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

[TwoSix]

Ironically, I also generally consider myself Lawful, or at least far more favorable to Law than Chaos. But--and perhaps this is the little candleflame of Red in my otherwise Blue/White soul--I find the Great Wheel goes too far.

To each their own, of course. If there are folks who just love the Great Wheel unabashedly, awesome. To love something sincerely is good for the soul.

As a Blue/Green myself, I like the harmony of the Great Wheel, but my own personal interpretation encompasses and transcends it.

 

[Alzrius]

To be fair, what I actually said that they (Elemental Wood and Metal) were first implied in OA, and Wood was fleshed out in the 3e MotP- which, sure, said "This isn't part of the Great Wheel", but that doesn't change the fact that earlier material implied its existence to be canon.

It's not the only time we've seen that, either. Notice that the 3E Manual of the Planes says that the Plane of Mirrors is one of those "does not have a place in the Great Wheel" planes. And yet it's explicitly stated to exist (with not only monsters from there appearing, but the PCs actually briefly visiting the place) in Expedition to the Demonweb Pits (page 120).

 

[MGibster]

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.

In The Wolves of Calla, the fifth book in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, our ka-tet lead by Roland Deschain fights against robots who resemble Dr. Doom and are armed with lightsabers. At the end of the book, Father Callahan is shocked to find a book that tells the story of his battle with vampires in Maine. Salem's Lot.

My first 5E campaign took advantage of the multiverse. The campaign revolved around a demon who realized he was a character in a game and sought to break out into the "real" world. The setting started out more like old school AD&D, we even played through some early modules, but then then entire world went to sleep for a century and when they woke up things were different. In game, the players started out in someone's 1st edition AD&D campaign and when then woke up they were in a 5th edition campaign being run by the son of the guy who created the original campaign. It got very meta.

 

[Chaltab]

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

No, I'm saying the 3E cosmology is an outlier and it is weird to take its interpretation of the Great Wheel as immutable canon when the AD&D & 5E Great Wheels work differently.

 

[dave2008]

I enjoy mixing genres, and it absolutely can work in a D&D-style game. Heck, Level Up just came out with an amazing science fiction supplement!

Of course you don't even need a supplement to run different styles of games. I could run pretty much any style of 5e game I want with the core 2014 books a minimal to 0 house rules.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, as noted, the 3e MOTP explicitly says the Great Wheel has no place for these other planes. It's not just "well it doesn't say you can't," because it DOES say that.

It provides examples of alternate planes. That they state the examples don't work for their featured cosmology (and for the record I don't really believe them) doesn't change that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No, I'm saying the 3E cosmology is an outlier and it is weird to take its interpretation of the Great Wheel as immutable canon when the AD&D & 5E Great Wheels work differently.

Ok, but that doesn't change my main point. Again, show me a D&D book that has more examples of alternate planes/cosmologies. That you don't like the book is no more meaningful to that point than my preference for the AD&D Great Wheel.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In The Wolves of Calla, the fifth book in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, our ka-tet lead by Roland Deschain fights against robots who resemble Dr. Doom and are armed with lightsabers. At the end of the book, Father Callahan is shocked to find a book that tells the story of his battle with vampires in Maine. Salem's Lot.

My first 5E campaign took advantage of the multiverse. The campaign revolved around a demon who realized he was a character in a game and sought to break out into the "real" world. The setting started out more like old school AD&D, we even played through some early modules, but then then entire world went to sleep for a century and when they woke up things were different. In game, the players started out in someone's 1st edition AD&D campaign and when then woke up they were in a 5th edition campaign being run by the son of the guy who created the original campaign. It got very meta.

I love the Dark Tower series so much!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Of course you don't even need a supplement to run different styles of games. I could run pretty much any style of 5e game I want with the core 2014 books a minimal to 0 house rules.

Sure, but I always prefer more specific modeling over re-skinning existing game elements.

 

[Mannahnin]

To me, the beginning of the end of the Gygaxian Multiverse was, weirdly enough, the Manual of the Planes, which was devised and released after Gygax was ousted. A lot of people really liked it, but the problem with that book is that it was 128 pages of detail about the various planes .... and do you know what it devoted to the infinite multiverse of Prime Material Planes?

.... three pages. In an APPENDIX. And it reduced the glorious diversity to three attributes that the DM would roll-
The Physical Factor (things like sentience is impossible, because all matter reacts with other matter and explodes, or nonsentient items like chairs are fully aware).
The Magical Factor- (from universal spell casting for all sentient beings limited only to their imagination, to no magic or imagination or creativity can exist).
The Temporal Factor- (weirdly, not all about time! It's really how closely linked the plane is to your prime plane; so it can go from very different because things are all different colors and planets lack atmospheres to the plane is similar to your prime, but millions of years in the past).

Importantly, it was boring, not helpful, and travelling to other prime planes had a decent chance of killing you from a random role of the dice.

So the book was basically, "Look how cool the outer planes are, but the primes? They suck." And that carried on after that.

I would argue that Gygax mainly thought of the outer planes as sources for stuff to come into the primes- devils, demons, solars, and so on. For him (and others at the time) the outer planes weren't interesting, because you had the infinite variety of the prime material multiverse. Both at his home table and in published adventures, he was constantly using the wild variety of the multiverse.

Yup, to all of this. The MotP was amazing in concept, but in practice largely a book where fun went to die*. Focused on making all these places one could theoretically have adventures about as boring and inhospitable as possible, rather than on making them exciting places to have adventures and making them as gameable as possible.

It does have some sweet art, though.

*(a characteristic it shared with the Dungeoneers' and especially Wilderness Survival Guides)