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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ilgatto" data-source="post: 8977022" data-attributes="member: 86051">What a shame that this thread quickly turned into a somewhat misplaced debate about what is canon and what isn’t after the <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-brilliance-of-the-original-gygaxian-multiverse.672504/" target="_blank">OP</a> sort of explicitly implied that he actually rejected everything canon.The first thing that came to my mind when I read the OP (perhaps like [USER=6920677]@Todd Roybark[/USER], <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-brilliance-of-the-original-gygaxian-multiverse.672504/post-8004726" target="_blank">here</a>) was that the whole Gygaxian concept of a “Prime Material Plane” is, perhaps, first and foremost a result of practice and the lack of “canon”.I mean, here he was, Gary Gygax, filled to the brim with the heroics of Conan, John Carter, Jirel of Joiry, Cugel, Dark Agnes, Shadowjack, Eric John Stark, of cowboys and Indians, and all manner of other heroes fantastic and science fiction, of the stories and worlds of Tolkien, Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Dunsany, Anderson, Lovecraft, and Zelazny, of King Kong, of Alice, of Pellucidar, the Dying Earth, Hyperborea, Ringworld, alternate Earths, and what have you… and then he could suddenly live and make folks live all of them.So why put a limit on things? Why limit yourself when you’re telling your kids marvelous stories at the kitchen table when play-testing your game? Why not use simple doors to take them to wherever takes your fancy? Why not have the Isle of the Ape behind one door, Wonderland behind a second, Barsoom behind the next, and Boot Hill behind the fourth? I mean, there’s no reason not to, is there, since you’re bloody well creating the game, aren’t you?When our group of grew and grew and we eventually had as many DMs as we had players, our PCs would simply hop from dungeon to dungeon, from wilderness to wilderness, from adventure to adventure, from story to story on a weekly basis without a second thought and without any other reason or explanation than that we wanted to play as much as possible.It was only after we started building our worlds that we began to think about how they actually worked, about where demons, devils, efreet, and the gods resided, about the reality of things – that we started thinking about how it could be possible that PCs simply hopped from world to world. We came up with all manner of solutions – a misty forest (Ravenloft, anyone?), a multi-dimensional inn (Sigil, anyone?), a shared world map…[rant]…which failed when my neighbor announced that he had nuclear reactors in the mountains between our nations, where I had carefully placed Rahab, the grey dragon, because nobody even knew a creature like that existed for I was the only one with that issue of Dragon Magazine! Ye Gods! To this day I clam up with frustration when the subject of these nuclear reactors comes up.[/rant]But then, we weren’t as well-versed in pulp fantasy and science fiction as EGG undoubtedly was – not American and therefore no history with all of that – so we had no notion of how the writers of the day dealt with such matters. Eternal, multi-dimensional warriors? Never heard of them. Ethereal travel? Come again? Astral planes? Isn’t that something New Agers whatchamacallit Transcendentalists in weird-smelling rooms do?So I suppose EGG did think along those lines and perhaps this is where his concept of an "infinite Prime Material Plane” comes from?And I must say, I kind of like the idea.</blockquote>

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