Dragon 370 - Design & Development: Cosmology

[Shroomy]

The newest "Design & Development" column was posted today; subscribers can read it here.

The most important piece of information IMO is that all the WotC campaign settings released will use the World Axis cosmology; there is even some hints about how it impacts Eberron.

 

[demonsquidgod]

What's a World Axis?

 

[Shroomy]

What's a World Axis?

Its the name of the 4e cosmological model. The world is between two parallel planes, the Feywild and Shadowfell, and two media planes, the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos.

 

[MerricB]

"Anyway, World Axis sounds cooler than the Great Bobbin." - Rich Baker.

That's a really good and interesting article.

Cheers!

 

[Vael]

Clearly Rich has never experienced the awesomeness of Bobbin Threadbare and the Loom.

While I wasn't exactly happy with changing Eberron's Cosmology, I really liked it, I understand the logic, and am still looking forward to seeing Eberron next year.

 

[MerricB]

Clearly Rich has never experienced the awesomeness of Bobbin Threadbare and the Loom.

While I wasn't exactly happy with changing Eberron's Cosmology, I really liked it, I understand the logic, and am still looking forward to seeing Eberron next year.

I dare say that the new cosmology for Eberron will likely play very similar to the old.

Cheers!

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm with them for much of the article, but there's one minor problem and one big problem with the thought process here.

#1:

Infinite planes stagger the imagination. If things were really infinite, you could walk for millions of miles across the burning plain of Avernus and not actually be any bit closer to your goal. And how many devils does it take to fill an infinite plane with a suitable population density? DMs just handwaved these questions before, but we wondered if it was really necessary for everything to be infinite when most D&D games visited just a few specific points of interest in each plane.

This is a "it's not really broke" angle. Like the size of halflings, no one had a problem with it. Infinite planes don't stagger the imagination, and the quantity of devils is a pointless question and has always been. You could walk millions of miles to your goal because you traveled at the speed of plot, exactly the way most D&D games travel. Limited Planes don't fix anything. No one mapped out all of Avernus, no one bothered to count the number of devils in Hell, and no one ever felt a need to. Infinity wasn't a problem, it was a solution: there's infinite possibilities here.

With that said, even "finite" planes are too big to map and STILL no one is asking how many devils exist in the nine hells, so it's not like anything has really changed.

Which is really the hallmark of a pointless change. No one cares.

#2:

So why is it so important that all D&D worlds should use that same cosmological chassis? Two answers: monster origins and spell effects. These are important because they’re hardwired into the game. We don’t want to create settings where you have to change some piece of information in the monster stat block to fit it into the setting. Likewise, we want the same spell (power, ritual, or magic item, really) to work the same way in each setting, regardless of cosmology. If we create a +3 shadowslayer sword, we don’t want the DM to have to work out what’s a shadow monster and what isn’t. Likewise, the shadow crossing ritual ought to work the same way in any setting. We don’t want to print settings with long lists of exceptions and modifications to powers and effects. It’s better to use a setting’s “exceptionalism currency” to deal with the specific locales and entities you have to deal with, not the mechanical workings of planar creatures and travels.

IMO, this kind of thinking is thinking is almost entirely bass ackwards.

FIRST of all, and most importantly, having a different cosmology helps define what is important in your world. I mean, this is basically the real reason that human cultures over the aeons have all come up with different cosmologies (Dante's vision of Hell/Purgatory/Paradise, Miltonian "world on a string"/"music of the spheres" heliocentrism, the Hindu wheel of existence, Nordic Ysgard, et cetra ad nauseum). To lack support for this customization in D&D is lazy, narrowminded, and ultimately at cross-purposes to actually telling the story you want to tell.

SECOND of all, but related, is that one cosmology is not truly universal. Like I talked about in the thread on "what is Core," settings define themselves by including things that others don't and excluding things that others include. If you can't exclude the feywild or the astral sea or the far realm or the elemental chaos, or the shadowfell, if you can't include, I dunno, a plane of dreams or a plane of parallel consciousness, or a million extra Earths, or something like the thread "A Nameless City on a Many-Named Sea" cultivates, you're shoehorning in things that were never meant to fit, that don't fit, and that are frankly incongruous, and you're leaving out things that would help define and differentiate the setting.

Now, I understand their reasons for making One True Cosmology. But there is too much sacrificed on the altar of convenience here. In a game that expects me to come up with on-the-fly narrative acrobatics for Shroedinger's Hit Points, they can't expect me to figure out what a shadowslayer sword or a shadow creature or the shadow crossing ritual is in a campaign that wants to make itself unique by excluding the shadowfell? REALLY? They have no problem chucking encounter-limited tripping at me and expecting me to totally be okay with that exception to the way the world normally works, but excluding or altering a subset of abilities is somehow too vastly complicated for my little lizard-brain? Are you serious? I can read a 900 page instruction manual for the game, but I can't quite understand when a shadow-thing might not work if I decide there's no shadowfell? Do you think I'm that dumb?

So because I don't just want to tear it down, let's see an alternative. How about we see how I would have it done:

Step 1: You know that things are going to have alternate cosmologies, alternate dimensions, different afterlives, and all sorts of interesting variations on worlds to explore. You know this. The real world does it, fantasy literature does it, every thing that you are ripping off culling for inspiration from does it, and it is something that a DM should not only be able to do, it is something they should be encouraged to do. Make your world your own, twist your cosmology to your own ends, and this is a good thing. Yes, I do want to hear about your world's alternate multiversal model.

Step 2: Don't hardwire the assumed cosmology into the game rules. Really, it's that simple. Maybe PC's in certain settings won't fight shadow creatures. That should be okay. Maybe PC's in certain settings won't shadow walk. That should be okay. Maybe there will be no gods in some settings, and maybe no fey in others. That should be okay, too. Maybe your little ritual doesn't have universal application. Really, what's the big deal?

Oh, wait, maybe this is the big deal:

We want Eberron players to be able to buy a book like Manual of the Planes and use it in their games.

...so I can't have a world modeled after the Norse cosmology because you want to sell more copies of the Manual of the Planes?

Shouldn't the Manual of the Planes have told me really how to make those new cosmologies, then? Shouldn't it have been more of a toolkit (a la the 3e MotP) and less of a "Now Everyone Needs Dragonborn" moment? Maybe said: "Hey, if you get rid of the Shadowfell, here are some things to consider..." instead of "OH GOD NO DON'T GET RID OF THE SHADOWFELL! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!" Instead of getting a toolkit, I get a brick wall that I can beat my head against while I'm trying to figure out my setting's own cosmology.

*deep breath*

But there's a lot of thought that I like, too. For instance, this:

* Exotic adventuring environments
* Homes of deities
* Homes of outsiders and elementals
* Alignment focused (outer planes)
* Elemental energy (inner planes)
* Means of travel
* Intrusions into “normal” world
* Where you go when you die

Only one of those has gone away: the planes aren’t really about alignment any more. They’re much less a means of travel than they used to be (we don’t explain teleportation as jaunting through the Astral Sea), but the Shadow Walk ritual still lets characters use the Shadowfell for speedy travel across the world.

It's a good list of what the planes are and should be, and I don't mind dropping the alignment angle at all on this one.

This:

The Elemental Planes were unusable. With the exception of the plane of Air, they were pretty much instantly lethal to unprotected characters. Most of the relatively few adventures set in these places actually took place in air pockets in the otherwise hostile planes. Places you can’t go to aren’t very useful for the game.

...

Good planes were boring. We’ve made Herculean efforts to make that less true in Planescape and various editions of the Manual of the Planes, but it was still true: Our fondness for alignment-based symmetry made us fill the Great Wheel with places like Arcadia, Bytopia, and Elysium.

Demons and devils were too similar. Two of our iconic monster groups in the game were essentially indistinguishable from each other. We wanted to take steps to give them each their own space to stand in.

The Ethereal Plane might be one of the most broken parts of the old D&D cosmology, and I don’t think it’s missed much...We cut a great big knot of crazy rules when we killed the Ethereal Plane. Ghosts could just be insubstantial and phasing -- they didn’t need to exist on another plane (and have a special ability that let them manifest in the world). All the complicated rules about what effects passed from the world to the Ethereal Plane (and vice versa) -- like magic missile and the gaze of a basilisk -- could just fade into history. If we want effects in the game that let characters walk through walls, we can still have them. They just give the characters phasing rather than transporting them to another plane of existence.

I mostly agree with that list. I mean, I know demons and devils weren't really that similar and that good planes didn't have to be boring, but making good planes more exciting and demons and devils more different is basically a good idea, and I think 4e did a good job on that, as far as I can tell (I haven't seen anything about "good planes" yet, but I'm looking forward to 4e's take on Celestia). I also have no love of planes that are just there to travel through, so ditching the Ethereal Plane (and the host of wonky rules it brings with it), without stopping the ability to move through walls, was a good idea.

So, yes, a lot of good stuff, but one very bad idea that needs to be abandoned tout suite.

 

[Shemeska]

The most important piece of information IMO is that all the WotC campaign settings released will use the World Axis cosmology;

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid decision.

It's also what I expected of them.

 

[Shroomy]

I've actually read multi-page threads about the nature of the infinite plans and it made my eyes bleed. I shall never go down that road again.

As for your second complaint, well, I see your point and if it makes any difference, I think that I read somewhere that the 4e MotP does give some guidance to DMs in creating their own cosmologies (isn't there where the Great Wheel part comes in?), but I also understand that WoTC is also in the business of selling books and they need to maximize their audience. Though they specifically mention monster origin and spell effects, they're biggest concern, given the reference to the FC series in relation to Eberron, seems to be how the fluff impacts sales. IMO, they're in a bind, as if they don't anchor planar content in at least some kind of fluff, they get flack, and if they do anchor it to fluff, it is less appealing to people who use specific settings that differs from the initial fluff. While I personally really like the World Axis cosmology based purely on the fluff, I can immediately see the benefit of a unified but extremely flexible cosmology (with the flexibility coming in through individualized Astral Domains, for instance).

 

[Shroomy]

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid decision.

It's also what I expected of them.

Its no dumber than forcing the Great Wheel on Athas or Krynn.