D&D General What is your favorite D&D cosmology?

[Scars Unseen]

For my part, I don't really see the need for a formally-distinct Ethereal plane properly speaking.

Instead, it makes more sense (to me) to think of etherealness as being like...an oscillation or wavelength. It's not "its own plane," it's a particular way of existing on any given plane. So you can be ethereal in the Astral Sea or the Elemental Chaos or wherever else and that's still fine, because etherealness is a state of being or perception, not a distinct place.

Personally, I like it as a plane for the existence of the deep ethereal. Basically, the further you get from the material plane, the less the rules of basic reality apply, allowing for pocket planes with wildly different rules and general weirdness, like say the stray remnants of a spell that collided with a bird and spiraled off into the deep ethereal, iterating on the idea of "bird" and growing more distorted over time until it formed a pocket plane consisting of gliding feathers all spiraling into a single eye that captures everything it sees and only releases you once you've contributed something it accepts as tribute for it's nest.

 

[Casimir Liber]

For my part, I don't really see the need for a formally-distinct Ethereal plane properly speaking.

Instead, it makes more sense (to me) to think of etherealness as being like...an oscillation or wavelength. It's not "its own plane," it's a particular way of existing on any given plane. So you can be ethereal in the Astral Sea or the Elemental Chaos or wherever else and that's still fine, because etherealness is a state of being or perception, not a distinct place.

I think this is how it is in-game anyway, just that it has always been called a plane, even though it is sort of a thready in-between thingy

 

[Aldarc]

Again, you might enjoy going there, but to me it feels deeply artificial and gamist. It feels like a place explicitly built for a game (like the rest of 4e imo). Those are not fun things for me. Different strokes I guess.

"Artificial and gamist" is precisely how the Great Wheel feels to me. As someone already said, a lot of planes exist for the purpose of filling in boxes for symmetry regarding the game concept of alignment. I'm honestly not sure how any cosmology could feel more artifical and gamist than that, and that is one reason why I dislike the Great Wheel cosmology. In contrast, the World Axis feels organic to me. It's a cosmology that reflects adventuring in a land of myth. There are a lot of planes and worlds that we don't know about in the World Axis, particularly within the Astral Sea, because we are not limited strictly to the artificiality of the Great Wheel. So there are lost domains to be explored in the Astral Sea, new creations in the Elemental Chaos, and unknown dangers in the Abyss.

 

[Voadam]

I think this is how it is in-game anyway, just that it has always been called a plane, even though it is sort of a thready in-between thingy

In AD&D the Ethereal being a plane meant that things like a succubus going ethereal was mainly a prime material power as the Ethereal connected the prime to the Inner Planes and was not connected to say the Outer Planes where the Blood War was being conducted.

 

[Li Shenron]

The one you cannot draw a picture of.
The one which is in fractal dimensions.
The one where the Abyss is everything and everything is the Abyss.

(inspired by a nightmare I had last summer)

 

[Voadam]

The one where the Abyss is everything and everything is the Abyss.

Pathfinder has a lot of neat ambiguity about the beginnings of the universe that I remember including that Limbo (or their equivalent, I can't remember if it is named differently) and the Abyss are two different primordial Chaos beginnings of the universe that interact and clash in defining reality. Demons and the Serpent Neutral planar exemplar race are specifically hostile to each other (though lots of things are very hostile to most other things).

 

[Weiley31]

I like me some 2E Planescape Great Wheel with a healthy dose/sprinkling of 4E's Dawn War with 3E/Forgotten Realms Deities for my 5E with a side order of the Ethereal, and Positive/Negative Energy Planes.

 

[Bupp]

In my mind, "cosmology" is a just a mortal understanding of the cosmic and any or all versions can exist or could even change from encounter to encounter with it - so I never worried to much about codifying it.

This is pretty much it. All of it is beyond mortal (and even sometimes immortal) understanding. All of the above are true, and none are true. It's turtles all the way down and Marvel's Asgard is a planet in space, and Anomalous Subservice Environment's Orbital Gods all at the same time.

 

[Staffan]

What exactly about the World Axis is "weird & wonderful"? Every plane is custom-designed for adventurers to play in. There's no ambiguity or sense of wonder at all to me. It is deeply gamist in my opinion.

Its lack of structure. The Great Wheel is a very regimented cosmology, where there's a plane for each alignment, and then another plane where the alignments intersect, and one for each main element, and then where those elements intersect, and then where the elements intersect with the positive/negative planes. It's all very neat, and I really dislike neat. I also dislike alignments, and the Great Wheel is based around those. It's the kind of cosmology that does not just give you devils and demons, but also says "but there must be fiends from the other lower planes too!" and makes designers come up with daemons and demodands just to check boxes.

The World Axis, on the other hand, is messy. The only structure is that there's the Elemental Chaos (with the Abyss inside of it), and then there's the Material plane and its dark/bright mirrors the Shadowfell and the Feywild, and then there's the Astral Sea with all sorts of wackiness in it. It's the kind of cosmology where you can imagine a doorway opening up to a vast void (that's somehow inhabitable), where there are stepping stones floating around that you can use to get to other doorways where things are weirder. It's the kind of cosmology that has room for Wonderland, or The Dark Dimension, or unaligned planes that are all about concepts like War or Love or Dreams. It allows for the Norse gods to have a bunch of planes arranged as a tree without that interfering with some other gods' heaven and hell.

 

[Yaarel]

"Artificial and gamist" is precisely how the Great Wheel feels to me. As someone already said, a lot of planes exist for the purpose of filling in boxes for symmetry regarding the game concept of alignment. I'm honestly not sure how any cosmology could feel more artifical and gamist than that, and that is one reason why I dislike the Great Wheel cosmology. In contrast, the World Axis feels organic to me. It's a cosmology that reflects adventuring in a land of myth. There are a lot of planes and worlds that we don't know about in the World Axis, particularly within the Astral Sea, because we are not limited strictly to the artificiality of the Great Wheel. So there are lost domains to be explored in the Astral Sea, new creations in the Elemental Chaos, and unknown dangers in the Abyss.

Another benefit of the World Axis and its Astral Sea, is the the Sea is ... fluid ... and culturally relative. Each culture (and subculture!) can have its own domain within the Sea. The symbols of that culture take on a life of their own. New domains can manifest, and old domains can dissipate, depending on the vibrancy of the cultures across the Humanoid populations.

I view the Astral as strictly a realm of thoughts and languages and symbols. Its celestial and fiendish inhabitants are constructs that are made out of thought, namely "angelic intellects", that function identically to paradigms and paradigm shifts. The Astral formed the thoughts that "planned out" how make the rest of the multiverse. So in some sense, the Astral Sea is a sea of architectural blueprints for the various realities that happen across the Material plane, and elsewhere.

Consider how the Ethereal Plane is physical but isnt material. For example, gravitational force and nuclear forces, and telekinetic force and the ki lifeforce of a soul, are all made out of ether. The Ethereal is a spirit realm of spiritual beings that can "push" around the Material plane, such as the way ghosts do.

The Astral and the Ethereal are different from each other, because the Astral is strictly nonphysical. The Astral is a mindscape only. The distance between one "place" and an other is only because of how similar they are (near) or how different they are (far). If one thing reminds one of something else, then the places border each other. The Dreaming is part of the Astral Sea, and its dreamscapes behave accordingly, traveling thru thoughts, memories, and insights.

Also the Astral Sea and the Farrealms are moreorless the same thing. The difference is, the Astral is like the conscious mind that includes the ideas that seem useful and develop further to create and make sense of the multiverse. The Farrealms is like the unconscious mind that includes all of the ideas that seem unhelpful or worthless, and were rejected, and are not part of the way that the multiverse works. Most of the time, the ideas in the Farrealms were rejected for good reasons! But sometimes, when the multiverse is working less well, the Farrealms can be a place where new ideas can come that can make the multiverse a better place. The Farrealms is dangerous but can be creative. An idea that was once assumed to be trash, can turn out to prove itself to be a valuable treasure.