D&D 5E 4E Cosmology

cbwjm said:

Out of interest, I know some people have already mentioned it, but what cosmology (if any) are people using in their home games?

Mine is fairly simple and mirrors 4e in a lot of ways:

At the top is Godsheim, the home of the gods and the various celestials.
Below them is the material plane which sits above/within the elemental plane though both are separate from each other, you don't look up and see the elemental plane of fire, for instance.
The Shadowfel and Feywild sit next to the material plane, they aren't true echoes of the material plane but you can use them to bypass obstacles if there are handy connections between material plane and one of the others.
Below the elemental planes sits the lower planes, home of the fiends, all grouped together with warring fiendish kingdoms.

Various connections allow access to the different planes, I use a great river that flows between them that people can use to access the others if they know how.

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For my setting of Scavenger, it's a custom cosmology called the Beyond. Its based off of Penrose diagrams, which are theoretical models of the multiverse IRL. Essentially, black holes (or things similar to black holes) can be used to access an adjacent Beyond. Each Beyond is its own universe, and the further you get from the base setting, the more wildly the laws of reality change, leading to wildly different universes. Characters primarily use Monoliths built to be gateways to travel to other Beyonds. There is one in their world, which leads to a destroyed hubworld, and that leads to all others.

There are also sub-levels of reality: the Void (a place we go when we dream in other Beyonds, as our brains can't process the universe well) and the Redshift (shardstones create magic, and inside every shardstone is a portal to the Redshift, where all information -- including those killed with or by magic -- appears as these white-flame reverberations.

No planes of fire or law or Hells for Scavenger; it's a project all about using contemporary science ideas for the basis for fantasy in lieu of traditional ideas like the Four Elements or Good & Evil.

cbwjm said:

Out of interest, I know some people have already mentioned it, but what cosmology (if any) are people using in their home games?

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I went with a modified (i.e. overcomplicated) World Axis. I brought the Ethereal Plane back as the Ethereal Void, mostly so the Radiant Citadel could have a home. I envision it as the Ginnungagap-esque space between the Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos, where the primordials crafted the world.

It’s also where I have the Flow set up for pseudo-spelljammer inter-world adventures. I keep the actual spelljammer ships in the Astral Sea as per 4e, and have the Flow navigated by more sci-fi, Barrier Peaks type ships. Each world is part of the same initial creation, shattered by the Dawn War and protected by crystal spheres, which are the manifestation of the primal spirits ban on divine/elemental interference.

I also have an Outland under Sigil, though my version is less Concordant Opposition and more Warcraft. It’s an accretion disk of broken dominions filled with old horrors from the Dawn War, essentially an astral no man’s land.

Shardstone said:

That's true, but it is only a flaw because they aren't activated well by the game IMO.

Ideally, each plane should have a number of unique challenges and story seeds that makes it fun to adventure there. The best way to do this is a Radiant Citadel-style anthrology, where the players have to go to different planes to do different things.

But I will say...most of them are completely redundant in terms of description. Everything from Arcadia to Arborea is literally the same idea with small differences like "Oh the Seven Heavens are seven mountains with a FOREST AND RIVER" or "Aborea is a giant forest with MOUNTAINS AND A RIVER" etc etc etc. It honestly feels like there is no difference at all in the Upper Planes. At least the Lower Planes have the Abyss, the Nine Hells, Gehenna...but then Hades is LITERALLY just Gehenna 2, and Archeon is just Gehenna with less evil.

So I think the issue is less symmetry, and more so the planes themselves are really mid.

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Yes; those are summaries.

But look, there's more; whole books and boxed sets of stuff!

Planes of Conflict (2e) - Wizards of the Coast | Planescape | AD&D 2nd Ed. | AD&D 2nd Ed. | Dungeon Masters Guild
Planes of Law (2e) - Wizards of the Coast | Planescape | AD&D 2nd Ed. | AD&D 2nd Ed. | Dungeon Masters Guild
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17298/Planes-of-Chaos-2e
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17287/A-Guide-to-the-Astral-Plane-2e
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17293/A-Guide-to-the-Ethereal-Plane-2e
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/17296/The-Inner-Planes-2e

And that's just a start!

Shardstone said:

That's true, but it is only a flaw because they aren't activated well by the game IMO.

Ideally, each plane should have a number of unique challenges and story seeds that makes it fun to adventure there

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I don’t really think that’s needed. The generally well regarded third edition Forgotten Realms guide describes hundreds of locations, far more than you could ever visit, and many are not particularly distinctive.

One of the secrets of making a setting feel like a real world is the inclusion of details that have nothing to do with the narrative. For example, the mention, without explanation, of Gondolin in The Hobbit.

Paul Farquhar said:

I don’t really think that’s needed. The generally well regarded third edition Forgotten Realms guide describes hundreds of locations, far more than you could ever visit, and many are not particularly distinctive.

One of the secrets of making a setting feel like a real world is the inclusion of details that have nothing to do with the narrative. For example, the mention, without explanation, of Gondolin in The Hobbit.

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I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm saying make game content, not worldbuilding. That means challenges players can undergo, antagonists players can face, and interesting locations players can explore. Also, story seeds, another thing I mentioned, has nothing to do with anything you mentioned here either. Story seeds are one sentence or maybe a paragraph most of plot idea to inspire and guide DMs for making adventures/stories.

Again, as I clearly said in my post, unique challenges and story seeds. I said nothing about the fluff building you're talking about.

dave2008 said:

Mine is similar to 5e with some changes to the positive and negative (which I no longer remember because I don't use them), changes to how Athas and Eberron interact with the cosmos, and I incorporated the Far Realm and the MtG worlds.

However, it is all very behind the current. My players know next to nothing about the cosmology and don't really care or ask. It is just my pet project.

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Yep, a lot of world building is the pet project of the DM. I think the only planes my players have only interacted with were the shadowfell and feywild, and their exact layout in the grand scheme of things didn't really matter.

npick03 said:

I went with a modified (i.e. overcomplicated) World Axis. I brought the Ethereal Plane back as the Ethereal Void, mostly so the Radiant Citadel could have a home. I envision it as the Ginnungagap-esque space between the Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos, where the primordials crafted the world.

It’s also where I have the Flow set up for pseudo-spelljammer inter-world adventures. I keep the actual spelljammer ships in the Astral Sea as per 4e, and have the Flow navigated by more sci-fi, Barrier Peaks type ships. Each world is part of the same initial creation, shattered by the Dawn War and protected by crystal spheres, which are the manifestation of the primal spirits ban on divine/elemental interference.

I also have an Outland under Sigil, though my version is less Concordant Opposition and more Warcraft. It’s an accretion disk of broken dominions filled with old horrors from the Dawn War, essentially an astral no man’s land.

View attachment 393860

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I have made many diagrams of my cosmos, but this is one of the most elegant things I have seen.

If the majority of my "other spheres" weren't just actual worlds orbiting other suns, I would snatch this up.

It is inspiring though, I might have to play with the aesthetic.

CosmosMap v2

Paul Farquhar said:

I don’t really think that’s needed. The generally well regarded third edition Forgotten Realms guide describes hundreds of locations, far more than you could ever visit, and many are not particularly distinctive.

One of the secrets of making a setting feel like a real world is the inclusion of details that have nothing to do with the narrative. For example, the mention, without explanation, of Gondolin in The Hobbit.

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IMO, that isn't even quite what's needed either. Far Harad got no details in the Legendarium, while Gondolin did. Why? Because Far Harad, and Khand, and other places are just not relevant enough. Instead, I'd say it's having fairly rich and comprehensive worldbuilding for all places close enough, whether conceptually or physically, that folks might be curious about it. Novel-authors can get away with more and more of a facsimile of full depth the further afield the location gets, until you have places like Far Harad, or Robert Jordan's "Mad Lands", about which we know almost nothing at all, and that's fine because it just isn't relevant.

But this does point to one of the very important areas where TTRPGing diverges from authorship (a separation I find most people inflate massively around here, even though I agree that it exists.) Namely, you as setting-creator don't have a foreknown, planned plot everyone is following. (Well, outside of "Metaplot" stuff, but that tends to be Very Unpopular.) Your audience (be it DM, player, whatever) decides that. You can't get away with superficial detail at the ragged edges because there are no ragged edges; everywhere with a name or a concrete direction is somewhere to someone. You can't get away with a facsimile of depth.

Unfortunately, you also can't entirely rely on another common novel-writing tactic, which the Great Wheel leans extremely heavily on: just straight-up """borrowing""" (or, in D&D's case, often outright stealing) things from other sources, like IRL mythologies (Celestia = Heaven, Ysgard = Valhalla, Arborea = Olympus) or works of mythic/legendary fiction (e.g. Nine Hells = The Divine Comedy), etc. Such heavy reliance on "oh, pshaw, you know what this is!" leads to pretty thin worldbuilding, doubly so when much of the way the outer planes work is handwaved away as just Planar Weirdness™.

cbwjm said:

Out of interest, I know some people have already mentioned it, but what cosmology (if any) are people using in their home games?

Mine is fairly simple and mirrors 4e in a lot of ways:

At the top is Godsheim, the home of the gods and the various celestials.
Below them is the material plane which sits above/within the elemental plane though both are separate from each other, you don't look up and see the elemental plane of fire, for instance.
The Shadowfel and Feywild sit next to the material plane, they aren't true echoes of the material plane but you can use them to bypass obstacles if there are handy connections between material plane and one of the others.
Below the elemental planes sits the lower planes, home of the fiends, all grouped together with warring fiendish kingdoms.

Various connections allow access to the different planes, I use a great river that flows between them that people can use to access the others if they know how.

Click to expand...

1) The Great Wheel is rearranged a bit. The Outer Planes have a lot of symmetry, with planes at opposite positions being complete opposites, while the planes across from each other along the L-C axis are "evil universe" analogs of each other. (Taken from here: [Let's Revamp] Planescape - a thematic / oppositional look at the Great Ring | Dungeons & Dragons / Fantasy D20 Spotlight)

1a) Arborea is in the NG spot, but with the day-dusk-night layers of the Beastlands. It's the plane of passion and vitality, the opposition to the despair and apathy of Hades/Grey Waste.
1b) Elysium is in the NG(C) spot. Focus on relaxation and contentment; the land of milk and honey.
1c) Olympus is in the CG spot, focus on heroism and bravery.
1d) Carceri is in the CN(E) spot, across from Ysgard. If Ysgard is honorable competition, Carceri is dishonorable competition. A vast metropolis where the cunning and streetwise get ahead, all built atop the holding cell for entities that must not be named.
1e) Pandemonium moves to the NE(C) spot. A mirror to Elysium. Elysium is contentment with your own company, Pandemonium is the paranoid need to isolate.

2) Lots of planes stretch and coexist in multiple places. The Feywild are the (many) places where the planes in the CG arc (from Arborea to Ysgard) touch the Material Plane; likewise, the Shadowfell is where the CE planes (from Hades to Carceri) cross over into the Material.

3) Limbo IS the Elemental Chaos, within its bounds are oceans of mutable protomatter, as well as each of the Elemental, Quasi-Elemental, and Para-Elemental planes. Nearly unreachably deep within Limbo is the Positive Material, the source of all creation.

4) Arcadia and Acheron are two great cities (one silver, one iron) sitting on either side of the Bridge of Mechanus, the waters of the merging Styx and Oceanus flow under the bridge in a thunderous waterfall into Nirvana, the Astral Sea. And unknowably deep in the Astral, all ideas flow into the Negative Material, at the end of all things.

5) Other cosmologies connect into the Great Wheel, although bridging the gaps between them may be nearly impossible. Eberron's Plane of Fernia, as an example, coexists in places with Baator and the Elemental Plane of Fire.