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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9573700" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And I appreciate your recognition thereof!I'd argue it was the fault of changing the guard 2-3 times. Gygax mostly wanted the planes as background, I think, in much the same way that divinity is in the background for Conan stories or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories (the gods in Lankhmar, rather than the capital-G Gods of Lankhmar, from what I've read). So, although he pulled from half a dozen different traditions, the sometimes strange associations were fine, because they weren't really meant to be places so much as....influences, if you will.Yeah. Even if later stuff insists it's metaphor...there was a LOT of effort put into making it literal, and giving it physical representation via portals, the whole "sloughing off a layer of Hottopica to be absorbed by Punkland" thing, etc. If they aren't in at least some kind of physical proximity, these things are a lot harder to square.Or, for one of my favorites, Kord couch-surfing with Bahamut and Pelor. Tiamat was a particularly nice touch, because in a very real sense she and Zehir could be so much happier if they were just able to cooperate, because he would prefer the depths and she would prefer the surface. That's not where their power bases formed, though, and as a result, they're locked in eternal war based out of lands they hate trying to steal lands they want. Perfect encapsulation of why even two like-minded evils can be eternally at one another's throats, while different factions of good can in fact get along and make each other better.My problem with this is that the souls thing is at very least the second-most-important way in which the alignment relationship is established and reinforced. The universe inherently knows your alignment and assigns your soul to the correct one, reifying alignment and ensuring that each outer plane naturally retains its alignment association. By cutting that out, nothing actually reinforces the planes anymore.AFAIK, there has never been a full-scale occupation of one Outer Plane by another. Given they're implied to at least be extremely large, and (at least to the limit of my knowledge) arguably infinite, such an occupation would severely strain the resources of whatever plane was trying to do it, which would result in that plane getting dogpiled, etc. So it's a bit speculative; would Celestia remain stubbornly LG despite sloughing off a huge chunk of its territory? Would reality simply cease to have a true LG plane? Would one or both of its adjacent planes slough off pieces to form a "new" Celestia (or a new plane filling Celestia's place)? I don't believe any Great Wheel publication has ever considered these things, even in hypothetical.Does this not conflict mightily with the "things work as they do on Earth except when explicitly told otherwise" premise that is so deeply important to your playstyle?A world that reflects back at you your fears/hopes/desires/etc. is one that still has an actual nature, that could reasonably be learned if one showed sufficient diligence. The explicit claim I was responding to was that person A can go to the Outer Planes and see the planes of the World Tree (including things like Dweomerheart), and person B can go to the Outer Planes and see things like the gods dwelling in Astral Domains, and person C can go to the Outer Planes and see Hades and Gehenna and Carceri etc., etc., and all three are correctly seeing what is actually there. The only way for this to happen--for people to have their beliefs and perceptions be 100% equally real, despite being explicitly contradictory to one another, is for there to be no facts about the world, just individual subjective impressions, all of which are true no matter how much they might contradict.</blockquote>

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