D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[Neonchameleon]

I've never read anything from the Greyhawk, Dragonlance, or Forgotten Realms settings. I have, however, read just about everything published in the '90s concerning Planescape, and this is all news to me. It sounds like there may be baggage of the Great Wheel from other supplements?

Absolutely. The Great Wheel is nothing but baggage. But Planescape's pitch involved using the Manual of the Planes.

But, really, none of that applies to Planescape,

Yes it does. Planescape is a cross-canon setting. If you want to change Planescape into a setting entirely unconnected to any other and give it an exclusive cosmology then it would work. The problem is, as I have said repeatedly on this thread the Great Wheel does not fit Planescape and it is to Planescape's detriment that the Great Wheel is there at all, let alone that it is associated with it more than other settings.

Without The Great Wheel dropped on it like an anvil from on high, Planescape's cosmology resembles Mage: the Ascension's with most of the problematic elements removed. Which is no bad thing.

Biased, disingenuous, and incorrect, pay no attention to this baiting, people.

And if an ad hominem and unsupported assertions are the entire counterargument you can raise, that only serves to underline the accuracy of the claims.

 

[Steely Dan]

Re: Sup

And if an ad hominem and unsupported assertions are the entire counterargument you can raise, that only serves to underline the accuracy of the claims.

No, it simply means people should ignore your Planescape/Great Wheel smear campaign. You are blatantly misrepresenting it because you don't like it, or understand it, or whatever your personal reasons are; so, please refrain from further lying about the setting and what it's about.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Yes it does. Planescape is a cross-canon setting. If you want to change Planescape into a setting entirely unconnected to any other and give it an exclusive cosmology then it would work. The problem is, as I have said repeatedly on this thread the Great Wheel does not fit Planescape and it is to Planescape's detriment that the Great Wheel is there at all, let alone that it is associated with it more than other settings.

There are two things that I would say make this untrue.

First, while technically, as an example, everything in Greyhawk is cannon in Planescape, that doesn't mean much in play. If you aren't a Greyhawk fan then you'll never see anything Greyhawk in your Planescape sessions. Greyhawk becomes more of one of those theoretical Prime Material planes that maybe you'll visit to gawk at the natives and laugh at their terribly misinformed understanding of the Multiverse, but that's about it. Which brings up the second part.

The Planescape books explicitly say that Primes don't know squat, and you have to take everything they think with a grain of salt. Which means, yeah Greyhawk might be cannon for Greyhawk, but in the context of the Planescape Campaign Setting, if anything contradictory is found then Planescape overrides and is the way of things.

All this means, to me, that the Great Wheel of Planescape is great because it is presented as a great thing in the Planescape books. I don't personally care about what Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance had to say. I do feel bad that all these things color your perception of the Great Wheel, but my last and best campaign required the Great Wheel to be what it was. An Astral Sea could never have sufficed, for example. It was the layout and the relationship of the different planes to each other that made everything come together.

 

[Desdichado]

Yes it does. Planescape is a cross-canon setting. If you want to change Planescape into a setting entirely unconnected to any other and give it an exclusive cosmology then it would work. The problem is, as I have said repeatedly on this thread the Great Wheel does not fit Planescape and it is to Planescape's detriment that the Great Wheel is there at all, let alone that it is associated with it more than other settings.

The cross-canon elements of Planescape were more an affectation and in-joke than anything else. For the most part, Planescape was presented as if it were meant to be used as a setting in and of itself, rather than the setting that bridged other campaign settings. Whether or not people played it that way I don't know, but the Planescape material that I read (and I didn't read all of it, I freely admit) was presented as if Planescape was the setting itself, and trips to various Prime Material worlds, like Greyhawk or FR or whatever, was just something that could be done, but wasn't necessarily encouraged.

I don't understand in what sense you mean that the Great Wheel doesn't fit Planescape, since it was designed from the get-go as a setting that expanded on the notion of the Great Wheel and both Planescape and The Great Wheel were designed as an alignment check box.

Without The Great Wheel dropped on it like an anvil from on high, Planescape's cosmology resembles Mage: the Ascension's with most of the problematic elements removed. Which is no bad thing.

I think the comparisons to Mage are more superficial rather than substantive; both involve the character's paradigm affecting reality, of course, but in Planescape that is specifically geared towards utilizing the pre-existing Great Wheel paradigm, not a Mage-like cosmology with the Umbra, Paradox, and whatnot, and alignment was a major force and essential component of Planescape.

Planescape is so heavily rooted in the alignment system of D&D (as is the Great Wheel) that decoupling them seems like it would require a major reworking of the Planescape system to maintain the greatest hits elements of it.

Not unlike what was done with the World Axis cosmology of 4e, as it happens. Like I said earlier, 4e didn't appeal to me for a number of reasons, but its setting was not one of them. The 4e setting, both in terms of the Points of Light material plane concept as well as the World Axis cosmology, seem to me to be ideal for the kind of D&D game I like best, where alignment is downplayed or even eliminated entirely and it has a more sword & sorcery feel rather than high concept reality-shaping paradigm.

 

[Mirtek]

It is, however, preached explicitly in Greyhawk, explicitly by the chief God of Good in Dragonlance, and maintained by Ao, the Overgod in the Forgotten Realms. It is therefore the standing assumption in all the largest D&D settings. Unless the Planescape Great Wheel is mysteriously different from all other Great Wheels in D&D Cosmology that is what the Great Wheel means.

Neither of these cared for anything but their respective backwater worlds.

Also two of your three examples are powerfull neutral entities/people (mere mortals on Oerth) claiming that neutrality/balance is better. The non-neutral entities disagree vehemently.

Paladine is an odd one in that regard though (if he really said it that way, never cared for Dragonlance)

 

[Umbran]

Ladies and Gents,

Some of you are getting a bit heated on this. I remind you to not make it personal. Don't deride others for having a different opinion or perspective on gaming products. We're talking about a hobby game - here, essentially, how to pretend to be elves... in space!. It isn't worth insulting folks over.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The problem here is that we have a complete clash in tones between Sigil and The Great Wheel.

I think I see what you're saying here, but my understanding is that Planescape's Great Wheel is no more the same as Greyhawk's Great Wheel than the Twilight vampires are the same as Bram Stoker's vampires. There's plenty of similarities, but there's a lot of very important differences that means that they're being ultimately used in very distinct ways in each of those treatments.

Admittedly, I think D&D has tried to conflate the treatments of the Planes and Planescape in 2e, in 4e (as the World Axis), and now, it seems, in 5e, because in each of those e's there's One True Cosmology. I don't think that helps things. But as it is played, and as I have played it, these are distinct things.

Sigil (pre *spit* Faction War) is a war of competing shifting philosophies. What you do, even what you argue, matters. Philosophies can rise and fall - and even be all but wiped out. If the Mercykillers were to decide that the whole of Sigil was impure and start cleansing it that would be a problem. If you were to somehow engineer a merger between the Takers and the Heartless (not that difficult in some ways) and drive the Dustmen underground you would fundamentally change the nature of Sigil as it stands. This is IMO sensible.

And quite fun!

The Great Wheel is a war of immutable symmetric philosophies. The philosophies are opposed - but due to the symmetry of the wheel, Balance Is King. In two Great Wheel settings this has been made explicit; the Avatar War started because the Gods forgot that Balance was King and in Dragonlance himself Palatine says that the goal was to free the pendulum, and that Good held sway just before the Cataclysm, implying that was the cause. In Great Wheel settings, Gods represent their philosophies and those philosophies must be upheld by the God. The God isn't the power, the God is a minion of the Great Wheel and they can be put on trial for not fulfilling their function. Strike one down and they will be replaced (which is why we've had multiple Mystras).

IMXP, as PS is played, this isn't the case. While it may be true in certain D&D source material such as Dragonlance and Greyhawk and FR (I know less about those settings), PS don't roll that way. The Great Wheel is explicitly mutable (The Third Layer of Arcadia, sliding gate-towns), and gods aren't reflections of the Great Wheel as much as they are reflections of the people who worship them (because belief in your divinity is what turns you into a god). While an individual character may regard balance as king, the PS setting itself doesn't regard that as true in any meaningful way. The Great Wheel itself is explicitly pointed out as as "only a model," only as true as the people that view the world this way take it to be true.

This is part of why I'd make a distinction between PS and the Great Wheel, ultimately. When you've got a game about leaping between infinities, mapping explicitly becomes a matter of perspective.

Because balance isn't king, your point about good being pointless isn't necessarily true (though certainly you could have a character that believes that). I think the more setting-relevant challenge to the set-up of an orphanage isn't that the cosmic scales will balance somehow, but rather that the question arises: why does my character think that setting up an orphanage is a capital-G Good In A Cosmic Sense thing? It matters to "that starfish," but if that starfish is going to grow up and perpetuate the cycle of poverty and war that creates the need for orphanages in the first place, maybe my act isn't as good as I like to think it is. Maybe being exposed to the horrors of abandoned children is what it will take to sway people into peace?

An orphanage in Planescape might look like a celestial raising children to be child crusaders, or a demon playing nursemaid to scarred orphans of the Blood War to get paladins and priests to protect it against the hellbound assassins tracking them, and the players get to ask these questions of themselves: when does this cross a line? And how? Are both bad things even though they are both functionally useful orphanages? Are both fine because they are orphanages regardless of what else they are? Is one good and the other not? Why?

Good isn't pointless there, but the idea is that Good means different things to different people and ultimately it is the PC's version of Good that transforms the multiverse, it is their ideas that, over the course of 20 levels, should emerge to define Good for people across the planes. It's not a direct accounting of balance (well, maybe if you're a rilmani, or maybe a modron, but those are explicitly alien beings of immortal thought), but rather a questioning of the nature of the thing.

Jam the two together and there's a huge clash in tones. The only reason Planescape/Sigil works at all is that there is an Overgod (the Lady of Pain) who has this one city as her personal petri dish and is simultaneously as curious and disinterested as any good scientist in seeing what happens. Sigil is the only place in the whole of Planescape where you can change anything important - and that only because of the protective umbrella of the Lady of Pain insulating Sigil from The Great Wheel.

Again, I don't think this is true on a setting-wide level. PS is a setting where gate-towns slide and where layers shift and where changing ideologies re-shape the cosmos. It is explicitly a game of a mutable Great Wheel.

It's possible that other D&D settings find the heavens less mutable for one reason or another, but in PS at least, things don't stay the same.

I'm of the opinion that Planescape works better with the 4e default cosmology than with the Great Wheel. The World Axis is inherently unstable, and the Great Wheel, as I've argued, promotes evil and makes good pointless.

I think ultimately for PS that cosmological maps are kind of irrelevant (which is why I had a pretty solid, if brief, 4e run in the setting), in part because of that flexibility. The World Axis can be true alongside the Great Wheel and alongside, I dunno, the Egyptian understanding of the path of the Sun, and they'd all be compatible with each other,and you could have three different characters in the party who all believe their own version of the tale and could even run a coherent PS adventure where all of them receive confirmation of and denial of their world views.

 

[DMZ2112]

Yes it does. Planescape is a cross-canon setting. If you want to change Planescape into a setting entirely unconnected to any other and give it an exclusive cosmology then it would work. The problem is, as I have said repeatedly on this thread the Great Wheel does not fit Planescape and it is to Planescape's detriment that the Great Wheel is there at all, let alone that it is associated with it more than other settings.

As a big fan of Planescape, Neon, I for one am picking up what you're putting down. There are absolutely interpretations of the Great Wheel that render the core concepts of Planescape irrelevant, the AD&D2 setting material does not do a good job of selecting interpretations that do not, and I do also prefer the World Axis as a greater setting for Sigil for that reason (among others).

Frankly, the position of Sigil at the "center" of the "center" of the "wheel" itself is a metaphor for balance; if not the balance of a set of scales then certainly the balance of a -- wait for it -- wheel, which must be weighted properly or it will rock itself right off its axle. This is not a subtle metaphor; Sigil is shaped like a tire; it sits atop a long pole; every single depiction of the city and its environs ever shows those environs radiating outward from it in a spoke-like fashion.

But your interpretation of the nature of the balance of the Great Wheel is just that -- an interpretation. Paladine's comments in particular imply that the "pendulum" /can swing/ and further /needed to be freed/, which suggests that the tet-for-tat* you describe can at the very least be obstructed for a short time or in a small area by the efforts of mortals, if not stopped entirely by cosmic events.

My interpretation of the Great Wheel is that the balance is permanent, but not by any design. There's no inherent desire on the part of the good or the evil for a neutral outcome, but rather the neutral outcome is the result of an infinite number of struggles on an infinite number of battlefields. No tet-for-tat, but rather a cosmic balance sheet.

Good and evil are well matched, in a cosmic sense, and we know this because if they weren't it would literally shake the foundations of fantasy roleplaying as a genre. Likewise, they are constantly at odds. If the planes themselves seem static, it's because they are not really places at all, but rather the distillation of the ideas and beliefs of an infinite number of people across an infinite number of worlds. Those people -- those minds -- are constantly changing. But like any gauge, the planes only give the reader a simplified, easily understood notion of what's going on under the hood.

You don't change the planes by changing the planes -- you change them by changing minds. And a lot of minds, at that. I always found it kind of comical that the Planescape authors thought Plague-Mort would slip into the Abyss because of the outcome of a local political struggle -- that's absurd. Plague-Mort, like everything else on the planes, is a symbol. You want to change the symbol you have to change what it symbolizes. And that means visiting a lot of prime material worlds. A whole lot.

One thing I definitely disagree with you about is the idea that the Sigil faction kriegstanz is in any way dynamic. I think it's interesting that you spit at the notion of the Faction War while trumpeting the opinion that factions should change. Nothing in the setting material until that book suggests that the factions have any interest in or motivation toward disrupting the kriegstanz in any real way -- it's right there in the word kriegstanz.

Sigil mirrors the Great Wheel perfectly, in that regard. At least in my opinion. Note that I'm not necessarily saying that's a selling point. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is right in that there is a fatalism to Planescape. No part of it is a story of change. It might be better as a story of change, and the World Axis might be the place to tell that story, but as written it's more about doom by status quo than any other setting with the possible exception of Dark Sun.

On a final note, for what it is worth, unlike [MENTION=1288]Mouseferatu[/MENTION], I find the idea of a good deity who prefers a carefully adjudicated balance for centuries over even the risk of one single day of complete domination by evil forces to be eminently practical and believable.

*Yes, I know it's not tet-for-tat, but you knew what I meant immediately and -for-tat would have been unnecessarily confusing. Sigh.

 

[I'm A Banana]

But your interpretation of the nature of the balance of the Great Wheel is just that -- an interpretation.

I like the way the Planewalker's Handbook put it:

The Outer Planes only appear as a ring when they're drawn on paper. But just 'cause some leatherhead sketches a picture of the planes and puts Mechanus next to Acheron, it doesn't mean that that a planewalker can just hop across some physical border or boundary between the two. The infinitely big planes don't really lay out like countries on a map. Instead, they're organized according to outlook, good versus evil, order versus chaos -- get the picture?

In fact, this pretty much is just the planes according to the Great Road and the "alignment theory." The existence of other planar pathways than the Great Road keeps other ideas in play: the Styx, the Oceanus, Yggdrasil, and Olympus, even the Well of Many Worlds and the Infinite Staircase are other ways to map the multiverse.

 

[Hussar]

There are two things that I would say make this untrue.

First, while technically, as an example, everything in Greyhawk is cannon in Planescape, that doesn't mean much in play. If you aren't a Greyhawk fan then you'll never see anything Greyhawk in your Planescape sessions. Greyhawk becomes more of one of those theoretical Prime Material planes that maybe you'll visit to gawk at the natives and laugh at their terribly misinformed understanding of the Multiverse, but that's about it. Which brings up the second part.

The Planescape books explicitly say that Primes don't know squat, and you have to take everything they think with a grain of salt. Which means, yeah Greyhawk might be cannon for Greyhawk, but in the context of the Planescape Campaign Setting, if anything contradictory is found then Planescape overrides and is the way of things.

All this means, to me, that the Great Wheel of Planescape is great because it is presented as a great thing in the Planescape books. I don't personally care about what Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance had to say. I do feel bad that all these things color your perception of the Great Wheel, but my last and best campaign required the Great Wheel to be what it was. An Astral Sea could never have sufficed, for example. It was the layout and the relationship of the different planes to each other that made everything come together.

But, this isn'T really an issue. Planescape can do whatever it wants to do. Same as every other setting out there, it is free to interpret, reinterpret and fold, spindle and maul concepts to its heart's content. Fantastic.

But the issue is that those interpretation are then forced back onto every other setting. It's no different than if they declared that all halflings must be Kender or all vampires must reference Ravenloft and the Domains of Dread. There's absolutely no reason that demons need to reference the Blood War in order to be usable in D&D.