Elemental Planes Killed

[Geron Raveneye]

Which is just a shame, seeing as the Elemental Planes being boring is entirely a matter of taste and creativity. I always found them attractive and tried to bring them into my campaigns when the levels were right, and the best one was when the Elemental Planes (plus Para- and Quasi-Elemental Planes) started overlapping with the Prime due to the Etheral Plane vanishing, and my group in the thick of it in Glantri City. Fun times.

 

[Wormwood]

Seconded. The whole "four elements" thing is rather boring, IMO.

Oh thank Jeebus---I thought I was the only one who thought that!

 

[sckeener]

There are a couple of places in the elemental planes that I liked (city of brass) and I like creatures from there....Djinn, Dao, Efreet, Marids, Jann, and the Qorrash.

And I liked the planetouched from there too...

I hope they make the Efreeti more visible beyond just the cover of a gaming book....

Admittedly one fact I loved in 1st edition....time moved twice as fast on the elemental planes as on the material plane. I can remember one of my characters storing wine on the elemental plane of earth to age it quickly.

Still...can't tell from that blog what they plan on doing....

 

[Mercule]

Oh thank Jeebus---I thought I was the only one who thought that!

Nope. Quickest and easiest way to tell if a fantasy novel is hackneyed and cliched: The back cover copy mentions "the four elements" or some variant, especially if it's involved in "the fundamental tapestry of magic".

 

[GreatLemur]

As such, I think that WotC designers are saying that they want playable places. So, I don't think they should be called the elemental plane of fire ... because a "fire-themed" plane would not be the elemental plane of fire to me. It might be a legitimately fun plane to adventure on, but it isn't the plane of fire. If WotC designers are smart, they'll make the elemental planes more capable of sustaining adventures AND change their names to something more believeable, too.

So maybe the thing to do would be to add sort of "antechamber" demiplanes to all the Elemental Planes, places where they border--or even overlap with--the Prime Material, and which are relatively survivable for non-elemental mortals.

So you can have your City-of-Brass-esque fire kingdom of desert and magma flows, ruled by efreet and azer, and that's a perfectly reasonable place for mid-to-high-level adventuring without having to turn the whole party into fire elementals first. But, then, if you venture deeper into the demiplane, you eventually hit the Deep Flame of the True Plane of Elemental Fire or something like that, which would of course be that old infinite expanse of burning energy, without fuel or gravity, source of all Wizards' fire magic.

That'd work pretty well for me. You'd have your adventurable fire-themed land, and you'd have your inaccessable "outer space" kinda region that's mostly just there to complete the cosmology.

 

[Celebrim]

The only reason that most DMs don't have a problem with the elemental planes is because they ignore them completely.

That is pretty much exactly my point. You can divide DMs into two groups: those that don't set adventures on the elemental plane of fire, and those that do. Those that don't set adventures on the elemental plane of fire will likely ignore any changes to the cosmology. Those that do have adventures there don't have the problem that WotC is trying to fix, because obviously, they find it a worthy spot to set adventures.

For me, the irony is that ideas for the elemental plane of fire are well described in fairy tale and fantasy literature. There is a 500 page supplement that has just been published on visiting that plane that supposedly has hundreds of adventure ideas. I seem to remember a published adventure for the four elemental planes way back in 1st ed. AD&D Manual of the Planes days. Planescape describes the locations in detail, and there are bits and peices of flavor scattered all over. If you are not interested in setting adventurers on the planes as they've been described, in most cases you probably aren't interested in setting adventures on other planes period.

If there is any problem with the elemental planes as described it is that they are too alien of places for most DMs or players to get there heads around (after planescape did a number on the outer planes, they are one of the few alien places left in the cosmology). They are hard to use not because they are unusable, but because life doesn't give you good reference points for what an infinite plane of air is like (for example, you can't fall even if you can't fly) or an infinite plane of water (there is no water pressure, when most people intuit that it would be infinite). This is what I was getting at when I said that they were throwing out anything that made 20'x30' rooms with two doors 'hard'. The environment doesn't lend itself to what most people are doing. But as for myself, anything that wasn't alien I'd just assume set on my world. If I'm reaching into my tool chest for an alternate plane, its precisely because I want something that is wierd and alien. I have a similar feeling about outsiders - don't try to turn them into funny looking humanoids with special powers just to make them easier to understand. If I want an outsider, then I want it to be really alien. When I hear them say, "The elemental planes aren't conducive to adventures", what I hear them to mean is, "The elemental planes aren't conducive to adventures in the familiar pattern." The appear to want to take away the alienness of the place so that adventuring on planes other than our own is fundamentally no different than adventuring anywhere else. I consider this dumbing down the cosmology.

At best, we are going to get new elemental planes that are effectively the same as the old planes but with a 'New and Improved' sticker stamped on them. At worst, we are going to get every plane of existance looks basically like Earth with a slightly different color pallette.

 

[GreatLemur]

Nope. Quickest and easiest way to tell if a fantasy novel is hackneyed and cliched: The back cover copy mentions "the four elements" or some variant, especially if it's involved in "the fundamental tapestry of magic".

Oh, frigging Christ, absolutely. I'm having as much fun speculating on what WotC is gonna do with the Elemental Planes as anybody, but there's basically no chance I'm gonna use them no matter what. The classical four elments--and the Chinese and Wicca five element options, too--are completely cliche and way too inherently illogical for my modern mind to work with. It's just a really silly abstraction of reality that I cannot buy into.

 

[Celebrim]

So, are we also going to see the elimination of deep water from D&D? I mean, the bottoms of oceans make pretty poor adventure locations. The skies, too; who adventures at 30,000 feet in the air?

Let me make a point about the OP's comment, because it might not be clear how important this is. If I want to have an adventure set on an island floating in the middle of the air, I'll set it on my normal adventuring world - which has several sorts of islands floating in the middle of the air (where, among other things, dwell cloud giants). If I want to have an adventure in a massive cavern complex, then I'll set the adventure on my normal adventuring world - which has a massive cavern complex underneath the whole of the world. If I want an adventure in the abyssmal depths of the ocean, then I'll the adventure on my normal adventuring world - which has plenty of abyssmal depths. If I want an adventure on a burning plain of ash with rivers of lava and toxic fumes, I'll still probably set it on my normal adventuring world - which has various volcanic regions.

The only reason I'd ever need to go extraplanar is if I want a place that is truly alien. Alien locales are typically tough to write adventures for, because they are alien. Obviously, truly alien locales like an elemental plane of air are even harder to write adventures for, and even harder to imagine why the PC's would want to go there. But, it's nice to have them there if you want to reach for them.

The elemental planes as described have pockets, antechambers, and border regions galore. I'm not sure why they would need modification if you need alien but not quite as alien as bottomless mountains of spongy waving fire, massive jet streams of pyroclasticly flowing fire, huge voids filled with streaming sparks, gardens of blooming explosions, and other things that make jokes of your attempts to make a map.

 

[catsclaw227]

Wow......

I am not going to run a list of pull-quotes here, and there could be many, but I am sensing that people are reading WAY too much into what Christopher Perkins said in his blog. He wasn't writing a friggin' legal contract, he was BLOGGING about stuff. Blogs are often thoughts, ideas and stream of concious blather that isn't run past legal dept and often times not deeply edited.

These guys are gamers, they want to make something fun for DMs and PCs to adventure in and the elemental planes are a candidate. I agree with Mouseferatu's and Whizbang's earlier statements about making the elemental planes unique places that can be fun. Maybe they are making the elemental planes more like transitional planes to pure element or energy.

And why does pure element or energy need to come from a "plane" anyway? The Elemental plane of Fire could be more like the City of Brass, in a transitional plane that is easier to tap into pure Fire. It doesn't have to be searing heat with eyeballs frying and skin boiling and lungs desicating into dust. That just isn't fun to me.

 

[GreatLemur]

The elemental planes as described have pockets, antechambers, and border regions galore. I'm not sure why they would need modification if you need alien but not quite as alien as bottomless mountains of spongy waving fire, massive jet streams of pyroclasticly flowing fire, huge voids filled with streaming sparks, gardens of blooming explosions, and other things that make jokes of your attempts to make a map.

I think the issue might be about the frequency of such habitable anomalies in an elemental plane. I've only got hazy recollections of the 1e Manual of the Planes to go by, here, but weren't they incredibly rare and isolated? And, for that matter, not granted all that much detail? I expect the only real change for the Elemental Planes in 4e will be that the pockets and border regions will play a bigger role.