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You've hit the nail on the head. This is the reason people accuse Planescape of not making the planes interesting enough. No matter how much detail you create for an infinite plane, you've only described an infintesimal amount of the plane; if you were to look a random part of the plane you...

While there are many technically distinct ways to earn the "chains" in Baator, these boil down into only a couple practical distinctions: First, you can sell yourself into bondage in exchange for something. Typically, hostages are used as a means to secure contracts in Baator, especially...

To clarify: I meant the enemies sent the shapechangers to cause the hubris which caused the disappointment of the gods which caused Demogorgon. I may have misunderstood you: when you said "creation myth" I thought you meant a story which explains where they come from and why.

Well, we all know that Brom's art was the primary influence. Exhibit A: Brom draws Agis with random streaks of white hair through his otherwise very dark hair. Outside of skunks, Rogue, the Bride of Frankenstein, and Mad Max that vitiligo motif was not exactly common at the time DS was...

Easy: The manipulative shapechangers are the descendants of infiltrators sent by the enemies (maybe more than one faction of enemies) of the gods of your world to destroy the nascent civilizations through subterfuge and sowing of discord. After accomplishing their original purpose they were...

To find the horizon distance formula you need to use calculus. Briefly, you need to solve for where the tangent line to the circle curve intersects the Y axis at 1 + the height of the observer (relative to diameter). To find the arc length visible you use the following formula: [90 -...

The article referenced above calculates the horizon distance, which is based on the curvature of the Earth's surface and would not necessarily be the same on your campaign world. If the PC's are on a larger planet the horizon distance will be larger since the surface doesn't curve as much...

Alright. Let's retconn Athas for WoTC: Before anything else can begin our R&D team has to know, "What Dark Sun is." Darksun is a ripoff of Mad Max movies. Maybe "ripoff" is too strong of a word, but they are trying to emulate the flavor of Mel Gibson's setting, just like Kevin Costner did...

Well, no, these aren't known to the mortals either at TSR or WoTC. Sorry for the disappointment. But, you could pretend they were canon, I mean what's the difference? I don't know the details of your game, so I am objective in some sense; I have (IMHO) a very concrete and logical system for...

I am officially putting on my neckbeard for Celebrim. Being an "aggressor" is obviously not necessary. The Kamikaze were employed explicitly to defend the Japanese mainland from invasion. Likewise, the Suicide Bomber could argue very strongly that they are responding to aggression (not that I...

I can't help myself from pointing out that the real historical basis for Paladins was a story about some xenophobic French dudes robbing (and killing) a bunch of Spanish Moors simply because they were Islamic. And so long as I am making Celebrim mad at me, I need to point out that Quag, Lord of...

Seeing as I know many of these entities from personal aquaintance, I think I can be informative: Ayailla: Light and Being High Up- Celestia Chaav: Delights- Arborea Estanna: Domesticity- Celestia Lastai: Love, Pleasure, Passion- Elysium Phieran: Endurance, Perseverance- Elysium Valarian...

Ok, ok, ok... (cracks knuckles) This actually makes more sense than the retconned by committee history of Athas in 2e canon, and probably was close to the original intent of the creator of the setting. I think they needed a long time degradation time scale to explain the unusual prevalence of...

Check out the List of Dungeons and Dragons deities in wikipedia. They have canonical home plane listing for most deities.

I am not sophisticated enough with the posting software yet, so let me see if this works: I don't mean to be the guy getting all defensive about his argument and responding to anything that could be construed as a breach of my argument's honor, but I do think this can clarify my intentions...

Sry. I assumed people were familiar with the 1e Great Wheel from Gygax (which excludes the 17th "plane" the Concordant Opposition). I've seen several threads using this terminology. "Baatezu" is the 2e name for Devils, resident of the "9 Hells" in the Great Wheel cosmology. There has been a lot...

Yes. Precisely. To the extent that everyone is a utility maximizer/ neutral survivalist (i.e. taking the statement as a tautology), that label is undescriptive. This is the core point of my OP. Everyone must at least implicitly make alignment choices due to the absence of omniscience in...

I am making a tautological revealed preference argument as follows: people do stuff they like and we know they like to do that stuff cause that is the stuff they do. Therefore everyone is "alike" in the sense that they do the stuff they like to do. However, this leaves a lot of latitude as to...

TN- Doesn't exist. There simply isn't room; either you can reliably enough predict the results of an action (as relates to your utility or "survival") or you can't. For those situations when you can't tell, trusting in "golden rule" type reasoning is good, being conservatively selfish is evil...

Thank you most for the thoughtful comments. @Umbran I may need to moderate my position somewhat: the term "survivalist" may be too concrete. What I intended was probably closer to the (tautological) concept of utility maximization. @BlubSeabass, Dausuul More importantly, I did not...