Design and Development: Cosmology

[Pale]

Hmmmm... I really like this.

They have ditched the Great Wheel, but it seems that they are still managing to keep all of the elements there in some fashion.

I don't see it as being too hard to use a Great Wheel cosmology with the provided materials if someone wishes to (especially using supplemental material from Necromancer Games).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You mean LeGuin? Ursula K. Le Guin.

Loved the books when I was young. Not so much for the Sci Fi series.

Sorry, I have a nascent flu, not to mention I'm trying to block out remembering more of The Farthest Shore than I have to.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

They can be. They can also be fantasy.

They can also be biology and geology, respectively.

 

[Scholar & Brutalman]

I really like this change. I don't see any mention of other prime material planes, which ishow I prefer things except in a specifically built plane-hopping cosmology - the cosmology should revolves around the PCs home plane.

I think that Wizards have a coherent process in how they're addressing older material: where they see elements as redundant, they merge or remove them if they see them as non-critical, or try to strongly differentiate them if they see as as central to the game.

They see having an elemental plane as important, but not individual ones, so they get merged. The negative energy plane and shadows get merged, probably with ethereal as well. The planes are now fewer but much more distinct. They remove the erinyes and keep the succubus because they don't see both sides having cheesecake fiends as a central element to the game; they want to retain Demons and Devils as separate types of fiends so they strongly differentiate them.

The early Design and Development article on Dragons said:

They’re different from each other, across categories (the metallics aren’t like the chromatics), across colors (reds and whites don’t have all the same attacks), and across age categories (fear the ancient dragons.)

so the process is going on across the monsters as well across the planes. Probably with all game elements.

 

[Mortellan]

The Wheel has fallen off the wagon!

Interesting that they have Vecna moving to Pandemonium. Calculated choice or pure random blather?

 

[Imp]

Huh. My "Feywild" and "Shadowfell" are named Seelie and Thule, and work like Eberron planes, but yeah, this is fairly close to the cosmology I brewed up too.

 

[Rechan]

I hope in 5th Edition, we can move away from names like Vecna and Thazamhanejad and suchlike.

 

[FabioMilitoPagliara]

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?!

where you are going to get Ioun Stones if there are no stars???? it's first adventuring place since a few billion years in the future!!!!

 

[mhacdebhandia]

It was as tied to the setting as spells that boned you based on your alignment.

Err . . . is that "Grandma friendly"?

 

[mhacdebhandia]

The Astral Sea is decent though, though the traditional (and mythological) Astral Plane would be just as good.

And by "mythological" you of course mean "19th-century theosophical", yeah?