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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 2699870" data-attributes="member: 11697">They're virtually identical now to their 2e incarnations save for the fact that they've been given stats. The flavor, the important stuff, hasn't changed in any real appreciable way. They're still the unquestioned rulers of their respective planes, and the deities who inhabit these planes don't argue the fact so long as their own domains are left alone. It's just that now since they have stat blocks that tend to be longer than their descriptions, they no longer cleanly fit into their notches on the planes as they did previously. But this verges on another argument for another time, and there's multiple ways to handle it, so let's avoid that tangent.They weren't necessarily hostile back then, they were just ill described and largely not elaborated upon greatly, and treated in a very different manner than since then. For the most part they were treated as extraplanar dungeons, and while you can conceivably still treat them as such, their elaboration in 2e and the continuation of that in 3e has made them less that than the alignments made manifest, places of horror and beauty, places of the greatest and worst of the multiverse taken flesh in sometimes familiar and sometimes alien fashion, the battlegrounds of the alignments where above all, belief is power. It's grown beyond its roots, but those roots are still there if you want to have that sort of focus in your game. The way the planes have gone and developed since then doesn't prevent you from using them in the way you want for epic gaming. It didn't go away since then, but the idea that only high level PCs could go to the planes was abandoned, though it's blatantly obvious that the planes are hideously dangerous and not to be taken lightly in the least way. In fact it was rather openly stated that if you approached the planes with a hack and slash kill everything that moves approach, you were going to end up very dead, very fast, simply because the denizens of the planes, especially the lower ones, were just that hostile and that deadly.The danger was there, it was there perhaps more than it had been before, but you were advised to avoid it for the sake of keeping PCs alive for the sake of a long term campaign. The opening portions of the PS campaign box have some interesting advice on the subject and how to handle relatively lower level parties when you have the option of going to such hostile places. Regardless of level though, you aren't going to get away very long with approaching things with an 'I am mighty, I can kill it because I am the hero' point of view.I've never played using the actual 2e game mechanics, I didn't play DnD till 2000. I've played most of the 2e settings though, right from the 2e books, using 3e mechanics. That has to be one of the best things about said settings, be it Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Planescape, etc that most of the books were light enough on the rules that they're perfectly valid to plug right into a 3e game. Twenty years from now they'll still be useful in whatever system DnD is using, as opposed to some other books that you might find to be largely invalidated once their stat blocks no longer mesh with a new system.I'm tempted to buy you a copy just to have you read it, and possibly change your mind on the topics it so beautifully covers. It really is a spectacularly written book, in my opinion the single best book on its topic so far written, and one of the best supplements in any edition of DnD. I don't use any of the specific rules regarding alterations to cleric caster levels on different planes inrelation to the home plane of their deity, nor the rules that modified weapon +'s depending on the plane of their forging when you went to other planes. I've only rarely used the material on spell keys and power keys (only fully using them in a one shot evil game). And for better or for worse, I run the planes as post Faction War, which isn't always a popular thing among PS purists.W/ regards to the setup of the planes themselves, I use Shadow as a full plane rather than a demiplane (which it was previous to 3e). That's the one cosmology alteration in 3e that I like, and I -really- like it. Beyond that I use an ordial plane, or have as valid the assumption of one, though it was a fan creation on mimir.net rather than from PS proper. I also utilize at least one partial sublayer of the Astral known as the House of Memory, which was created by Orri aka Orriloth aka one of the drunk guys at Hellhound's Suite that night at GenCon this year <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Beyond that are a subtle but significant number of alterations to the prehistory of the lower planes, in specific I've gone out of my way to elaborate upon the role of, and personalities of, the various extant Baernaloths, and some of the lesser elaborated Abyssal Lords.And FWIW, don't expect much out of me over the weekend, I'll be otherwise occupied.</blockquote>

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