D&D General What Does Your Cosmology Look Like?

honestly mine is depressing, no heavens only hells as I can't ever find convincing descriptions of heaven but hells are all you need.

Which cosmology--the one known and accepted, based on all observable evidence available to the finest natural and esoteric philosophers?

Or the truth?

According to all data available to Waziri mages and other, non-magical observers, there are only and exactly three observable planes: the mortal world, Al-Duniyyah (with the Spirit World as a sort of altered-perspective version thereof); the Elemental Otherworld, Al-Akirah; and the Netherworld, aka "(the) Hell(s)" and "the Abyss". The mortal world and elemental otherworld are globes which orbit stars in different parallel dimensions, which is why their geography is nearly but not perfectly identical. Other stars exist, but are so distant they cannot be reached.

The truth is that this is but one world among many, one plane among many, but this world, specifically, has been walled off--or, more accurately, barred up. It is a prison for something, and (nearly) all transplanar beings except devils and demons departed it about two thousand years ago, when those supernatural, invisible bars went up. What else lies in the Deep Beyond, no one knows...yet.

By default, it consists of the Heavens (where Gods dwell), the Hells (where demons and devils dwell), and The Beyond (where your spirit goes when it is separated from your mortal body). These are also the originating points of the three kinds of magic in the campaign world, conveniently (i.e. miracles, demonic pacts, and necromancy). And, of course, the mortal realm. Which is where the game takes place, by default.

Umbran said:

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.

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I try to do this with every new game world. I figure the D&D cosmology(ies) are interesting once and a while, and work when we are playing in Mystara or Forgotten Realms, but why include the same thing for homebrew? I tell my players "your character isn't certain if the afterlife is someplace they could walk to" and about half the time they get into it. The other half, they basically treat it as the DM saying "your character, at game start, doesn't know these things" instead of "we're not necessarily going to do things this way (let's find out together as it becomes important). I remember having a game world without 'planes' and having to hand it off to another person to DM because of free-time constraints. He said he'd been thinking for some time on how to explain why may game world was 'mostly cut off' from the standard D&D multiverse -- like, it's your world now, but can you really not conceptualize that it might not be in a multiverse?

TwoSix-verse, the Great Wheel (a repost of a post I made last year found here: D&D 5E (2014) - 4E Cosmology)

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.

I opted to just do the World and the Otherworld (or Spirit World). The Otherworld has regions where fiends, celestials, fey, etc live and the influence of these areas is often seen in the World, but the Veil (my world's ethereal plane) was created to separate the two and keep the Gods influence in the world limited, since they nearly destroyed it in the First Age.

Lanefan said:

I tried this, then realized while sorting out the pantheons that all these deities needed (preferably off-world) places to live and call home.

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Yeah. Admittedly, my approach is easier when my deities are not, well, "people". Non-corporeal, powers and spirits don't need a "location" to "live". Physical "location" may not even apply at all.

Mere mortals will speak of them as if they are people, and have places to live, but that's the "lore" I was speaking of. Those are all stories and metaphors mortals use to find ways to relate to these powers, but mortals often mistake their metaphors for reality after a few generations...

Lanefan said:

I tried this, then realized while sorting out the pantheons that all these deities needed (preferably off-world) places to live and call home.

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Oddly enough, where a deity spends most of their time has rarely been a question that I felt the need to answer... the people in the fantasy world obviously are free to narrate such things, but they are just theories and beliefs. I don't need to establish facts in advance.

BUT... I have to say that I also tend not to define deities & pantheons in advance either!

Voadam said:

There are a couple more D&D cosmologies.

3e Rokugan planar cosmology is detailed in Fortunes and Winds and I think BECMI has a different one as well. The big other one is the World Axis though from 4e.

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IMO, the world axis is the same as the 5e version of the wheel - just seen from a different perspective. I don't think any of the D&D cosmologies are a100% as described in their respective books. I take the stance those descriptions are created by mortals trying to make sense of what they can't possibly understand and are therefore incomplete and incorrect to some degree.

I don't actually care where the gods live, or if they are even real. In fact, I would say that planar adventures are more fun if they don't involve the gods.