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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4633061" data-attributes="member: 32536">However, a lot of both that tradition and the "color and background" of it was awful.I have never liked a lot of the Planescape and Great Wheel concepts and ideals. There are countless things in there that were bad from the start, and holding on to them for tradition's sake doesn't change the fact that they can use improvement. It is not change for change's sake if you are changing something for the better.I mean... the Blood War is contrived and pointless. The Great Wheel absolute order and symmetry lead to nothing but a huge excess of redundant and overly similar planes, as well as even more redundant and meaningless things like Yugoloths. We don't need a planar set-up with half a dozen variations on "the place where evil souls go". We needed half a dozen of variations of "where good/lawful/chaotic souls go" even less. The utter pointlessness of the Inner Planes was bad enough, but even hearing that things like the Para- and Quasi-Elemental planes even existed at some point is more depressing than I can bear. Don't even get me started on the boring stuff like the old Astral, Ethereal, or Deep Ethereal. The distinction between Evil Gods and Archdevils/Demon Princes is weak at best, and the entire concept behind the Lady of Pain is terrible beyond reckoning.Now that I am probably done making every Planescape fan hate me, I think I may as well mention that I dislike the 4E Manual of the Planes in large part due to how it forces a lot of this old tradition and heritage back into a 4E cosmology that I was hoping would distance itself more from such old ideas (the other part I dislike is that a lot of the newer stuff isn't developed anywhere near as well as I would have liked). The changes they made, like redefining the nature of demons and devils somewhat, getting making the Succubus a Devil in order to match the new definitions, getting rid of the Great Wheel, and other such things, were all good steps towards cleaning up D&D's overly convoluted and messy cosmology and turning into something presentable and usable. However, the 4E MotP just ignores a lot of that and fits in older concepts straight back into the new cosmology like a square peg in a round hole.Still, I really do like a lot of the elements of the 4E cosmology. Unlike the meaningless Inner Planes, the Elemental Chaos is very good. It embodies the idea of a primal sea of chaos that is seen in real-world myth and literature (it is practically taken straight from things like Greek creation myth and Milton's Paradise Lost), and embodies a true place filled with the "stuff of creation" rather than a stratified and sometimes limiting system of "pure elements", where anything that exists for more than a second has to fight to protect its right to continue existing. The Astral Sea is great for more reasons that I can list here. The Feywild and Shadowfell fill incredibly valuable roles that the Great Wheel never properly touched upon. The new cosmology isn't perfect, and the material that covers these places right now is far from adequate, but the changes in 4E are an important step forward.Nothing is ever good enough that it can be left unchanged indefinitely, so we should constantly look to see how things should be improved.</blockquote>

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