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

[Micah Sweet]

You keep acting like my objection is the age of 3E canon and not Ezekiel's use of it to argue the GW can't be more than what the 3E MOTP says it is.

You're the one who said, "Why should we care about lore from three editions ago".

 

[Staffan]

3e MotP recognizes Oerth as an individual world but also gives it as the name of the 3e default Prime Material Plane. The latter is new to 3e as far as I can tell.

Keep in mind that in 3e, the assumption was that each setting would have its own cosmology. Greyhawk, which was considered the "core" setting? Great Wheel. Forgotten Realms? World Tree. Eberron? Orrery. I never bought Ghostwalk so I don't know if it had any cosmology of its own.

 

[Mannahnin]

I still remember the DSG. It looked amazing. I was so excited! And then I started reading ... ugh.... it was nearly impossible to pull the small bits of good out of the giant morass of "OMG THIS THIS IS SO BORING KILL ME NOW."

And somehow, I didn't learn my lesson. Because I got the WSG. And that? That made the DSG look like a rip-roarin' page turner by comparison!

Yeah, I don't judge people who love those three books, but AFAIC they don't exist.

Dan (from seminal OSR blog Delta's D&D Hotspot), a 1E lover and detail-oriented stickler from way back (he's a math professor nowadays) says trying to implement the WSG in his college campaign literally killed it. The weather and other systems were just so onerous and unmanageable.

I take exception to this. I loved all those books, especially MotP. It had a logical, verisimilitudinous take on the planes as they were described in earlier material, and didn't push the supremacy of narrative tropes and a PC-centric view of the universe it was describing. That's why it's my favorite 1e book. Calling it "where fun goes to die", as you and @EzekielRaiden have, is harsh bordering on insulting, and not at all funny.

Humor, like fun, is subjective.

It's entirely possible to design planes in such a way that they are both verisimilitudinous and actually make adventuring opportunities obvious and exciting.

I'm happy the book brought you a lot more joy than it did me. If you'd like to regale us with tales of awesome outer planar adventures you had using it, and how the rules actually facilitated fun rather than obstructing it, I'm all ears!

 

[Alzrius]

It's entirely possible to design planes in such a way that they are both verisimilitudinous and actually make adventuring opportunities obvious and exciting.

Sure, but there are some people for whom what makes adventuring on the planes exciting is that the adventuring opportunities aren't obvious. To make a generalization, that was how BECMI tended to treat the planes, with a lot of planar adventuring being something reserved for characters either nearing immortality or who'd made the jump to being Immortals proper.

It's been forever and a day since I've flipped through IM1 The Immortal Storm, but I recall that one of the planar locations (besides planet Earth, which is the part everyone remembers) had the entire structure of the plane being wildly different from standard expectations of how space was oriented. Things like that made the planes feel different, which is something I appreciate.

 

[Mannahnin]

Sure, but there are some people for whom what makes adventuring on the planes exciting is that the adventuring opportunities aren't obvious. To make a generalization, that was how BECMI tended to treat the planes, with a lot of planar adventuring being something reserved for characters either nearing immortality or who'd made the jump to being Immortals proper.

It's been forever and a day since I've flipped through IM1 The Immortal Storm, but I recall that one of the planar locations (besides planet Earth, which is the part everyone remembers) had the entire structure of the plane being wildly different from standard expectations of how space was oriented. Things like that made the planes feel different, which is something I appreciate.

Feeling different is awesome!

Not making opportunities for adventure obvious is a disservice to the DM. It's just less useful as a book.

The MotP made visiting the planes a bookkeeping headache and extremely unappealing to players, IME.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

I think the return to the Great Wheel as the truth of the multiverse in 5E comes down to two things: nostalgia and broad applicability between settings.

What I mean by "broad applicability" is that if WotC decided to start putting out planar material that it would be usable with most settings. This explicitly happened to the Feywild during 4E's run. At the beginning of 4E each setting had its own separate multiverse, and in the case of the Feywild this meant there could be deviations such as Dark Sun's Land Within the Wind, a Feywild ruined as a side effect of the defiling magic of Athas.

However, the late-4E supplement Heroes of the Feywild retcons this. It says that there is one Feywild for all material plane worlds, and more importantly says why:

You can view this consistency as a mysterious property of the Feywild—its features mirror every world at once—or as a convenience to make this material as useful as possible to the game.

 

[Chaltab]

You're the one who said, "Why should we care about lore from three editions ago".

While also ignoring lore from AD&D and 5E that does not make the GW multiverse so smol and inflexible. I suppose I should have added exclusively to that sentence. My point wasn't old lore is bad, new lore good, it's that no edition gets to be the final word until there is no more D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Feeling different is awesome!

Not making opportunities for adventure obvious is a disservice to the DM. It's just less useful as a book.

The MotP made visiting the planes a bookkeeping headache and extremely unappealing to players, IME.

As I have stated many times, a setting that can plausibly exist outside of anyone's particular use for it in a logically consistent way is my first worldbuilding goal. The 1e MotP did that.

 

[Chaltab]

However, the late-4E supplement Heroes of the Feywild retcons this. It says that there is one Feywild for all material plane worlds, and more importantly says why:

My take on that has been that the Feywild is really flippin' big and all connected. You could get from one setting to another through it but you're looking at a challenge akin to beating the Tarrasque with a toothpick'

 

[Hexmage-EN]

The Planescape 5E adventure Turn of Fortune's Wheel has a baernoloth called the Scholar who shares a one of four secrets with the party, the most relevant for this discussion being:

The Spire is made of countless stacked versions of Sigil from past incarnations of the multiverse.

The book also says whether each secret is actually true or not is up to the DM, but one of the secrets is essentially a teaser for Vecna: Eve of Ruin. Maybe each retcon to the multiverse actually created a new one?