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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KvnLuck" data-source="post: 9577737" data-attributes="member: 7040788">Long post coming up.I came into TTRPG’s in my early 20’s during 4E. As a system, 4E remains my absolute favourite. I own all the books and I wish I could play it again with my group. So I was the target audience and consumer of 4E products.The only thing I don’t like about 4E is the cosmology. Though I get why it exists the way it does.The cosmology to me is just about what I thought a basic generic fantasy cosmology would look like. In fact it’s exactly what I thought of when I thought about fantasy cosmology. The only thing that surprised me was that Hell was located in the heavens and the place I thought of as hell was a place of chaotic elements. Basically I found it boring.So I tried to figure out how to make it interesting. The thing is I wasn’t that good at the time when it came to any kind of world building (I’m still kind of bad at it), and the Great Wheel only has a single page to it in the 4E Manual of the Planes (and looking back on it doesn’t really tell you how it works). Everything I came up with in an attempt to make it more interesting just made it more generic.And to me that’s the strength of the World Axis cosmology. It is so basic, generic, and simple that anyone can easily understand it, and add to it.In comparison the Great Wheel is so strange, weird, and complex, that the best way to introduce someone to it is to do so slowly. But to me the Great Wheel cosmology in all its strange, weird, and complex glory was something I had never seen before!Seriously, to me the Great Wheel was like an epiphany of what a cosmology could look like, and when I finally learnt about it my imagination went wild with possibilities, which is something that the World Axis never did. Yggdrasil, The River Styx, Olympus, the Outlands, Sigil’s Factions, the Phlogiston and Crystal Spheres!The Great Wheel is not a generic fantasy cosmology, it is unique to D&D. And every setting that I’ve come across that uses something similar was made after the Great Wheel was already made and designed to easily work with it.That’s why I like the Great Wheel.</blockquote>

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