The Great Wheel Cosmology as an "assumed part of a D&D world"

[Ahnehnois]

My homebrew uses a Great Wheel-ish planar structure with the basic planes and some extra ones from MotP thrown in. The whole concept of planes to me is that they represent a world taken to some extreme, and that there is an opposite plane with an opposite extreme, and that in the middle lies the "real world"-the Material Plane. That's what my campaign setting is all about, finding a balance between opposing forces. The Great Wheel operationalizes this philosophical point wonderfully well.

I find it hard to imagine a setting without a Great Wheel structure. Sure it could happen, and I like original new settings with different cosmologies, but I wouldn't want to see it in the "standard" D&D world.

 

[shadow]

I never understood the "great wheel". I don't understand why it is sacrosanct to so many people. Then again, I never really got "planar adventuring". Almost all the games that I have played in or run focused on the material world at hand and never got into plane hopping.

 

[Li Shenron]

The Great Wheel is just a configuration of planes.

If they totally remove some of the transitive planes (Ethereal, Astral, Shadows) then there are going to be some mechanical differences, particularly the removal of staple spells like Etherealness, Astral Projection or Shadow Walk.

But otherwise, if they just rehash the configuration, there is no reason to worry, because the DM is always going to make the cosmology a setting choice.

 

[Li Shenron]

The point is though, that to anyone who is interested in using the Blood War as a key part of the campaign (and is thus already invested in the great wheel to some extent), there is no difficulty in just continuing to use the great wheel. They just ignore the 4e assumed cosmology for their own preferred cosmology.

If the Blood War is important to someone, they don't have to work out how to shoe-horn it into a new cosmology - they just their existing cosmology which has it already tied in.

What is the difficulty in doing this I wonder?

Exactly.

I liked the great wheel at first, and used it for a few years. Then it became boring and restrictive, so I just had my fun changing the cosmology a few times, and in every campaign I modified the planes (with the extra benefit of "resetting" what the players know about the multiverse). If it's possible NOT to stick with the great wheel in 3.0, I see no reason why it should be difficult to do the opposite in 4e.

Unless the GM is someone who cannot suffer not having it written in an official published book, in which case it's his own problem

 

[Branduil]

No matter how much they say you can just cram in all the old Great Wheel planes into the "Astral Sea" or have a chunk of Elemental Chaos that's all one element for an adventure there, it's inherently a disorderly multiverse, it's a mishmash without order.

Or perhaps there is order... it's just beyond the capability of mortals to understand.

 

[Irda Ranger]

The Great Wheel isn't Core. We know this because if you removed it, no one "in the campaign world" would notice or care. Planescape included - because you get places by going through gates, not walking to the edge of the plane and "hopping to the next one." You can't even do that.

Compare the effect of removing the Great Wheel vs. removing Wizards or Elves. They're core to every D&D setting.

Frankly, I bet 95% of gamers (and probably higher) can't even put the Planes in the right order. I probably can't and I DM'd a short-lived Planescape campaign once ...

 

[Exen Trik]

I knew about the great wheel forever it seems, but didn't realize it was actually supposed to effect the setting at all. It just seemed like an abstraction for showing how inner planes were related and that the outer planes were outside of that. Having to shoehorn gods into Valhalla or whatnot just because of alignment seems ridiculous and arbitrary.

If that's considered a sacred cow, then fire up the grill, grab the knives and pass the sauce, because it time for a BBQ.

 

[Deverash]

The Great Wheel was a very orderly, very lawful look at reality. The very flavor of the Great Wheel was one of a a cosmic balance with raw physical reality (the elemental and energy planes) at the center and raw metaphysical reality (outer planes based on alignment) at the outside, each with their precise balanced order, with the material plane at the center of them being perfectly balanced between belief and reality.

This is part of the reason I /like/ the changes. The old system was inherently ordered. Even Chaos was bound into that order. How does that even closely resembe balanced? In the new system, depending on how the Astral Sea is described, you can actually have the chaotic planes in the sheer chaos of the Elemental Tempest(with the Abyss at it's center), balanced against the mental/divine order of the Astral Sea.

I mean, under the Great Wheel, every druid in existance should be working to destabilize the overly ordered arrangement of the planes.

 

[Tharen the Damned]

You can see the great wheel as an idea of how the planes are supposed to be connected and the world is ordered.

The nedless homebrew cosmologies and the new 4th ed. cosmology is another idea of how the planes are ordered.

That is all Fluff and can be changed or modified. Maybe the paladin Wingsandword mentioned does not believe in the "new" idea of the multiverse but in an ordered and structured multiverse. Who can say he is wrong?

But, and that is what interests me, has the new setting implications that effect how D&D is played?
Apart from the recent sex tourism of the demons and devils on the material plane and the rising Tiefling population? (by the way, are Tieflings always Human -Devil/Demon Offspring? What about Halflings, Dwarves or Elves?)
How will the PCs do their plane hopping? How will Incorporeal Undead work? That is the more interesing question.

 

[Baby Samurai]

like Lolth not being in Dragonlance

Even though she wasn't specifically part of Dragonlance, the 2nd Edition Dragonlance accessory Wild Elves detailed the Valley of Perfect Silence where Spelljamming drow elves had settled from the planet Nightlock. There were even Spider-Dragons thanks to good old Llolth.