D&D General What Does Your Cosmology Look Like?

Just a chat thread:

What does your planar/worlds/heaven and hell/etc cosmology look like in your D&D campaign?

I very rare use the official D&D cosmology. I just don't particularly like. it. If I am inclined to use it, I use at least the 4E version of the Astral Sea as opposed to the Astral Plane.

The one I use most that I much prefer is a Mirror World Cosmology. Every plane is a direct reflection of the Prime, down to the geography, but dominated by one particular cosmological force and faction (the Prime is Neutral). So the Faewild/Faerie is a world that looks almost exactly like the Prime, except everything in nature from forests to rivers to glaciers is just More, and the powers that dominate are faerie spirits and beings. Hell is where brimstone and chaos rule, while Heaven is where Order and Light rule. You can travel between them at points and places that are infused with the power of two (or more) planes, as well as by typical magic. And you might have to travel through, say, Faerie and then Hades in order to actually get to Hell (just as an example).

I also do like the Eberron cosmology, but I only use it if I am running in Eberron.

So, tell us about your campaign's planar cosmology.

Mostly I go with a Hyborian/Eberron view where there are plenty of in world views from different cultures and religions but it is mostly a mystery.

From in play adventuring PCs have gone to Concordant Opposition/The Outlands, Acheron, The Feywild/First World, Hel, and some Werewolf the Apocalypse spirit realms. A player had an in-character explanation of being out of the campaign for months of being captured by a fey lord in a Changeling the Lost style and returning changed several levels later. One character went to Carcossa in a dream and fled Hastur, though it was not clear how real that was.

Demons, slaad, and mythos horrors have been summoned from somewhere. In game discussions have included planar cosmology lore such as D&D and Pathfinder and even In Nomine planar fiend lore, efreeti and djinni elemental planar empires, Kult like cosmological overlays for the afterlife, Norse afterlife realms, 4e Shadowfell mystery soul journeys, Golarion afterlife soul absorption into planes, hints about mythos stuff.

So mostly a mix of D&D Great Wheel (including all the real world polytheist syncretisms, 1e Deities and Demigods tie ins, and the mostly compatible Golarion and Scarred Lands planar stuff) and the 4e Dawn War Axis with a bit of White Wolf and others.

Inspired by McMaster-Bujold's World of the Five Gods, I'm working on a cosmology that has a finite number of deities and an ordered universe far more like the vision of the religions of the book than the chaotic Pagan world view of random Gods and Goddesses everywhere. A universe where things are orderly. There are cosmic rules. And the various religions have real differences and lots of sub-sects. I've never liked the planes thing. So just kind of leaving that amorphous.

As far as the government of my world is concerned, the outer planes don't exist. You think you've seen an angel? No you didn't, why would anyone say something so stupid, you should go talk to a government agent in this windowless building about how silly that is.

I'm thinking of a flat cosmology.

We have the mirror worlds of Fey and Shadow (they are just too good), but we'll add Liminal worlds between.

Fey : Astral : Prime : Ethereal : Shadow

Lets go further and swap Fey and Astral:

Astral : Fey : Middle : Ethereal : Shadow

This breaks the symmetry. Ethereal is half way between the Middle and Shadow realms. The Fey is in the other direction, and further in that direction is the Astral realm.

The Ethereal has everything transparent, and you see things and their decay at the same time. The Shadow is a rotted mirror where everything is solid again.

Next, lets make the world bigger, in that most of it is terra incognita. We'll fold the Elemental Chaos into the world itself! There world contains the Elemental Chaos, you can walk there, it shows up on maps.

The Shadow echo of the Elemental Chaos becomes the Abyss. Possibly the influence of the Abyss blocks the Fey and Astral from existing in that area, and there maybe is a barrier in the Ethereal blocking the Abyss from the Middle Realm.

We'll put the domains of the Gods in this world. They literally have places - up mountains, in oceans, or deep in the earth - where they live. These can be in the Fey, Astral, Ethereal or Shadow Realms, or in the Middle Realm itself.

And as a place, the Underdark shows up. The "under the hill" is a different place in the Fey and in the Middle Realm and in the Shadow. Possibly we also block Astral and Ethereal in the "under hill" realms, with the reason being there is a chained god down there in all 3 under realms.

This feels very fantasy-Greek to me.

NotAYakk said:

I'm thinking of a flat cosmology.

We have the mirror worlds of Fey and Shadow (they are just too good), but we'll add Liminal worlds between.

Fey : Astral : Prime : Ethereal : Shadow

Lets go further and swap Fey and Astral:

Astral : Fey : Middle : Ethereal : Shadow

This breaks the symmetry. Ethereal is half way between the Middle and Shadow realms. The Fey is in the other direction, and further in that direction is the Astral realm.

The Ethereal has everything transparent, and you see things and their decay at the same time. The Shadow is a rotted mirror where everything is solid again.

Next, lets make the world bigger, in that most of it is terra incognita. We'll fold the Elemental Chaos into the world itself! There world contains the Elemental Chaos, you can walk there, it shows up on maps.

The Shadow echo of the Elemental Chaos becomes the Abyss. Possibly the influence of the Abyss blocks the Fey and Astral from existing in that area, and there maybe is a barrier in the Ethereal blocking the Abyss from the Middle Realm.

We'll put the domains of the Gods in this world. They literally have places - up mountains, in oceans, or deep in the earth - where they live. These can be in the Fey, Astral, Ethereal or Shadow Realms, or in the Middle Realm itself.

And as a place, the Underdark shows up. The "under the hill" is a different place in the Fey and in the Middle Realm and in the Shadow. Possibly we also block Astral and Ethereal in the "under hill" realms, with the reason being there is a chained god down there in all 3 under realms.

This feels very fantasy-Greek to me.

Click to expand...

Is this the one you use?

Vague and unspecified. Things beyond the world the PCs lived on were lore. And by that I mean "stories" not "game-world facts".

For the last couple of campaigns, I had no intent on ever having the PCs get anywhere near planar-travel magics, so I didn't need to create a real cosmology. Different people thought different things about what might be, but it was all moot, as that information couldn't be used to change matters in the real world.

Like, it doesn't matter if the earth elemental was summoned from the elemental plane of earth, or just collected from the "earthiness" around you. The elemental was there, either way.

Depends. Mostly it's a Great Wheel. Sometimes it's an orrery of 12 planes (and a lost 13th). Even when I did design my own, it was still just a paired back Great Wheel because I still felt the need to find homes for all the planar creatures D&D uses with much regularity.

Faerie is the border between the material plane and all other planes. Where faerie is closest to the material plane it reflects the latter geographically (though much like you said, everything is “more”), but the deeper you go, the more it begins to deviate from the material. It’s like if you draw the same picture from memory every day on a new page of a sketchbook. The ink will bleed through in places, and over time the parts you draw most often and most consistently will become clearer and darker because more ink is bleeding through there, while the parts you don’t remember as well will become more distorted over time. Deeper faerie is like later pages in the sketchbook, where the picture is more informed by emotional impression than accurate memory. Except the drawing isn’t just done by you, it’s done by everyone who has ever visited that place. And some of them have more abstract or impressionistic styles.

While within faerie, proximity has more to do with sympathetic alignment than physical space. Getting from place to place is not so much a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and more a matter of becoming mentally and emotionally attuned to your destination. This is also how you can reach the other planes from there. If you want to get to the plane of water, go for a swim. Being surrounded by water makes you more sympathetically attuned to water, and so you become closer to that plane. That of course also means you are further from the material plane, so things become less geographically similar to it, but instead of just being shaped by your emotional impression of a place, the picture is now being informed by the concept of water. As if you’re still drawing in that same sketchbook but with each page you emphasize a little more the things that remind you of water. You start making your lines softer, more fluid, start using more blues and greens, maybe adding bubbles or waves, until you’ve eventually got a picture that’s an abstract meditation on water.

You can reach any of the elemental planes in a similar way. Light a fire and feed it until it grows to be your entire environment. Climb to lofty, windy peaks and leap. Find a cave and follow it deep into the earth. Though, if your hope is to reach the plane of earth, be sure to maintain that intent, because underground is also very dark, and where the dead are interred. You may end up in the plane of shadow, or the underworld, if you don’t maintain the proper metaphysical alignment. Indeed, should you delve too greedily and too deep you may even find yourself digging a hole all the way to the abyss. The elemental plane of ether is quite difficult to access for beings of crude physical matter. It is a place of ephemera, made up of and making up spirits. Probably the best way to try to reach it would be to bathe oneself in light.

The astral plane is also quite difficult to reach. You might be able to project your mind there through stargazing, but to reach it physically, you will probably need some sort of flying vessel - and one that can take you beyond air, to the heavens themselves. But from there, entire other worlds can be accessed, should you be able to attune yourself to their alien natures.

I generally say the Great Wheel exists and is as presented int eh books, the same way a five minute explanation of quantum mechanics is correct (for the audience). However, the outer planes are not the afterlife. Instead each world in the Prime Material also contains their own afterlife tailored to the world which are varied as per the planar traits in the original 1E Manuel of Planes. All the other stuff floating around the PM is the same, although the entire Fey Wild things is new to me and I'm still working on dealing with it. The Outer Planes are just that, other planes separate and under different rules than the Prime Material and Inner Planes. They are not the afterlife, but just interferers and colonizers of the PM and IPs. Beyond them is Chaos, not even in a Law versus Chaos sort of way, just ineffable and beyond the understanding of even the Outer Planes. Yet the Chaos seeks to corrupt and absorb not just the PM and IPs but also the OPs in ways and for reasons that just can't be easily understood.