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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9559427" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The issue is that alignment itself is already an extremely rigid and artificial structure (hence the eternal issue of treating alignment like a straightjacket), and the Great Wheel reifies alignment as literally being the structure of the universe itself. Reality enforces alignment, and that enforcement is rigid and dogmatic, even for Chaos. Planescape has the worst of it, since--as noted--planes get chunks cleaved off of them the instant those chunks cease to be of appropriate alignment.They have to be uniform--at least above a certain minimum of alignment content--or else reality itself says, "You've been too Sarcastic Fashionable for Pradadise, your lands are part of Hottopica now."Yes...that's one of the things I dislike about them. Reality has a specific, ingrained, defined, known purpose. It is "for" one and only one specific thing, filtering souls into their rigidly-defined afterlife realm within the alignment grid.Point of order: They did not. They held as a matter of belief that there were afterlives. No one who went to one of them could return from them IRL. Hence, they were not verifiable. But within the context of a Great Wheel cosmology, it is literally and physically the case that every soul goes to one, and only one, specific Outer Plane upon death; that that soul's location can be verified and tracked using magic; and that this is, again, a reification of alignment into the literal laws of existence itself. Laws that even Chaos is beholden to.I don't see how that's possible. If the Great Wheel holds any weight at all, it can be empirically verified to be true or false. Souls have to go to their assigned plane, including the Outlands/Concordant Opposition/Bernice/whatever you want to call it. They don't have a choice. Contrariwise, in the World Axis, souls have an afterlife domain they're supposed to go to, based on whichever god they worshipped or were most similar to in their behavior, but the shattering of the Lattice of Heaven broke this connection, ensuring that some souls simply don't have an afterlife to go to, a problem most deities (regardless of alignment!) are content to completely ignore because they think they have bigger fish to fry. (One of my favorite things about 4e Bahamut is that he is the only deity who cares enough about the homeless petitioners of the Astral Plane, regardless of their alignment, to try to build for them a safe and comfortable home.)It is, quite literally, a matter of empirical fact whether the Great Wheel is true or false. That's one of the biggest things I dislike about it. It isn't allegorical, metaphorical, or metaphysical. It isn't just one plausible theory amongst many with muddy evidence. It makes explicit, specific claims about the nature of the universe and those claims not only can be verified, they are explicitly so in any setting that has signed up for it. The Great Wheel is hegemonic; it excludes any planar cosmology that disagrees with it. That's why it had to absorb and implement the Feywild and convert the Plane of Shadow into the Shadowfell; it would deny the existence of those planes if they weren't incorporated into the structure.</blockquote>

Verification