| Post/Author/DateTime | Post |
|---|---|
| Daydreamer04-17-07, 07:14 PM | I remember it from the second edition resources published. Tell me, are there any official '3rd edition' resources that give details on sigil? I know that the new adventure 'demonweb pits' takes the players to sigil-and then to battle lloths followers-which implies its part of the forgotten realms cosmology at least. your thoughts? |
| Rickiel04-17-07, 07:15 PM | Yes there is, the Planar Handbook has a nice section on Sigil. |
| Daydreamer04-17-07, 07:41 PM | i figured as much, i heard that the FR setting messed with traditional cosmology though, anyone know how it varies it? |
| Shemeska the Marauder04-17-07, 07:59 PM | i figured as much, i heard that the FR setting messed with traditional cosmology though, anyone know how it varies it? It retroactively removes FR from the Great Wheel cosmology, essentially taking what were the divine domains of the gods worshipped in FR and making them planes in their own right, ignoring any larger planes that they had previously been a part of. Add in carbon copies of the Inner Planes and an Abyss and Baator that are carbon copies of the real Abyss and Baator, and a squished pastiche of the Gray Waste and Gehenna they call the Blood Rift. It's the equivalent of moving from a Copernican model back to a Ptolemic 'we're the center of everything and there's nothing else out there nya nya' except there are still connections to the Great Wheel via Sigil, the Infinite Staircase, and other ways so in the end FR is still just one world among many, but one degree seperated and with a lot of its own internal consistancy and history mucked with. Use what works best for your purposes. |
| primemover00304-17-07, 08:04 PM | FR basically took all the Divine Realms of the Gods and made them into full fledged outer planes. So instead of Tyr's Realm being on Mt. Celestia it's now a Celestia-like plane with his mountain being the primary and seven others surrounding it that house the Archons, or instead of Selune living in Ysgard in her Domain the Gates of the Moon, the Gates are now a plane of their own. Like wise with Brightwater being a plane smooshing the features of Arborea and some of the Outlands together to house Sune, Lliira, Tymora, and Waukeen together. Each plane is connected to each other through the Fugue Plane, Cynosure, and the Astral (which are direct conduits to and from Toril to the Plane). All of this is shaped in a "Tree" |
| Ordbyrht04-17-07, 08:05 PM | i figured as much, i heard that the FR setting messed with traditional cosmology though, anyone know how it varies it? In Third Edition, as well as in 3.5, all campaign settings are no longer assumed to use the Great Ring/Wheel cosmology. Forgotten Realms' cosmology, for example, has been retconned into the Great Tree, or some such, cosmology and Dragonlance has been given its own cosmology as well, though I've no idea what it is. Because Greyhawk is the default setting of Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition/3.5, its cosmology (which is the Great Ring cosmology) is the default cosmology. Thankfully, the 3ed/v3.5 planar books (Manual of the Planes, The Planar Handbook and the two Fiendish Codices) have all been written with the default setting in mind. As such, FR's new cosmology does not impact on Sigil in Third Edition. I know that the new adventure 'demonweb pits' takes the players to sigil-and then to battle lloths followers-which implies its part of the forgotten realms cosmology at least. Lolth is not exclusive to the Realms. I may be wrong, but I believe that Lolth appeared in Greyhawk before she appeared in FR (don't quote me on that though). |
| turalisj04-17-07, 08:24 PM | Lolth is mentioned in the Monster Manuel, so she's not FR exclusive... And you CAN quote me on that. :P |
| ripvanwormer04-17-07, 08:34 PM | Lolth is not exclusive to the Realms. I may be wrong, but I believe that Lolth appeared in Greyhawk before she appeared in FR (don't quote me on that though). You're correct. She originally appeared in module D3, Vault of the Drow, which is set in the World of Greyhawk. She was also in the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, as an ally of Venger. In 3rd edition, she's in a variety of core products, including the Monster Manual, Deities & Demigods, Complete Divine, Races of the Wild, and Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss. She's never been exclusive to GREYHAWK; her second appearance, in Queen of the Demonweb Pits, showed that her web connects to dozens of worlds. Oerth, the World of Greyhawk, is one of them; later on, when the Forgotten Realms became an official D&D setting, Toril became another one of them. But she's certainly not exclusive to FR. |
| Daydreamer04-17-07, 08:51 PM | as i understand it though 'greyhawk' and the 'forgotten realms' are metaphysically disconnected. that is to say you could no more move from greyhawk to Fr, than you could from FR to eberron. having said that- the 9 hells and the abyss still exist in forgotten realms? I think someone above mentioned you can still acess them via sigil? If this is so, isnt what FR did jsut completely needlessly complicated. |
| ripvanwormer04-17-07, 09:16 PM | as i understand it though 'greyhawk' and the 'forgotten realms' are metaphysically disconnected. that is to say you could no more move from greyhawk to Fr, than you could from FR to eberron. Officially, you can move between Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, or between FR and Eberron, through the Plane of Shadow. It only takes a few hours walk through Deep Shadow. You can presumedly get to the d20 Modern worlds, or any other worlds, the same way. the 9 hells and the abyss still exist in forgotten realms? I think someone above mentioned you can still acess them via sigil? If this is so, isnt what FR did jsut completely needlessly complicated. Yes, yes, and absolutely yes. In 1st and 2nd edition, all settings shared the same cosmology (although this is complicated in some settings - for example Dark Sun had its own set of para-elemental planes). The original reasoning behind the Forgotten Realms cosmology introduced in 3e was that for people who only wanted to use the Forgotten Realms and not venture out into the planes much, here was a cosmos tailored specifically for their setting. Later on, WotC decided that the Plane of Shadow was the connecting element between all cosmologies and campaign settings, and that pretty much made the whole thing needlessly complicated. So there are separate but nearly identical versions of the Abyss and Baator in both the FR cosmology and the core cosmology, and most or all of Eberron's planes are more or less identical to planes in the Manual of the Planes. If you want to run a campaign that shuffles quickly between multiple settings, it seems easiest to give them a common set of outer and inner planes, as was done for the first 25 years of D&D's history (with some odd exceptions). A lot of people want to get rid of the nuevo-FR cosmology but keep Eberron's cosmology because Eberron was designed to have its own set of planes from the very beginning, while for FR the distinctive planes are a retcon introduced very late in the game. |
| Daydreamer04-17-07, 09:45 PM | Im not disagreeing with you, but were does this 'officially from the plane of shadow get from greyhawk to Fr' listed? Additionally...i really though eberron made a concerted effort to be completely else, im suprised to hear you say that they can acess each other, i would have though it was very very much its own place. |
| Taeldrin Laesrash04-17-07, 10:44 PM | Ebberon is accessible, though it requires a bit more thought. 1. The Plane of Shadow, which is described as connecting to multiple or alternate realities. 2. Wildspace (Spelljamming through). Ebberonspace is undiscovered, and we don't know if spelljamming technology is or was available in the sphere, but it's possible. 3. The Hinterlands (The Outlands beyond the gate-towns). I don't even think it's official, but supposedly, you'd find new gate-towns to new planes if you traveled far enough. Anything goes out there, I guess. |
| Daydreamer04-17-07, 10:47 PM | described as connecting to alternate realities sounds like a plot device that dm could use to connect to eberron, if he so wished, but not that it officially is connected. So it could just as easily be interpreted that no connection exists. This is different as i understand it with the link to greyhawk: From what i see here, it looks like greyhawk and Fr are officially connected in 3rd. |
| Bob the Efreet04-18-07, 12:21 AM | It only takes a few hours walk through Deep Shadow. You can presumedly get to the d20 Modern worlds, or any other worlds, the same way. Not presumedly, Estevan did it. |
| Daydreamer04-18-07, 12:42 AM | Not presumedly, Estevan did it. official sourcE? to d20 modern? really wow.... |
| JoAT04-18-07, 01:00 AM | official sourcE? to d20 modern? really wow.... Yep - his Planar Trade Consortium appears in Urban Arcana, and it, himself and his 'partners' are the focus of the small series of adventures at the back. |
| ripvanwormer04-18-07, 11:05 AM | Not presumedly, Estevan did it. Does it specifically say that Estevan used the Plane of Shadow to get there, or could he have simply used one of the portals in Sigil? |
| Ordbyrht04-18-07, 01:44 PM | Does it specifically say that Estevan used the Plane of Shadow to get there, or could he have simply used one of the portals in Sigil? It doesn't explain how Estavan initially reached Earth. However, he first meets the PCs as he is coming out of portal in a underground portion of his estate. Where the portal leads is unknown, blinding light spills out from the doorway while the portal is open and the PCs cannot open the door itself. I think that it was implied that the portal was to a world beyond Shadow, though, from an Urban Arcana stand-point, I wouldn't nessecarily say Sigil. From a Planescape stand-point, however, I would definetly say that the portal connects to Sigil. |
| Daydreamer04-18-07, 01:50 PM | i still cant help but imagine that as ...well unearthed arcana is house rules, this is jsut a way to get that ball rolling. I mean, as a dm i would never allow a connection to earth! wow the problems that could cause. |
| ripvanwormer04-18-07, 02:03 PM | Keep in mind that the Earth of Urban Arcana isn't really our Earth; it's an alternate Earth where elves and gnolls walk the streets openly and there are large, thriving churches dedicated to Wee Jas and Pelor. So a lot of the problems with a portal leading to our Earth (for example, can the characters meet the players who control them?) are avoided. |
| JoAT04-18-07, 02:17 PM | i still cant help but imagine that as ...well unearthed arcana is house rules, this is jsut a way to get that ball rolling. I mean, as a dm i would never allow a connection to earth! wow the problems that could cause. Also note that Unearthed Arcana and Urban Arcana are two separate books. The first is a listing of varient rules that might make one's campaign more interesting. The second is a setting book for d20 Modern detailing a world wherein 'creatures of Shadow' - the denizens of the D&D universes - have come to visit modern earth. |
| Orion7204-18-07, 03:05 PM | So every place is (theoretically) connected to every other place via Shadow, and you can walk through Shadow to reach different realities. I could swear I read that somewhere before... oh yes, Zelazny's Amber novels. Also, if Shadow is one way that FR connects to other realities, doesn't that give Shar a bit of a power boost? At least as a sort of gatekeeper? |
| RealSorceror04-18-07, 03:27 PM | Anybody know the break DC for the central spire that negates salient abilities? How much hardness and hp does the sucker have? :D Also, how quickly would the Lady of Pain respond to an enormous steam-powered mecha landing in sigil and attacking the central spire? :D ......no, I'm not planning anything. :Bluff Check: |
| Shemeska the Marauder04-18-07, 03:55 PM | Also, if Shadow is one way that FR connects to other realities, doesn't that give Shar a bit of a power boost? At least as a sort of gatekeeper? Assuming that you don't just have FR within the same cosmology anyways, yes, Shadow is one way that you might link it to other realities (though 3e Shadow branching between realities is something that the Deep Ethereal was there for in the first place, and still is depending on what 3e source you look at) As for Shar and her having a power boost, Shar doesn't have any special power over the plane of Shadow. In the retconned 3e FR cosmology her divine domain is on that plane (rather than on the Gray Waste where she is in the Great Wheel cosmology) but she doesn't have any power over or connection to that plane as a whole. |
| Shemeska the Marauder04-18-07, 03:57 PM | Also, how quickly would the Lady of Pain respond to an enormous steam-powered mecha landing in sigil and attacking the central spire? :D ......no, I'm not planning anything. :Bluff Check: The Infinite Spire isn't visible nor accessable from inside Sigil. A giant mecha in Sigil wouldn't get any response unless it started damaging the city or causing a major disturbance, at which point it would be sent to the mazes or destroyed. |
| The Ubbergeek04-18-07, 04:35 PM | Note - Sigil exist ALSO in Forgotten realms. So, there is a possible link there too. |
| ripvanwormer04-18-07, 05:33 PM | Anybody know the break DC for the central spire that negates salient abilities? How much hardness and hp does the sucker have? :D Also, how quickly would the Lady of Pain respond to an enormous steam-powered mecha landing in sigil and attacking the central spire? :D ......no, I'm not planning anything. :Bluff Check: As Shem said, you can't reach the Spire from Sigil. If you move off the edge of the city, you're teleported to a random plane of existence or you fall forever. You can't touch, or even see, the Spire from Sigil, and you can't get into Sigil by any means other than its portals. The Spire doesn't have a break DC; I favor the 1st edition interpretation that it can't even be touched by deities or mortals. There's some hints in 2nd edition sources that if you get close enough, the Spire nullifies not just magic, psionics, and poison, but thought, life, and matter. Sigil exists within a region of nothingness, and that's what the Spire is like. |
| Bob the Efreet04-19-07, 04:00 AM | Does it specifically say that Estevan used the Plane of Shadow to get there, or could he have simply used one of the portals in Sigil? I think that might have been extrapolation on my part. See, this "beyond Shadow" that all the fantastic creatures in Urban Arcana came from seems a lot like the Plane of Shadow to me. I think my assumption was that Estevan and some of his PTC minions went to the Outlands and crossed Shadow from there, although the idea that he used a portal in Sigil seems equally valid (and, perhaps, more likely). |
| RealSorceror04-19-07, 11:00 AM | As Shem said, you can't reach the Spire from Sigil. If you move off the edge of the city, you're teleported to a random plane of existence or you fall forever. Bugger. Well even thats not much of a problem. You can't touch, or even see, the Spire from Sigil, and you can't get into Sigil by any means other than its portals. And I'm guessing there aren't any portals large enough for a Collossal+ robot? The Spire doesn't have a break DC; I favor the 1st edition interpretation that it can't even be touched by deities or mortals. So....what about non-diety immortals? :D There's some hints in 2nd edition sources that if you get close enough, the Spire nullifies not just magic, psionics, and poison, but thought, life, and matter. Sigil exists within a region of nothingness, and that's what the Spire is like. Holy Cow! :eek: Well I'm not magical, psionic, or alive, but I am made out of matter....so ya, that kinda sucks. What can touch this thing? Can the Lady of Pain herself even touch it? Is it even a physical object? |
| Rickiel04-19-07, 12:14 PM | It's not so much physical as metaphysical. Confused? That's the idea. Think of the Spire as a visual representation of Nothing. Or perhaps, considering the floating donut above it, a visual representation of Nothing as a Fulcrum that supports an Impossible place. :) |
| RealSorceror04-19-07, 12:24 PM | It's not so much physical as metaphysical. Confused? That's the idea. Think of the Spire as a visual representation of Nothing. Or perhaps, considering the floating donut above it, a visual representation of Nothing as a Fulcrum that supports an Impossible place. :) :confused: Yes....of course. :D Ok, well I guess I'll just do it the old fashioned way and attack the buildings and structure of Halo...er, I mean Sigil. I know that will get the Lady's attention, but I'm a lvl60 character with the body of a Collossal+ clockwork mecha. Unless shes really uber, I think I can take her.....right? I have big cannons..... |
| Rickiel04-19-07, 12:48 PM | Maybe I should have you in one of my Future d20 games. One of my players, new to notions of Planescape, when he first heard of Sigil thought of an idea to take out this 'competition' (he was a trader of sorts) via a DNA weapon (Dimensional Nuculear Armament). However when he began browsing a few dives for some info on Sigil, he came up with a rather disturbing new fact. That there have been attempts like this in the past and NONE of them worked. A few terrorists had attempted to set off a dirty nuke and were swiftly ripped apart. By a shadow of Her Dreaded Serenity. Gathering more information only unveiled that there was an enigmatic presence in Sigil dubbed The Lady of Pain, who seemed to be very apt at protecting her city from anything and anyone that would destroy her Cage. Oh, and she's barred Sigil from folks like Zeus and Hextor. No Deity, or abomination for that matter, can enter Sigil. She controls all access into Sigil. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Try leveling the place from the inside (five or more blocks worth of destruction) and you will be looking at Maze soon enough. |
| sicsemperjohn04-19-07, 01:43 PM | ...Certainly, portals could exist that could fit a colossal+ robot. It's just that, well, you're going to be a new low-income housing apartment building in the lower wards. |
| Rickiel04-19-07, 01:48 PM | Originally Posted by sicsemperjohn ...Certainly, portals could exist that could fit a colossal+ robot. It's just that, well, you're going to be a new low-income housing apartment building in the lower wards. That is brilliant :D |
| Jarred Garrison04-19-07, 01:50 PM | This is entirely up to the DM, but as far as canon goes, and as a sensible DM would do... As soon as you start causing ruckus, you'll be dead meat (or Collosal+ automaton, or whatever). |
| Kobold Avenger04-19-07, 08:56 PM | There already was some sort of colossal construct that lived in Sigil, if you go by Planescape: Torment. Depending on what the Nameless One did, the construct ended up leaving Sigil. Secondly the Lady of Pain can control what goes into Sigil, and she kicked an Ancient Wizard's butt an entrapped him in a soul gem which she dumped into Agathion, Pandemonium until he was later destroyed as part of a spell. The ancient wizard who was never statted completely, was something like Ranger 10+/Cleric 10+/Wizard 30+. She also killed Aoskar who was a greater deity and would have no problem with any 60+ level character as a greater deity is more powerful than that. As far as the Urban Arcana earth, I like to treat it sort of like the World Of Darkness Earth, everyone is blissfully ignorant of what really goes on... |
| ArcTan04-21-07, 02:34 AM | Officially, you can move between Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, or between FR and Eberron, through the Plane of Shadow. It only takes a few hours walk through Deep Shadow. You can presumedly get to the d20 Modern worlds, or any other worlds, the same way. Well, that's putting it fairly strongly. Officially you can get to *other Prime Material worlds* through Shadow, but it's completely up to the DM whether any particular Prime exists. The MotP does not say anything at all that would indicate that a connection officially does exist between Krynn and Oerth through Shadow, any more than it indicates that a connection exists between Oerth and Middle-Earth, or Oerth and Barsoom, or Oerth and Coruscant, or Oerth and the "world of Dungeons and Dragons" from the old D&D cartoon, or Oerth and Transexual Transylvania. You could only say such a connection "officially" existed if the core references to the Plane of Shadow explicitly referenced a specific Prime world in relation to the D&D default (Greyhawk) Prime. To my knowledge, no such reference exists in any core D&D book, any FR core book or any Eberron core book, though I could be wrong. Keith Baker has said that he doesn't mind the idea of Eberron *possibly* being one Prime world among many -- one explanation for the Gith in Eberron is that they're immigrants from other Primes destroyed by the Daelkyr -- but that the Eberron universe is, nonetheless, not designed to plug into other defined universes at all. The one place where you can make an argument for such a connection "officially" existing is the d20 Modern Shadow Chasers and Urban Arcana settings, where the D&D monsters appearing in the modern world are explained as creatures coming from "Shadow", and "Shadow" described as the barrier between the "real world" and the D&D world. Ironically, this means you have more current core backing you up for travelling from Oerth to Earth than for travelling from Oerth to Abeir-Toril, despite the popularity of the Oerth/Abeir-Toril transit in past editions. Yes, yes, and absolutely yes. In 1st and 2nd edition, all settings shared the same cosmology (although this is complicated in some settings - for example Dark Sun had its own set of para-elemental planes). The original reasoning behind the Forgotten Realms cosmology introduced in 3e was that for people who only wanted to use the Forgotten Realms and not venture out into the planes much, here was a cosmos tailored specifically for their setting. Later on, WotC decided that the Plane of Shadow was the connecting element between all cosmologies and campaign settings, and that pretty much made the whole thing needlessly complicated. So there are separate but nearly identical versions of the Abyss and Baator in both the FR cosmology and the core cosmology, and most or all of Eberron's planes are more or less identical to planes in the Manual of the Planes. As an Eberron fan, I can point out that while Eberron's Outer Planes are intentionally similar to some of the core Outer Planes -- why waste time coming up with whole new planar traits and definitions if you don't really have to? -- they are by no means identical. Eberron's Irian and Mabar are Eberron's Postive Energy and Negative Energy Planes, but while the core PE and NE Planes are both sparsely populated, in Eberron only Irian is relatively sparse, while tons and tons of the fiends from the Abyss and Baator in core now live in Mabar in Eberron (generally the sneaky ones, like Succubi and so forth). Neither one has the major positive- or negative-dominant trait, each one having the minor one instead (no exploding in Irian). Eberron's Xoriat is kind of like the core Far Realm, except that Xoriat is one plane among many that orbits and changes proximity like all the others, Xoriat is unambiguously Neutral Evil, and Xoriat is explicitly under the complete and total rule of the Daelkyr, Eberron-specific creatures who do not exist in core. Eberron's Fernia and Risia are like the Elemental Plane of Fire and Paraelemental Plane of Ice, but not the same. (Note that the Para- and Quasielemental Planes don't officially exist in 3e anyway, at least according to the 3e MotP.) Both are Evil-aligned, and Fernia is the equal and opposite of Risia, rather than any (nonexistent in Eberron) Elemental Plane of Water. A lot of Lower Planes monsters are scattered around here, too -- Balors and Pit Fiends in Fernia, Ice Devils in Risia, etc. Dolurrh is like Hades, I guess, with the Entrapping trait and everything, but Neutral-aligned, and *everyone* goes there after death barring extremely special circumstances. Also a completely barren place barring the souls of the dead and a very few explicitly death-linked fiends. Thelanis has no actual core analogue, though I guess it's somewhat similar to Arborea and really most like the variant Plane of Faerie introduced in the 3.0 MotP, right down to the Flowing Time trait. Lamannia is similarly kind of like the Beastlands though more like the generic "Spirit World" introduced in 3.0 MotP -- home to *all* Genies except Efreet, home to *all* Elementals except Fire Elementals, etc. Neither of these has much to do with any core plane that I can see. Similarly, Shavarath is kind of like Acheron in conception, but rather than being a representation of the Lawful-Lawful Evil alignment and the futility of war, it's presented as a Neutral battleground of the forces of Good and Evil, with various Archons, Demons and Devils all native to it. No real core analogue. Syrania is one of the hardest to place, since Syrania is a plane that looks like the Elemental Plane of Air, is aligned Neutral Good (i.e. like Elysium), and is home to Angels, who don't have a specific home plane in core. It's a generic plane of Good and the Sky, which core has no analogue for. Finally, Dal Quor is the most obvious example of lack of correspondence between core and Eberron -- Dal Quor is like the variant Region of Dreams in MotP, but with the very important and fundamental difference of the Quori spirits who rule it on behalf of the giant Evil godlike entity who rules the whole plane, the Dreaming Dark, making the whole plane Evil-aligned. All of these are really, really hard to reconcile with the old-school Great Wheel. If you want to run a campaign that shuffles quickly between multiple settings, it seems easiest to give them a common set of outer and inner planes, as was done for the first 25 years of D&D's history (with some odd exceptions). If you want to jump from Eberron to Oerth, I actually think the Plane of Shadow-only connection kind of works, since the point is that such a connection will be disorienting and disjointed and involve a single point of connection between two highly disparate cosmologies. A lot of people want to get rid of the nuevo-FR cosmology but keep Eberron's cosmology because Eberron was designed to have its own set of planes from the very beginning, while for FR the distinctive planes are a retcon introduced very late in the game. I'm not a huge fan of the new FR cosmology, but I can respect them wanting to downplay the Planescape multiverse concept, since for someone who wants to play in the Realms and only the Realms the multiverse is a hindrance rather than a boon (you'll have to deal with the occasional player constantly asking "Why don't we go to Sigil?" and "Why don't we travel to Krynn and get help from there?"). |
| ArcTan04-21-07, 02:38 AM | Assuming that you don't just have FR within the same cosmology anyways, yes, Shadow is one way that you might link it to other realities (though 3e Shadow branching between realities is something that the Deep Ethereal was there for in the first place, and still is depending on what 3e source you look at) The central source is MotP, which -- along with the PHB and DMG for 3e and 3.5 -- don't include the Deep Ethereal as a core plane, only as a variant. As for Shar and her having a power boost, Shar doesn't have any special power over the plane of Shadow. In the retconned 3e FR cosmology her divine domain is on that plane (rather than on the Gray Waste where she is in the Great Wheel cosmology) but she doesn't have any power over or connection to that plane as a whole. Appropriately so, since the 3e Plane of Shadow has become a multiverse-spanning plane that is, in a sense, "bigger" than each plane's Astral. |
| ArcTan04-21-07, 02:54 AM | It doesn't explain how Estavan initially reached Earth. However, he first meets the PCs as he is coming out of portal in a underground portion of his estate. Where the portal leads is unknown, blinding light spills out from the doorway while the portal is open and the PCs cannot open the door itself. I think that it was implied that the portal was to a world beyond Shadow, though, from an Urban Arcana stand-point, I wouldn't nessecarily say Sigil. From a Planescape stand-point, however, I would definetly say that the portal connects to Sigil. This would explain why Estevan and Estevan alone can make it back and forth from the UA Earth without trouble, while everyone else who reaches Earth through "Shadow" is basically trapped forever, and receives the Gift of Lethe, losing all memory of their home Primes -- apparently the territory of Shadow around Earth is somewhat dangerous and has somewhat unique properties designed to isolate Earth from the other Primes -- note that it's pretty explicit that magic to access the Transitive Planes from Earth simply don't exist in UA, meaning that Earth is for some reason magically isolated. Estevan having control of the only known Portal Key from Sigil to Earth would explain his unique position pretty well. Of course, I still don't regard a strong connection between the UA Earth and the Great Wheel as canon per se -- it's really strongly implied, but the point of UA is, after all, not to make you play in the D&D multiverse cosmology, which is why the Gift of Lethe exists at all. |
| ArcTan04-21-07, 02:58 AM | Keep in mind that the Earth of Urban Arcana isn't really our Earth; it's an alternate Earth where elves and gnolls walk the streets openly and there are large, thriving churches dedicated to Wee Jas and Pelor. So a lot of the problems with a portal leading to our Earth (for example, can the characters meet the players who control them?) are avoided. While the UA Earth is certainly a fictional Earth that contains many corporations and institutions that don't exist in our Earth, including some pretty important criminal gangs, shady multinationals with plans for world domination, and bizarre fringe religions and secret societies -- *to an average person* it doesn't appear that different from our Earth. One of the core precepts of UA is that Shadow creatures are "veiled by Shadow", and that while Elves and Orcs certainly walk around on the streets, they don't walk around "openly" -- they are perceived by those without the ability to "sense Shadow" as ordinary humans. The UA Earth is like the World of Darkness Earth -- it's a world where a combination of willful disbelief and veiling magics make everything appear "normal" to everyone except the few in the know. The church of Wee Jas poses as just another Skull and Bones-like secret society. The church of St. Cuthbert seems to just be a new and more militant takeoff of street Catholicism centered in homeless shelters and soup kitchens. The church of Hextor seems to just be a nihilistic street gang. Mages are just well-dressed businessmen who consult their PDAs a lot and seem suspiciously lucky in their endeavors. Etc. |
| ripvanwormer04-22-07, 11:08 PM | As an Eberron fan, I can point out that while Eberron's Outer Planes are intentionally similar to some of the core Outer Planes -- why waste time coming up with whole new planar traits and definitions if you don't really have to? -- they are by no means identical. No, they're not identical, but they're so similar that I think including both sets of planes in the same campaign is a waste of time. Irian and Mabar are only the ones that I think are different enough that they'd be worth including in a campaign that also included the Positive and Negative Energy Planes. The other differences mostly revolve around alignment traits, which is really just a matter of emphasis. The Plane of Fire is pretty evil if you just look at its dominant monster species, for example. Except a neutral Plane of Fire is more interesting, in my opinion - evil versions of the planes of Fire, Ice, and the Far Realm seem like very bad design decisions. As for the Region of Dreams, it's infinite - part of it could be firmly dominated by the quori while leaving other regions completely untouched. As for Dolurrh, lots of pantheons have similar underworlds. Faerun has one, as do the Greek, Babylonian, and Finnish pantheons. Usually those underworlds are identical to Dolurrh in every respect, and fit fine in Hades. All of these are really, really hard to reconcile with the old-school Great Wheel. No, they're really, really not. Things become a little trickier if you actually care about absolute fidelity to Eberron materials, which I don't, but even I don't see much of a problem. Say part of the Paraelemental Plane of Ice has been invaded by fiends, for example, and you've got it covered. |
| ArcTan04-23-07, 01:00 AM | No, they're not identical, but they're so similar that I think including both sets of planes in the same campaign is a waste of time. Okay. What about the fact that the planes have the orbiting trait, so that they swing near and far from Eberron and create different conditions on Eberron's material plane at different times? How do you explain this in the context of the non-orbiting planes of the Great Wheel? This is a hugely important part of how the planes work in Eberron. Irian and Mabar are only the ones that I think are different enough that they'd be worth including in a campaign that also included the Positive and Negative Energy Planes. Funny, because the only real difference between Irian and the PE Plane is that it's Minor Positive-Dominant instead of Major. Irian and Mabar are two of the *easiest* planes to fit to existing Great Wheel planes. The other differences mostly revolve around alignment traits, which is really just a matter of emphasis. ...Also the minor matter of the actual mechanical effect of alignment traits on characters with alignments. The Plane of Fire is pretty evil if you just look at its dominant monster species, for example. Except a neutral Plane of Fire is more interesting, in my opinion - evil versions of the planes of Fire, Ice, and the Far Realm seem like very bad design decisions. Why? They're just different. Eberron is subtly *rejecting* the Greek four classical elements that core D&D is so enamored of -- Fire and Ice are two kinds of destructive, evil energy that are opposed to each other, and both detached from Air, Water and Earth, the three elements of the natural world (represented by Lamannia). Making such a change is a big change in and of itself from core D&D -- and represented by stuff that actually happens on the Prime in Eberron, such as the difference between the normal elemental binding practiced by gnomes and the firebinding practiced by the evil Sulatar drow. As for Xoriat, the whole "Creatures from the Far Realm keep invading the Prime with the sole intention of utterly destroying it" plot, overused as it is in unimaginative campaign settings, makes a hash out of the whole "Far Realm is unaligned" idea. Saying that the Eberron Xoriat was unaligned would be really, really dumb -- apparently the most horrific acts of Evil imaginable become Neutral if you're crazy enough. Also, note that this *is* a way in which Xoriat is different from the Far Realm -- most of the actions attributed to Illithids in core are still things Illithids have done in Eberron, except now Illithids are natives of Xoriat and servants of the Daelkyr. Illithids are still the same inherently Evil horrible empire they always were, though. It's actually a pretty huge change to say that now all Aberrations come from Xoriat, when in the Great Wheel it's pretty clear that "ordinary" Aberrations come from the Prime same as everyone else and the Far Realm creatures are different. Xoriat is, if you want, less insane than the Far Realm is. As for the Region of Dreams, it's infinite - part of it could be firmly dominated by the quori while leaving other regions completely untouched. The Region of Dreams also is not part of the Great Wheel anyway. As for Dolurrh, lots of pantheons have similar underworlds. Faerun has one, as do the Greek, Babylonian, and Finnish pantheons. Usually those underworlds are identical to Dolurrh in every respect, and fit fine in Hades. No, they aren't. Faerun does not mandate that all people go to Dolurrh regardless of their alignment. This is actually a critical difference between Faerun and Eberron. Faerun also does not have the Entrapping trait affect the actual shades of the dead, preventing resurrection and true resurrection from even functioning except in very special cases. This is also a pretty damn important difference. You've still left out Syrania -- so what Upper Plane is native to Angels that aren't beholden to any deity, who can be of any ethical alignment, and who live in an empty expanse of Air? Lamannia -- so what part of the Beastlands is the home of all three Elemental races of Air, Water and Earth? Thelanis -- what part of Arborea manifests in faerie rings on the Prime and has the Flowing Time trait and so on? Shavarath -- what part of Acheron is actually the *native home* of Archons warring against Baatezu and Tanar'ri? No, they're really, really not. Things become a little trickier if you actually care about absolute fidelity to Eberron materials, which I don't ...which says a lot... but even I don't see much of a problem. Say part of the Paraelemental Plane of Ice has been invaded by fiends, for example, and you've got it covered. Well, sure, if you want to cheapen everything the Eberron planes are about. The whole reason MotP spent so much time on covering variant cosmologies was to make the point that the cosmology says a lot about the philosophy of a setting, and the old-school notion that anything and everything could be shoehorned into the Great Wheel somehow is deeply unsatisfying for lots of people. Yeah, you *can* force Eberron's planar cosmology to fit the Great Wheel. You have to grossly alter a lot of things, and more or less say that the Eberron primes are so clueless that they've mistaken tiny little regions of the planes for the whole planes themselves, and don't even have the basic understanding of how the Inner Planes are structured as any berk on Faerun would have, and so on. I just find the whole thing disrespectful. The only way to do a non-clunky Eberron/Planescape crossover would be to *rewrite Eberron into something different*. And fine, you can do that. But Eberron itself doesn't fit into Planescape well at all, any more than the Star Trek universe, the In Nomine universe or the White Wolf World of Darkness fit into Planescape. Frankly, I would rather not bother. I'm actually pretty strongly in favor of WotC's decision to let every setting be its own setting and *not* keep performing the subtly disrespectful act of having each campaign setting merely be a home for clueless primes struggling in ignorance of the *real* Planescape setting that overarches and contains them all (and *constrains* them all as to what can be accomplished or said within them). Much as I love Planescape itself -- the setting consisting of the Outer Planes and Sigil -- the idea of a meta-setting in which all the other settings are "Prime Material worlds" doesn't appeal to me all that much. It was a great way to tick off setting purists in the old days and it's probably a good idea to back away from it. |
| ArcTan04-23-07, 01:02 AM | One thing I want to say too is that I dislike the idea that just because the Great Wheel is the older meta-setting, that Eberron has to be shoehorned into it. If you want to do a crossover, it's just as easy to have Abeir-Toril be a random Prime world in the Eberron multiverse as vice versa. Rewrite Abeir-Toril to function with the assumption of distant and non-appearing deities, and an elemental cosmology based on the opposition of Fire and Ice over the Natural World of Air, Water and Earth, and all that other good stuff, and you'll have just as viable a crossover. If you protest that this means radically changing Abeir-Toril, I protest that a Great Wheel cosmology for Eberron greatly changes Eberron. Just as a Great Wheel cosmology for the World of Darkness would greatly change the World of Darkness. And I protest the attitude that denies that crossovers, by nature, attack the assumptions of the worlds they cross over and that a crossover isn't a form of *rewriting the setting* that takes thought and care if you want it to actually make sense and be respectful. |
| Perun04-23-07, 01:48 AM | Ebberon is accessible, though it requires a bit more thought. 1. The Plane of Shadow, which is described as connecting to multiple or alternate realities. I'd say it requires less thought to connect Eberron to the Great Ring (or Great Wheel, but I still want my full complement of 18 inner planes and the Deep Ethereal) via Plane of Shadow because it's cosmology is so different. When playing with RAW FR (that is, using the Great Tree cosmology) and connecting it to the Great Wheel, you suddenly end up with two Abysses and two Baators, with a virtually identical set of demon lords and devil princes, one from each of the two (virtually identical planes). Then you've got the CE Greater Power Lolth from the plane of Demonweb Pits and the CE Intermediate Power Lolth from the 66th layer of Abyss which is, incidentally, called the Demonweb Pits. When connecting GH to Eberron, you don't get any of that. Your planes are different (well, the vast majority is) and the planar inhabitants are different (celestials and fiends, with the exceptions of yugoloths and aasimo... angels, are sprinkled all over the planes). (Let me correct that, planar inhabitants are the same as in Great Wheel, but where they live is different). Just thinking out loud... ;) Regards. |
| ArcTan04-23-07, 01:57 AM | I'd say it requires less thought to connect Eberron to the Great Ring (or Great Wheel, but I still want my full complement of 18 inner planes and the Deep Ethereal) via Plane of Shadow because it's cosmology is so different. When playing with RAW FR (that is, using the Great Tree cosmology) and connecting it to the Great Wheel, you suddenly end up with two Abysses and two Baators, with a virtually identical set of demon lords and devil princes, one from each of the two (virtually identical planes). Then you've got the CE Greater Power Lolth from the plane of Demonweb Pits and the CE Intermediate Power Lolth from the 66th layer of Abyss which is, incidentally, called the Demonweb Pits. When connecting GH to Eberron, you don't get any of that. Your planes are different (well, the vast majority is) and the planar inhabitants are different (celestials and fiends, with the exceptions of yugoloths and aasimo... angels, are sprinkled all over the planes). (Let me correct that, planar inhabitants are the same as in Great Wheel, but where they live is different). Just thinking out loud... ;) Regards. True. The question is whether you want to deal with the implications of this kind of crossover -- a multi-multiverse. I don't actually mind thinking about it, but it seems to be anathema to a lot of Great Wheel fans -- notice how few crossover ideas actually *use* the structure shown in the MotP, where every Prime *by default* has a completely different planar cosmology attached to it except for the Plane of Shadow. I guess it's hard to think up new planar cosmologies. I do like the implication that in the "real" d20 Modern Earth portrayed in Urban Arcana, there *are* no other planes but the Material and Shadow, or at least the other planes, if they exist, are incredibly hard to access (even Shadow is impossible to get back into after you come out of it, unless you're Estevan and are instead using a portal from Sigil). |
| ripvanwormer04-23-07, 02:56 AM | Okay. What about the fact that the planes have the orbiting trait, so that they swing near and far from Eberron and create different conditions on Eberron's material plane at different times? How do you explain this in the context of the non-orbiting planes of the Great Wheel? The planes of the Great Wheel also orbit. It just doesn't get mentioned much. Funny, because the only real difference between Irian and the PE Plane is that it's Minor Positive-Dominant instead of Major. The major difference is that Irian has solid ground. ...Also the minor matter of the actual mechanical effect of alignment traits on characters with alignments. Meh. Boring. Fire and Ice are two kinds of destructive, evil energy Fire and ice are inherently evil? That doesn't sound like a terrible idea to you? Where does that put non-evil fire and ice creatures? Or non-evil spellcasters who want to use those energies? Saying that the Eberron Xoriat was unaligned would be really, really dumb -- apparently the most horrific acts of Evil imaginable become Neutral if you're crazy enough. Not at all. The actions of Xoriat's known inhabitants don't bear on the alignment of the plane as a whole, any more than the actions of efreeti bear on the alignment of the Elemental Plane of Fire. The Region of Dreams also is not part of the Great Wheel anyway. It is, if you go back to 2nd edition sources. No, they aren't. Faerun does not mandate that all people go to Dolurrh regardless of their alignment. Faerun mandates that all people go to the Fugue Plain, regardless of their alignment. There, they're judged and either forced to stay there or they pass on to a further destination. The salient point here is that both the Forgotten Realms and Eberron settings have unaligned realms of the dead where everyone goes, at least at first. The Fugue Plain was placed in the Gray Waste in 2nd edition, like other nearly identical underworld realms like Hades and Niflheim. Eberron is not at all original in this case. This is actually a critical difference between Faerun and Eberron. Faerun also does not have the Entrapping trait affect the actual shades of the dead, preventing resurrection and true resurrection from even functioning except in very special cases. That could easily be an effect specific to the realm of Dolurrh. You've still left out Syrania -- so what Upper Plane is native to Angels that aren't beholden to any deity, who can be of any ethical alignment, and who live in an empty expanse of Air? Any or all of them. Syrania could work as a region in the sky of any Outer Plane, or simply be a term the people of Eberron use to describe the skies of the Upper Planes in general. I'm not saying that Eberron shouldn't have its own cosmology, only that there's no point in giving it one in a campaign that also contains the Great Wheel planes, as unoriginal and redundant as most of Eberron's planes are. In a campaign that's only about Eberron, sure - play it by the book. Lamannia -- so what part of the Beastlands is the home of all three Elemental races of Air, Water and Earth? No part of the Beastlands; Lammania should Thelanis -- what part of Arborea manifests in faerie rings on the Prime and has the Flowing Time trait and so on? Shavarath -- what part of Acheron is actually the *native home* of Archons warring against Baatezu and Tanar'ri? I'd get rid of those planes entirely, replacing them with the elemental planes, Faerie, and the Lower Planes. Well, sure, if you want to cheapen everything the Eberron planes are about. Well, that's my problem. If I thought the Eberron planes were rich and interesting instead of just being renamed planes from the Manual of the Planes with a few tweaks, I'd totally think they should be kept. As it is, they really can't be cheapened. It'd be like cheapening pennies. I just find the whole thing disrespectful. You would be correct. I'm extremely disrespectful, and proud of it. You're right that it's just as valid to put Toril or Oerth into Eberron's cosmology, except Eberron's cosmology is thinly detailed and not very interesting, while the Great Wheel is richly detailed and fascinating. That's not fair, probably, but few things are. The few things that make Eberron's cosmology distinctive are arbitrary and add no real benefit to the setting, while providing the dramatic disadvantage of making it harder to get to interesting planes from Eberron (and vice versa). |
| ArcTan04-25-07, 02:32 PM | The planes of the Great Wheel also orbit. It just doesn't get mentioned much. When I see a core Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms event that depends on the Elemental Plane of Fire drawing near to Oerth and making every large area of flame a portal to the Inner Planes and creating unseasonably dangerous levels of heat, etc., then I'll go along with saying that this doesn't matter. The major difference is that Irian has solid ground. I actually think Daanvi and Kythri are planes you can make this argument about more easily than Irian and Mabar. Kythri is Limbo in every way except for no Slaadi, and Daanvi is Mechanus in every way except for no Modrons (and it's not made of gears). Fire and ice are inherently evil? That doesn't sound like a terrible idea to you? Where does that put non-evil fire and ice creatures? Or non-evil spellcasters who want to use those energies? Their manifestations on the planes can be Evil even if they aren't Evil in every possible respect. Fernia isn't all fire everywhere, it's when fire threatens to consume the world -- it's out-of-control forest fires and unseasonably hot summers that blight crops and such (and such natural events are attributed to Fernia orbiting closer to the Prime). All I'm seeing here is something that subverts the simplistic "If it's Evil, then the plane is Evil-aligned, and every time you use it, it's Evil, and everyone associated with Evil" "law", and you rejecting it because it doesn't follow that law. (Not like Core D&D is totally consistent there, either, or do we need to revisit the arguments about [Evil] spells, Evil Undead, and Negative Energy?) Not at all. The actions of Xoriat's known inhabitants don't bear on the alignment of the plane as a whole, any more than the actions of efreeti bear on the alignment of the Elemental Plane of Fire. Well, sure. You can "solve" all of these problems by attributing everything different about one of these planes to it being just a region of another plane. Big deal. It is, if you go back to 2nd edition sources. It's still very different from Dal Quor in Eberron. You still haven't explained how Lamannia fits into the Great Wheel, except that it vaguely looks like the Beastlands because they're both animal-themed, and therefore Lamannia can just be a part of the Beastlands. What's actually getting me, here, is that it's increasingly becoming clear that there's no way you could make up *any* plane *anywhere* that doesn't fit into the Great Wheel if you use this handwavy logic to it. (Well, obviously, the Courts of Chaos are just one layer of the Abyss, and the Great City of Amber is just one particular city on Arcadia.) Faerun mandates that all people go to the Fugue Plain, regardless of their alignment. There, they're judged and either forced to stay there or they pass on to a further destination. The salient point here is that both the Forgotten Realms and Eberron settings have unaligned realms of the dead where everyone goes, at least at first. The Fugue Plain was placed in the Gray Waste in 2nd edition, like other nearly identical underworld realms like Hades and Niflheim. Eberron is not at all original in this case. No one said it was totally original. The part where you don't get judged and summarily sent on your way is, in fact, a pretty important and original thing to have happen. That could easily be an effect specific to the realm of Dolurrh. Which, y'know, cheapens it. (Death is an inevitable gray wasting that respects neither virtue nor vice... for you guys. For everyone else the afterlife is totally understandable and just.) Any or all of them. Syrania could work as a region in the sky of any Outer Plane, or simply be a term the people of Eberron use to describe the skies of the Upper Planes in general. I'm not saying that Eberron shouldn't have its own cosmology, only that there's no point in giving it one in a campaign that also contains the Great Wheel planes, as unoriginal and redundant as most of Eberron's planes are. In a campaign that's only about Eberron, sure - play it by the book. So what do you need to do to a plane to make it *not* "unoriginal and redundant"? Eberron isn't incredibly wildly different from the Great Wheel, but only because it is supposed to be a standalone fantasy setting with certain fantasy tropes, and therefore lacks things like an Elemental Plane of Chocolate. I'd get rid of those planes entirely, replacing them with the elemental planes, Faerie, and the Lower Planes. Well, that's my problem. If I thought the Eberron planes were rich and interesting instead of just being renamed planes from the Manual of the Planes with a few tweaks, I'd totally think they should be kept. As it is, they really can't be cheapened. It'd be like cheapening pennies. When the "few tweaks" are the important part and the parts that match MotP are, well, the vague general idea (a plane where everyone fights all the time), then I disagree. You would be correct. I'm extremely disrespectful, and proud of it. You're right that it's just as valid to put Toril or Oerth into Eberron's cosmology, except Eberron's cosmology is thinly detailed and not very interesting, while the Great Wheel is richly detailed and fascinating. That's not fair, probably, but few things are. Well, for one thing, there hasn't been a Planes of Eberron supplement out yet, so yes, in that sense it isn't fair. If you compare just the *idea* of the Eberron cosmology with the *idea* of the Great Wheel, leaving out all the individual adventure locations and whatnot from Planescape that probably won't come up in a single campaign, I don't see how one is better than the other. The few things that make Eberron's cosmology distinctive are arbitrary and add no real benefit to the setting, while providing the dramatic disadvantage of making it harder to get to interesting planes from Eberron (and vice versa). I actually liked the argument someone else brought up -- the new idea that the Plane of Shadow links different cosmologies actually is *more interesting* -- that there's a whole different afterlife in one world than there is in another, and that Shadow is the *only* means to get from one to the other. One of the things that Planescape purposely ignored -- with its diffident and uninterested attitude toward the Prime -- was why it's taken so long for the Prime worlds to use the Planes as a means to communicate with *each other* (something that the Spelljammer meta-setting was actually all about). And, of course, it actually makes more sense to stumble into Eberron and come upon a whole new set of planes with a whole new planar physics and everything, than to stumble upon Forgotten Realms and come upon a set of planes that's just like the one you left except with a different shape and a different Prime world sitting in the middle and some of the gods are bigger and some of the gods are smaller etc. |
| ArcTan04-25-07, 02:38 PM | I will add that my bias is, as I said, that I don't want an Eberron crossover to happen AT ALL. I *like* the idea of letting Planescape be its own setting and not the meta-setting to which all other campaign settings must conform. I actually think that for non-Planescape fans, the implication that anything that happened in your setting was subordinate to whatever stupid politics were going on in the Blood War or Sigil at the moment was really annoying, and while the whole "clueless primes" thing was cute *in Planescape*, the way Planescape fans sometimes liked to use it to undermine other campaign settings was, again, annoying. I like that now, WotC's policy means that I can have my own campaign setting with my own rules and my own ideas and *even* have a way to go to Oerth from that campaign setting through Shadow, but nothing in the rules encourages me or my players to assume that my campaign setting is stuck inside the same old stupid Great Wheel with the same outsiders and gods and planar factions hanging around. It's nice. So yes, I am a big fan of changing FR's cosmology from the Great Wheel to a Great Tree, even if I don't like the new cosmology that much for its own sake -- I like the message it sends, that "We're not in Planescape anymore, Toto". |
| Naderion04-25-07, 02:59 PM | Well, you could always have any setting you want be or not be connected with others. ;) That wizards is doing that now themself, doesn't change that in any way. |
| ripvanwormer04-25-07, 03:30 PM | When I see a core Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms event that depends on the Elemental Plane of Fire drawing near to Oerth and making every large area of flame a portal to the Inner Planes and creating unseasonably dangerous levels of heat, etc. Aw, man, that would be cool. Sign me up. I actually think Daanvi and Kythri are planes you can make this argument about more easily than Irian and Mabar. Kythri is Limbo in every way except for no Slaadi, and Daanvi is Mechanus in every way except for no Modrons (and it's not made of gears). My argument was actually that Irian and Mabar were among the planes most different from their Great Wheel equivalents. You're arguing the same thing I am. All I'm seeing here is something that subverts the simplistic "If it's Evil, then the plane is Evil-aligned, and every time you use it, it's Evil, and everyone associated with Evil" "law" That's not simplistic, it's rational. Making a non-evil substance associated with an evil plane is just bizarre and random and senseless. It's not - "Oh, what an interesting twist" bizarre, either - it's just terrible game design. do we need to revisit the arguments about [Evil] spells, Evil Undead, and Negative Energy?) No, that's really simple and coherent - there's nothing inherently evil about negative energy or undead, and the Negative Energy Plane isn't evil either. Some people try to make that overly complicated by inventing theories for why negative energy is morally abhorrent while their planes aren't, but that's their problem, not a problem with the setting. It's still very different from Dal Quor in Eberron. Not substantially, no. There's no aspect of Dal Quor that can't be comfortably attributed to the Region of Dreams, improving it greatly in the process. That's one of the great things about Eberron, that it offers things that can improve the Great Wheel cosmology. It'd be a shame to keep all those things in their little ghetto instead of letting them interact with the multiverse as a whole. You still haven't explained how Lamannia fits into the Great Wheel, except that it vaguely looks like the Beastlands because they're both animal-themed, and therefore Lamannia can just be a part of the Beastlands. No, I never claimed that at all. Lamannia could be turned into a version of the Spirit World, which seems to be its inspiration. And yes, there are Spirit Worlds in the Great Wheel cosmology, usually associated with specific worlds (the Birthright campaign had one, for example). there's no way you could make up *any* plane *anywhere* that doesn't fit into the Great Wheel if you use this handwavy logic to it. Absolutely! That's the strength of the Great Wheel cosmology. If it wasn't flexible, I wouldn't like it. The alternative is very specific, rigid "boutique cosmologies" that are only usable in a specific, rigid campaign, and that doesn't appeal to me at all. I greatly prefer a situation where many different mythoi and worlds are free to interact on an equal basis than one where some are segregated and hidden away where they can't enrich and nourish the rest of the multiverse. I think a multiverse where quori from the Region of Dreams can interact with yugoloths and night hags from the Gray Waste, trade in the City of Doors, and war with the modrons is objectively better than one where they have to devote all their intentions to one little world and its satellites. No one said it was totally original. The part where you don't get judged and summarily sent on your way is, in fact, a pretty important and original thing to have happen. Not if you've ever encountered the Ghostwalk campaign, or Greek or Norse mythology, it's not. Which, y'know, cheapens it. (Death is an inevitable gray wasting that respects neither virtue nor vice... for you guys. For everyone else the afterlife is totally understandable and just.) (Nods). I can see that. If you really, really like that aspect of Eberron, you'd want to make that part of the campaign multiversal, putting everyone from all worlds in the same gray wasty plane. Since I don't care about how angsty the afterlife is, I'd just ignore it and send Eberronian souls to their plane of alignment. So what do you need to do to a plane to make it *not* "unoriginal and redundant"? A lot more detail. If we lived in a just world, Eberron's cosmology would have been invented in 1980 and it would have been fleshed out right along with the standard cosmology, but the world's not fair and Eberron's cosmos is pretty thin and redundant - it just makes sense to me to use the one that's been with D&D since time immemorial, the one that's more than flexible enough to handle any kind of local planology. When the "few tweaks" are the important part and the parts that match MotP are, well, the vague general idea (a plane where everyone fights all the time), then I disagree. Are you still trying to associate Shavarath with Acheron? That's not what I want at all. Ditch Shavarath entirely, and replace it with the Abyss, Baator, and Mount Celestia, which are much more interesting sources of demons, devils, and archons. Manifest zones associated with Shavarath could be associated with Acheron or the Gray Waste, as appropriate. If you compare just the *idea* of the Eberron cosmology with the *idea* of the Great Wheel Yes, yes. If you just compare their abstract ideas, leaving out everything that makes the Great Wheel cosmology awesome, one isn't necessarily better than the other. But why would you want to do that? I like the Great Wheel cosmology because of the things that make it awesome! You're not going to play a game in an abstract idea, you're going to play it in individual adventure locations and whatnot, which the Great Wheel has in spades and Eberron has none of. Maybe in some abstract, philosophical way you like the idea that Eberron has its own cosmology, but in a practical, let's-actually-play-the-game sense, Eberron's cosmology is all but useless and the Great Wheel remains awesome. And no, that's not fair, but that's what the reality is at this point. I actually liked the argument someone else brought up -- the new idea that the Plane of Shadow links different cosmologies actually is *more interesting* Turning the Plane of Shadow into a cosmology-linker is unaesthetic, ugly, and paradoxically extremely inconvenient and far too convenient at the same time. A single cosmos with a layer for the god planes, a layer for the elemental planes, and a layer for the material planes is beautiful in its way, a greatly appealing unifying shape, and so useful from an RPG sense because all the things from all those worlds can interact freely and make each other better through that interaction, all those plots and characters boiling off each other. Perhaps the worst part is how arbitrary using the Plane of Shadow in that way - cosmology-linking has nothing to do with that plane's themes or features, it's just a last-minute "maybe we should use that plane for something" hack. It's hideous. It makes anything the PCs do small and insignificant, because if you kill the Lich-Queen there are still an infinite number of other Lich-Queens that haven't been killed; if you save a gate-town from sliding into the Abyss there are still an infinite number of other gate-towns and other demonic planes. It's inconvenient and silly because it means there's an infinite number of Astral Planes (for example) with an infinite number of githyanki lich-queens, because things from one cosmology's plane of fire have to shlep through the Plane of Shadow to make alliances and deals with things from another cosmology's plane of fire. At the same time, it's still far too convenient from the perspective of someone who wants to keep the various worlds separate, since it's only a few hours walk through Deep Shadow to cross from one world to another and contaminate it with kender or Zhentarim or whatever. So it does nothing for those who want their settings pristine under all circumstances, while it's not very good for a campaign that's supposed to be cross-world either. Putting all the D&D worlds on the same Material Plane allows them to stay separate if you want, but it makes it easier to connect the themes of a common campaign at a planar level (or with spelljammers or whatever, if you want). If you only want to play on one world, it's far better to simply say the other worlds don't exist at all. This "they exist and they're a few hours away through the Plane of Shadow" idea is the worst of both scenarios. One of the things that Planescape purposely ignored -- with its diffident and uninterested attitude toward the Prime -- was why it's taken so long for the Prime worlds to use the Planes as a means to communicate with *each other* (something that the Spelljammer meta-setting was actually all about). Why are so few people on Oerth or Toril aware of spelljammers and giff and neogi? Because spelljamming helms are extremely rare, and not many people have them. Why don't people from Toril travel regularly to Oerth through the Astral Plane? Because plane-travelling magic is high-level and rare, portals are rare and usually unknown, and Oerth and Toril are both just one among a theoretically infinite number of worlds, so the chances of people from one specific world meeting one from the other are low. At the same time, there are NPCs who have specifically been to both worlds through the planes - Rowan Darkwood, Elminster, and Gwydiesin of the Cranes, to name just three. |
| ArcTan04-25-07, 05:58 PM | Aw, man, that would be cool. Sign me up. My argument was actually that Irian and Mabar were among the planes most different from their Great Wheel equivalents. You're arguing the same thing I am. Okay. What makes Irian more different from the PE Plane than Shavarath from... anything? That's not simplistic, it's rational. Making a non-evil substance associated with an evil plane is just bizarre and random and senseless. It's not - "Oh, what an interesting twist" bizarre, either - it's just terrible game design. Why? What do you mean by "associated with", anyway? Negative Energy is *associated* with Evil in D&D. It's just not Evil itself. Fire isn't Evil in Eberron. Lighting a fire in the woods doesn't leak evil into the world or anything. But Fernia is Evil. Just like Negative Energy isn't Evil in core D&D, but the vast majority of Undead creatures happen to be Evil, several [Evil]-descriptor spells use Negative Energy, and gods and planar lords who like Undead tend to be Evil. No, that's really simple and coherent - there's nothing inherently evil about negative energy or undead, and the Negative Energy Plane isn't evil either. Some people try to make that overly complicated by inventing theories for why negative energy is morally abhorrent while their planes aren't, but that's their problem, not a problem with the setting. ...Well, it's also a problem with the spell detect evil, the [Evil] descriptor on animate dead, and so on. It's not my problem unless the fact that I don't houserule them out is my problem. But that's a discussion for many other threads. Not substantially, no. There's no aspect of Dal Quor that can't be comfortably attributed to the Region of Dreams, improving it greatly in the process. That's one of the great things about Eberron, that it offers things that can improve the Great Wheel cosmology. It'd be a shame to keep all those things in their little ghetto instead of letting them interact with the multiverse as a whole. I actually think the more you mix big, exciting ideas with other big, exciting ideas so that they're just part of a whole bunch of other ideas, the less exciting they are and the more dumb they are. I'm not a fan of multiverses and crossover cosmologies and the idea that every sitcom ever exists in Tommy Westphall's autistic mind. I don't say that someone who really wants to *shouldn't* mix Eberron with other settings. But to do so is to *rewrite Eberron* and to rewrite those other settings as well. You're not playing in Eberron anymore, because part of what defines Eberron is not being part of the Planescape meta-setting. And I actually think it's totally fine and reasonable to ask that other settings *not* be written into the Planescape meta-setting by default, because that *does* restrain what kind of grand cosmos-altering ideas you can come up with, and dilutes the rest. No, I never claimed that at all. Lamannia could be turned into a version of the Spirit World, which seems to be its inspiration. And yes, there are Spirit Worlds in the Great Wheel cosmology, usually associated with specific worlds (the Birthright campaign had one, for example). Now we're drifting further and further away from the Great Wheel proper and into things that have been pushed into coexisting with the Great Wheel. (MotP even made the observation that the Spirit World only maintains its flavor if it's the only plane besides the Material rather than being one plane among many.) Absolutely! That's the strength of the Great Wheel cosmology. If it wasn't flexible, I wouldn't like it. The alternative is very specific, rigid "boutique cosmologies" that are only usable in a specific, rigid campaign, and that doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't necessarily think that Eberron's cosmology is "specific and rigid". I mean, there are a lot of things you can do with Fernia and Risia. Loosely inspired by the Jade Phoenix Mages from ToB and the PGtE's entry on Frostburn, I've been kicking around for a while the idea that Fernia and Risia have become Evil-aligned because of some multiverse-shaking event generations ago that unbalanced the planes toward Evil, and that the balance can be restored by freeing the most prominent Good-aligned beings linked with Fire and Ice -- the soul of the Phoenix and the body of the goddess Hleid, respectively, both of which are being championed by a particular sect on Eberron, the Jade Phoenix Mages and the Rimefire Witches. I greatly prefer a situation where many different mythoi and worlds are free to interact on an equal basis than one where some are segregated and hidden away where they can't enrich and nourish the rest of the multiverse. I think a multiverse where quori from the Region of Dreams can interact with yugoloths and night hags from the Gray Waste, trade in the City of Doors, and war with the modrons is objectively better than one where they have to devote all their intentions to one little world and its satellites. ...Whereas this is the kind of thing that makes me vaguely ill, and one reason I dislike the way fanfic writers seem addicted to crossovers. Mythoi make sense for the environments where they were created -- transplant them willy-nilly and they unravel. (If I see another instance of Harry Potter transporting himself to the deck of the USS Enterprise, which has just made contact with the wreck of the Nostromo, I'm going to blow up the Internet.) Not if you've ever encountered the Ghostwalk campaign, or Greek or Norse mythology, it's not. Ghostwalk is very different -- the afterlife is known to exist but nothing is known about it, and the ghostwalking existence before the afterlife really is just like your life on Earth with full consciousness and identity retained, not a loss of all knowledge and sentience into dull gray nothing. As far as Dolurrh being based on the Greek Hades, of course it is. And it's the fact that the Greek Hades is a neutral place that doesn't have much of the flavor of the ersatz Great Wheel Hades that makes me want to separate the two. (Nods). I can see that. If you really, really like that aspect of Eberron, you'd want to make that part of the campaign multiversal, putting everyone from all worlds in the same gray wasty plane. Since I don't care about how angsty the afterlife is, I'd just ignore it and send Eberronian souls to their plane of alignment. Well, that's my point. One way or the other you're rewriting Eberron or the Great Wheel. A lot more detail. If we lived in a just world, Eberron's cosmology would have been invented in 1980 and it would have been fleshed out right along with the standard cosmology, but the world's not fair and Eberron's cosmos is pretty thin and redundant - it just makes sense to me to use the one that's been with D&D since time immemorial, the one that's more than flexible enough to handle any kind of local planology. Well, it's been *made* flexible enough because local cosmologies have been shoehorned into it. That doesn't necessarily make it more appealing to everyone -- including the current higher-ups at WotC, apparently. Are you still trying to associate Shavarath with Acheron? That's not what I want at all. Ditch Shavarath entirely, and replace it with the Abyss, Baator, and Mount Celestia, which are much more interesting sources of demons, devils, and archons. Manifest zones associated with Shavarath could be associated with Acheron or the Gray Waste, as appropriate. Well, see, that's a wild change from Shavarath. You can't tell me that Shavarath is just like something from the Great Wheel, when that "something from the Great Wheel" is several different planes. As far as I can tell, Eberron's idea of a plane that's just one place -- one world -- where Good and Evil war with each other, and these Good and Evil beings *have no other purpose* but to war with each other and know no existence outside of warring with each other, *is* unique. The idea that the Archons exist in a happy peaceful realm of Celestia from which they are sent out to *meet* the fiends on the battlefields of Hades is totally different from Shavarath. Yes, yes. If you just compare their abstract ideas, leaving out everything that makes the Great Wheel cosmology awesome, one isn't necessarily better than the other. But why would you want to do that? I like the Great Wheel cosmology because of the things that make it awesome! You're not going to play a game in an abstract idea, you're going to play it in individual adventure locations and whatnot, which the Great Wheel has in spades and Eberron has none of. Maybe in some abstract, philosophical way you like the idea that Eberron has its own cosmology, but in a practical, let's-actually-play-the-game sense, Eberron's cosmology is all but useless and the Great Wheel remains awesome. So if you *want* to explore the outer cosmology of the Great Wheel, then play in the Great Wheel. If you want to play on the Prime, and if the actual history and mythology and cosmology of the Prime campaign setting -- the actual campaign setting -- is important to you, then the question isn't so easy. There are multiple reasons one might want to do a crossover. One is to play a Planescape campaign where one of the clueless primes comes from Eberron. In that case, the decision to make Eberron a shoehorned Planescape Prime is easy. However, if the idea really is to play a campaign where we go from Oerth to *Eberron* and the idea is that both Oerth and Eberron are equally important in this game, then no, Eberron just being a random part of the Great Wheel doesn't fly. That Eberron isn't Eberron anymore in any of the important respects, just like the Alien movies no longer work if the Xenomorph homeworld is just one world among many of the Star Trek Federation. I mean, looking at Eberron *itself*, if Eberron is a Prime world in the Great Wheel, then many of the most important things known by scholars in Eberron -- that death is a misty gray void, that the gods have no shape and cannot ever be seen or proven to exist, etc. -- become demonstrably disprovable facts, or else are just wacky things unique to those silly folks from Eberron. Turning the Plane of Shadow into a cosmology-linker is unaesthetic, ugly, and paradoxically extremely inconvenient and far too convenient at the same time. A single cosmos with a layer for the god planes, a layer for the elemental planes, and a layer for the material planes is beautiful in its way, a greatly appealing unifying shape, and so useful from an RPG sense because all the things from all those worlds can interact freely and make each other better through that interaction, all those plots and characters boiling off each other. ...Not everyone likes that. That's why there *are* variant cosmologies given in the MotP. Perhaps the worst part is how arbitrary using the Plane of Shadow in that way - cosmology-linking has nothing to do with that plane's themes or features, it's just a last-minute "maybe we should use that plane for something" hack. It's hideous. I dunno. It makes sense to me. Shadow, as a concept, represents the unknown, the distant, what could be but isn't. Possibility. It's the theme behind things like the Shadowcaster, shadow conjuration spells, the shadowstriking item property, and so on. There are other options, like the Deep Ethereal. It makes anything the PCs do small and insignificant, because if you kill the Lich-Queen there are still an infinite number of other Lich-Queens that haven't been killed; if you save a gate-town from sliding into the Abyss there are still an infinite number of other gate-towns and other demonic planes. Oh, bah. That's what you do to any campaign setting by embedding it in Planescape anyway. Congratulations, you stopped one Evil Lich from conquering one kingdom. Meanwhile, uncountable billions continue to perish in the unending slaughter that is the Blood War. Meanwhile, the faraway Prime world of Athas continues to choke and die in the monstrous corruption of its past. Meanwhile, the whole multiversal nature of belief has just made one of its few ever significant shifts thanks to the ending of the Faction War. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile... I think the real answer to your *specific* complaint is to *not* have all campaign cosmologies be identical, which means that if you save one particular gate-town from sliding into the Abyss you've saved *that gate-town*, which doesn't have an exact analogue anywhere else in the omniverse. Of course, to do this, we need to define the Great Wheel as the multiverse of *just* Oerth and whatever other Prime worlds exist alongside Oerth (which, sure, can include Abeir-Toril and Krynn for old times' sake, but doesn't have to). That way when you travel somewhere else through Shadow you *don't* keep running into exact duplicates of Demogorgon, Lolth, Zaphkiel, etc. It's inconvenient and silly because it means there's an infinite number of Astral Planes (for example) with an infinite number of githyanki lich-queens, because things from one cosmology's plane of fire have to shlep through the Plane of Shadow to make alliances and deals with things from another cosmology's plane of fire. Well, it means other planes don't have to have an Astral Plane with a githyanki lich-queen. Which is nice. And that you only have to control *one* element -- how dangerous is Deep Shadow? -- to control whether or not there are annoying plane-spanning trade consortiums and other nonsense to pollute your campaign setting. At the same time, it's still far too convenient from the perspective of someone who wants to keep the various worlds separate, since it's only a few hours walk through Deep Shadow to cross from one world to another and contaminate it with kender or Zhentarim or whatever. So it does nothing for those who want their settings pristine under all circumstances, while it's not very good for a campaign that's supposed to be cross-world either. I dunno. MotP leaves it nice and vague how dangerous Deep Shadow is and how far a walk it is. If I really want trans-multiverse communication, sure, it's a few hours' trek, and Deep Shadow becomes an important thoroughfare between the Efreet of the Brass City and the *completely different* Efreet tribes who live in Fernia. If not, I can make travel through Deep Shadow a traumatic, highly risky voyage that nearly always strips away the memory and identity of all but the most powerful planar travelers, leaving them to wake up, blinking and confused, in a new world, having mysteriously adopted all of that world's language, basic cultural customs and outlook on life, but cursed to live in that world's shadows cut off from full function by Shadow's curse on them to be forever veiled as beings of their new world without any memory of their homes. (Doesn't sound like anything I've heard of.) Putting all the D&D worlds on the same Material Plane allows them to stay separate if you want, but it makes it easier to connect the themes of a common campaign at a planar level (or with spelljammers or whatever, if you want). If they were *designed* to be connected, then they should start out connected. If they were designed to be separate, then they should start out separate, as was done with Eberron -- and any possible connection should be that kind of tenuous, once-in-a-million-years kind of thing (as with the implied connection through the Plane of Shadow, or the stated Shadow connection between Oerth/Planescape/whatever and the "modern" world.) If you only want to play on one world, it's far better to simply say the other worlds don't exist at all. This "they exist and they're a few hours away through the Plane of Shadow" idea is the worst of both scenarios. Well, if you make it so they exist only a few hours away and the trip through Shadow is nothing, sure. I thought the point of that was to make Shadow travel a lot *harder*, implicitly, than just casting two plane shifts or hitching a ride on a Spelljamming vessel running the Realmspace/Greyspace/Krynnspace trade triangle had been. Why are so few people on Oerth or Toril aware of spelljammers and giff and neogi? Because spelljamming helms are extremely rare, and not many people have them. Why don't people from Toril travel regularly to Oerth through the Astral Plane? Because plane-travelling magic is high-level and rare, portals are rare and usually unknown, and Oerth and Toril are both just one among a theoretically infinite number of worlds, so the chances of people from one specific world meeting one from the other are low. At the same time, there are NPCs who have specifically been to both worlds through the planes - Rowan Darkwood, Elminster, and Gwydiesin of the Cranes, to name just three. On the other hand, Planescape created a giant city that's full of portals that just happen to be right there to walk through, and even stated that the existence of these portals is why Sigil is important, and even said that it's the fact that planars don't care about primes very much that's why things are the way they are. Spelljammer was weird and inconsistent with this, and started out by saying that spelljamming helms were really rare and no one knew about 'em, but toward the end of it really had put D&D into this weird steampunk future world where there *were* people making quick trade runs back and forth between Krynnspace and Realmspace for weird spices or to see the sights, or where the Neogi had tried to invade Oerth and been beaten off multiple times, and we kind of accepted that the way this affected your average ground-based Greyhawk resident was vague and unclear. |
| ArcTan04-25-07, 05:59 PM | Well, you could always have any setting you want be or not be connected with others. ;) That wizards is doing that now themself, doesn't change that in any way. Yeah, but WotC makes a statement with everything they do about how they imagine the world and what their new ideas are going to plug into. They're basically now saying that stuff that happens in the Forgotten Realms will treat the Forgotten Realms as a unified place that doesn't have any contact with Sigil or Oerth, which means that those of us who are Realms fans and not Planescape fans won't have to, metaphorically speaking, sit there picking the Planescape out of our food with our fingers before digging into it with a spoon. |
| ArcTan04-25-07, 06:01 PM | FWIW, I don't mean to be down on Planescape itself, which was an awesome setting. However, it doesn't need any particular Prime world in it to be an awesome setting, and the point of the setting was that the people in it didn't give two craps about the Prime and largely ignored it ("Waterdeep? Never heard of it"). So the benefit to people who like any campaign setting *itself* for putting it in Planescape isn't that high. A lot of Dark Sun fans never treated Athas' inclusion in Planescape as canon, and most Dragonlance fans (in my experience, anyway) handwave away Lord Soth's tenure in Ravenloft. |
| ripvanwormer04-25-07, 07:35 PM | Okay. What makes Irian more different from the PE Plane than Shavarath from... anything? Irian is kind of interesting; with its crystal landscape and minor positive dominance I think it would fit in well as a useful demiplane, located "near" the Positive Energy Plane but not in it. Shavarath doesn't really interest me at all. It seems nothing more than a way to shoehorn demons, devils, and archons into a setting in a marginalized way. Better, I think, to just use Baator, the Abyss, and Mount Celestia. Shavarath is just an arbitrary difference for the sake of difference, adding nothing to the setting. Kythri is Limbo in every way except for no Slaadi Kythri has slaadi. Eberron Campaign Setting, page 96: "Inhabitants: Chaos beast, githzerai, howler, slaad (all), titan." What do you mean by "associated with", anyway? How is fire associated with Fernia, or ice with Risia? That should be obvious. Fire isn't Evil in Eberron. Then why should the Plane of Fire be evil? It's nonsensical, and not in the good way. Negative energy is not a complicated or difficult issue. It's not evil, and it oughtn't to be associated with evil. If you want to associate it with evil, as some official products occasionaly do, you've made it difficult, but that doesn't turn Fernia into an example of good game design, so why bring it up at all? I actually think the more you mix big, exciting ideas with other big, exciting ideas so that they're just part of a whole bunch of other ideas, the less exciting they are and the more dumb they are. Well, then you must not be doing it right. But to do so is to *rewrite Eberron* and to rewrite those other settings as well. You're not playing in Eberron anymore, because part of what defines Eberron is not being part of the Planescape meta-setting. Eh, not really. You're making much more out of Eberron's cosmology than is actually there. I don't think the specific planes chosen to orbit Eberron add much to it - it's a world, not a multiverse. The only really important thing about them is that they're the origin of the quori and daelkyr and that they make manifest zones. Any planes that could create quori, daelkyr, and similar manifest zones would work just as well. The enigmatic nature of the gods and afterlife are important to Eberron, so if you wanted to keep those aspects of the setting in a broader cosmos you'd want to change the broader cosmos accordingly. But you still wouldn't need to use Eberron's cosmology. And I actually think it's totally fine and reasonable to ask that other settings *not* be written into the Planescape meta-setting by default, It's not unreasonable to ask, but I'm going to argue with you about it. I'd much rather have a meta-setting than a dozen cutesy little themed mini-multiverses that can't interact in an efficient way. The more you chop up the planes, the less interesting any single part is. Incorporating them together doesn't water them down - it enriches them and makes them more nuanced and intriguing. Now we're drifting further and further away from the Great Wheel proper and into things that have been pushed into coexisting with the Great Wheel. I could care less about the Manual of the Planes - I'm talking about the richer, broader multiverse that's been evolving for over twenty-seven years now, not the narrow, abridged thing that came out in hardcover six years ago. (MotP even made the observation that the Spirit World only maintains its flavor if it's the only plane besides the Material rather than being one plane among many.) Yes. I don't agree, or I think the flavor the Spirit World acquires in proximity to other planes is superior to what it gets alone. Ghostwalk is very different -- the afterlife is known to exist but nothing is known about it Nothing known to the PCs, initially. There's a whole chapter on it, though, including a map. It's different from Dolurrh, but the flavor of the Ghostwalk underworld could be transferred to Eberron and actually improve the setting in my opinion. As far as Dolurrh being based on the Greek Hades, of course it is. And it's the fact that the Greek Hades is a neutral place that doesn't have much of the flavor of the ersatz Great Wheel Hades that makes me want to separate the two. By Hades I'm not talking about the Gray Waste - "Hades" is just what the Clueless call it, frankly. The "real" Hades is a specific realm on the layer of Pluton, and yes - it's a neutral place, ruled by a lawful neutral deity. Except for the presence of a deity, it's virtually indistinguishable from Dolurrh. Well, see, that's a wild change from Shavarath. Good. You can't tell me that Shavarath is just like something from the Great Wheel I didn't. That's just something you were trying to make me say. I'm saying Shavarath is useless and redundant if you include the Abyss, Baator, and so on anywhere in your campaign, which isn't the same as it being exactly the same as a plane in the Great Wheel cosmology. I dunno. It makes sense to me. Because you're forcing it to, but it's not a natural idea, and it really "waters down" what Shadow is. Frankly, it's more "disrespectful" than any mutilations I might want to inflict on Eberron. The Plane of Shadow is a specific thing, and turning into the cross-cosmology plane makes it something else more dramatically than shifting the planes around makes Eberron something else. Possibility. No, the Ethereal Plane is already the plane of possibility, so that can't be what Shadow is. Shadow is sterile, bereft of possibility - it is a reflection of real things, but it has no possibilities of its own. Oh, bah. That's what you do to any campaign setting by embedding it in Planescape anyway.Congratulations, you stopped one Evil Lich from conquering one kingdom. That's hyperbole, unless there are a dozen versions of the exact same lich in a dozen other campaign worlds. Taking that "reasoning" to its illogical conclusion, every campaign setting should be a single town with a single villain, because saving just one town becomes inexcusably insignificant if the PCs ever go to another one. There's nothing wrong with establishing that there's a bigger world beyond the one the PCs know initially, and there's nothing wrong with establishing that there are other worlds beyond that. It's a logical progression, in fact. There's nothing wrong even with creating a larger cosmology beyond the known one. The problem comes with redundant doppel-cosmologies that add nothing new, that water down and make insignificant any one cosmology. If you're going to bother to create a new town, you should populate it with new characters and themes, and this is true on the macro scale as well. Since Eberron has so many of the same races and themes as the Great Wheel - demons, devils, archons, guardinals, faeries, and so on, even if their politics and interests are different on that world - it's sensible to connect the two, to consolidate those themes for the sake of a single plane-spanning campaign. A cross-worlds campaign isn't an Eberron campaign, nor should it be. It should have its own themes and goals, and Eberron would only exist to serve them. Giving Eberron its own cosmology would be counterproductive. I'm not criticizing your specific preferences to not connect Eberron to other worlds/planes. What I'm saying is that if you do, it makes more sense to consolidate the cosmology in a rational way instead of using an ugly, spread-out mess linked awkwardly together with a dramatically inappropriate plane like Shadow. And if you're going to argue with that, I'll take exception and argue right back. I dunno. MotP leaves it nice and vague how dangerous Deep Shadow is and how far a walk it is. No, it doesn't. It includes random monster charts and gives precise travel times (it takes a few hours). We know exactly how dangerous it is, and how long it takes. If not, I can make travel through Deep Shadow a traumatic, highly risky voyage that nearly always strips away the memory and identity of all but the most powerful planar travelers You could, but that's not how it is officially. If you're making stuff up, you could invent an entirely new plane, one more appropriate for that task, that does that sort of thing. If they were *designed* to be connected, then they should start out connected. If they were designed to be separate, then they should start out separate, as was done with Eberron What is this "should?" They should be connected if I want them to be connected - I could care less what the designers think. Keith Baker isn't my DM, nor do I want him to be. |
| ArcTan04-25-07, 09:39 PM | Irian is kind of interesting; with its crystal landscape and minor positive dominance I think it would fit in well as a useful demiplane, located "near" the Positive Energy Plane but not in it. Shavarath doesn't really interest me at all. It seems nothing more than a way to shoehorn demons, devils, and archons into a setting in a marginalized way. Better, I think, to just use Baator, the Abyss, and Mount Celestia. Shavarath is just an arbitrary difference for the sake of difference, adding nothing to the setting. It depends on whether you think of the idea of the Archons, Devils and Demons existing for no reason but their eternal war to be a good or bad feature of the setting. It's still a pretty big feature of that plane, though. Kythri has slaadi. Eberron Campaign Setting, page 96: "Inhabitants: Chaos beast, githzerai, howler, slaad (all), titan." Mea culpa. How is fire associated with Fernia, or ice with Risia? That should be obvious. Yes, but that doesn't mean all fire is touched by Fernia's evil taint and is automatically evil. There are non-core Good-aligned Fire-subtype creatures included in Fernia by default, after all. Then why should the Plane of Fire be evil? It's nonsensical, and not in the good way. I don't see why it's nonsensical that something could be associated with evil but not actually be intrinsically evil. It's not nonsensical that in a setting jumping off of stereotypes about Heaven and Hell that Hell be a place filled with fire without fire itself being evil, or the Devil be physically portrayed as a man with horns without horns being evil. Negative energy is not a complicated or difficult issue. It's not evil, and it oughtn't to be associated with evil. If you want to associate it with evil, as some official products occasionaly do, you've made it difficult, but that doesn't turn Fernia into an example of good game design, so why bring it up at all? Because it *is* core that lots of evil folks use Negative Energy, that Negative-Energy-using spells take the [Evil] descriptor, and so on without the NE Plane itself being Evil? If the NE Plane can be Neutral-aligned but the spell curse water be [Evil], then Fernia can be Evil-aligned but the spell fireball be Neutral. Well, then you must not be doing it right. Maybe. Eh, not really. You're making much more out of Eberron's cosmology than is actually there. I don't think the specific planes chosen to orbit Eberron add much to it - it's a world, not a multiverse. The only really important thing about them is that they're the origin of the quori and daelkyr and that they make manifest zones. Any planes that could create quori, daelkyr, and similar manifest zones would work just as well. Well, at least part of why I was excited about Eberron was "Wow, a new D&D setting that isn't scared to start over from scratch and throw out a lot of sacred cows!" One of those sacred cows being the Great Wheel. It's not unreasonable to ask, but I'm going to argue with you about it. I'd much rather have a meta-setting than a dozen cutesy little themed mini-multiverses that can't interact in an efficient way. The more you chop up the planes, the less interesting any single part is. Incorporating them together doesn't water them down - it enriches them and makes them more nuanced and intriguing. So would you actually find the d20 product line to be improved if we somehow found a way to link d20 Star Wars, d20 Dark Matter and d20 Call of Cthulhu to the Great Wheel as well? By Hades I'm not talking about the Gray Waste - "Hades" is just what the Clueless call it, frankly. The "real" Hades is a specific realm on the layer of Pluton, and yes - it's a neutral place, ruled by a lawful neutral deity. Except for the presence of a deity, it's virtually indistinguishable from Dolurrh. *shrug* Isn't the presence of the deity for which it's named a rather big deal for that region of the Gray Waste, though, since it's the explanation for why that part of the Gray Waste isn't corrupted by Evil? Also, isn't the base of Mount Olympus there or something? I'm still annoyed at the "Take away all of this and add all of that and the planes are indistinguishable" stuff. Eberron is indistinguishable from Oerth if you take out the inhabitants and put in new ones. Good. Saying "You can't adapt Eberron to the Great Wheel without changing it wildly for the better" is very different from saying "You can adapt Eberron to the Great Wheel without changing anything important". The latter is less likely to offend Eberron fans. I didn't. That's just something you were trying to make me say. I'm saying Shavarath is useless and redundant if you include the Abyss, Baator, and so on anywhere in your campaign, which isn't the same as it being exactly the same as a plane in the Great Wheel cosmology. Well, no. Shavarath is the Plane of War on which Eberron's eternal battle of good and evil is fought. Oerth doesn't have such a plane. Neither setting is the same if you change that fact, either subtracting it from Eberron or adding it to Oerth. Because you're forcing it to, but it's not a natural idea, and it really "waters down" what Shadow is. Frankly, it's more "disrespectful" than any mutilations I might want to inflict on Eberron. The Plane of Shadow is a specific thing, and turning into the cross-cosmology plane makes it something else more dramatically than shifting the planes around makes Eberron something else. No, the Ethereal Plane is already the plane of possibility, so that can't be what Shadow is. Shadow is sterile, bereft of possibility - it is a reflection of real things, but it has no possibilities of its own. Really? Then it makes no sense for Shadow to "spawn" bizarre and mutated things that bear no relationship to the Material Plane, which it apparently does, or for people to be able to create quasi-real things -- including entire fortresses -- from Shadow. The Ethereal actually matches the description of a sterile place where possibility ends rather than begins very well, including being the place where Ghosts live, and where the Ethergaunts huddle, having fled the ruins of their long-dead civilization and surviving by stealing from the Material, and so on. That said, I have no quarrel with switching it over to the now-defunct Deep Ethereal being the gateway between worlds. (The fact that this move makes the whole Ethereal Plane eerily similar to the White Wolf setting Wraith only makes me enjoy it more, of course.) That's hyperbole, unless there are a dozen versions of the exact same lich in a dozen other campaign worlds. Taking that "reasoning" to its illogical conclusion, every campaign setting should be a single town with a single villain, because saving just one town becomes inexcusably insignificant if the PCs ever go to another one. I *said* that the problem is alleviated if you make it so that each new cosmology is *different*, didn't I? This is why I *don't want* every Prime world to have a Celestia, a Baator, a Negative Energy Plane, an Outlands, etc. There's nothing wrong with establishing that there's a bigger world beyond the one the PCs know initially, and there's nothing wrong with establishing that there are other worlds beyond that. It's a logical progression, in fact. There's nothing wrong even with creating a larger cosmology beyond the known one. The problem comes with redundant doppel-cosmologies that add nothing new, that water down and make insignificant any one cosmology. If you're going to bother to create a new town, you should populate it with new characters and themes, and this is true on the macro scale as well. Since Eberron has so many of the same races and themes as the Great Wheel - demons, devils, archons, guardinals, faeries, and so on, even if their politics and interests are different on that world - it's sensible to connect the two, to consolidate those themes for the sake of a single plane-spanning campaign. No, because I don't actually think those themes are that similar. And you're only seeing them as similar because you're insisting that Fire Elementals in Fernia makes Fernia a doppel-Elemental Plane of Fire, which is no more true than saying that Orcs on Eberron make Eberron a doppel-Oerth, so it's easier and more coherent just to make Eberron and Oerth the same world -- or, hell, the same continent. What's wrong with saying that Fernia and the Elemental Plane of Fire are worlds with similar physics and appearances but different specific people inhabiting them and different specific histories -- just as Eberron and Oerth are both worlds with similar physics and appearances -- both rocky Prime worlds with air and water and gravity and wise Elves and savage Orcs and Vancian magic and the whole shebang -- but are still *different places*? A cross-worlds campaign isn't an Eberron campaign, nor should it be. It should have its own themes and goals, and Eberron would only exist to serve them. Giving Eberron its own cosmology would be counterproductive. Again, it depends. I can see the merit in having a crossover that's literally just a crossover -- "Yikes, we're in a strange and different land where all our expectations are shaken! What are these warforged things?" -- and that would *benefit* from every plane in Eberron being different, not just the Prime. I'm not criticizing your specific preferences to not connect Eberron to other worlds/planes. What I'm saying is that if you do, it makes more sense to consolidate the cosmology in a rational way instead of using an ugly, spread-out mess linked awkwardly together with a dramatically inappropriate plane like Shadow. And if you're going to argue with that, I'll take exception and argue right back. I dunno. Colliding two unrelated game worlds together is *already* creating a messy, convoluted universe. I don't mind the slight extra messiness of saying two portions of the universe are organized in similar-but-different ways. It actually makes slightly more sense that a lot of the polarities in Eberron -- Law vs. Chaos, Positive vs. Negative -- still exist, so there *are* cosmic verities expressed by the planar cosmology -- they just *aren't always expressed in the same way*. It's the always being expressed the same way that gets me -- I find it stifling and annoying that in old Planescape, no matter where I go and what the people there believe, if I use magic to travel from that world to the ultimate expression of the ideals of Law, I find a giant gearbox transmission with little cube guys and giant ant guys running around in it. It feels lame and constraining to me. No, it doesn't. It includes random monster charts and gives precise travel times (it takes a few hours). We know exactly how dangerous it is, and how long it takes. *shrug* Then it could be that going to other Primes simply isn't worth it for whatever reason (none of them contain appreciably more magic power or treasure than the others, since they're all based on D&D's basic rules, with the possible exception of Athas and the arguable exception of bad sourcebooks in the Realms). Or, you could argue that by having a single conduit going between Primes, it at least makes it easier to *set* the difficulty than when everyone lived in the same Great Wheel by default. I can *say* traveling through Shadow is easy if I want Planar Trade Consortia galore, or I can *say* it's nearly impossible if I don't -- whatever I pick, I can actually make it really simple to determine what the level of interplanarity is without having to do stuff like ban the plane shift spell. You could, but that's not how it is officially. If you're making stuff up, you could invent an entirely new plane, one more appropriate for that task, that does that sort of thing. Enh. Shadow seems appropriate to me as a plane of hidden, secret things unknowable any other way. Why else would the Shadovar want to have gone there? But sure, I could make it the Deep Ethereal or whatever else you want it to be. Doesn't matter. The *idea* is still better -- the idea that not everyone lives in the Great Wheel unless they actually want to. What is this "should?" They should be connected if I want them to be connected - I could care less what the designers think. Keith Baker isn't my DM, nor do I want him to be. Okay. I think it's *better* if they're only connected if they were designed to be connected, because I don't think you can shoehorn things together that weren't designed to match up with each other without breaking things. |
| ripvanwormer04-25-07, 10:54 PM | Yes, but that doesn't mean all fire is touched by Fernia's evil taint and is automatically evil. There are non-core Good-aligned Fire-subtype creatures included in Fernia by default, after all. All the more reason to not give Fernia an evil taint. It's, I think, an obviously broken part of the setting that three planes that have no good reason to be evil (Xoriat, Fernia, and Risia) have gratuitous evil taints that don't reflect the nature of the elements they personify. It's not nonsensical that in a setting jumping off of stereotypes about Heaven and Hell that Hell be a place filled with fire without fire itself being evil, or the Devil be physically portrayed as a man with horns without horns being evil. That would be a great analogy if you were talking about a Plane of Horns, where the landscape was made of horns, the sun and moon were fiery/silver horns in the sky, and the inhabitants were all horns walking around, and if this was pretty much the only plane with any horn-based theme. It would indeed be very odd if this was presented as a plane of great evil, when its only salient feature was that there were horns everywhere. The analogy you actually used, however, was not so good. Asmodeus has horns, yes - he also has arms and legs, fingers and eyes, and many other anatomical features. Baator has fiery layers, yes - it also has icy layers, marshy layers, and rocky layers. Context is also key here. Baator exists in a cosmology where there is a clearly defined Plane of Fire that is not evil, and it's apparent that the Plane of Fire is the plane that represents the concept and substance of fire, while Baator is the plane that represents the concept and substance of lawful evil. There are many other fiery layers in the Outer Planes, including one in an upper plane, Ysgard. Likewise, there are many good outer planar creatures with horns, including cervidals, bariaurs, and celestial unicorns. In that context, there's nothing strange that the inhabitants and environment of Baator includes anatomical features and weather that aren't in themselves lawful evil. It's difficult to conceive of any single element that would be only lawful evil, in fact. Meanwhile, Eberron has only one plane of fire, and it's the origin of fire elementals, azers, and other non-evil fiery creatures. So why make the plane itself evil? What possible purpose does that serve? It's just broken, senseless, and bad. It's completely indefensible. If the NE Plane can be Neutral-aligned but the spell curse water be [Evil], then Fernia can be Evil-aligned but the spell fireball be Neutral. Oh, sure, I agree with that. The issue isn't so much that all [Fire] spells should be evil because Fernia is evil; the issue is that because [Fire] spells aren't evil, Fernia shouldn't be either. There's just no reason for it. I do think that the way negative energy has been handled in the game is occasionally bad and contradictory, but this flaw in the core doesn't in any way justify Eberron's plane of Fernia being likewise bad and contradictory. So would you actually find the d20 product line to be improved if we somehow found a way to link d20 Star Wars, d20 Dark Matter and d20 Call of Cthulhu to the Great Wheel as well? Maybe. It could be done badly, but it could also be done well. The way to do it would be to make the really off-genre things low-key and in the background. There are indications of high technology in the background of the Great Wheel cosmology (for example, the ruined weapons in Acheron), and there are certainly places for Lovecraftian themes and creatures in D&D. But you're really hyperbolizing for effect. There's a difference between combining Star Wars and D&D and combining Eberron and Greyhawk. Eberron and Greyhawk belong to the same genre and use the same rules; they have mostly the same monsters and races, the same spells and magic items. There's nothing disconcerting about allowing the quori to invade Oerth, or putting warforged in the Archbarony of Blackmoor. Putting Yoda in the City of Greyhawk would be very disconcerting (but, again, could be acceptable if things were kept low-key and vague). *shrug* Isn't the presence of the deity for which it's named a rather big deal for that region of the Gray Waste, though, since it's the explanation for why that part of the Gray Waste isn't corrupted by Evil? Also, isn't the base of Mount Olympus there or something? Yes. I'm not sure if you believe those things advance your argument or not. The point is, the Greek Underworld fits very well into the Great Wheel. I'm still annoyed at the "Take away all of this and add all of that and the planes are indistinguishable" stuff. That's not my argument at all. I'm saying that Eberron's planes don't have anything to recommend them, because the Great Wheel's planes do the same stuff. It's not important that they're indistinguishable - that's your argument, where you're listing all the little differences as if they somehow added to the quality of the campaign world, not my argument. I'll freely admit that Fernia's alignment trait makes it different from the Elemental Plane of Fire; I can't see how Fernia's alignment trait improves it, or improves Eberron. The Elemental Plane of Fire would function in relation to that world just as well. Saying "You can't adapt Eberron to the Great Wheel without changing it wildly for the better" is very different from saying "You can adapt Eberron to the Great Wheel without changing anything important". The latter is less likely to offend Eberron fans. I think both statements have some truth to them. I think it's necessary to change the cosmology wildly for the better, but I don't think doing so changes anything important about Eberron itself. The precise configuration of the multiverse surrounding Eberron doesn't seem important - ditching the existing Eberron planes entirely and replacing them with the Great Wheel wouldn't change the world substantially. The named manifest zones would be associated with slightly different planes, that's all. As for being "offended," I'm not very sympathetic. Well, no. Shavarath is the Plane of War on which Eberron's eternal battle of good and evil is fought. Oerth doesn't have such a plane. Neither setting is the same if you change that fact, either subtracting it from Eberron or adding it to Oerth. Actually, both settings would be pretty much unchanged. All Shavarath does, in pragmatic terms, is provide a distraction for demons, devils, and archons so they concentrate on one another primarily and the world secondarily, allowing rakshasas, quori, daelkyr, and so on to step up as the primary evils of Eberron. However, the Blood War can be made to do pretty much the same thing, especially if archons are given a greater role in it. Really? Then it makes no sense for Shadow to "spawn" bizarre and mutated things that bear no relationship to the Material Plane, which it apparently does, or for people to be able to create quasi-real things -- including entire fortresses -- from Shadow. I can't agree with you. Shaping shadow-stuff is nothing like creating anything new - it's simply reshaping what's already there. If Shadow was the plane of possibility, its inhabitants wouldn't all have the same basic themes - dark, twisted creatures, in the main. They'd be as varied as the multiverse itself. Most of all, the plane of possibility wouldn't be monotone - it'd be a place of wild colors and endless variety, as the Deep Ethereal is, with its demiplanes and illusions and dreams and rainbow mists. Why would a plane of possibility lack the possibility of color and light? That's what makes no sense. Ethergaunts don't "huddle" or "survive by stealing from the Material." They're a formally reclusive race undergoing a cultural renaissance, taking the entire multiverse on, starting with the Material Plane. Nothing they use comes from the Material Plane - they create it from the raw possibility mists, using their own technology and goods and eschewing those used by material races. Your description of the ethergaunts is exactly backwards. As for ghosts, they're limited to the Border Ethereal, which isn't as much place of fertile possibility as the Deep. They dwell there because they're clinging to the ghosts of the life they once had. The Ethereal is a place where things begin - dreams, entire planes of existence. Every motion you make causes new matter to come into being. I *said* that the problem is alleviated if you make it so that each new cosmology is *different*, didn't I? Yes. Unfortunately, Eberron's cosmology isn't sufficiently different. It's not exactly the same, but the differences it has don't add anything substantial to the setting, for the most part. And you're only seeing them as similar because you're insisting that Fire Elementals in Fernia makes Fernia a doppel-Elemental Plane of Fire, which is no more true than saying that Orcs on Eberron make Eberron a doppel-Oerth, so it's easier and more coherent just to make Eberron and Oerth the same world -- or, hell, the same continent. No, that's another bad analogy. The difference is that both Oerth and Eberron are very well-detailed, so they have many, many differences along with their similarities (although I do think Eberron should be less like Oerth than it is). Eberron's planes, on the other hand, aren't detailed at all - they're mostly just names and lists of monsters and planar traits. This is why they're not worth defending, because there's really no substance to defend. Then it could be that going to other Primes simply isn't worth it for whatever reason You could say that no matter what cosmology you're using. I can *say* traveling through Shadow is easy if I want Planar Trade Consortia galore, or I can *say* it's nearly impossible if I don't You can say whatever you want; I'm mostly criticizing the official set-up. I'm not doubting your ability to improve things if you set your mind to it. As for myself, I can say that Eberron and Oerth are coterminous with a common Astral Plane, share a common set of Inner and Outer Planes, and it's fairly difficult but not impossible (with enough magic) to get from one to the other. Okay. I think it's *better* if they're only connected if they were designed to be connected, because I don't think you can shoehorn things together that weren't designed to match up with each other without breaking things. Breaking things is half the fun of the process; call it creative destruction. |