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

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

Oh boy, just wait until I start posting actual essay-threads. You'll be singing Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn in no time!

 

[fuindordm]

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 Great Wheel is too well organized to represent a multiverse where Law and Chaos are in equilibrium.

 

[fuindordm]

I'd recommend The Elusive Shift to start with- you will get a much better idea about how weird early D&D was. For example, many of the early RPGs were actually DM's notes from campaigns. The first super hero RPG was a D&D campaign that traveled to a super hero plane, and the product was just the rules that were used.

Thanks for this nugget Snarf. Was that RPG Villains & Vigilantés?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The Great Wheel is too well organized to represent a multiverse where Law and Chaos are in equilibrium.

Oh, absolutely agreed. The Great Wheel is lawful down to its bones.

 

[Distracted DM]

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.

Welp. That's pretty convincing to me. I used the great wheel because I was a Planescape fan, but when it came to making my own settings I now realize that I was trying to force the great wheel into them when it shouldnt be that way. I think for whatever reason I always assumed that you needed the great wheel, even as I bent over backwards to include it and yet when I wanted cool stuff I ignored it for bits and pieces. But really, I'd rather just abandon it entirely.

Thanks!

edit: I guess one function it serves is a common ground- for example, when your bag of holding ruptures all it contains gets dumped into the astral plane. If you didn't have the great wheel as a default, I guess the rule would be that its contents would be "scattered to a random plane" or something

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Welp. That's pretty convincing to me. I used the great wheel because I was a Planescape fan, but when it came to making my own settings I now realize that I was trying to force the great wheel into them when it shouldnt be that way. I think for whatever reason I always assumed that you needed the great wheel, even as I bent over backwards to include it and yet when I wanted cool stuff I ignored it for bits and pieces. But really, I'd rather just abandon it entirely.

Thanks!

edit: I guess one function it serves is a common ground- for example, when your bag of holding ruptures all it contains gets dumped into the astral plane. If you didn't have the great wheel as a default, I guess the rule would be that its contents would be "scattered to a random plane" or something

4e also has this rule. Its Astral Sea is sort of a hybrid of the Outer Planes (several of which exist as domains within the Astral Sea), the Astral Plane, and the Ethereal Plane.

And if this leads to you doing your own stuff with gusto, awesome. I wish you luck and many deeds of derring-do!

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

I can see your point about the World Axis, even if I prefer the Great Wheel (I love Planescspe too much to be happy with any other cosmology for actual D&D). I don't think anyone needs to "persuade" anyone else to go with their vision though.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.


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

Show me a D&D book that has better evidence of alternate cosmologies. Allowing it without saying it is not evidence, even if you prefer that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

The Demiplane of Electromagnetism was presented in the 1e MotP as existing, but dying, and the home plane of the shocker.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Why should the edition matter in terms of lore? Is this a, "newer is better" thing?