Nivenus
First Post
This is not correct. The "Great Wheel" was first mentioned in Dragon Magazine #8 (July 1977).
My mistake. But as you will yourself admit, the Great Wheel was presented very early in D&D and so has a long history that does not make it "intrinsic" to Planescape or antithetical to the spirit of D&D. Indeed, the fact that it was included in one of the core rulebooks (even in appendix, which is also the case for 5e) indicates that while it may not have been considered "essential" or "required," it was definitely considered "core."ted within the Great Wheel framework.
MotP was published in 1987. That is 10 years after Dragon #8 and 8 years after the publication of the final core AD&D rulebook. MotP is not "canon", any more than DDG is "canon" - it is an optional supplement that most players of the original AD&D game would not have purchased or probably even heard of.
It was canon to Greyhawk, so I think it's fair to say it was canon to D&D, given Greyhawk's status as the preeminent "default" setting before 4e. I mean, how else are you going define canonical?
Besides which, the foreword to MotP indicates it was intended to be fairly widely applicable:
MotP (1e) said:The AD&D system over the years has treated the known planes of existence as holding bins for every idea and adventure that did not quite belong in the Prime Material Plane... With additional books of monsters, we moved all manner of slaad, modrons, and githyanki into these planes as visitors, then moved entire pantheons to co-exist in the Legends and Lore book. And for every adventure in every plane, another set of effects on spell-casting was created.
This then, has been the AD&D game closet; like Fibber McGee's, it is filled to capacity with the well-intended thoughts of a decade.
And I have the pleasurable task of throwing open the door and (provided I am not crushed by the bowling ball on the top shelf)
picking through and explaining the pieces.
It is a massive task. Consider, for example, that the planes are infinite (except the demi-planes, but that's another story). Can these
regions be mapped? How do the Hells appear to descend and the Heavens to rise? Where do the gods of the ancient pantheons
live? Do they get along with each other? What about other life on those planes (gods need servants, after all)? How do you travel
through an infinite plane filled with elemental fire? Indeed, how do you even survive on an infinite plane filled with elemental fire?
This book attempts to answer these questions and many more. One of the basic assumptions of this tome is that what has been
written in the past is true, and our job is to explain it. The chief reason is that the AD&D system is a living and dynamic system
that is built upon the foundation of its past. While the game can absorb any amount of new material, casting off pre-existing
material often damages the system. My purpose is to reveal the mysteries of the AD&D game without voiding a majority of them.
The intent is clear, the MotP is intended to be the definitive source for all things planar in 1st edition D&D, at least insofar as basic, widely held assumptions go. Now, I don't agree that all settings should use the cosmology. As I have said before, I hope 5e (like 3e) supports a wide number of potential models. But the fact remains that the Great Wheel (and the Manual of the Planes which detailed it) was intended to be widely applicable across all of 1e.
OMG! So much confusion. Surely that would mean doomsday with cats and dogs living together. Call one 'celestial archon' and the other 'elemental archon.' Done. Or would the use of adjectival descriptors confuse your players and wiki editors too much?
That is what we do. But it's a rare thing for monsters of completely different natures to have the same name, would you not agree? Aside from chromatic and metallic dragons (which are still both essentially dragons) I'm not sure I can think of an example. For simplicity's sake it's better that they have different names. Which is what I expect WotC will do if they decide to incorporate both.
And? This seems to be as big of a deal as having different people with the title of 'king' or 'prince' in a setting.
It's not even remotely the same. One is a generic title that is expected to apply to different people. Another is a species name. It's more like having the word "octopus" apply both to an aquatic cephalopod and a flying mammal.
And, really, if it was just the Blood War that made it over to the core of the game, I'd be pretty happy. It was certainly a cool idea when I first saw it. But, Planescape became the over-setting and thus all planar material had to then follow Planescape canon, no matter what. That's why I keep bringing up Planescape. You really can't separate the Great Wheel from Planescape anymore. Planescape completely took over all the Great Wheel and all things planar.
Considering Planescape didn't exist in 1e (but the Great Wheel did) and wasn't supported in 3e, I find this questionable. Certainly the two are very closely connected, but so are a lot of basic assumptions of Greyhawk that have worked their way into non-setting specific material. The example of "Yondalla" several pages back is one such case, as is the existence of shared dwarven and elven deities across multiple settings. I'm not a huge fan of forcing everything to be core, but the truth is that Planescape is hardly unique in this category.
For example, I could probably sell a module to Dungeon magazine (presuming it comes back) that features an orc tribe that is working with an elf group, presuming the module was interesting enough. It's a generic, setting free adventure. But, I will never, ever be able to sell a module to Dungeon where a demon has three modron body guards and is working for a devil. It will just never, ever happen because it violates too much canon. I can never buy a supplement which features planar elements that doesn't obey Planescape lore, because, as you say, Planescape is now the default setting.
Actually, I'm not sure that's accurate. The Blood War's a general rule for demons and devils relationships. I've actually seen more than a few stories where the two do occasionally work together (though rarely of their own accord). Honestly, I don't see it as any more difficult than imagining a scenario where devils and (celestial) archons might work together - not likely but not impossible either.
I never had a real problem with Greyhawk as default because Greyhawk is so generic that it can be plopped pretty much anywhere. PS is not generic. It is a very specific setting. People love it and that's great. I just wish that for gamers like me, who aren't interested in PS, that we could get planar supplements that weren't forced to follow a single setting.
Greyhawk seems generic only because the rest of D&D is built upon it. A lot of the tropes Greyhawk and generic D&D share were not altogether common in fantasy before either came along. Greyhawk's seemingly non-intrusive nature is just a result of it having been designed by Gary Gygax, who was also the chief designer of D&D.
The first time I used a nycadaemon it was allied with both a demon and devil to try to advance the cause of an evil god. There seemed to me that there was no greater barrier to demons and devils cooperating than dwarves and elves - and everyone knows that in extremes dwarves and elves will align against orcs and ogres, whereas we never see elves and ogres aligning against dwarves and (LE) orcs!
I say that's more for a lack of imagination in the use of elves and ogres than anything else. As I said above, I can see devils and demons working together for specific purposes. It's just not going to happen very often (nor do I think it should, given the prevalence of law vs. chaos as an equal conflict to good vs. evil).
When I later acquired a copy of D3, I saw that, in it, mezzodaemons and nycadaemons were hanging out in the Vault much like demons. 4e's treatment harks back to that. (And that is no obstacle to nycadaemons playing both sides for those who want it - for instance, a nycadaemon could ally with a force of devils to betray a force of demons fighting on the Plane of 1000 Portals. Nothing in 4e makes that sort of scenario impossible.)
No, it's not. But it does strike me that the argument that "daemons were originally just another kind of demon" is pretty obviously false in light of the fact that the 1e lore reads closer to the 2e lore than it does the 4e lore.
This all rests on premises that I don't really accept.
For instance, I don't agree with your contrast between "continuation" and "adaptation". Todd McFarlane's Peter Parker married to Mary Jane is not in any meaningful sense a continuation of Ditko's nerdy photo-journalist getting beaten up by Flash Thompson. They're different riffs on the same character and his tropes.
To a certain extent you are correct. The characters of Marvel Comics and other long running continuities do essentially change as new writers and artists take the wheel. All the same, Earth-616 today is still Earth-616, not Earth-1610 or any of the other numerous Marvel universes. Moffat's Doctor Who may be markedly different from the original 1960s show with William Hartnell or even RTD's relatively recent take on the series, but it's still the same show and there is a sense of continuity from the beginning to the end, with callbacks, references, and recurring characters.
But adaptations aren't quite the same thing because again, there's no shared continuity (and I mean this in the sense of "continuing" the story and the themes rather than a literal timeline of events). No one is expecting the X-Men movies to match the comics' storylines precisely (well, outside of a few really impractical fans). It is expected that events will be reinterpreted and reshaped to fit the movies' needs. Besides the fact that they are in some ways starting from scratch there's also the fact that the stories have to be molded to suit the purpose of an entirely different medium: film instead of comics.
On the other hand, each edition of D&D is a pen and paper RPG, played in very much the same way (with a few changes) as it was decades ago. There's no transition from medium to medium. There's no need to "start from scratch" because you're retelling the same story. Instead, each edition simply built (or did, until 4e) on what the previous editions had already done. There were reinterpretations of course, but they were small and gradual changes, like those that occur (for example) when one writer leaves a comic book and is replaced by another. The changes you described in the Spider-Man comics occurred over decades of time, just as the changes from 1e to 3e did. The changes from 3e to 4e though, occurred immediately and were more akin to an adaptation, as they took what existed it and reimagined it as something else.
I've never heard any of the criticism of First Class that you mention. They don't resonate with me at all. The point of the movies (or the comics) isn't, primarily, to present a history of an alternative universe. It's to tell stories, with the alternative universe background being a tool to that end.
I'm actually genuinely surprised. I don't agree with many of these criticisms, but I've hear them all the time.
But that's beside the point.
4e didn't render past material "invalid". Material doesn't become invalid, because there is no relevant test of validity. It is all just story elements for use in an RPG. Did the Caves of Chaos become "invalid" when AD&D rewrote most of those humanoids as LE? Was its validity partially restored when 3E rewrote orcs as CE?
If new material says past material is "wrong" than yes, it does make the past material invalid.
I think it depends to a certain extent whether you consider the lore part of an established world or not. Again, this comes back to the setting thing and while I get that's not an issue for you the fact remains that WotC and TSR have both historically implemented "core" lore in specific settings.
As something of an aside, 4e doesn't have a metaplot - all the material you mention has already happened in the default setting, and is part of the background known by the players.
It absolutely is a metaplot. The Dawn War and the details of 4e's cosmology in form a lot of what's going on in the world, not only in the default setting but in the Forgotten Realms as well. The conflict between elementals and immortals is considered just as essential in 4e as the conflict between demons and devils was in 2e/3e (indeed, the former's used to quasi-justify the latter). I don't see how you can say it isn't.
The bottom line, for me, is that TSR/WotC is not engaged in worldbuilding. They are presenting me (and other D&D players) with the material to put together my (our) games.
But they objectively were and are. I honestly don't get how you see it otherwise. Yes, there's definitely a lot of allowance for a DM and players to reinterpret things as they wish, but if TSR and WotC aren't worldbuilding than they're wasting a lot of words doing something that looks an awful lot like worldbuilding.
No. I'm saying that a version of the game that develops AD&D assumptions in a certain direction isn't "disrespecting" or "disregarding" what came before. It is building on it.
It's building on it by disregarding the following 2 editions. Again I'm not comfortable using the word "disrespect" here as that feels too judgmental to me. But absolutely there was a major shift to something different than what came before. D&D was, for lack of a better word, "rebooted."
Let me be more specific.
If I wanted to describe Acheron as a realm of post apocalyptic cities, no flying cubes at all, what would my chances of getting published be?
After all, that does not run counter to any core D&D material. The plane of Acheron is not really described anywhere but in a Planescape specific manual (the Planewalker's Handbook, 1996, according to Wikipedia). So, what would my chances be?
Considering that Acheron was described as a plane of floating cubes as early as the 1st edition Manual of the Planes I don't see how that's actually Planescape-specific.
MotP (1e) said:Acheron is divided into four layers, each layer stressing order over evil, the group over the individual. Each layer consists of huge blocks that drift together, join for a time, then part again. These blocks are the size of nations, yet when they collide thereare no tremors. While blocks are joined, beings can change blocks and travel with the new block as it drifts off. Gravity is toward the center of each block; the medium between the blocks can be considered to be air for purposes of breathing and flying.
That isn't to say your interpretation isn't necessarily an valid one. But again, I don't get where the idea that all of this stuff originated with Planescape comes from when it clearly didn't.
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