For us? No. That's a sample cosmology. You (or a setting book) decide what your setting has. Our rulebooks have no default setting (though they do have sidebars with examples of things from settings).
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Level Up (A5E) A Level Up Cosmology
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
thelordofthemorning
Explorer
Cool. As someone said above WotC is going real hard on the one shared setting/cosmology thing and I'm not a fan, and am really happy to hear Level Up is not doing that.
Scribe
Legend
Can I get a rough idea of how much content is dedicated to cosmology/deity/alignment type systems in the books?
An appendix.
Timespike
A5E Designer and third-party publisher
This is a running ... light-hearted truth, let's call it? Because A5E is compatible with O5E, you can use WotC adventures as Level Up adventures.Wait, what?
dave2008
Legend
I would guess it is in the appendix of the core rulebook (Adventurer's Guide)
Some problems with the middle layer:
Space and time are two separate planes of existance? That... completely negates, well, pretty much everything. Outside the material plane, which is fundamentally a little bit of everything, and the astral plane for obvious reasons, reality immediately falls apart. First, a basic problem: If space and time are their own things, existing in their own planes, how does an arbitrary plane, let's say the plane of fire, have any spatial or temporal dimensions? Where and when is the City of Brass located, and what does travel within the Plane of Fire entail given it is now no longer defined by traversing physical distance over some duration of time at a given speed? So that's a problem right there.
Now the real crux of the matter: space and time cannot be separated into two separate identities in this way, physically speaking. Why? Because, in order to maintain one of the genuinely absolute physical laws of the universe, namely the constant speed of light, space and time are constantly shifting back and forth from more space-like to more time-like. They are, fundamentally, interrelated to the point where physicists routinely use the word spacetime in place of either concept, as they feel the word more accurately describes the true state of affairs. To summarise a complex topic briefly, all things that exist move through spacetime at a constant, universal speed. That speed is, of course, the speed of light. Some, though normally comparatively little, of that motion is through any combination of the three space-like dimensions (left-right, up-down, forward-back). This is the regular motion we experience. Whatever is left over is movement through the one time-like dimension. The total motion in both space-like and time-like dimensions is always equal to the speed of light, which is an established universal constant with an (approximately) exact value you can look up on google. We know the speed of light is a hard limit because we know that the only things which move at exactly that speed are massless force-carrying quanta, one of which, of course, is the photon, the quanta of light (hence the name speed of light). Everything with more mass than a photon moves slower than a photon, and the idea of something with less mass than a photon is physically meaningless, so the only things left are the photon and other quanta like it, which we already know travel at exactly the speed of light, no more and no less. Given what I said about space-like and time-like movement types-a concept far from unknown in D&D, given we regularly use the rules for movement types such as swimming, flying, climbing, etc, in place of walking speed without tripping up-what does a photon look like? Simple. All space-like, no time-like. For a photon, time doesn't exist, just movement through space. Something that was truly stationary, on the other hand (a physical impossibility, but let's pretend), would be entirely moving in the time-like dimension, and not occupy any space at all. (This might suggest Greater Deities, which don't really exist in any particular locational sense, are the natural inhabitants of such a purely time-like state of being, if you want some usable lore out of all this). Everything else, except at incredibly high speeds, moves a little bit through the space-like dimensions and a lot through the time-like dimension, and no combination of movements ever exceeds the speed of light.
I also question the fact that life and death are in that middle layer, rather than outside the whole system as in the standard 5e cosmology of the positive and negative planes. That would seem to imply that neither life nor death hold any meaning to the outer planes, which isn't true, given gods, archdevils, demon lords, etc. have died in established lore. Unless it's a case of Schrodinger's pantheon, where the gods are in a superpositon of being both alive and dead, but I think that might raise its own problems (the idea is intruiging, though).
Anyway, separating space and time produces unliveable planes of existence that truly would be conceptual in nature. Arborea isn't a place, Arborea dwells within us all. And... so does Baator. So uh... those summoned and currently very real devils you are currently attempting to decapitate with a silvered sword are... metaphors. Yes. And not having life and death as a fundamental dichotomy of the universe does raise some questions about the inhabitants of the outer plains, not even the deities, just, like, the Eladrin, the Archons, the Demons and Devils, the Slaadi and the Modrons, all those. Some are immortal, more or less, but they still die, sometimes. And it's kind of hard to see Lawful, Good, Chaotic, Evil, and Neutral as defining aspects of reality on at least the outer plains and not expect life-affirming and life-denying to be equally as powerful and universal aspects of reality if not more so.
So, that's my critique. In fairness, I'll set about posting my own general adapted cosmology for the planes as well, albiet without a convenient diagram.
How does any other plane have any fire? How does any other plane have any water? The plane of earth doesn't mean that's the only place where there's earth. Never has done.
These are fictional, magic planes of existence. Obviously no fantasy cosmology can work in the real world. If you're looking for a cosmology based on real world physics, Level Up (or indeed D&D, or the MCS, or Star Wars) ain't the place you'll find it.
Faolyn
(she/her)
@Steven K, T&T gives a description of those two planes which seems as though they don't have much to do with actual physics. They're not elemental planes. The Plane of Space is described as sort of a plane of weird geometries made of magical force. And the Plane of Time seems more like a place where you can potentially see any and travel to other time. To me, the Plane of Space sounds like another option to use instead of the Astral Plane. It sort of represents the spaces between reality in the same way the Astral does, but does so with weird special effects instead of silvery nothingness. Time feels more transitive, in the sense that you go there first if you want to time travel, and you have to hope you can get to the right time portal.
