D&D General What Does Your Cosmology Look Like?

[Fifinjir]

There are “Heavenly” and “Earthly” realms. For the earthly realms, they’re more like layers of one place than separate places. For instance, and godling might have their castle on another layer at this mountain, but it’s still on this mountain.

This leads to the rather unsettling reality that celestials, fey, and fiends are constantly present. Most of the time they’re on other layers, which limits what they can do, but their presence still has an effect.

Heavenly realms are beyond this world entirely. Most of them don’t have room for matter, so you can only visit them in visions rather than physically. It should be noted that “heavenly” here doesn’t necessarily mean good, archfiends can rule from one of these planes as well.

The world the dead go to is not an earthly layer, as might be suspected, spells that can take you to other layers won’t get you there. Instead, ghosts have to pass through a specific gate to get to the afterlife. The gate has a crack in it, which is why undead exist.

 

[dave2008]

Just a chat thread:

What does your planar/worlds/heaven and hell/etc cosmology look like in your D&D campaign?

I very rare use the official D&D cosmology. I just don't particularly like. it. If I am inclined to use it, I use at least the 4E version of the Astral Sea as opposed to the Astral Plane.

The one I use most that I much prefer is a Mirror World Cosmology. Every plane is a direct reflection of the Prime, down to the geography, but dominated by one particular cosmological force and faction (the Prime is Neutral). So the Faewild/Faerie is a world that looks almost exactly like the Prime, except everything in nature from forests to rivers to glaciers is just More, and the powers that dominate are faerie spirits and beings. Hell is where brimstone and chaos rule, while Heaven is where Order and Light rule. You can travel between them at points and places that are infused with the power of two (or more) planes, as well as by typical magic. And you might have to travel through, say, Faerie and then Hades in order to actually get to Hell (just as an example).

I also do like the Eberron cosmology, but I only use it if I am running in Eberron.

So, tell us about your campaign's planar cosmology.

Here is what I am working with. It kind of brings all the various D&D and Magic cosmologies under one roof (if you squint a bit) - PS, I haven't reviewed this in a bit:

1. The Blind Eternities from MtG are analagous to the nebulous "Far Realm" in the D&D cosmos. Though the image makes it look like it is a vast space, it is not. The Blind Eternities area a sublime shadow. It is not space or a place, but the concept between space and reality. Here the be aberrations (including Eldrazi). Passing through the Blind Eternities is nearly impossible. Typical spells do not work, and even planes walking is almost inconceivable through the depths of the Far Realm. Gods can travel through it with great effort, but doing so attracts the attention of the Eldritch Titans (Eldrazi, Azathoth, etc.) and it tends to damage the boundary between a reality and the Blind Eternities, allow aberrations to infect reality.
2. The Border Realities are areas were the Blind Eternities are weaker. They are created by the close conceptual proximity of separate realities. Most magic (plane shift, gate, etc.) will not penetrate the border realities; however, planes walking and some very power rituals / magic might. A door in Sigil might lead to Athas or Eberron for example, but it couldn't reach the Aether Realties.
3. The Great Wheel reality is the general reality of D&D. Any world / plane that can be reached by a spell, such as teleport, gate, or plane shift, in D&D is in this reality.
4. The Athas reality exists in the border reality of the Great Wheel. It is in close enough "orbit" that powerful magic can allow travel between the two, but not standard spells.
5. The Eberron reality exists in the border reality of the Great Wheel. It is in close enough "orbit" that powerful magic can allow travel between the two, but not standard spells. It might be slightly further out than Athas, requiring even more powerful magic to reach.
6. The Aether realities are all the planes from MtG. Their close proximity to each creates a border reality that allows planes walking between these worlds. The Aether realities are in the abstract "orbit"of the Great Wheel reality, but they are so far out that the vast metaphysical space that separates them makes it virtually impossible for planeswalkers or deities to travel between the two.

 

[cbwjm]

Really only created for me when I built my campaign setting ages ago since it rarely if ever comes up in game.

• I have the Prime/Mortal Realm; next to it are the Feywild (closer to Celestia) and Shadowfell (closer to Infernis).
• Surrounding The Prime is the Elemental Chaos.
• Above the Prime/Elemental Chaos is Celestia, home of (surprise, surprise) celestials, including the majority of the gods.
• Below the Prime/Elemental Chaos is Infernis filled with all the fiends.
• All of this sits within the Astral (maybe, I imagined Celestia somehow being linked to the Astral as the gods imprisoned their brothers and sisters, the titans).
• Links exist between the realms, like sailing the river Styx will get you from Celestia to Infernis or vice versa.

I think of Celestia as being a source of positive energy and Infernis being a source of negative energy which is also why the Feywild is closer to Celestia and the Shadowfell being closer to Infernis.

There are no layers to the planes. Infernis has large domains forming the 9 hells and the domains of Sin (7 archdevils), as well as small independent principalities of the abyssal lords. There is no split between devils and demons, there are only fiends and they can all be found throughout Infernis.

 

[Distracted DM]

Originally I kept things vague to my players, but high level DnD tends to lead to planes-hopping or at least visiting other planes, so that ends up with some stuff getting nailed down. Or defined, at least, for the moment. I do like my players to have the feeling that they have some idea of the world, setting, planes, n' such- some of them really jive with that. On the other hand I don't want to be restricted to the definitions that they've made previously about such places.. so it's complicated.

Basically I take inspiration from a bunch of things: great wheel, eberron, elder scrolls, pillars of eternity, michael moorcock, MCDM ... whatever's cool and can mesh together in my head.

Some stuff becomes vestigial over time as my tastes change or as other needs arise: I ran a campaign in my setting's local version of Sigil, but I'm a lot less enamored with that place now that we finished that game... so I might just axe it, or change it.

In one campaign the players traveled to the City of Brass and found that it was a place where many magic items could be bought, acquired, won etc. and that soon became a destination in future games (because I try to avoid magic shops in games)... but I really didn't love the idea of being able to so easily acquire powerful magic (once they could plane shift), they were even fine risking their characters lives (and thus sort of the campaign) in a death match arena there for powerful magic prizes... so I have since steered away from that, and I think if it does come up there'll either have been a regime change which will makes things tougher for mortals there, or I'll need to have a hard look at some city of brass sourcebooks (I have a couple different ones :'D) to get a more concrete idea of how other folk have handled it.

All that to say... it's flexible.

I guess I can give an actual answer to this:

Three moons (yup dragonlance inspiration): red blue and silver. Rana the Silver's always been there. Kaxtros the Red and Aurelios the Blue only showed up some centuries ago.

silver: natural world, elysium-type stuff, beastlands, etc. it's also where Tanelorn can be reached (hasn't happened in a game but it has been referenced), and it's home to Axis the Vailed City (Sigil-analogue).
Aurelios the Blue is where the celestial realms are located, the plains of celestis, etc.
Kaxtros the red is where hell and the abyss are- the hells are technically nine massive chains that bind the red moon together, the abyss is inside the moon and its surface is the battleground.

Then there are other worlds/planes that aren't exactly great wheel-related. i took some from EN's A5E Planestrider's Journal, some from monte cooke's planebreaker, and some from old earth mythology (like Poul Anderson's Broken Sword fey realm).

From Matt Colville and Eberron I took the idea of shifting distances, where the different worlds change position and distance from the mortal world and that affects how easy they are to reach, and how time flows there relative to the mortal world.

You'll notice the red and blue moons only showed up centuries ago... that's because they're supposedly the two ascended human gods; there was an absence of deities because of the elves' enslavement of the lands in the previous age, and the whole divine cycle got borked up, so these two brother-emperors went out and fixed it by becoming gods. previous ages record pantheons, many gods, but this "age of man" only has the two brothers and their saints/harrows.

And yeah, the appearance of the two moons really borked up the world. cataclysm-type stuff. So it went from roman empire-type stuff to post-apocalypse dark ages really fast, now feudal kingdoms pick up the pieces.

 

[Zaukrie]

Vague and unspecified. Things beyond the world the PCs lived on were lore. And by that I mean "stories" not "game-world facts".

For the last couple of campaigns, I had no intent on ever having the PCs get anywhere near planar-travel magics, so I didn't need to create a real cosmology. Different people thought different things about what might be, but it was all moot, as that information couldn't be used to change matters in the real world.

Like, it doesn't matter if the earth elemental was summoned from the elemental plane of earth, or just collected from the "earthiness" around you. The elemental was there, either way.

This for me also. Other than the far realm, it's not important to most campaigns I run anymore.

 

[Zaukrie]

I do have a novel, unpublished, where the cosmology somewhat matters. There are three moons, one dominated by fay, one demons, one the gods. The world has areas dominated but one of the factions, though most areas are neutral and aligned with the world spirit and The Unicorn. It's unclear if I'll ever rewrite this, or finish the other story set there instead, or whatnot. But I can see Faerie being in one of the stories.