Is Manual of the Planes obsolete?

[Mercule]

How good is MotP for someone interested in building their own cosmology, rather than using anything resembling the "Great Wheel" design?

As a note, I find the four elements cliche and would like to kill off those planes, as well as having multiple layers (like an onion) of outer/divine planes.

 

[Trainz]

There's info in the MoP about creating different cosmologies. I vaguely perused the section, but it's in there.

 

[Mercule]

I'm just concerned that it'll be like DDG -- a small portion devoted to roll-your-own with the bulk a bunch of statistics that I'll never use. (I don't mind stats for deities, since mine are mortal, but I don't need the four pantheons they included.)

 

[Psion]

I'm just concerned that it'll be like DDG -- a small portion devoted to roll-your-own with the bulk a bunch of statistics that I'll never use. (I don't mind stats for deities, since mine are mortal, but I don't need the four pantheons they included.)

I don't have a page count, but I'd guess that about 40% of it is the great wheel. Depending on what your cosmology is like, you may even be able to use some of it at that. For example, I am not using the great wheel for my Second World campaign (the cosmology is very different), but still aspects of it are used, like the ethereal and shadow planes, the abyss, and so forth.

 

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I like the MotP (mostly for the sensible 3e rules), but I'm still using my Planescape stuff for the epic planar campaign I'm running at the moment.

I'm hoping the new Planar Handbook will update the PS factions, some of the more obscure monsters and so on to 3rd edition, and will also contain brand new material.

Cheers


Richard

 

[Ahnehnois]

The MotP is easily the easiest conversion to 3.5 of any 3.0 rulebook. And it has plenty of good stuff in it. Still well worth getting.

As for its usefulness to different cosmologies, there is a significant section on various variants, but most of the book describes the standard planes. If you want to use at least some of those planes, but just arrange them and use them differently, you're in luck. If you have no use for the inner and outer and transitive planes, the book really isn't going to do much for you.

 

[GrayIguana]

Further, I think people are just a little too eager to shed their old books. Most of them are still useful and can be used with minimal modification (in fact, I question the utility of some "3.5 updates.") As an example, I sat down and considered what I would need to do to update certain 3.0 classes to fit with 3.5. After careful consideration, it occured to me that the classes in question needed no updating at all.

I had this exact thought. I haven't found the modifications to be worth my time, and the differences that we've kept from 3.0 haven't seemed to disrupt the game much.

 

[simmo]

How good is MotP for someone interested in building their own cosmology, rather than using anything resembling the "Great Wheel" design?

I have not tried doing this myself but the MotP is a good toolkit for creating your own cosmology. It uses the Great Wheel as an example and there is plenty of information and ideas about how to construct new planes from scratch or incorporate existing planes.

 

[Thotas]

Speaking as someone who never liked the Great Wheel (as another old timer added on some other thread, "... even when it was the Great Square Filing Cabinet") and was very much less than enthused when a friend of mine introduced me to the Planescape material that he loves so much, I say the MotP is a fine book. Like so many supplementary books, the thing WotC is doing best with their material is making it easy to use what you like, ignore what you don't.