus, Elysium, and Hades.

I really don't think there is such an implication. Particularly because I've never seen any official source even theorize an attempt to do so, nor seen any interest from the fanbase at large for such a thing. The Great Wheel is functionally fixed. Perhaps, in some alternate universe where the focus remained on the Prime as Snarf wishes it had, your position might have come true. But in practice it did not.

A purely-theoretical "well maybe other planes COULD exist!" is frankly completely trumped by the actual, historical usage of these things. Further, you cite the 3e MOTP as saying that the Great Wheel could accept new planes, but you clearly didn't read the introductory text for the chapter on "Variant Planes & Cosmologies" (emphasis added): "None of the following planes have a place on the Great Wheel, but you can use them in a cosmology you build yourself." That's pretty explicitly saying that the Great Wheel is fixed. You can choose to come up with your own, custom cosmology...but whatever thing you come up with won't be the Great Wheel anymore.

Heck, the text of the shocker suggests an unknown plane of Electromagnetism. Yes, this is later retconned into being either a demiplane or the quasiplane of Lightning, but there's no reason it has to be so.

I mean, the fact that you have to admit that it got retconned like that shows the very reason it has to be so: there will always be a pressure to make any deviation conform to the structure. It is too mechanistic.

 

[guachi]

I love Mystara/The Known World. When it started getting fleshed out in 1987 (along with the Forgotten Realms) The Known World kept the weirdness. Just before the first Gazetteer was produced TSR had issued the DA series of modules and grafted on Blackmoor to it.

Mystara was like a last gasp of the strangeness you're talking about that finally gave up the ghost in 1992 with the publication of Wrath of the Immortals. The entire world was upended because of a runaway nuclear reactor from a spaceship introduced with the Blackmoor addition and the meddling of Glantrian Wizards introduced in X2, which was inspired by Clark Ashton Smith and Roger Zelazny.

 

[Chaltab]

A purely-theoretical "well maybe other planes COULD exist!" is frankly completely trumped by the actual, historical usage of these things. Further, you cite the 3e MOTP as saying that the Great Wheel could accept new planes, but you clearly didn't read the introductory text for the chapter on "Variant Planes & Cosmologies" (emphasis added): "None of the following planes have a place on the Great Wheel, but you can use them in a cosmology you build yourself." That's pretty explicitly saying that the Great Wheel is fixed. You can choose to come up with your own, custom cosmology...but whatever thing you come up with won't be the Great Wheel anymore.

I mean who cares what the MOTP from three editions ago says?

IIRC the 3E Manual also said, "The Prime Material Plane of the D&D cosmology is called Oerth."

obviously that's not how it worked before or after 3E. Oerth isn't even the only planet lit by the same sun, much less the name of whole Material Plane.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I mean who cares what the MOTP from three editions ago says?

I certainly don't. But if one is going to say, "There can be other planes in the Great Wheel, they showed this in this book!" And then that book actually says "these other planes have no place in the Great Wheel", well, that would seem to deeply undercut the book as evidence for the thing being claimed. Which means the claim is now lacking in evidence, being closer to a bald assertion, which can be dismissed as easily as it can be said.

Nobody needs WotC's approval to create cosmologies. But if one claims a book is evidence for X, when the book explicitly says it's against X, that's a flaw in an argument.

IIRC the 3E Manual also said, "The Prime Material Plane of the D&D cosmology is called Oerth."

I would have to actually look at the text. I'm not comfortable quoting without having checked first.

 

[KYRON45]

EzekielRaiden has volunteered to do Cliffnotes for my essays?

EXCELLENT! Now I can really make them long!

Well...the internet is known for its helpful and positive commentary.
Kudos to @EzekielRaiden for accommodating my tiny tiny....ooh...a bumblebee!!!!

While I do consider myself a (Snarfy? Zagygite?) fan of your work and am waiting for your plushy Kickstarter to launch....to my brain your work is Cthuluhu madness inducing.