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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jared Rascher" data-source="post: 3747147" data-attributes="member: 28825">Let me rephrase this, because it was never my intention to say that something does or does not have to be part of the game for the game to be D&D.  That's not actually my point.  My point is that the Great Wheel, as it stands, has a certain history, and has a certain way that it works, and that has been in place since 1987, although aspects of it were brought in much earlier.My point is that I think it runs contrary to the spirit of something established in the game to alter it fundamentally.  The Great Wheel is based on the four axis of alignment, but if you mess with that, change its history, and still use the same name, you do start to undermine some of this history of the game.  To clarify, if 4th edition didn't want to have a set cosmology, or wanted to create a whole new cosmology or just refer to "the lower planes" or "the upper planes" it would be much different than using the same names for various groups on the planes and the planes themselves, and then fundamentally change them.As to the Forgotten Realms having a separate cosmology, well, taht's a recent development.  While I'm sure Ed Greenwood didn't use the Great Wheel in the stories he was writing before it was a published setting, it pretty clear right from the start that it was used as soon as it was a D&D setting, and I even remember Ed's "Down to Earth Divinity" article where he advoctes the need for places like Acheron so that gods like Bane would have a home without getting involved in Hell's politics.So I guess I would mind that much if the "generic" material in 4th edition just referred to demons/devil/yugoloths as fiends from the lower planes, and left it to the individual campaign settings to set up the divisions and history between them  (in fact, such an approach would be ideal for a setting like Krynn where there is indeed no Blood War and little point to distinguishing between devils and demons).Also, I strongly suspect that "eladrin" is going to now mean what aasimar meant before, which seems to imply that there may be no "chaotic good" celestial organization in 4th edition, with most of the celestials falling under the purview of angels.  Again, if they had changed the aasimar's name without using an established name, I think it would work better for the "generic" mean that 4th edition should be setting up with its implied setting.</blockquote>

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