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

[Yaarel]

I am leaning towards removing it. But I might keep it also.

Trying to simplify and build a "Unified Field Theory" as it were. Needed, no. Fun tinkering, kinda?

In our games since the first manual of the planes, we had places where the ethereal bleed onto reality. You could walk into the mists, go ghostly, look around unseen, etc. If you wandered deeper, you get get lost, and end up in the Shadow Plane, or the "Bright" (the Faerie Realm).

Now if I remove the ethereal, there's no "wandering". You are either in the material, or in the shadow plane. Poof. So the BORDER ethereal is what we used the most. I can indeed do without the deep per se, although if you wander around lost in fog until you accidently step into faerie, or shadow, or Ravenloft, what else would you call the area you traversed?

I make the ethereal the same thing as the Weave of magic. It is a natural psychosensitive telekinetic force, relating to force, soul, and is the fifth element. The other four elements are made out of ether. It is the fundament of all magic.

So, the ethereal plane is the same thing as the "spirit world", and includes both Fey (infused by the plane of positivity) and Shadow (unraveled by negativity).

In the shallow ethereal, spirits can interact with the material world.

The deep ethereal is the Fey, Shadow, and Four Elemental planes, respectively, depending on frequency.

 

[SkidAce]

I make the ethereal the same thing as the Weave of magic. It is a natural psychosensitive telekinetic force, relating to force, soul, and is the fifth element. The other four elements are made out of ether.

So, the ethereal plane is the same thing as the "spirit world", and includes both Fey (infused by the plane of positivity) and Shadow (unraveled by negativity).

In the shallow ethereal, spirits can interact with the material world.

The deep ethereal is the Fey, Shadow, and Four Elemental planes, respectively, depending on frequency.

So the deep is replaced by other locations. Simple, elegant.

I will likely still have them wander n formless mists for a while, not being able to see either origin or destination, but this could work.

I was going to replaced the Deep with Limbo. There are a few 70s and 80s fantasy stories about people with strong will striding into the mists and extending or creating worlds. And Limbo has that "create stability" thing going on.

 

[Vaalingrade]

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.

Because they're there to adventure and have fun in and let the game be a fun game.

Where's the wonder in a place you have no interest in going that kills you for going there like every elemental plane but air? Or Hell, Prison Hell, and War Hell? Also, Farm Heaven and Ant Heaven.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because they're there to adventure and have fun in and let the game be a fun game.

Where's the wonder in a place you have no interest in going that kills you for going there like every elemental plane but air? Or Hell, Prison Hell, and War Hell? Also, Farm Heaven and Ant Heaven.

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.

 

[Vaalingrade]

How is being built to be visited any more or less artificial that literally being built to tick all 9 alignment boxes?

 

[Micah Sweet]

How is being built to be visited any more or less artificial that literally being built to tick all 9 alignment boxes?

I have repeatedly said it feels artificial and gamist to me. That is my feeling. Your feelings are clearly different, and that's fine. Maybe it has to do with the entire universe revolving around a tiny handful of PCs as opposed to being based on a fundamental part of the rules system the game was built on at the time (alignment in this case). Maybe because the Great Wheel allowed every pantheon, including those based on RL gods, to coexist, and I think that's neat (rather than the very limited and made for PCs 4e pantheon). Take your pick.

 

[Yaarel]

So the deep is replaced by other locations. Simple, elegant.

I will likely still have them wander n formless mists for a while, not being able to see either origin or destination, but this could work.

I was going to replaced the Deep with Limbo. There are a few 70s and 80s fantasy stories about people with strong will striding into the mists and extending or creating worlds. And Limbo has that "create stability" thing going on.

The Shadow and Fey planes already do this. A person that has a strong mind can create a "domain" that expresses ones will.

Where the ether responds to the will of a person, it can become like a virtual-reality illusion, hence a domain. These manifestations can even cross over into the Material plane and become actual reality.

Like the domains of Fey and Shadow, the DM allow for domains to manifest in the Elemental planes as well.

 

[Scars Unseen]

I used to be largely a proponent of the 2E cosmology because I love Planescape as a setting, but if I was to run a game today, I think I'd go with something closer to the Pactverse cosmology, where most realms exist either to serve a purpose related to reality, as a reflection of aspects of reality, or simply because something powerful enough makes it separate from reality. It's neat because you can create the equivalent of pocket dimensions with their own weird rules, and that realms tend to be sources of both great power and danger, often changing people who spend too much time in a given realm to reflect the realm's nature.

 

[Casimir Liber]

I liked 1e's extra planar cosmology and still consider it my canon, replacing the positive material with the feywild and negative material with the shadowfell (both of which are more creative and interesting than their 1e analogues) - emphasising the energy-giving status of the former and energy-sapping status of the latter. I found Sigil was lame.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

All I wanted to do was discuss the impact of having or not having an Ethereal in cosmology.

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.