Do You Care About Cosmology?

[The-Magic-Sword]

I really love it, it is a big part of what makes me interested in a fantasy setting in the long term, whether for reading books or to play in them for an RPG. The Magic system is even more important than other elements for me because I want to be able to understand what my mage characters are doing and why, and I want them to be able to (accurately) technobabble about the magic they're doing when they pass a knowledge check or what have you. Similarly, the cosmology tends to inform a lot about dungeons and the lore that I'm trying to discover, some of it is more historical, but in a fantasy setting that tends to blend-- civilizations that worshiped now forgotten gods or whatever. To me, the appeal of a game that doesn't really allow for that kind of world-building up front would be if it lets us do it at runtime in a collaborative way, but even then it's chancy because I don't like badly thought out lore.

Eventually that usually leads me to the literal cosmology, to addendum about a discussion from a page or two ago. We've actually been working out what exists outside of the planet, and the 'Dream' since Starfinder is going to be offering us rules for starships my players are interested in using.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

I want to know the background lore and stuff, but I'm pretty sure I'm in a minority. But I think it's good to have it there, as a "base of the iceberg" kind of thing – it may be that only some bits actually matter in the campaign, but I think it makes for a better foundation if they have common roots.

This.

 

[aramis erak]

Not really. In RPG terms, "cosmology" is "how the universe is ordered."

YUP!
Mythology really doesn't apply in the technical sense, as the beings we'd label mythological are cosmological forces within the majority of D&D settings...
Mythology is the fantasy written to explain the world's cosmology...

But in D&D, it's often written such that the gods actually did the things that we would think of as myths... and in some settings, they can even go track them down for the "No «bleep», there I was..." stories that we associate with mythological heros, such as Utnapishtim, Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Deucaledon, Yima, Noah, Nuh... building boats to survive a world flood... but to be honest, not a one of those is likelythe actual name of whomever it was build the boat and rode out the flooding of the black sea valley. In a D&D cosmology, we can get a priest to connect us to as who actually did it...