Planescape now that other settings have their own cosmology

[Nightfall]

Rip,

You forgot to mention Orcus in that list!

 

[Shemeska]

Here's a curious question: What do all you Planescape DMs do with Eberron? If you were to travel from Eberron to Irian or Mabar, or Fernia, where would you actually be going?

Given that Eberron (unlike FR, Krynn, Grayhawk, etc) was designed from the start to be within its own seperate cosmology, and has enough quirks to make its direct inclusion into a unified multiverse problematic, I'd prefer to respect that design and not seek to make a force fit into the Wheel/Planescape. If I did use it, I'd treat it perhaps as a seperate multiverse branched off of the Deep Ethereal, and I actually have an incomplete story floating around somewhere with some fiends from the Great Wheel wandering into Mabar and then into Eberron proper and 'conversing' with a number of that world's Rakshasas. Was just something idle to explore the difference in perspective between the two fiends given the differences in their natures as required by the cosmology difference. I might still finish it, but a lack of knowledge about Eberron made it difficult and I haven't picked it back up going on 9 months now.

That rambling aside, since I don't have much exposure to Eberron, and what I have seen has never really sparked my imagination as far as setting feel and themes go, I don't have any particular motivating interest to incorporate the world into the planar rubric of the Great Wheel, and so it has never made an appearance in any of my campaigns, and I likely wouldn't allow anything from it to show up unless it could be hijacked and converted to something not tied down to it specifically.

 

[Henry]

...I don't have any particular motivating interest to incorporate the world into the planar rubric of the Great Wheel, and so it has never made an appearance in any of my campaigns, and I likely wouldn't allow anything from it to show up unless it could be hijacked and converted to something not tied down to it specifically.

Well, one could have it hanging on the other side of the plane of shadow in an alternate multiverse, like the Manual of the Planes for 3E suggests...

If I were to run a Planescape game, I'd probably use their idea for the Plane of Shadow to be the connect point for all these multiverses.

 

[Voadam]

Here's a curious question: What do all you Planescape DMs do with Eberron? If you were to travel from Eberron to Irian or Mabar, or Fernia, where would you actually be going?

The only Eberron I have is some Dragon articles detailing warforged, dragon marks, and mage wrights. So the inclusion of that material is no problem.

 

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

Primes never leave the great wheel. First of all, they just have thier own descriptions for the same thing, and think they've left the great wheel. That's why sods are so clueless when they finally get out of thier yard. And second, what kind of addle-cove berk are you any how? Haven't you figured out that that the great wheel isn't really a wheel anyway? Or a tree, or bowl of pasta, or whatever. As any blood knows, those are just barkle designed to make it all simple enough for the sods to understand anyway.

YES, I Understand! I wish everybody did. Didn't think it was that complicated. It's EASY to fit a "non-standard" cosmology into a larger multiverse of places that don't usually touch/interact with a certain prime world. Each prime can have wildly differenct cosmologies, but still be part of the same multiverse. Just because you can't find a door/portal to a place from your world doesn't mean a place doesn't exist - People there just don't know about it.

 

[Shemeska]

Well, one could have it hanging on the other side of the plane of shadow in an alternate multiverse, like the Manual of the Planes for 3E suggests...

If I were to run a Planescape game, I'd probably use their idea for the Plane of Shadow to be the connect point for all these multiverses.

I'm not a big fan for using Shadow in that way. The 3e MotP tried to leave an avenue to linking cosmologies through deep shadow, but such had already been touched upon in earlier sources, and shadow doesn't seem as good a fit to do the job given the conceptual role filled by Shadow versus some other transitives.

Using deep shadow as a point of connection to abberant, twisted version of a particular world... maybe; shadow is a dark reflection of the prime material, but trying to extend that to entire cosmologies seems incredibly forced. Conceptually speaking the Deep Ethereal is the gulf of probability between cosmologies, with the Great Wheel being perhaps only one of an infinite number of seperate multiverses/cosmologies that branch off of the depths in the same way that demiplanes float like sea foam on the surface. I like the imagery there, so that's what I'd use (and have used) as a link or alluded link to alternate multiversal structures, or even to theoretical higher order structure above them all.

 

[Ripzerai]

Since I like both Eberron and Planescape, I'd keep them separate - like I did with the Dark Sun material. Eberron has a really unique cosmology where the gods do not physically interact with the world at all.

Eberron's cosmology is nearly indistinguishable from the Planescape cosmology in every respect that matters. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say, since Eberron has only 13 outer planes to Planescape's 17 outer and 18 inner planes, but I don't think the precise number is important for anything other than reiterating the "Baker's dozen" theme that crops up all over the place in Eberron. If other planes existed, the setting wouldn't be substantially different.

If you look at the individual planes, Kythri is essentially indistinguishable from Limbo, Xoriat is the Far Realm, Daanvi is essentially Arcadia, and so on. It seems distasteful and messy to me to fill the multiverse with doppleganger outer planes with nothing in particular to recommend them. Why have two identical Limbos when one will do? If they were uniquely interesting in some way, that would be one thing, but they're not - Eberron's planes are pretty generic, designed for maximum compatibility with generic planar monsters.

Both Planescape and Eberron have orrery-based cosmologies, although Planescape was vaguer about this.

As for the gods, that's just a matter of the style of the campaign. Either the gods throughout the multiverse are interventionalist (and definitely exist) or none of them are. Either style could work with either Eberron or Planescape.

I'm not convinced that making Eberron theologically agnostic or imprinting the number 13 everywhere are themes interesting or important enough to justify bend the multiverse into knots.

Dragonlance Adventures was very vague on the matter of the planes, and it's a mischaracterization to say it definitively presented a separate cosmology. If you read the "Travelers From the Beyond" section on page 12, it's clear that it's possible to get to Krynn from other AD&D campaign worlds.

There's no particular reason why Krynn's inhabitants should be thought of as especially ignorant. They call the planes by the names they prefer - that's a cultural difference, not a knowledge-based one. Every culture has its own names and diagrams symbolizing the planes of existence, and while some are more complete than others, none of them are "wrong." Sigil's maps of the planes aren't necessarily complete, either. Personally, I care less about what Tracy Hickman thinks than almost anything in the world, except possibly what Keith Baker thinks.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Other - It's never come up, so I don't know. I don't know much about other settings, so using them isn't really anything I've looked at in the past. The Prime has practically always been a generic land when the PCs have visited or have met Primes/Clueless in my PS games.

 

[Ripzerai]

Something Miscellany said in this thread on the Wizards boards rings true to me:

Most campaigns don’t focus on the planes; for them the planes are peripheral regions at best that are good for a few mid to high level adventures, until play naturally returns to Faerûn. Thus the notion of ‘what Cosmology to use’ is really one of esthetics and DM experience.

In most campaigns, whether Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dragonlance, Eberron, Ptolus, Diamond Throne, Scarred Lands, Wilderlands, Blackmoor, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, or whatever, whether or not the setting is part of a greater cosmology or whether the local maps of the planes are the "one true one" are inconsequential. Generally, these matters only come up in a planes-heavy campaign like Planescape or Beyond Countless Doorways - and so I think naturally what you as the individual DM decides for the planes-heavy campaigns should trump the stuff specific to any single world.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I was just wondering how Planescape fans have reconciled with the fact that other campaign settings (such as FR and DL) are now contained within their own cosmologies.

No matter how much they try to avoid the Great Wheel cosmology it has too much legacy to actually get rid off, all the planar monsters were designed for it and thus the planes can't be altered much in substance and remain valid for the monsters. So all the designers do is change a few names, draw new links between planes and call it done.

Take Eberron for example. It fits right into the Great Wheel cosmology because the description of its planes match closely enough to just call them regions of the known Great Wheel. Ignorant Eberronians just don't know that say Thelanis is actually part of Arborea, or Lammania is part of the Beatlands, or Daani is part of Arcadia.