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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMZ2112" data-source="post: 6156297" data-attributes="member: 78752">It sure seems to torque a lot of people up.I am admittedly not a Dark Sun scholar and I am surprised by the number of in-setting references you provided for planar contact.  I will have to touch base with my Athas.org buddy to see if he has anything to say about them.  The Ravenloft and Spelljammer references are, of course, illegitimate, because like Planescape they are transitive settings whose whole bailiwick was in pulling adventurers from other worlds.See, I don't see this at all.  I see D&D everywhere I look in the 4th Edition setting.  Ah, but wait, it IS true that I do not see a whole lot of Planescape.  I think this goes to my earlier point about Planescape not being particularly D&D-like.  When push comes to shove, what I love about Planescape is its theme, not its lore.  I've always found the construction of the AD&D cosmology clunky and inelegant.  The new D&D4 material may invalidate the "clunky and inelegant" lore, but I think it does a fantastic job of capture the "theme" of what it is to play amongst D&D's metaphysical constants.Yeah, but it's not, is it?  All full planes are infinite.  So...Pretty sure elemental summoning spells still work on the Outer Planes.  And Secret Chest is a good example.  Why does that spell need a connection to the Ethereal Plane?  I mean, I know why: it creates an ethereal space for storage.  But why does it have to be on the Ethereal?  Why couldn't it be an Astral space?  What is it about the Ethereal (or the Astral, if you prefer) that is /so important/ that everything floating in it couldn't just be moved to the other transitive plane?  Fundamentally, they are both just empty space with stuff in.  Neither plane is a /destination/. I know how it works.  The point still stands.From the perspective that "one level is too much," four levels is an insane power loss.  Screw it -- from /any/ perspective, four levels is an insane power loss.  The fact that it is worse /without/ leaving the Outer Planes does not make it /better/.Some people do.  Some people play Hackmaster with no sense of irony.It's /worse/ than simple inconsistency; it's consistent inconsistency.  It's not self-contradictory because the lore has established that the very nature of reality itself is contradiction. Well, now, hold on a second.  Hold.  On.  A second.One, Dragon Magazine.Two, even considering point one, I feel /absolutely certain/ that there is more to this conversion than "paladins in Dark Sun."Three, DRAGON MAGAZINE.Okay, stop that.  Pulp is not a genre.  You cannot pastiche "pulp."  It's like writing a recipe including the phrase, "chop the onion finely with a kitchen utensil."  Well, you'd damn well better pick the right one.D&D is a pastiche of fantasy fiction popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  But the important thing is that that pastiche is /specific/, and has an identifiable character.  That identifiable character is clear in all of the AD&D1 campaign settings and... let me think... yes... I would say /none/ of the campaign settings introduced after the release of AD&D2.  Mystara does not count.Again, this doesn't make them /bad/.  I enjoy them all, except Birthright which to be fair I've never spent any real time with.  But if the objective is to make a unified D&D cosmology, I do not think the Planescape version of the Great Wheel is it. This has been said many times before, but: Elven PCs -- in any edition of D&D -- do not closely resemble Tolkien's elves at all.It's just the impression that I got.  I could very well be incorrect, or at least thinking wishfully.The Abyss was a victim of the numbskull decision that Chaotic Evil was SUPER EVIL, and I won't defend that.</blockquote>

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