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Wandering Monsters 1/15/14: Reinventing the Great Wheel
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<blockquote data-quote="Klaus" data-source="post: 6246462" data-attributes="member: 607"><p>For no other reason than the fact that it's been presented in AD&D, 2e and 3e, the Great Wheel earned its place as the baseline D&D cosmology. But a lot of D&D settings never used the Great Wheel (and suffered when shoehorned into it):</p><p></p><p>- Dragonlance;</p><p>- Dark Sun;</p><p>- Eberron;</p><p>- Nentir Vale;</p><p></p><p>(I don't know enough of Birthright and Mystara to comment on their cosmologies, and Red Steel never spoke about extraplanar adventures)</p><p></p><p>Plus, as James Wyatt mentioned in the article, the Great Wheel is just a mortal's attempt to make sense of the different planes. During the 3e era, Ravenloft boasted "mistways", which were semi-reliable paths through the Mists, linking the Core to certain Clusters and Islands of Terror. Back in the day, I did a mapping exercise where I tried to imagine how a RL denizen would make sense of the "mistways" (since the denizen would have no idea he lived in a "demiplane"), and created a RL "world map" which attempted to rationalize these "mistways" as actual, physical connections. Like the Great Wheel, it was just a mortal's attempt to wrap his brain around something that shouldn't make any sense.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Klaus, post: 6246462, member: 607"] For no other reason than the fact that it's been presented in AD&D, 2e and 3e, the Great Wheel earned its place as the baseline D&D cosmology. But a lot of D&D settings never used the Great Wheel (and suffered when shoehorned into it): - Dragonlance; - Dark Sun; - Eberron; - Nentir Vale; (I don't know enough of Birthright and Mystara to comment on their cosmologies, and Red Steel never spoke about extraplanar adventures) Plus, as James Wyatt mentioned in the article, the Great Wheel is just a mortal's attempt to make sense of the different planes. During the 3e era, Ravenloft boasted "mistways", which were semi-reliable paths through the Mists, linking the Core to certain Clusters and Islands of Terror. Back in the day, I did a mapping exercise where I tried to imagine how a RL denizen would make sense of the "mistways" (since the denizen would have no idea he lived in a "demiplane"), and created a RL "world map" which attempted to rationalize these "mistways" as actual, physical connections. Like the Great Wheel, it was just a mortal's attempt to wrap his brain around something that shouldn't make any sense. [/QUOTE]
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