Ragnar_Deerslayer said:
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?
I think you're not grasping the idea. This is done to emulate the idea of Fairy Realm from old fairy tales. The deep, dark forest is home to wolves, goblins and worse, but on a full moon when the borders between the worlds wear thinner, powerful and capricious spirits can come and play havoc with hapless travellers. In those nights, prudent folk lock themselves at home, spreading sheep's blood on their doorways to keep the evil spirits at bay. Of course, certain more powerful personages can ally themselves with the barons of the other world and set up an outpost there, keeping themselves hidden from all who don't know where to look.
In other words, it's perfectly possible to have a dangerous mundane world
and a dangerous fey realm side-by-side.
Ragnar_Deerslayer said:
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?)
While I agree the Fey realm and the realm of the Dead may be doing some sort of conceptual overlap, I can't really picture the dead mingling with dryads and Redcaps; regardless, if one of the two had to go, I'd drop the Fey realm.
That being said, I imagine the two will have a very different feel. When one is in the fey realm, everything feels more vibrant, more alive, more
untamed. The danger here is from Nature's retribution for the folly of Men in trying to control her. In the Lands of the Dead, however, sounds and colours should be muted, and an oppressive air hangs everywhere. Cities lie in broken ruins, but the ruins aren't overgrown; rather, they're tortured hulls sticking from the earth like black, broken teeth. Amid those ruins, the Dead lie, envious of the living who come to mock them with their colour and heat. And if the living should intrude for too long, they will themselves be marked by the dark energies of the place, until such a time comes that they are claimed by the land as its own...
Ragnar_Deerslayer said:
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.
Except the current Elemental Planes aren't infinite, per se, since one may walk (or swim, or fly, or whatever) and eventually reach the edge of the plane, where it blends as a paraelement into the next element. Like somebody said in a previous thread: the "bottomless ocean" of the Plane of Water actually has a bottom: it's called the Paraelemental Plane of Ooze -- and further "beneath" it, the Elemental Plane of Earth.
Furthermore, taking current movement rules, humans usually walk three miles every hour. The London to Jerusalem trek would take, then, 1166 hours of walking, which can be done in 145 days. Now, in the Abyss there's not much likelihood of finding a road stretching from one side to the other, so those 145 days may perhaps double into 290 days -- the better part of a year. Now, this may not seem so bad, but consider the utterly inimical terrain that is the Abyss: harrassed every day by demons, never knowing where you can find a place to rest or whether the water can be drunk or if those demonic spawn's flesh is really edible or not...
Ragnar_Deerslayer said:
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.
You're certainly welcome to dismiss these all out of hand; it's an implied cosmology for a reason. Still, it would be good for you to at least look at it with an open mind if for nothing else than to mine for ideas...
