Elemental Planes Killed

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Given the pretzel everyone had to twist themselves into to make Air, Water or Earth remotely gameable ("yeah, it's Air, but, uh, there's an island of Earth here in the middle of it ... like every other place you adventure in Air ..."), this is likely them just taking many folks' house rules and making them core.

I wouldn't mind seeing the planes become fantastical kingdoms where themes like the elements were the focus, rather than the actuality of the elements. This goes double for places like the Ethereal, which seems to vary wildly from table to table, and a lot of the time is just a big empty nothin' unless the DM has tracked down books from previous editions.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Um, I'm really not seeing a need to tweak the elemental planes.

Just buy City of Brass from Necromancer and you won't need to tweak the Elemental Plane of Fire at all.

Isn't Necromancer Games' CoB actually set in its own demiplane, the Plane of Molten Skies?

And Monte Cook and William Connors wrote a Planescape book called the Inner Planes which provides plenty to do on the Elemental Planes.

That's true. It's also two editions out of date. I also don't know that asking people to shell out a few dozen bucks to make the Plane of Fire interesting and fun is a good system, either. (They should be shelling it out because they're already excited about planar locales.)

 

[Mouseferatu]

I wouldn't mind seeing the planes become fantastical kingdoms where themes like the elements were the focus, rather than the actuality of the elements.

I wouldn't mind seeing that myself, especially since some of the best Inner Planes material--like the aforementioned City of Brass--already leans in this direction anyway.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If I were doing it (and I can be had, cheap, WotC!), I would make the Plane of Fire, I dunno, the Burning Sands of ________, a magical Arabian nights desert where actual flames lick off the sand where a terrestrial desert might have mere ripples in the air. The efreet would be the dominant race and other standards, like the azer, would be remade in more of an Arabian mold. The entire plane would be remade into caliphates and emirates and the like.

All genies would be here (and I would get rid of the Anglicized "genie" and "djinn" meaning two different things, probably by giving a new name to the latter), or in the skies above, in the mountains that border the desert or along the massive river that runs along its center.

There would be the ruins of ancient pharoanic progenitor races, including ancient pyramids, terraced cities, giant monoliths covered in ancient laws and the like, but the primary focus would be on flying carpets, sinister viziers and clever peasants. I would also have lots of mortals (what 2E would have called "primes") living at the bottom of the social structure in the genie realms as slaves and barely free peasants.

I would keep all the Arabian flavor in just this one plane and go very different directions with Earth, Water and Air.

 

[Howndawg]

I wouldn't mind seeing that myself, especially since some of the best Inner Planes material--like the aforementioned City of Brass--already leans in this direction anyway.

City of Brass, like in the picture on the cover of the original DMG with the trio of adventurers fighting an efreet? Now that is my idea of an extraplanar adventure and I hope what they want to achieve with a reimagining of the planes.

Howndawg

 

[Jer]

Given the pretzel everyone had to twist themselves into to make Air, Water or Earth remotely gameable ("yeah, it's Air, but, uh, there's an island of Earth here in the middle of it ... like every other place you adventure in Air ..."), this is likely them just taking many folks' house rules and making them core.

It's pretty clear that the original version of the planes were places where the "Platonic Ideal" of each element could exist. A very medieval view of how the world works, and very fitting for a game that was trying to model a fantastical version of the Dark Ages, but not really designed for "adventuring" in. The Plane of Fire even had to be transformed into an Arabic version of Hell to make it worth adventuring in by plopping the efreeti City of Brass into it. Even in 2e the best that Monte Cook and the other Planescape folks could was to try to replicate that by setting up other genie cities in the other elemental planes. Unfortunately, none of the rest of the genies are as fun to beat down as the efreet are.

 

[frankthedm]

I have no problem with the planes being tweaked to be better adventure sites, as long as the core essence of said planes is retained.

IMHO their core essence is that some are NOT good adventure sites. On Fire Planes magma level fire damage should be the default. Any one not protected from fire should find their eyes fried to a crisp as soon as they are open and taking massive con damage should they dare to breath in the superheated air.

 

[Jer]

IMHO their core essence is that some are NOT good adventure sites.

Then what's the point of having them?

I don't mean it to be flip - I mean it seriously. If they're not good for adventuring then what's the point of having them in the game at all?

 

[Nonlethal Force]

I don't mean this response to be flippant, either, but why have really tall and pointed mountains? Or why have really deep oceans? They make really lame adventure sites, too.

Personally, I don't think every place in a game world/cosmology should be accessible by default. I want high mountains in my campaign world, but I don't necessarily want to adventure up them. I want oceans in my campaign world, but I probably don't want to campaign in their depths. Just because I don't want to go there doesn't mean I don't want them.

In other words, I can understand having an elemental plane of fire like Frank suggests. In fact, by my understanding of what an elemental plane of fire should be, Frank's assertion is probably the purest ideal. But it doesn't make a great adventure site.

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.

 

[WayneLigon]

Now, maybe he actually meant a new, improved version of the Elemental Planes. But what he wrote is a statement that the 4e cosmology will have something other than the Elemental Planes. Not a changed version, not a supplement to them. A replacement.

Good. Eberron shows a better way of dealing with a cosmos of various planes, anyway. Dark Sun had a very evocative cosmology, virtually the only thing I really liked about it. Both of those show a far more interesting way of dealing with such things than the Great Wheel concepts.