The Little Raven
First Post
Korgoth said:
I wasn't aware that Iron or Sigils were a distinctly Kung Fu convention.
Silly me for thinking the West has had it's own long tradition of secret societies.
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Design and Development: Cosmology
- Thread starter Mouseferatu
- Start date
I wasn't aware that Iron or Sigils were a distinctly Kung Fu convention.
Silly me for thinking the West has had it's own long tradition of secret societies.
Howndawg
Explorer
Mouseferatu said:http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20070926a
This is simply going to further inflame the ongoing conflict between those who want them to keep the Great Wheel and those who don't.
Me? I like the sound of this. Feels much more mythic and properly spiritual to me.
Sounds a little White Wolfy to me. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. I've never been a big fan of the Great Wheel.
Howndawg
mhacdebhandia
Explorer
Druids spilling blood over the roots of thirsting trees suggests to me that your hopes are justified.MoogleEmpMog said:
I'm quite happy with this new cosmology. I have always liked planes which are alternate versions of the material world - and now we have two, with excellent distinctions between them. The Astral Sea is infinitely expandable - you could place anything you wanted in it. The Elemental Chaos sounds very useful in games.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Hooray?Belorin said:
Ragnar_Deerslayer
First Post
I've been VERY positive on 4E so far, but this is the first 4E preview that hasn't sounded good to me.
Feywild:
Why do we need a place that's "just like the real world, only here, there's less civilization and an eladrin's tower?" I thought the "points of light" concept meant there was less civilization already and plenty of unmapped places to put things like an eladrin's tower. Evil druids, mazes of thorns – why do we need a separate plane for these things?
Shadowfell:
Basically, a necropolis done as a plane. Meh. "Points of light" again – I was thinking Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser for the Prime Material gameworld, with plenty of "ruined cities swept by long ago plague and madness." What else is there? Oh, no! A "forest of black thorns!" How the freak will we know whether we're in the Shadowfell or the Feywild?!! At least we know we're not on the Prime Material Plane. No thorns there, nosiree. (Seriously, didn't anyone else think the prominent mention of "thorns" in two of the planes was a little much?)
Elemental Chaos:
"Unthinkably vast – thousands of miles" – huh? London to Jerusalem is ~3500 miles by road. That's not unthinkably vast. That's well within the experience of medieval Crusaders. And they basically just took the elemental planes and mashed them together. Will it work better? I'm not sure. I liked the idea of an entire Plane of Fire, with infinite distance of flame, and no escape but magic.
Astral Sea:
Sounds like the Great Wheel, just less organized. Still, this one held my interest the most. It offers more room than the Great Wheel did, with more opportunities to explore. If you're ditching alignment as a cosmological force, this was the right thing to do.
I liked the complexity of the Great Wheel. The intricacies of the Paraelemental and Quasielemental Planes were logical but required thinking about – the Prime Material Plane was only a very small part of a very large Omniverse. Once players stepped out of the PMP and started exploring the planes, it was a whole new ballgame. The 4E cosmology sounds like "just like our world, but different." The GW cosmology was alien and foreign but ordered and structured – it wasn't necessarily intuitive, but it did make sense.
In short, there's little here in the Feywild or Shadowfell that I wouldn't have put on the Prime Material Plane of a game world in a "points of light" setting. For the rest of it, I'll take a "wait and see" approach.
Feywild:
Why do we need a place that's "just like the real world, only here, there's less civilization and an eladrin's tower?" I thought the "points of light" concept meant there was less civilization already and plenty of unmapped places to put things like an eladrin's tower. Evil druids, mazes of thorns – why do we need a separate plane for these things?
Shadowfell:
Basically, a necropolis done as a plane. Meh. "Points of light" again – I was thinking Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser for the Prime Material gameworld, with plenty of "ruined cities swept by long ago plague and madness." What else is there? Oh, no! A "forest of black thorns!" How the freak will we know whether we're in the Shadowfell or the Feywild?!! At least we know we're not on the Prime Material Plane. No thorns there, nosiree. (Seriously, didn't anyone else think the prominent mention of "thorns" in two of the planes was a little much?)
Elemental Chaos:
"Unthinkably vast – thousands of miles" – huh? London to Jerusalem is ~3500 miles by road. That's not unthinkably vast. That's well within the experience of medieval Crusaders. And they basically just took the elemental planes and mashed them together. Will it work better? I'm not sure. I liked the idea of an entire Plane of Fire, with infinite distance of flame, and no escape but magic.
Astral Sea:
Sounds like the Great Wheel, just less organized. Still, this one held my interest the most. It offers more room than the Great Wheel did, with more opportunities to explore. If you're ditching alignment as a cosmological force, this was the right thing to do.
I liked the complexity of the Great Wheel. The intricacies of the Paraelemental and Quasielemental Planes were logical but required thinking about – the Prime Material Plane was only a very small part of a very large Omniverse. Once players stepped out of the PMP and started exploring the planes, it was a whole new ballgame. The 4E cosmology sounds like "just like our world, but different." The GW cosmology was alien and foreign but ordered and structured – it wasn't necessarily intuitive, but it did make sense.
In short, there's little here in the Feywild or Shadowfell that I wouldn't have put on the Prime Material Plane of a game world in a "points of light" setting. For the rest of it, I'll take a "wait and see" approach.
Loincloth of Armour
First Post
delericho said:
Maybe they already tried, and the Abyss spat out a horde of howling demons that tore the alliance down into the Abyssal maw, and birthed a new legion of fearsome beasts born from the twisted souls of the alliance.
Maybe the Powers have learned that the Abyss is a problem, but left to itself, it's a problem you can (sort of) live with. Life is miserable with the Abyss around, but liveable.
Rile it up, and the Abyss becomes your worst nightmare.
I found the concept of size to be amazingly bad in this design, as others have posted. Thousands of miles? All the demons in the multiverse, and whatever else lives there? A few dozen epic adventurers and their angel allies could wipe out that small amount of evil.
I like the inclusion of faerie, it is one of the communities' biggest wants in terms of things not really done in D&D.
I like the collapse of the shadowfell into one realm (even if it is too small).
I'm not keen on the concept of the demons and devils, the size of their realms, and all that other stuff I've already complained about.
This cosmology seems to assume there is only one inhabited planet, doesn't it? That is the only way to explain the tinyness (sp?) of the outer planes.
I like the inclusion of faerie, it is one of the communities' biggest wants in terms of things not really done in D&D.
I like the collapse of the shadowfell into one realm (even if it is too small).
I'm not keen on the concept of the demons and devils, the size of their realms, and all that other stuff I've already complained about.
This cosmology seems to assume there is only one inhabited planet, doesn't it? That is the only way to explain the tinyness (sp?) of the outer planes.
I love the Great Wheel, of course, but I'd rather it not be in the hands of designers who clearly DON'T care for it.
So with that in mind, I think there's a lot to like in this new cosmology. It's fairly simple, and if the game no longer has alignment I think some of that simplicity is quite welcome.
There seem to be very few "planar" stories I could play in 1e, 2e, or 3e that I couldn't find a way to shoehorn into this new cosmology. Even some of the real world mythological planes like Ysgard and Nirvana and whatnot could pretty easily fit in as domains floating in the Astral, so I'm not really sure what we're losing.
Chris Sims said in another thread that Graz'zt is still around and he's still a demon. Malcanthet is an open question, and I've got to wonder if there's room for Sigil somewhere in this new set-up, but I'm a lot less interested in the spatial relationship of one plane to another than I am in whether or not I can recreate the classic D&D planar atmosphere with the new design.
And judging by what I've seen so far, I think I can, and that's quite refreshing.
The devil will be in the details, of course, but from what I've seen so far I imagine you could fit most of the Abyss as written (by me, ahem!) in Hordes of the Abyss into this new set-up.
And I think that's pretty cool.
--Erik
So with that in mind, I think there's a lot to like in this new cosmology. It's fairly simple, and if the game no longer has alignment I think some of that simplicity is quite welcome.
There seem to be very few "planar" stories I could play in 1e, 2e, or 3e that I couldn't find a way to shoehorn into this new cosmology. Even some of the real world mythological planes like Ysgard and Nirvana and whatnot could pretty easily fit in as domains floating in the Astral, so I'm not really sure what we're losing.
Chris Sims said in another thread that Graz'zt is still around and he's still a demon. Malcanthet is an open question, and I've got to wonder if there's room for Sigil somewhere in this new set-up, but I'm a lot less interested in the spatial relationship of one plane to another than I am in whether or not I can recreate the classic D&D planar atmosphere with the new design.
And judging by what I've seen so far, I think I can, and that's quite refreshing.
The devil will be in the details, of course, but from what I've seen so far I imagine you could fit most of the Abyss as written (by me, ahem!) in Hordes of the Abyss into this new set-up.
And I think that's pretty cool.
--Erik
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