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Message: <blockquote data-quote="occam" data-source="post: 9559288" data-attributes="member: 39815">I assume you're not familiar with 2e's Planescape setting, because almost nothing you've said above is true there. Chaos does not "stay nicely in its lane"; nor does Law, for that matter, nor Good nor Evil. It's repeatedly reinforced in the published materials that a constant push and pull exists between various ideological forces, which can at times result in meaningful change. A location is part of the Abyss not because of a neatly drawn static border, but because a particular strain of extreme Chaos and Evil holds sway there; if it were less extreme, it might instead be considered part of the Outlands, or part of Pandemonium if it's a shade more chaotic and less evil, and so on.The fact that there are 17 Outer Planes in the Great Wheel's conception is simply a consequence of the structure of the alignment system, which itself is a straightforward result of opposing forces along two axes. But just because 16 of those 17 planes are drawn on diagrams as equally sized and spaced blocks of well-confined environments doesn't make them so, and they aren't represented like that in the fiction (of Planescape, anyway). There is always struggle, and the forces aren't necessarily perfectly balanced.Again, in Planescape entire books and boxed sets were published for every one of these places (Astral, Ethereal, Elemental, and Outer Planes), detailing a multitude of adventuring locations, encounters, adventure hooks, and full adventures. How could an entire book be published about a place "devoid of locations", including locations such as Anavaree, Believer's Forge, the Castle at the Edge of Time, Fellfield, and Leicester's Gap? How could a book be published about places that "cannot meaningfully be adventured in" full of information about adventure locations, means of travel, and conflicts to engage with?And if we take a look at Planescape's series of adventure modules, the very first one (The Eternal Boundary) climaxes with a trip to the Elemental Plane of Fire. Others travel to such "fundamentally identical" places as Elysium, the Beastlands, Mount Celestia, Carceri, Limbo, and Acheron, not to mention the adventure anthologies that range all over the multiverse.The Great Wheel cosmology, even to the extent that you believe it's represented as some objective truth, is not the impediment to adventure gaming that you seem to think. Planescape set out to demonstrate that, successfully IMO.</blockquote>

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