S'mon said:
Re the Inner Planes - I preferred previous edition's more complex approach, with Elemental & Energy planes shading into each other, so you get the Plane of Dust, Plane of Minerals, Para-Elemental Plane of Ice, and such. To me, those are fun and inspiring.
What I don't like is the Great Wheel denoting say Asgard/Gladsheim as the CN(G) plane, or the Happy Hunting Grounds as the NG(C) plane, and so on. It may suit a Gygaxian need to jam everything into a single rigid alignment-based classification system, but it does a horrible job of evoking actual mythology or any sense of wonder.
I'm with you, mostly. I never really used the Great Wheel, but in my old campaigns it never really came up. But i had decided that the way the outer planes work is that they are representations of belief systems and deific power. So, basically, each deity has a plane, and the plane behaves the way the deity wants it to. For some, this means an established plane with definite rules. For others, it means a realm that bends to thedeity's every whim. For others it might be something like [D&D's] Limbo. Several deities might share a realm (Olympus), or have connected realms (Asgard/Niflheim/Gehenna), and a really minor power might simply live in another deity's realm.
I really like the idea of other planes of existence, and, in the case of more epic fantasy, the ability to travel there for adventures. But i didn't like the idea that, say, a bunch of elven and Greek deities shared a realm, while Greek deities that should be living together didn't, all because of alignment. Even when i used alignment, thegoverning organization of the outer planes was deity or belief system (i.e., pantheon), rather than alignment (just the inverse of the great Wheel, which puts alignment first and deity/pantheon second).
The extension of this is that there are theoretically infinite outer planes, but only those whose governing powers are recognized on a given world have connections to that world. You could theoretically hop into the Astral and go to any outer plane, but the odds of you findig the route if it's not one with conduits to the plane you started from are pretty slim. This also means that if *nobody* called upon them, the various demons, devils, etc., couldn't come to this world.
As for inner planes, in my homebrew, the ultimate source of all energy--from magic to such mundane things as digestion or thinking--is the energy planes (Positive & Negative). It used to be that living beings could pretty much all tap into this power directly, to varying degrees, making all sentient beings the equivalent of wizards, and those who chose to learn a bit more could warp reality in ways that now only gods can. Anyway, these godlike mortals, back at the dawn of time, after one too many magical accident, created the inner planes to "filter" this raw energy. So now, the mana that powers magic comes from the elemental planes, having been filtered from the raw power of the positive/negative planes. This means much less raw power is available, much of it lost in the conversion/filteringp rocess, but magic is also much more reliable (i.e., standard D&D spellcasting, where it basically does what it should every time)--so you don't have to worry about accidentally blowing up the world. Oh, the idea isn't that spellcasters actively channel elemental energy, and i don't flavor magic any more elementally than the core rules, just that the fundamental building blocks really *are* the 4 elements (as in Classical philosophy), and the mana that permeates reality, and can be harnessed to do magic, is a "side effect" of reality being made of the tempered stuff of creation (the elemental planes), which is in turn a refinement of the raw stuff of creation (the positive/negative planes). Needless to say, i follow the MotP (1st ed) take on the inner planes: barely hospitable to mortals, with the positive/negative planes being pretty much completely inhospitable--as in "if you're epic-powerful, you might be able to survive for a dozen rounds" inhospitable.
oh yeah, and i added a dream realm, which doesn't "go" anywhere, but is otherwise most like a transitive plane: it was cospatial with every bit of the prime material, and you didn't enter it by physically travelining, but just by changing your state of mind while on the material plane. I never did establish if the body could enter the dream realm, too--the campaign ended before it became a question. I also toyed with adding a faerie realm, but i never did decide whether faeries were elemental spirits, or something else. If they are elemental-related, maybe the faerie realm would be sort of the reality created by the direct intersection of the elemental and material planes.
