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Message: <blockquote data-quote="glass" data-source="post: 8621840" data-attributes="member: 12251">For real, this time. First thing I am going to assume is that where the various astrals meet Toril, they are also close to each other in cosmological terms. Not close enough that you can go directly from one to another, but close enough that some demi-planes that are also cosmologically close to Toril can have connections to more that one.Speaking of demiplanes, the cheerfully-named Barrens of Doom and Despair might be a largish example of such. Officially, its is just a standard (for the World Tree) outer plane - basically a collection of divine realms. Bane, Beshaba, Hoar, Loviatar, and Talona do not actually live there, of course (their Realms are in the GW), but there might be portals to their realms.The reason I am thinking of keeping it around (other than the art being cool), is that it seems like an ideal battleground for forces from different cosmologies. It therefore solves my issue with the Untheric pantheon (well, one of them).OTOH, Blood Rift is up next, and that is officially a battleground (in the Blood War). The Great Wheel’s Blood War does not need such a battleground (they have Gehenna, Hades, and Carceri for that). But maybe the World Axis’s does - I cannot remember OTTOMH what the 4e books say about how demons and devils (who live at opposite ends of the titular World Axis) actually get at each other.The River of Blood is a big old river of evil, basically the World Tree’s cognate of the GW’s River Styx. When they ditched the former cosmology to return to the latter, it officially became an alternative name for the Styx. Which works, but I wonder if there is an opportunity here for it to be something more. My first instinct was to reach every evil plane connected to Toril, but that is an awful lot of planes and ties cosmologies together a bit more closely that I would like. So I would need to pare it down a bit (or a lot)Cynosure is connected to all of Toril (or at least all the bits that have actual gods), although mostly via portals - its connection to the Astral Plane (any of them) is “tenuous at best” according to PGtF.The Dragon Eyrie is interesting. I said in my previous but one post that most of the non-human pantheons are the generic D&D pantheons from a bunch of sources, but that is not the case with regard to dragons. The pantheon originally introduced (I think) in 2e Draconomicon has very little overlap with the generic D&D draconic pantheon presented in (for example) Monster Mythology or Council of Wyrms - basically just Tiamat and possibly Bahamut IIRC, although I do not actually have a copy of Draconomicon. There have been some subsequent attempts to merge the two (“Asgorath is know as Io on the outer planes”), but as has been pretty well established I am a splitter, not a lumper.So, the Dragon Eyrie remains; a demiplane divine realm cosmologically close to Toril, and linked to all  or most of Toril’s Astral Planes.Heliopolis is the name of the shared divine realm of the <s>Egyptian</s> Pharaonic Pantheon in the GW and also home of the Mulhorandi pantheon in the World Tree. As I said upthread, I am keeping the two separate, which means two - although if I was going to worry about the occasional name clash I would have much bigger problems that that!Ziguraxus was the home of the Untheric Pantheon. It was supposedly destroyed (or perhaps faded away) after said pantheon got killed or wandered off, and then was rebuilt for “unknown purposes” (according to one wiki page I found, which apparently got it from a novel). Given that the Ao promoted mortals to replace the Faerunian gods killed during the Time of Troubles why would he not do the same for Gilgeam and Ramman? Or those killed in the Orcgate Wars for that matter? Unther may be smaller than Faerun, but does that mean Ao would leave it without divine…whatever the word is?ISTM more likely that the reason Zigguraxus exists is not because it was rebuilt, but because the Untheric pantheon never completely disappeared so it never faded away.Anyway, since it is desperately short of branches (and since the humans involved came from the same place), I am going to stick Zigguraxus in the rather depleted World Tree with Heliopolis._glass.</blockquote>

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