Planescape Casting off Planescape

[ccs]

Not quite sure. I’m divided between a bigger, more complex thing, and a much simpler cosmos.
The first option is not finished; I need to refine the connections and role of each plane, but will include: Material(s), Spirit World, Places for aligned creatures (but different than the Great Wheel), Place for elementals (perhaps Elemental Chaos or countless minor elemental planes), Shadow Plane, Plane of Mirrors, some “Temporal Plane”, Plane of Electro-Magnetism (just to make a point, part of the elemental planes), Feywild, Far Realm and other Phrenic Planes, Demiplanes. Not sure about Material’s astronomy. But I’m waiting to read more books about the edition.
The other option is: since my campaign will be about time travel, have as few planes as possible. This could be achieved with just one plane besides the Prime Material: the Otherworld, where all extra-planar things are, or perhaps the Spirit World, and perhaps the Temporal Plane too. This would reduce my work and allow me to focus more on time-travel than the planes themselves.

OR....

You could keep the idea of the bigger more complex thing and just not actually detail it. Especially since you say that's not the focus of your campaign.
Great Wheel, 4e-whatever, something else, whatever your players come up with to describe it - it's all the same. Just ways to imagine how it's all organized. And, unless you specifically state something as being a fact as the DM, it's all true. Or might as well be. And if you later think up something cool that would alter the "facts" you gave out? Well, apparently the info wasn't as accurate as was thought....
On the players side it's mechanically the same - Cast the right spell/preform the ritual/use the right magical device & travel to an alternate dimension. Maybe cast certain spells to survive on the desination plane. Have adventures, kill some monsters, loot them, talk to NPCs & return home to the prime.

Oh, and nobody cares if there's such a thing as the Electro-magnetic plane. Or how it connects to whatever. ESPECIALLY if it's not important to the adventure/campaign being played.
Except for DMs who write such stuff up.

 

[cbwjm]

Unless you're doing it for enjoyment, you may want to follow CCS's advice and keep it fairly simple to start with, only detailing the planes as needed for the games. I'm sort of doing that myself for my group's homebrew world.

So far I have the following planes of existence:

The Prime.
The Feywild.
The Shadowfell.
The Elemental Planes which merge some of the older 2e elemental planes (I think the planes as presented in the 5e DMG are similar) with 4e so that I have separate planes of the 4 main elements; border planes of ice, magma, ash, and ooze; and in the middle of all this, the elemental chaos. I haven't detailed any of the outer planes as of yet.

I've detailed this as it came up in my games, the Prime is of course where the main adventures are set. I had an elemental theme to my first adventure which is going to be continuing in the future so I fleshed out the elemental planes a bit. In another story arc, the PCs helped resolve a crisis in an elven kingdom where they discovered a planar orrery that showed the Feywild was passing close to the Prime, allowing an ancient elven enemy (originally from the Shadowfell), to extend a piece of itself into the Prime and start corrupting the wood elf kingdom. The Feywild itself is the original home of the elves from which the current elves escaped to the Prime around 10,000 years before the current storyline.

While I do find fun to create an entire cosmology or campaign setting, it is also a lot of work, much of which may not be seen by the players. If you're fine with that, then create away, otherwise I'd say only do what is needed for the campaign and develop and build upon it as needed.

 

[Igwilly]

Honestly, that is a good idea. No need to carefully detail every plane to start the game; especially when time-travel will get the spotlight. I just have kind of an urge to do a bigger, more detailed game; it’s a mini-game in itself. However, I do need to think about the necessities of my campaign: I’m already taking too much to begin play, I must address that rapidly, and if I start to devise the whole cosmos before DMing, it’s going to take some more time.
I just need to convince myself about that.
After the test adventures, I’ll need some other things, but those can wait. It’s mostly about where I can find stuff on the pdfs; let’s do one thing at a time.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

But what problems would arise if I reject Planescape entirely?

None. None whatsoever.

I found a section in the Monstrous Manual about creating monsters, but if there’s anywhere else to look for, I would be glad to know.

Can't say I've EVER seen much, if anything, along the lines of advice for creating monsters. Mostly you just think it up, throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

.

 

[Big Mac]

Probably the only problem you are going to get is that spells that summon creatures like elementals or outsiders are supposed to pull them over from specific planes.

And spells like Shadow Walk are supposed to interact with specific planes.

If you want to get rid of any planes that are connected to any magic spells, then you either have to tweak the spell (so that it matches the new cosmology you are creating) or get rid of the spell (if you want to avoid having that sort of effect entirely).

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6801225]Igwilly[/MENTION] - as others have said, it's simply not a big deal.

Probably the only problem you are going to get is that spells that summon creatures like elementals or outsiders are supposed to pull them over from specific planes.

And spells like Shadow Walk are supposed to interact with specific planes.

If you want to get rid of any planes that are connected to any magic spells, then you either have to tweak the spell (so that it matches the new cosmology you are creating) or get rid of the spell

You don't even need to tweak. Spells like Conjure Elemental, Gate, Contact Other Plane, etc, don't rely for their mechanics on any planar details.

Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is Dimension Door, which can strand you in the astral plane if you get your coordinates wrong (at least in 1st ed AD&D; I'm assuming that carried over to 2nd ed).

 

[Greenmtn]

As others have mentioned. "Rejecting Planescape" should have no affect on your game (Although I am desperately trying not to cry in my coffee at the thought) and you can go into as much or as little detail as you want about the Planes with them not being the focus of your game.

My recommendation - IF you want "Outer Planes" tied to alignments like in Planescape, would be to concentrate more on different times than different Planes, depending on how your world looks maybe using the Outer Planes as different timelines on the same world? Then you just need stories for what happened in each timeline to make the wold turn out that way.

 

[Igwilly]

Hey, guys!

Thank you for the input. It was a personal issue of mine, and I needed to know it first before my friends and I start to buy lots of pdfs. I’ll tell them this information.
@Greenmtn hahaha yeah, I know Planescape is a much beloved setting, very important to D&D, many people connect this setting to D&D in general, etc. But, as I said, I prefer to not going down the rabbit hole of discussing setting preferences. On the other hand, this is a good suggestion