Elemental Planes Killed

[Desdichado]

Non-Dark Sun sourcebooks certainly do include Athas as part of the Great Wheel. I can quote you page numbers if you'd like.

Within Dark Sun material, it's questionable and certainly up for debate. It really depends on if you approach it from the meta-setting perspective, or solely from the Athasian perspective. But even in that latter event, it's up for debate.

Why would anyone want to look at a non Dark Sun sourcebook for the Dark Sun cosmology? The only way it could be considered debateable is if you're a Planescape fanboy who is constantly looking for Planescape to trump any other setting materials, regardless of what they say in the actual setting books themselves.

Oh, wait...

 

[Desdichado]

It's not just "four people" who care about it, or else we'd probably have a much shorter thread, many longtime D&D players, especially those who play or played cosmology-intensive games are going to care about this. Personally, the D&D Multiverse was one of the great things about D&D as far as I was concerned, the idea that all the myriad official settings were tied together via Spelljammer and Planescape.

Psst! Hyberbole! I know there's actually more than four people who care. Would it make you feel better if I said "very few?"

I'm with macben... macdaddy... whatever his name is; the Australian guy... I think most D&D fans think the whole Great Wheel tying together all campaign settings is complete garbage.

Actually, "the planes" is not a D&Dism, it's an actual medievalism. One of the most interesting courses I got to take getting my History degree was Medieval Cosmology. Turns out that much of the "Great Wheel" (especially the inner planes and the transitive planes) came from medieval and renaissance thought about the metaphysical structure of the universe.

Now, I know there is this idea out there that medievalism is bad in D&D, and it is supposed to be 21st century western culture and ways of thinking with a thin veneer of renaissance clothing and weapons for flavor, but the general layout and structure of the Great Wheel cosmology is very much in-period for D&D.

I'm calling

on that claim.

The foundation of the Great Wheel is the two axis alignment system is not based on anything the medievals dreamed up. And the fact that they include Norse, Greek and even American Indian concepts all shoehorned together makes your claim even more bizarre.

Only the inner planes, as a relic of Neoplatonic schools of thought could possibly be compared to a medieval cosmology, and even then it's a relatively poor fit. And the word plane was coined by Yelena Blavatskaya in The Secret Doctrine which was a late 19th century theosophical work. But even so, the concept wasn't anything like the D&D word "plane"---it was more like a state of being or consciousness, not a world outside our world. Gygax took a concept from mythology---realms like Hades, Jotunheim, etc. and applied a word that was currently popular amongst relict hippies and New Age thought that was still kicking around in the mid-70s and jammed the two of them together.

Sorry, not buying it.

 

[Midknightsun]

I'm with macben... macdaddy... whatever his name is; the Australian guy... I think most D&D fans think the whole Great Wheel tying together all campaign settings is complete garbage.

I couldn't agree more with this ^

DOWN WITH THE GREAT WHEEL!!!!!!!!

Though personally, what I'd really like to see is just a loose cosmos with a bunch of different planar ideas, and maybe several conceptual models on how they interact on a multiplanar level, and encourage DMs to take what they want and make it how they want. If you like the GW, have at it. Personally, I'm tired of it after 20 odd years of playing the game. Some new ideas--new inspirations, would be great.

YMMV

 

[Geron Raveneye]

I'm calling

on that claim.

The foundation of the Great Wheel is the two axis alignment system is not based on anything the medievals dreamed up. And the fact that they include Norse, Greek and even American Indian concepts all shoehorned together makes your claim even more bizarre.

Only the inner planes, as a relic of Neoplatonic schools of thought could possibly be compared to a medieval cosmology, and even then it's a relatively poor fit. And the word plane was coined by Yelena Blavatskaya in The Secret Doctrine which was a late 19th century theosophical work. But even so, the concept wasn't anything like the D&D word "plane"---it was more like a state of being or consciousness, not a world outside our world. Gygax took a concept from mythology---realms like Hades, Jotunheim, etc. and applied a word that was currently popular amongst relict hippies and New Age thought that was still kicking around in the mid-70s and jammed the two of them together.

Sorry, not buying it.

Dunno, I can see the basic platonic foundation in the old D&D cosmologies...just because he chose to call "spheres" planes, and didn't put them up in an exact onion-like model with inner and outer planes layers, and chose to sub-partition the heavenly sphere into different planes according to alignments doesn't mean it's bovine excrement to assume a pseudo-platonic foundation that is actually known and discussed by the sages on the Prime Material.

 

[Desdichado]

Well, I did qualify that the Inner Planes have a rather superficial resemblance to Medieval cosmologies based on Platonic philosophy, but when I hear "Great Wheel" or Planes, I think mostly of the Outer Planes. Which were nothing like anything any medieval scholar believed in.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

No, of course not...because there was only one heaven to go to, so only one heavenly sphere necessary.

Now take that sphere, partition it into 17 planes, and you're back on track again.

 

[Arnwyn]

The fact remains that TSR never published a campaign setting other than Greyhawk which assumed the Great Wheel right from the start until Planescape. Dragonlance, the Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun . . . any relationship these settings had to the Great Wheel was retconned in later.

You continue to be wrong in the case of the Forgotten Realms. It used the Great Wheel from day 1 of publishing (which is, of course, the proper definition of 'right from the start'). The cute little "Ed Greenwood didn't use it from the start" is a nonsensical strawman (and, as shown in his Dragon articles, he did use it even then long before FR was published). Go figure.

Psst! Hyberbole! I know there's actually more than four people who care. Would it make you feel better if I said "very few?"

I suspect he's hoping for a little more evidence and statistics, as opposed to some random internet guy screaming some unsubstantiated "4 people!" "Very few!" "A minority!". (The whole "majority/minority" fallacy that overfills the internet does get tiresome after a while. Why do people still spew it out, I wonder? Ah, all my statistics and polling courses does make reading internet messageboards a little painful at times.) So, with that said... got any?

[And before some misguided ENWorlder starts yowling some variation of "U R teh bias!", note that I don't have a problem with the removal of the Great Wheel within the context of 4e. If there's any time to start butchering D&Disms, an edition change is probably the best time to do so.]

 

[Dinkeldog]

No, of course not...because there was only one heaven to go to, so only one heavenly sphere necessary.

Now take that sphere, partition it into 17 planes, and you're back on track again.

Why 17 planes? Why aren't there 9 alignment-based planes? Who can really tell the difference between CNG and NCG, or for that matter differentiating either from CG and NG or CN? It really seemed to me that the initial planes were attempts to utilize western mythology. So we'd have 9 planes in the Hells. Why? Because Dante said there were 9 rings in "The Inferno". There had to be an Asgard; there had to be an Arboria. Why? Because those existed in Earth's mythologies. Then it was "canon" and couldn't be changed because of the herds of cattle roaming the Outer Planes.

 

[Desdichado]

I suspect he's hoping for a little more evidence and statistics, as opposed to some random internet guy screaming some unsubstantiated "4 people!" "Very few!" "A minority!". (The whole "majority/minority" fallacy that overfills the internet does get tiresome after a while. Why do people still spew it out, I wonder? Ah, all my statistics and polling courses does make reading internet messageboards a little painful at times.) So, with that said... got any?

Do I have market research about gaming tastes? Of course not, other than the vague comments from the launch of 3e. To the best of my knowledge no other market research findings about gaming have ever been made public by anyone.

Does he? Do you?

What's your point? Refer to my sig. In the case of his rampant speculation vs. mine, I'll naturally prefer mine. Given that there's no objective reason to prefer one to the other.

 

[NotDeadMeat]

Excuse me for butting in but...

You see, when 2e came out, they didn't rewrite the entire D&D cosmology just because some designer thought it sounded better like that.

You see when 2e came out they went from playing in Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms to ... playing in Greyhawk and the Forgotten realms. Not suprising nothing really changed.

Same with 3e, 3e made a minor change or two to the Great Wheel cosmology, but not much.

Same with 3e, from playing Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms to plaing Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms.

Now with 4e they want to chuck decades of D&D heritage for some Johnny-come-lately idea that's supposed to be better?

And now with 4e it's not Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms so it's not Greyhawk's or the Forgotten Realms' cosmology. It's a different setting with a different cosmology. Just as Eberron's a different setting with a different cosmology, so is the "Points of Light" setting.