Design and Development: Cosmology

[Just Another User]

Wow. Not that it shocks anyone, but I totally dig this!

Nitpicks: the Abyss being 'thousands of miles arcoss.' The Earth's radius at the Equator is 6,378 km, so it's diameter is 12,756 km, or 7,296 miles. My point is...that makes the Abyss seem incredibly small to me...it could barely swallow the Earth. I would expect the Abyss to be tens or even hundreds of thousands of miles across, if it could even be measured.

So, planes are no longer infinite? Does the new cosmology assume that the material plane is only a single planet? I'm not advocating Spelljammer or anything, but where does the stars, sun, moon, an everything in the sky fit in? I think I'm having a hard time making a written case, but I just get the impression that they are scaling things too small...this entire cosmology (material, shadowfell, feywild, astral, and elemental) could all fit in our solar system.

But man, I love the flavor!

There are no stars in 4D!,You see, you can't have adventures on them so designer decided they are useless and they are just tiny speck of light in the sky, the same for planets. Also, the sun is just a ball of fire in the sky some kilometer of radius, maybe less After all why make it bigger? It is just a waste of space for a place where you can't go anyway. And last, Earth can be so big but the game world is much smaller, what is the point to have places in it that are too far away to be able to have adventures in it? My guess is that all the game world will be big as twice the north america, larger of that would be overkill.

Kidding, of course (a little bitter maybe, but kidding )

"Unthinkably vast -thousands of miles" Hey, wait! I just thought it?!

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

"Unthinkably vast – thousands of miles" – huh? London to Jerusalem is ~3500 miles by road.

... by road?

Aren't there, like, oceans getting in the way and stuff?

Oh, sure, there's the Chunnel now, but there certainly wasn't a hundred years ago.

Besides, thousands of miles across, and millions of miles deep would certainly qualify as "unthinkably vast" in my book.

 

[Keldryn]

I'm really liking the sounds of this so far. The old "Great Wheel" always seemed ultra dogmatic and rather bland to me. Planescape was certainly not bland, but that was the tone of the setting and had nothing to do with the structure of the outer planes. And it always seemed really dumb to me how the elven gods, Sune of the Forgotten Realms, and Chaotic Good gods from dozens of pantheons all hung out with the Greek gods.

While it may sound strange, I don't mind the article as much as I thought I would. I still have no intentions of using the new cosmology (as in, EVER), but I can now relate to its premise - to simplify the Great Wheel to make it more accessible to younger (or, rather, easily bored/impatient) players and those who dislike planar adventures and material in general.

That came off as supremely arrogant and unnecessarily insulting. Thanks.

The openness of the Astral Sea is also really appealing. Instead of the codified Outer Planes, we have the ability to toss in any number of dominions out there in the sea. Got an idea for a strange new plane? Toss it in the Astral Sea and there you go!

This was pretty much how the Astral Plane was set up in the D&D Companion Set (1985ish); there were no rigid alignment-based planes branching off from the Astral, only whatever planes the DM felt like putting into the game.

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.

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 this approach to cosmology; it's basically the same approach that Eberron, the 3e Forgotten Realms, and The Book of the Righteous all take. The cosmology isn't designed to be all things to all possible gaming worlds -- its customized to each campaign setting to reflect its mythology. The old Great Wheel cosmology was comprised of a mish-mash of thematically unrelated elements, many of which did not belong in a large number of campaign settings.

 

[Aloïsius]

No, it has to be because they are copying Exalted.

I disagree : they are bot copying Ars Magica.

More seriously, I think Ars Magica "regio" will work perfectly with the feywild or the shadowfell. In fact, IMC, I have a "mythic" alternate plane (dragons, giants and fey) and a "undead" alternate plane (and a few other, as well...). And you can travel between them through regio.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I wonder whether they will have allowances for a 'far realm' sort of place in this cosmology?

It doesn't sound as if it would be a particularly natural fit for a domain in the astral sea (because that would kinda make it a 'near realm', no?)

But then where *would* it go? Maybe at the far edges of the astral sea?

I think the far realm is the only one of the standard cosmological features that I'd be loathe to give up...

 

[Grog]

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.

Keep in mind that "thousands of miles" could mean anything from 2,000 miles to 999,000 miles. And the latter would be many many many many times bigger than Earth.

And anyway, it's not as if the infinite planes of the Great Wheel didn't cause huge problems with the setting if you actually thought about them. (One example off the top of my head - each layer of the Nine Hells and the Abyss is infinite, right? Well, with a nonzero density of Pit Fiends and Balors on each of those layers in their respective home planes, that means there's an infinite number of Pit Fiends and Balors out there. So why would they bother using lower-level demons and devils in the Blood War? Why not just field vast armies purely made up of Pit Fiends and Balors?)

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

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.

Medieval France was hundreds of miles across, and had 40 million inhabitants, just as a point of comparison. Make it much bigger than "thousands of miles across" and you might as well have it be "infinite."

 

[Imaro]

Yeah, because it's not as if Exalted ever drew on mythological sources to design it's world, and D&D sure couldn't be drawing on those same sources. No, it has to be because they are copying Exalted.

Yeah, just drawing on them in a very similar way. You can draw on inspirations that are the same, but it all boils down to how you use them, and I'm sorry but it's not just the inspirations...it's how they're being used.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Yeah, because it's not as if Exalted ever drew on mythological sources to design it's world, and D&D sure couldn't be drawing on those same sources. No, it has to be because they are copying Exalted.

There's been a lot of that. 4E is clearly going back to a more real-world mythological feeling, tapping into classic tropes. It seems a lot of people are only familiar with those classical elements via their expression in other games or recent fantasy fiction, as opposed to the original myths and fairy tales.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

Better yet...again from Exalted

Shadowfell=Shadowlands
Elemental Chaos=Wyld lands
FeyWild=Borders of Creation
Astral Sea=Yu-shan( actually this one is a stretch, but everything else is spot on)

This with the demon and devil tid bits has got me kinda dissapointed. I've played this game before.

The Shadowfell is similar to the Shadowlands, but the Shadowfell seems similar to the Demiplane of Dread, the Plane of Shadow, and the Negative Material Plane.

Both the Elemental Chaos and the Wyld seem to be areas roiling with energy, but the former seems more elemental while the latter involves things like dreams, stories, passions, rages, etc. There is a definite emotive component to the Wyld, so much so that you can actually slay powerful beings with a story. I doubt telling a story in the Elemental Chaos will help you very much. The Elemental Chaos seems much more "physical", while the Wyld contains both physical and emotional components, and it much less "restrictive" about what can be there.

The Feywild seems to be essentially the Faerie realm as depicted in numerous other mythologies and legends.

So I guess I don't see how this is a rip off of Exalted. There are some similarities, but that's because many of these cosmologies have similar sources (the Wyld is pretty much "ripped off" from the Amber series, for example).