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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 6344507" data-attributes="member: 14159">I can understand why they might not put Dark Sun directly in the PHB, since it's pretty far from the standard pseudo-medieval setting of D&D.  Dark Sun was a good setting, and it has its fans, but the setting makes enough changes to things like how magic works and core classes that it's a textbook example of adapting D&D to fit a different style of fantasy world.  For that, I can see them leaving it to the DMG or a later supplement.  Remember, Dark Sun doesn't have a pantheon.  There are no Gods in the conventional sense, Clerics worship the elements, Druids have their powers of nature, and Templars worship the Dragon Kings, who aren't Gods but are instead epic-level mortal wizards who discovered how to grant spells as they begin to transform into giant dragons.  Mystara doesn't have Gods in the conventional sense either, it has "Immortals" who are just plain different, being somewhere between super-powered immortal adventurers and conventional deities, and while some WotC works have tried to shoehorn Mystaran religion and planes into the Multiverse (Warriors of Heaven from very late 2e), I can see them doing the same thing with that they are doing for Dark Sun and waiting for the DMG or another supplement.Infinite worlds.  WotC can only publish so many.  It's getting into petty semantics, but at least WotC is acknowledging that their published canon does not supercede the DM.  It's better than their approach to the subject in 4e of saying that the canon of the Forgotten Realms was too complex for DM's, so they'll blow it all up so DM's don't have as much to keep track of.I disagree.You could have said the same thing about 2e's multiverse.  Frankly, the reborn multiverse is one of the things I'm looking forward to in 5e.  Planescape and the D&D multiverse managed to put Dragonlance in the bigger picture, retconning Krynnish mages as being rather naive about planar layouts.  It put Dark Sun in by saying it's Crystal Sphere was way off out of the way and unusually hard to penetrate, so Spelljammers should never find it, and that it is sealed from the Astral Plane and all outer planes, has a couple of special planes (Grey and Black) buried within its sphere, and the only interplanar access it has is via the Inner Planes. . .which works a lot better in 5e because the Athasian version of the Inner Planes is more of the 5e concept of "Border Elemental" planes than the normal Planescape elemental planes.Connecting worlds not normally connected has been slowly built up for a while.  Eberron for example.  It was originally written with its own cosmology.  We don't know if 5e is going to just mean each Eberron plane was "actually" a Great Wheel plane such as Shavarath being Gehenna (or all the lower planes, connected via River Styx) or Idrian being Positive Energy for example, or if they are going to have their own mini-cosmology hooked to others.However, the idea of Eberron connecting to the rest of the Multiverse didn't start with 5e.  In Dungeons and Dragons Online, for a couple of years now, although set in Eberron, they introduced inter-planar crossovers with Forgotten Realms.  The plot being that Lolth managed to build a connection to Eberron (something about her plot trying to basically turn an Eberron spider demon trapped into Khyber into her local avatar, and get access to that world as a deity), the players of the game thwart her effort, but it leaves open the planar connections between Eberron and not only the Abyss, but Realmspace (so PC's can travel back and forth).  A bridge between two multiverses, or just a fairly isolated material world getting wrapped up in bigger planar politics?  They also have the Forgotten Realms part having an epic-level (~25th level) plot which basically implies that Mystra is in the process of being reborn and the players have to ensure that a young peasant girl can live up to her destiny of becoming the new Mystra, which is probably setting up for the rebuilt/restored Realms of 5e, maybe WotC's been setting up some of these plot elements for a while.2e had the Plane of Shadow connecting not just the normal Great Wheel, but other multiverses and realities, and in d20 Modern it even connected the D&D multiverse to the "real world", albeit making it very difficult to go from the "real world" back to the Plane of Shadow once you step through.I'm fine with that.  In this post-edition wars era, let us just be happier that we're all still playing D&D.  There are and have been many editions, and they encompass many play styles.  Acknowledging that setting and system are not inherently married is actually very progressive.One interesting thing about the "Arcane Age" products, is that they actually had rules in them for pseudo-1e in them when you went before the ToT.  Nobody sincerely expected gaming groups to switch editions when moving through time, or for groups that didn't have 1e books to buy them just to run a time-travel adventure, but the Arcane Age box set did have rules for changing some things, mostly magic, to fit a 1e model better.  Also, 2e had, in a lot of places, the idea that mortal advancement stopped at 30th level, and even Deities could only reach 40th level (2e High Level Campaigns, the Faiths & Avatars series, Dragon Kings), while 1e explicitly had no cap (Throne of Bloodstone).   Since part of the whole point of Arcane Age was ridiculously high level wizards starting to go a little too far in exploring the limits to magic, that 30th level cap didn't make sense there, so it's another pseudo-edition change.We'll see when the 5e DMG comes out.  Honestly, it's the first DMG since 3.5e that I've actually looked forward to buying.  I might not play 5e and stick to 3.5, but I'll at least buy the core books and see what I can take back to 3.5.</blockquote>

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