D&D 5E 4E Cosmology

[AbdulAlhazred]

What I love about 4e lore and the World Axis is so tight and works together like real world mythology. That drew me into the PoL setting more than any previous setting. It is great from that aspect.

However, I spend an inordinate amount of time working on deities and similar exalted beings (love me some primordials). At some point I realized the tight PoL setting didn't make sense for my understanding of the divine (and similiar entities). My default assumption when it comes to deities, and by proxy the cosmos, is that mortals do not, and possibly cannot, understand them. Therefore, and myth, tale, or cosmology mortals develops is invariable wrong to some degree or another. So a tidy cosmology / lore didn't make sense to me from that perspective.

So, back when I played 4e, I started thinking of ways to modify the default 4e setting to make it less comprehensible. First and foremost was that any idea of the cosmology would be incorrect. Any description of the cosmos is limited by our ability to observe, describe, and understand its true nature. That was freeing. Now, it so happens the easy, and nostalgic, thing to do to add some crazy was to mash it with the great wheel, so I started working on that. What I came up with ended up being very similar to what became the 5e cosmos (mine had some differences), so I was surprised to see my work in the 2014 DMG!

I find this very obtuseness to be antithetical to game play. I would never expect a player to really engage with something incomprehensible. That doesn't mean it all has to have a neat bow around it, just that players are able to see what they are getting into. Maybe you support Gruumsh in a quest to defeat Demogorgon's ultimate plan to trash the universe. There's no good guys here, but you know Gruumsh at least doesn't want to destroy the world. To me this is a huge virtue of WA.

 

[dave2008]

I find this very obtuseness to be antithetical to game play. I would never expect a player to really engage with something incomprehensible.

I mean people have faith IRL, so I don't see why that is an issue.

That doesn't mean it all has to have a neat bow around it, just that players are able to see what they are getting into. Maybe you support Gruumsh in a quest to defeat Demogorgon's ultimate plan to trash the universe. There's no good guys here, but you know Gruumsh at least doesn't want to destroy the world. To me this is a huge virtue of WA.

I don't see how what you describe is any different in the WA or the GW or the WT. Can you clarify?

I mean my players enlisted the help of Torog to help them defeat Tiamat's plan to manifest her full power in the Prime. I just don't see how the cosmology (which my players didn't even ask about) comes into it.

In game, I have never had players care about cosmology at all. It has only ever been a DM discussion in my experience.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I just want to put on the record that I have not overlooked this! I've posted about it, on-and-off, for the last 15+ years. It's one of the strongest aspects of 4e as a FRPG, and as a version of D&D.


I generally agree with your first quote (though a planer arrangement can also be cool/compelling in its own right), but not quite with your second. The traditional ("Great Wheel") outer plans exist because they reflect certain game idea - especially alignment and elementals - and connect those to some literary/mythological traditions. I agree with Lev Lafeyette's description of its original presentation (in Appendix IV of Gygax's PHB) as a "rather evocative assignment of Earthly polytheistic pantheons within the AD&D alignment system".

I think it was the effort of making the outer planes not just a set of evocative ideas but actually and systematically amenable to game play - via the MotP and the Planescape - that created the unplayable stuff that 4e then reacted against.


In the early presentations (PHB Appendix IV and DDG) there is no suggestion that the wheel is mere metaphor or design. And then in the MotP, and I believe also Planescape, the wheel is explained in terms of portals - eg Acheron has portals to Nirvana/Mechanus and to the Nine Hells; the Nine Hells has portals to Acheron and to Gehenna; etc. And it is these portals that establish the literalness of the "wheel" arrangement.

Even if one doesn't include those portals, there is still the classification of planes by alignment, which then supports an arrangement of them analogous to the alignment graph (compare pp 119 and 121 of Gygax's PHB). That is not a merely arbitrary arrangement, and it reveals the wheel-like structure of the planes.

What 4e does is break the relationship between the outer planes and alignment: it permits multiple planes for similarly aligned beings (eg Tiamat and Zehir don't get stuck in the Nine Hells) and permits differently-aligned beings to live in the same place without that creating alignment oddities (eg Erathis, Ioun and Pelor all living together on Hestavar).




I agree with @TwoSix that the souls stuff is pretty peripheral. But the relationship of outer planes to alignments, in the Great Wheel, is not peripheral. If you drop that, you no longer have the Great Wheel. And while you do have it, you get the symmetry of the alignment graph projected onto the cosmology. And you also get the problem of what to do when an aligned plane becomes inhabited by, or conquered by, beings of a different alignment. The Planescape approach to that, which @EzekielRaiden has criticised, is probably only one possibility. But I don't think it's a case of "anything goes" - I mean, it would be weird for the Seven Heavens/Celestia to remain a plane of absolute LG if it had been conquered by and was now overwhelmingly inhabited by devils and demons.


To me, both these suggestions seems a bit narrow. Who knows how vision works in the Outer Planes - or for that matter even on the material plane! Even if photography worked on the material plane, there's no reason to think it would work in other, more magical, places.

And as far as the relationship between belief and reality, it seems possible (perhaps challenging, but possible) to imagine a fantasy setting, or some aspect of a fantasy setting, where what a person encounters or perceives reflects, in part if not in whole, their fears, hopes and expectations. This could be done comedically, a la the Alice books, but perhaps seriously as well.

EDIT: Link to Lev Lafeyette quote: Review of AD&D First Edition Players Handbook - RPGnet d20 RPG Game Index

Good! I just wanted to point out that there's actually quite a bit of history to the GW predating the 1e PHB. It had been explicated at least once in a TD or SR article. There also exists, or did exist at one time, some information online about the genesis of the GW, its antecedents, and early form. This is also, of course, related to the discussions, articles, and development of the two-axis alignment system.

I'm going from memory here, but the 'ur cosmology' was basically the 7 heavens and the 9 hells. These were apparently (this being Gygax's own game) depicted as abstract non-physical spiritual realms which can only be visited by Astral Projection. They primarily existed to provide some explication of the Contact Other Plane spell, which is an early type of divination. Basically the higher/lower you went, the more authoritative the answers you could get, but the more likely the terrifying alienness of the interlocutor would be to drive you mad.

While AD&D made the planes more 'real' in some sense, the original design is still kind of hanging around at the edges. COP still exists, along with astral projection, but they are made largely irrelevant. By the time of MotP you can teleport, gate, or find a portal to, pretty much anywhere.

 

[pemerton]

the 'ur cosmology' was basically the 7 heavens and the 9 hells. These were apparently (this being Gygax's own game) depicted as abstract non-physical spiritual realms which can only be visited by Astral Projection. They primarily existed to provide some explication of the Contact Other Plane spell, which is an early type of divination. Basically the higher/lower you went, the more authoritative the answers you could get, but the more likely the terrifying alienness of the interlocutor would be to drive you mad.

While AD&D made the planes more 'real' in some sense, the original design is still kind of hanging around at the edges. COP still exists, along with astral projection, but they are made largely irrelevant. By the time of MotP you can teleport, gate, or find a portal to, pretty much anywhere.

That's interesting that (i) they were spiritual - Astral Projection makes more sense in that context - and (ii) they were explanations/justifications for Contact Other Planes. I always was curious, as a young RPGer, what the "planar distances" in that spell were on about!

 

[pemerton]

I mean people have faith IRL, so I don't see why that is an issue.

Because playing a game is not, generally, the same sort of experience/activity as participating in religion.

 

[dave2008]

Because playing a game is not, generally, the same sort of experience/activity as participating in religion.

Ok, but playing an RPG is playing a fictional person. If RL people can do it, why can't fictional people do it? A game is just deciding what fictional people do. Typically they can do anything people can do IRL + more.

Its not like anything about the cosmos is important to the mechanics of the game. I have played D&D 30+ years and never came to point were cosmology mattered. It is there only if you want it. It is a DM/Player choice, not a game requirement

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You can prove the mathematics is true, but you cannot prove reality runs by mathematics, and even if it does, you cannot prove you are using the right mathematics. Maths is a human invented tool, like a hammer. And is equally as good as hammer for answering the question "what is Truth?" There is experiential evidence that certain conservation laws are not always true, and in science, experiment always trumps theory.

Not ones which have the form described by Noether's Theorem! It's even worse than @EzekielRaiden is stating because much of modern physics was arrived at by applying this theorem and deriving conservation laws from symmetries (or vice versa) and then demonstrating that they hold. If NT is not applicable then you must assume we arrived at much of this physics by pure luck. That really is not a tennable position to take.

 

[dave2008]

Not ones which have the form described by Noether's Theorem! It's even worse than @EzekielRaiden is stating because much of modern physics was arrived at by applying this theorem and deriving conservation laws from symmetries (or vice versa) and then demonstrating that they hold. If NT is not applicable then you must assume we arrived at much of this physics by pure luck. That really is not a tennable position to take.

This is outside my league, but just to be clear you are discussing this issue with an astrophysicist

 

[pemerton]

Ok, but playing an RPG is playing a fictional person. If RL people can do it, why can't fictional people do it? A game is just deciding what fictional people do. Typically they can do anything people can do IRL + more.

Playing a game is a thing that an actual person is doing, in their leisure time. I agree with @AbdulAlhazred that the GM keeping the fiction obscure does make it harder to play the game.

Its not like anything about the cosmos is important to the mechanics of the game. I have played D&D 30+ years and never came to point were cosmology mattered.

I've played FRPGs - both D&D and Rolemaster - in which cosmology has mattered quite a bit.

 

[Incenjucar]

Great Wheel is my chocolate, World Axis is my Peanut Butter. I prefer chocolate but they're both lovely and blend well in any ratio.