D&D General Pros and Cons of Combining Hells and the Abyss.

[Zaukrie]

My campaigns as a DM or player have never made it to either plane, so I'm not sure it really matters for most (yes, I'm extrapolating from my experience, sorry).......but really, I doubt it matters almost ever.

The idea above that demons are corrupted Far Realm devils is a very cool idea, btw.

And, I love reading the old Nine Hells articles, and all the fluff that was put out for demons and devils. It is very flavorful.....but I can't recall it ever mattering in a campaign (I've played since the game launched on and off).

 

[Casimir Liber]

I've always kept them separate - and used them multiple times over 40 years. More often devils being machaivellian in human affairs and then consequences

 

[Tonguez]

I use Demense which kinda acts like an Aura of corruption around a given Demon/Fae/Elemental/Divine Lord. As such there is No Hell Plane, but if asmodeus turns up in your neighbourhood then the territory around him both material and ephereal transforms into a hellish domain. Until it can be cleansed and reclaimed by the Forces of Light.
The Abyss was infinite because it lacked a Lord and thus every Demon seeking power would effect its form in infinite different ways.

 

[DammitVictor]

It really depends on what I'm doing. If I'm running Planescape, then I'm running the Great Wheel and the Lower Planes and the Blood War in all of their glory, and the players are going to be knee-deep in every fetid corner of them. Most of the time, though, I'm running Spelljammer-inspired (no Radiant Triangle) homebrew where I'm not using the Lower Planes at all, combined or separate or anything in-between. Usually... with a side order of having to tell at least one player that there are no Outer Planes, this is a game about magical flying sailboats in outer space, stop asking me about Hell.

The cosmologies in my current work-in-progress settings don't really have much in common with the Great Wheel at all. If you had to compare them to D&D cosmologies, I'd say both of them owe a debt of inspiration to the World Axis, with Shroompunk taking place mostly in the Feywild with sojourns through the Far Realm to reach other parts of the Feywild and Sagas of the Cosmic Rangers taking place in an unbounded Prime Material Plane that is coterminous with a plane that is simultaneously the Feywild and the Far Realm. Both settings have a rough conception of the Astral Sea and the Shadowfell bordering and mirroring the primarily game world, and numerous/innumerable Heavens and Hells that exist as a part of that but are not part of the game world, stop asking me about them.

 

[SkidAce]

Good inputs.

Feels like since I use multiple words/planes as a cosmic structure, I could instead of combining them or separating them as grand concepts/places, there could be a multitude of hells and abysses across the cosmos, no singular Hell for example.

Thanks.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I have a map (well had). When Manual of The Planes came out I had a diagram of the planes around my game world. I had it gridded out based on the alignment chart and just added the planes that I used into my game.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I think the codification of planes as a consistent thing is as often as not constraining as much as it is helpful to the game world. At the start of the game, PCs know that different cultures and scholars have different ideas about how the world works, and it isn't clear which is right (perhaps we'll discover which is right together). Sometimes, there aren't planes, and (for example) the afterlife is a place where one theoretically could walk to. In the OP situation, have some people (or even demons/devils) think they are the same, some think they aren't.

 

[cbwjm]

I think the codification of planes as a consistent thing is as often as not constraining as much as it is helpful to the game world. At the start of the game, PCs know that different cultures and scholars have different ideas about how the world works, and it isn't clear which is right (perhaps we'll discover which is right together). Sometimes, there aren't planes, and (for example) the afterlife is a place where one theoretically could walk to. In the OP situation, have some people (or even demons/devils) think they are the same, some think they aren't.

One of the other changes for my home-brew is that the outer planes aren't where your soul ends up, unless your sound is bound up in a pact. Some souls might end up in the Shadowfell, but mostly the Soul-Forger (a god in my setting) makes sure that souls continue through to the great life stream where that soul energy can be reborn anew.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Over the years I have had them combined and seperate. Looking to nail it down for my homebrew continuity and looking for constructive inputs for and against.

At work, might be a while before I can post, but I can view replies.

If you are keeping demons and devils as separate entities and don't have a big story worked out about how there's a civil war in Hell or something, keep them separate. (A civil war is easier for everyone to grok than the Blood War, which has so many patches on the holes in its logic, it's practically a quilt at this point.)

That said, I think it'd be very easy to imagine a cosmology missing either demons or devils, depending on what you want to do with your campaign. If I was doing something more Americana-based, for instance, I'd need devils at crossroads, but could easily replace marauding demons with all sorts of more thematic critters for my campaign.

 

[Fifinjir]

The concepts of the Lower Planes, Shadowfell, and Negative Energy Plane are blended into one, the Void. Something like the Blood War is present, but the main focus is all fiends’ war on mortals.

EDIT: Reread the title and wanted to tie back to it. What I consider the “pro” is in the last sentence, I emphasizes more on the mortals vs fiends conflict that the players are probably going to be more invested in. A possible “con” is that it can create a more mortal-centric universe.