DMG2 blurb on Amazon. Attention Planescape fans!

[Shemeska]

Actually, if the Dragon magazine entry on the Mercykillers is anything to go by, there will still be this aspect of Sigil -- Arwyl Swan's Son was mentioned as specifically from Toril.

It's not exactly pure canon, but it puts the idea of "alternate Worlds" in 4e, so there is precedence.

I noticed that as well. I'm not sure if Rob managed to sneak that one past the editors or if they didn't mind. But beyond that mention, the article was well written and touched upon all the sources on the MK's, including the mentions in Dragon during 3e (Nilesia's rumored fate and all).

It did deviate from the core 4e default cosmology in having that setting mixing element, so it'll be interesting to see if WotC's design team themselves keep with that in the future. If they don't, something of Sigil's flavor would be lost.

 

[Mokona]

No...you'll eventually run into the astral dominions of other worlds

I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that if you make it to the Astral Dominions of Forgotten Realms then you can make it to Abeir-Toril.

I intuited that a Spelljammer is how you do this:

planeshift from "the world" into the Astral Sea, get into your well-stocked astral dromond and travel far, far past Hestavar, you just might find the Fugue Plane someday. If you enter the Fugue Plane, and planeshift back to "the world", you'll actually find yourself in the Forgotten Realms.

I'll admit that my intuition can be proven wrong by supplements from Wizards of the Coast.

Logically, and perhaps "as written", if Forgotten Realms and the known world are connected by the Astral Sea then the planar portal ritual could allow you to travel from the known world's Sigil to Abeir-Toril. Therfore, , I declare that Sigil still has all those portals just like it originally had.

 

[Dire Bare]

I noticed that as well. I'm not sure if Rob managed to sneak that one past the editors or if they didn't mind. But beyond that mention, the article was well written and touched upon all the sources on the MK's, including the mentions in Dragon during 3e (Nilesia's rumored fate and all).

It did deviate from the core 4e default cosmology in having that setting mixing element, so it'll be interesting to see if WotC's design team themselves keep with that in the future. If they don't, something of Sigil's flavor would be lost.

Huh? How does this "deviate from core 4e"??

The 4e books have been pretty clear that there are alternate worlds, specifically "the world", Krynn, Toril, and Eberron at the very least. Show me where the 4e books state that each campaign setting is completely divorced from the others, as they were somewhat in 3e (hmm, that sounds awful demanding, how about "show me . . . if you want to . . .).

Now, 4e has not yet written down the "planar metaphysics" on how the various campaign worlds relate to each other, are they alternate planes, alternate dimensions, can you fly a spaceship or a spelljammer in between them, etc. And really, if you can take a gate from Toril to Sigil and then another from Sigil to Krynn, it really doesn't matter if these worlds are alternate realities or simply different planets in the same material plane.

 

[Dire Bare]

I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that if you make it to the Astral Dominions of Forgotten Realms then you can make it to Abeir-Toril.

Heh, looks like I read the section in MotP a bit too literally and overthought it. Yes, it makes sense that you can travel directly from the Astral to a different campaign setting without having to travel "through" an astral dominion first, just as you can access the Astral directly from "the world" and vice versa.

I've got too many versions of D&D cosmology bouncing around in my head!!! I'm sure I was right for at least one of them! Maybe BECMI!

 

[TwinBahamut]

My brother already posted about this, but I may as well do so too...

As one of the people who thinks that a major flaw of the 4e Manual of the Planes was that it had far too many elements of the old Great Wheel cosmology and Planescape setting (and sacrificed many of the best ideas of the 4E cosmology in order to put them there), I don't like the fact that Sigil will be given so much space in the DMG 2.

I would be much happier if the WotC people would put more effort into creating totally new places, like they did with Fallcrest, rather than rehash old places and concepts that have been done before.

 

[TheWyrd]

I was a fan of 3e giving each 'world' its own built in Cosmology and then offering up the option of a Cosmological Bridge through Shadow (Or the Phlogiston or Sigil) so I'm a little sad to see it go away but I'll likely just keep it for my own use anyway.

The way the 4e cosmology appears to be shaping up, you have the Astral Sea with a clustering of Astral domains in a neighborhood. If you go far enough into the Astral sea you have another neighborhood with another set of Astral domains and a world. If you think about it, the Astral Sea has just become space and each of the neighborhoods is a solar system with Astral Domains orbiting around their own world. No real word on how the Elemental Chaos works into this.

I think I'm much happier with self contained little cosmologies.