D&D 5E Two more Classic Settings to go

[Aldarc]

OK, sure, I acknowledge your feelings about it. I'm just talking about what the official version of the game world is.

Does the official lore say that the people of Eberron are a bunch of ignoramuses? If so, I would love a citation.

 

[Parmandur]

The Paladine/Bahamut and Takhisis/Tiamat issue strikes me as simply a planar version of the Greeks coming into Egypt after the Alexandrian conquest, seeing Amon-Re, and saying that’s Zeus in a different form. Are the dragon gods separate and merely identified as a familiar form, or are they a connected distinct version (anyone who’s read Proclus’s “Platonic Theology” can discuss the analogy of sublunar Jupiter on Olympus descended from demiurgic Jupiter!)?

It's all in Plato, all in Plato: Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

I'm not exactly a fan of the idea that the people of Eberron are just "confused" or "idiots." It's a bit condescending in how it treats the setting as having a lesser understanding.

Would the correct term be ignorant? I mean that is how I treat all D&D cosmology from a mortal perspective. Whatever the books say is just bad analogy made by mortals to try and comprehend what they can’t understand.

Ignorant is not a bad thing, us mortals just lack all the info need to make a truly informed decision. More so on Eberrob were the gods don’t talk to people

 

[Parmandur]

Does the official lore say that the people of Eberron are a bunch of ignoramuses? If so, I would love a citation.

Rising from the Last War includes a description of a Gnome from Eberron who moved her Artificer operations to Sigil. Ergo, Eberron is part of the Great Wheel cosmology (and notably, Vi shown up in official streams on Ravnica and the Forgotten Realms). So, they are literally ignorant of their cosmological position. Doesn't mean they know nothing. Most people ever are similarly ignorant.

 

[Parmandur]

Would the correct term be ignorant. I mean that is how I treat all D&D cosmology from a mortal perspective. Whatever the books say is just bad analogy made by mortals to try and comprehend what they can’t understand.

The books even say that.

 

[Aldarc]

Rising from the Last War includes a description of a Gnome from Eberron who moved her Artificer operations to Sigil. Ergo, Eberron is part of the Great Wheel cosmology (and notably, Vi shown up in official streams on Ravnica and the Forgotten Realms). So, they are literally ignorant of their cosmological position. Doesn't mean they know nothing. Most people ever are similarly ignorant.

They are part of the Great Wheel, but also explicitly apart from it with its own cosmology.

 

[overgeeked]

I'm still not sure what Sigil has to do with anything. I'm simply saying that I don't think that an approach that condescendingly treats the people as Eberron as a bunch of ignoramuses who don't have a higher grasp of the universe does any favors for that setting. If the same was true about condescendingly treating the inhabitants of Sigil as just plain wrong, then I would also have an issue with that.

You’re forgetting that a large part of the Planescape setting is treating anyone without higher understanding as ignorant Primes. It’s fairly common to associate the same arrogance to the players who prefer the setting.

But when it comes down to it, if two people have conflicting ideas about how something works, at least one of them is wrong. If you have a disagreement about what’s the center of the solar system two common arguments are either the earth is the center or the sun is the center. For millennia we thought it was the earth. We were wrong. For centuries we thought it was the sun. But we were wrong. Now we know it’s a point near the sun thanks to the gravity of Jupiter.

If the cosmology of the planes is an established fact, either the people of Eberron are right or wrong. Either the Planescape notion of cosmology is right or it’s wrong. Both can’t be right, unless we’re going back to crystal spheres and applying that to cosmologies somehow. But both could be wrong.

 

[Parmandur]

I think you are reading too much into what this means. I think that it means that Eberron is part of the D&D multiverse, but not necessarily the Great Wheel.

The Great Wheel is just a model, in Setting (and again, this is all made up bull poop, do with whatever you feel like). The inhabitants of Sigil are equally ignorant, most likely, just on a different level.

 

[Aldarc]

The Great Wheel is just a model, in Setting (and again, this is all made up bull poop, do with whatever you feel like). The inhabitants of Sigil are equally ignorant, most likely, just on a different level.

Sorry. I went back and changed what I wrote.

 

[Parmandur]

You’re forgetting that a large part of the Planescape setting is treating anyone without higher understanding as ignorant Primes. It’s fairly common to associate the same arrogance to the players who prefer the setting.

But when it comes down to it, if two people have conflicting ideas about how something works, at least one of them is wrong. If you have a disagreement about what’s the center of the solar system two common arguments are either the earth is the center or the sun is the center. For millennia we thought it was the earth. We were wrong. For centuries we thought it was the sun. But we were wrong. Now we know it’s a point near the sun thanks to the gravity of Jupiter.

If the cosmology of the planes is an established fact, either the people of Eberron are right or wrong. Either the Planescape notion of cosmology is right or it’s wrong. Both can’t be right, unless we’re going back to crystal spheres and applying that to cosmologies somehow. But both could be wrong.

Probably that last thing. It's all DM discretion, but in official terms that means it's Perkins' and Crawford's discretion.