It's certainly usable. Not a bad effort.
But I'm a little bewildered that they didn't go with a more inclusive, modular idea: here's a BUNCH of planes for your game, weave them in and out as yous see fit, include or exclude or roll together planes that work for you or whatever.
Defining a cosmology is a key component of designing a world, and it's something that D&D could be more helpful to DMs with than "here's a cosmology that ALL OF OUR WORLDS ARE GOING TO FOLLOW, THIS IS REALITY!"
I'm also not convinced that this layout is really that useful for any purpose. What does a "border fire plane" do that a ring of volcanoes on the Prime can't do? Why can't the Prime have Basalt towers and Azers hanging out there?
There's also going to be a lot of doubling-up. 4e's Elemental Chaos was essentially Limbo, so it had Githzerai and Slaadi. It was also next to the Abyss, so we had elemental demons running around. So now we have Githzerai and Slaadi on the Elemental Chaos, and on Limbo on the outer planes, essentially doing the same thing in both places? And we have the Court of Stars in Arborea and the Court of Seasons on the Feywild? Shadowfell and Ravenloft and Border Negative Energy and also the Grey Waste?
Also: Astral plane/sea? Ethereal?
I could live with this set-up, but it seems like...not a great solution. Especially with the idea to have all of their settings share it. Why? Why does every setting need the same cosmology? We live on a planet composed of
millions of different views of the universe, why does D&D need to enforce One True Planar Structure? "Basic D&D" doesn't even need
any planar structure (there's evil critters from evil places, and they're here...that's generally enough), and when you're at the level of world-building where you'd need it, you're much better served by a menagerie of countless worlds that you can assemble than One Way.
It works, but it tries really hard to make everything fit into a Grand Vision of the Planes for Everyone, when really it'd be more useful I think to give DM's ways to assemble their own cosmology, with 4e, the Great Wheel, Eberron's Orrey, and other cosmologies as examples and possibilities. We don't need one cosmology to rule them all, we need the power to forge our own.
Jeff B said:
I really do not understand why WOTC (and post Gary TSR) feel the need to have a very detailed default cosmology as core and published settings must conform
3e had diverse cosmologies (including the Pharonic, Norse, and Greek!...though not in the core book), and Gary I think invented the idea that the Great Wheel should unite all worlds, and I love Planescape, but yeah, I am with your sentiment, here.
I'm not sure what they gain out of it. Most D&D games don't need much of anything in the way of cosmology, and it's a fair bet that whatever cosmology they come up with, it ain't gonna work for everyone, so I don't understand the insistence on this point.