Forgotten Realms and The Great Wheel

[poilbrun]

The way the poll is worded shows that the Poll author is biased in favor of the Great Wheel.

No offense to the Great Wheel, I love Planescape and all, but I use the new Forgotten Realms Cosmology (affectionately nicknamed the Great Tree) in my campaign.

The Great Wheel has too much baggage to be appropriate for Faerun. Norse gods, Greek gods, and gods from other Earth pantheons don't really fit or belong in the Realms. The new Realms cosmology is so much more appropriate and well integrated into Faerunian myth and religious tradition.

I am really glad they rebooted the cosmology in 3E. The new cosmology is well conceived and just plain wonderful in my opinion.

And for those Great Wheel junkies who want to play on Toril, don't worry! It is still connected to Greyhawk through the plane of Shadow, so a Faerunian can still adventure on the Wheel with just a short side-wise hop through Shadow.

I tend to disagree about real-world gods... Tyr is clearly from earth, and the Mulhorandi (sp?) and Untheric pantheons are too...

Personally, I tend to use both... The planes as described in the new FR books are parts of the planes in the Great Wheel. You cannot go to another place on the plane directly from Faerun, but travelling on the other plane, you can reach the boundary of the FR deities' territory and arrive in the Great Wheel plane... or you can travel through the shadow plane to another world (Greyhawk, or any other that doesn't have its own cosmology [thinking Eberron] here), and from there to the various planes of the Great Wheel.

Not really intuitive, but I wanted the FR books to be accurate, and at the same time be able to use the Great Wheel cosmology, which is for me and my players the way the planes work...

 

[Paragon Kobold]

It certainly seems a bit odd that Wizards are currently supporting only two worlds, and neither of them uses the 'standard' Dungeons and Dragons cosmology.

To me the Great Wheel fits best with D&D, as it is essentially a manifestation of the alignment system.

 

[vulcan_idic]

I don't think there's neccesarily a conflict between the systems. Anytime you begin to describe a system that encompases more dimensions than a human can directly observe simultaneously you have to fall back on metaphor in order to communicate such thoughts in a meaningful fashion and even the best metaphor breaks down at some point. This is similar to the real world dilemma of trying to describe spacetime (by current theories) to average person. It is generally couched in a metaphor making three dimensional space two simensional space to discribe the warping of sspace by gravitational fields and so on which, while useful, are only metaphors for something we can't directly communicate. The D&D planes are similar, the way I see them. The way they are described in cosmologies are merely metaphors attempting to encapsulate and communicate a reality beyond the human sphere of experience and beyond our ability to percieve directly - we only see it indirectly through its affects on other things. Like the old story of the seven blind wise men describing an elephant (again a metaphor collapsing a more complex concept into a simpler one for the purpose of relating) each was limited to describing the portion it could observe while the whole of the elephant was outside of their ability to directly percieve it. Thus one percieving a leg proclaimed an elephant to be like a tree, while one percieving the trunk proclaimed it a type of serpent, the one percieving the tail proclaiming it to be quite like rope in all actuality, and so on. Thus both the Great Wheel cosmology and the Great Tree cosmology can be simultaneously true - and accurate though not neccesarily precise descriptions of a nature of reality beyond the ability of humanoids to percieve directly.

 

[Goobermunch]

I tend to disagree about real-world gods... Tyr is clearly from earth, and the Mulhorandi (sp?) and Untheric pantheons are too...

Personally, I tend to use both... The planes as described in the new FR books are parts of the planes in the Great Wheel. You cannot go to another place on the plane directly from Faerun, but travelling on the other plane, you can reach the boundary of the FR deities' territory and arrive in the Great Wheel plane... or you can travel through the shadow plane to another world (Greyhawk, or any other that doesn't have its own cosmology [thinking Eberron] here), and from there to the various planes of the Great Wheel.

Not really intuitive, but I wanted the FR books to be accurate, and at the same time be able to use the Great Wheel cosmology, which is for me and my players the way the planes work...

But Eberron does have it's own cosmology. It's just different from any we've seen todate. For example, certain types of devils and demons live together on the same plane, as do the angels . . . .

It's just different see.

--G