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<blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 7424966" data-attributes="member: 1288">All of which are entirely guesses or artist's representation. Dante's Hell--which is, perhaps, the most common image--is pulled from his own imagination and the current events of his time (made metaphoric), and bears little resemblance to anything from religious texts, let alone a provable reality. Ditto popular representations of Heaven. And that's just drawing on one the world's many religions.In D&amp;D, mortals being able to travel the planes might mean that a human can go to Hell and back, but it still doesn't mean he'll have any idea &quot;where&quot; Hell is in relation to, say, the world of the fey. And frankly, the number of people capable of doing that--the casters who are of sufficiently high level that they can both plane travel and have any likelihood of surviving the trip--are vanishingly small.I certainly have no objection to people who want to detail their cosmology, and as I said, I do so myself if/when it matters (or I just feel like it). But I hardly believe it's essential, or likely to be common knowledge--assuming there even is a truth of &quot;planar locations&quot; in any form the human mind can comprehend--and I certainly don't believe that the many and varied imagined/artistic versions of it in the real world suggest there must be a single known truth in the game world. At most, it implies that a fictional world should have many varied imagined/artistic versions of its own--which it can have whether or not the DM has decided what the truth may be, or even if there is one.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mouseferatu, post: 7424966, member: 1288"] All of which are entirely guesses or artist's representation. Dante's Hell--which is, perhaps, the most common image--is pulled from his own imagination and the current events of his time (made metaphoric), and bears little resemblance to anything from religious texts, let alone a provable reality. Ditto popular representations of Heaven. And that's just drawing on one the world's many religions. In D&D, mortals being able to travel the planes might mean that a human can go to Hell and back, but it still doesn't mean he'll have any idea "where" Hell is in relation to, say, the world of the fey. And frankly, the number of people capable of doing that--the casters who are of sufficiently high level that they can both plane travel and have any likelihood of surviving the trip--are vanishingly small. I certainly have no objection to people who want to detail their cosmology, and as I said, I do so myself if/when it matters (or I just feel like it). But I hardly believe it's essential, or likely to be common knowledge--assuming there even is a truth of "planar locations" in any form the human mind can comprehend--and I [I]certainly[/I] don't believe that the many and varied imagined/artistic versions of it in the real world suggest there must be a single known truth in the game world. At most, it implies that a fictional world should have many varied imagined/artistic versions of its own--which it can have whether or not the DM has decided what the truth may be, or even if there is one. [/QUOTE]

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