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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hexmage-EN" data-source="post: 8345689" data-attributes="member: 79428">Expanding on my previous post:In 2E, the Forgotten Realms was part of the Great Wheel as described in the Planescape setting (where all the gods lived in the same set of planes).3E shook this up massively, with the explanation being that Vecna was the cause.Not only was the 3E Forgotten Realms not part of the Great Wheel, it didn't belong to any one cosmology. The World Tree cosmology that is commonly believed to be the standard for 3E Forgotten Realms was actually only the cosmology of Faerunian and Mulhorandi pantheon:<a href="https://www.realmshelps.net/faerun/planes/index.shtml" target="_blank">Source</a>I couldn't find a nice illustration for this, but I went ahead and whipped up a simple representation of the true 3E Forgotten Realms cosmology:[ATTACH=full]140782[/ATTACH]As far as I can tell, in 4E the Spellplague changed the Faerunian Astral Plane in such a way that it shifted from the World Tree model to the World Axis model while severing the connection of the other Astral Planes to Toril (the entirety of Maztica shifted from Toril to its counterpart Abeir, so hypothetically the link to the Maztican Astral Plane could have been shifted from Toril to Abeir).Rather than providing an explanation for the cosmology changing, as was done for both the transition from the Great Wheel cosmology to the "multiple Astral Planes" cosmology and from that cosmology to the World Axis cosmology, 5E hand waves everything away by saying that the various cosmologies are all just models. In practice, though, the Great Wheel is effectively presumed to be true by the majority despite apparently not actually being a real thing.I'm also curious to how the "everything's just a model" stance interacts with 3E's cosmology that included separate Astral Planes with unique sets of Outer Planes and gods. Was it the case that there was actually only one Astral Plane, but it was so vast that it gave the impression that groups of Outer Planes were in their own separate Astral Planes? What happened to the planes in the 3E schema that are not present in the Great Wheel? Were they never truly independent planes, but actually sections of the planes of the Great Wheel?In my opinion, 5E is trying to have it's cake and eat it to by saying that all previous cosmological explanations and details were only theory and models while also presenting the Great Wheel model as the only model anyone takes seriously. Eberron's planes are said to be part of its Material Plane to fit it into the Great Wheel despite the Great Wheel supposedly not actually being a thing that exists.</blockquote>

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