Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9580824" data-attributes="member: 6790260">So, there seems to be something of a disconnect here.I'm describing an explicit claim, made by the World Tree cosmology. This isn't me inventing a thing. It's something canonical to the World Tree.Having read more closely, it seems that the strong claim is different, but not dramatically so.In the D&D cosmology, the Astral Plane surrounds all the other planes in a shapeless cloud, allowing astral travel directly from one plane to any other. But Toril’s Astral Plane shares the treelike shape of the cosmology as a whole. Because of this arrangement, it is dif- ficult (though not completely impossible) to jump from branch to branch of the tree—that is, to cross directly from one Inner Plane or Outer Plane to another. (See Traveling the Planes, below, for more information.) It is more natural—and far safer—to travel between the Inner Planes or Outer Planes by way of the trunk (the Material Plane). As part of its ability to alter the nature of its realm, a deity can forge a direct connection to any other deity’s realm, so long as both deities agree. Apart from divine influence, however, such direct connections are impossible. Travel from one Outer Plane to another is slightly more com- plicated. Normal astral travel cannot take a character directly from one plane to another except by way of the Material Plane. A character or monster can use plane shift to move directly from the Material Plane to any other plane or vice versa, but not from one Inner Plane or Outer Plane to a different Inner Plane or Outer Plane.3e Player's Guide to Faerun, p 139-140 (two separate but related sections)The structure of Toril's Astral Plane is tree-like. It specifically only has "branches" connecting one plane to another. You have to do a very dangerous thing in order to even attempt to cross between those branches. Direct connections between different planes simply do not exist in Toril's Astral Plane, unless personally created by deities to link their divine domains together. (Meaning, for example, direct connections from any of the Inner Planes to any of the Outer Planes are simply impossible, since no deity can claim those spaces as their domain.)Conversely, direct connections between all planes can--and often do!--exist regardless of divine intervention in the World Axis and Great Wheel. Indeed, creating such connections is a slow but completely achievable process for purely mortal beings with enough magic mojo.Either these connections exist, or they do not. There could be changing truths, or truths that only apply to area A but not to area B, or truths that apply only in one sense. But these connections between planes can't both exist and not exist in the same world, in the same sense, at the same time.Note that it even (explicitly!) says that plane shift DOES NOT work to get you from Outer Plane A to Outer Plane B! This is something literally anyone who can cast plane shift can verify. Anyone who can survey the planes can check for counter-examples where a connection not created by deities exists between two non-Material planes.</blockquote>

Verification