Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Suin Bahhar 05-14-07, 08:26 PM	Are there Interplanar Portals or other ways of getting out of the planar system in Eberron? Is the plane of shadow present somewhere and is it connected to the planes of shadow of other cosmologies?
UnderworldLord 05-14-07, 08:33 PM	Most people prefer not to have this kind of option, but if you're the DM, its your Eberron. There is a plane of shadow, IIRC, but as to if it connects to other cosmeotologies, thats totally up to you.
Vharuck 05-14-07, 11:09 PM	Planar portals, if such things exist, would be found in the heart of manifest zones linked closely to that specific plane. One might be in the center of the Gloaming, a well of shadows leading to Mabar. Maybe leaping into the Fist of Onatar, an active volcano in the Mror Holds, on the hottest day of summer will instead wisk one away to Fernia.
UnderworldLord 05-14-07, 11:38 PM	I don't think he was refering to portals to other planes or reality. I think he wanted to leave the eberron cosmotology as a whole.
Darakhoranon 05-15-07, 05:04 PM	In that case he´s out of luck. If I´m not mistaken, it´s even stated in the ECS that Eberron DOES NOT connect to any other cosmology. NEVER. However, somewhere on these boards there should be a (naturally fan-made) map that links all the different campaign worlds together by putting them all on the same planet. Campaign "worlds" that are inaccsessible - or just difficult to reach - are behind some kind of "magic curtain". It may sound a bit crazy, but if you look it up, it starts to sound more logical. But the main point was already mentioned by UnderworldLord: It´s YOUR game. So everything you decide to allow can be considered "legal".
Psionycx 05-15-07, 08:52 PM	In that case he´s out of luck. If I´m not mistaken, it´s even stated in the ECS that Eberron DOES NOT connect to any other cosmology. NEVER. And yet, mysteriously, the dragons of Argonnessen worship the same pantheon of draconic deities that dragons worship in the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk....
RogueElement 05-16-07, 04:02 AM	Yeah, they always say their world never connects to other worlds, but there's always one author who snaps and has to make a portal between their favorite worlds. I remember a published piece on Forgotten Realms had a character with strange clothes, armor, and steel coins...yep, a Dragonlance character fell through a portal into the Forgotten Realms. Holy Crossovers, Batman!
Psionycx 05-16-07, 02:08 PM	Yeah, they always say their world never connects to other worlds, but there's always one author who snaps and has to make a portal between their favorite worlds. I remember a published piece on Forgotten Realms had a character with strange clothes, armor, and steel coins...yep, a Dragonlance character fell through a portal into the Forgotten Realms. Holy Crossovers, Batman! Actually, prior to 3E it was generally accepted that all the various AD&D campaign worlds were part of the Great Wheel cosmology and it that travel between worlds via portals, planar travel or spelljamming was possible. It wasn't until 3E introduced the idea of each world having it's own cosmology that the notion of the worlds being separate and standalone arose. A lot of the published novels and game accessories before 3E covered overlaps between campaign worlds, particularly Planescape, Ravenloft and Spelljammer. Being an old-timer (all the way back to 1E), I am personally hostile to the 3E introduction of isolated campaign worlds. In the case of a world like Eberron I would assume that if one traveled far enough through the Astral then one could eventually reach the other cosmologies. This would be rare though, as most natives of Eberron don't seem to be big on planar exploration. Only those who spend lots of time on the Astral (like the Undying Court) might know about other worlds.
Vharuck 05-16-07, 04:52 PM	And yet, mysteriously, the dragons of Argonnessen worship the same pantheon of draconic deities that dragons worship in the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk.... And, mysteriously, their gnomes are physically and statistically the exact same as the ones in Eberron!
Psionycx 05-17-07, 11:33 AM	And, mysteriously, their gnomes are physically and statistically the exact same as the ones in Eberron! If you find two populations of the same species on different worlds that strongly implies interconnection. If you find the presence of specific individuals on separate worlds that more or less proves it.
UnderworldLord 05-17-07, 09:05 PM	You are trying to use logic, fact, and real world stuff in D&D. My best of luck to you in that endeavor but I find that its largely, though not completely, inapplicable the majority of the time.
Psionycx 05-17-07, 10:29 PM	Well then mayhap Eberron be naught but an alternate quantum reality version of Greyhawk...
OctaviusIII 05-18-07, 02:45 AM	Or maybe Ao, when creating Faerun, created the other worlds as well, each an experiment in differing cosmologies and pantheons of deities!
Psionycx 05-18-07, 02:54 PM	Or maybe Ao, when creating Faerun, created the other worlds as well, each an experiment in differing cosmologies and pantheons of deities! Well if you remember the Avatar Trilogy's end, Ao isn't a supreme deity. In the last scene he withdraws to a higher plane and into the presence of an even greater being who questions him how his cosmos is doing. This led to the asumption in 2E that individual Crystral Spheres (as Prime planar solar systems were then laid out) each had their own overpowers, but that they were all ultimately a part of the same cosmos.
CannibalSmith 05-24-07, 12:33 PM	Are there Interplanar Portals or other ways of getting out of the planar system in Eberron? Is the plane of shadow present somewhere and is it connected to the planes of shadow of other cosmologies? As a DM you can put them there, but before you do, be sure to have thought through all the implications. "Why hasn't Eberron exported it's magictech to Greyhawk?" "Why hasn't Faerun conquered Eberron with it's armies of high level soldiers?" "Where are the spelljammers?" The easiest way is to make it so that your players are the first beings in the Multiverse to discover travel to other cosmologies.
ArcTan 05-25-07, 05:31 AM	In that case he´s out of luck. If I´m not mistaken, it´s even stated in the ECS that Eberron DOES NOT connect to any other cosmology. NEVER. It never actually states it. Technically, since it says the Plane of Shadows is unchanged from core, it retains the feature where Shadow is a link between different Prime Material worlds. BTW, to the OP, yes to your second question -- Shadow definitely exists in Eberron and is accessible by all the usual means (like shadow walk and such). Whether it connects to other worlds, and which other worlds it connects to, is totally up to you as the DM.
ArcTan 05-25-07, 05:34 AM	Well if you remember the Avatar Trilogy's end, Ao isn't a supreme deity. In the last scene he withdraws to a higher plane and into the presence of an even greater being who questions him how his cosmos is doing. There are a few in-jokes as to the fact that this Being of Light is a fourth-wall-breaking reference to the DM himself, who rules all possible universes in the context of a D&D game. Which just reinforces the point that whether cosmologies are connected or broken is your decision and your decision only. WotC have wisely decided to step back from making any inter-setting connection of any kind explicitly canon -- they've even explicitly disconnected Forgotten Realms from Greyhawk and Greyhawk's Great Wheel (the basis of Planescape).
ArcTan 05-25-07, 05:35 AM	Planar portals, if such things exist, would be found in the heart of manifest zones linked closely to that specific plane. One might be in the center of the Gloaming, a well of shadows leading to Mabar. Manifest zones and other places tend to become portals when the planes swing coterminous to Eberron. When Syrania is coterminous, anyone flying upward in Eberron's atmosphere crosses over to the Sapphire Heaven. When Fernia is coterminous, you can go there simply by jumping into a large enough fire.
ArcTan 05-25-07, 05:37 AM	Actually, prior to 3E it was generally accepted that all the various AD&D campaign worlds were part of the Great Wheel cosmology and it that travel between worlds via portals, planar travel or spelljamming was possible. It wasn't until 3E introduced the idea of each world having it's own cosmology that the notion of the worlds being separate and standalone arose. A lot of the published novels and game accessories before 3E covered overlaps between campaign worlds, particularly Planescape, Ravenloft and Spelljammer. Being an old-timer (all the way back to 1E), I am personally hostile to the 3E introduction of isolated campaign worlds. In the case of a world like Eberron I would assume that if one traveled far enough through the Astral then one could eventually reach the other cosmologies. This would be rare though, as most natives of Eberron don't seem to be big on planar exploration. Only those who spend lots of time on the Astral (like the Undying Court) might know about other worlds. Eberron's unique planar structure would also have to be the result of some kind of bizarre dislocation from the rest of the Great Wheel as a whole, which would be very weird. They kind of sort of tried to explain how come Athas was different by having Athas be in some kind of "planar eddy" of currents that spun it around and isolated it, but it was dumb, and they ended up just mostly giving up on discussing Dark Sun in a Planescape context except as a few throwaway references.
ArcTan 05-25-07, 05:43 AM	If you find two populations of the same species on different worlds that strongly implies interconnection. If you find the presence of specific individuals on separate worlds that more or less proves it. This is true *except* in the case where one or more of these worlds are fictional. I mean, characters on the TV show Seinfeld watched the film The English Patient. I, a real person, watched the film The English Patient. The English Patient exists both in my world and their world. Does that mean that the characters on Seinfeld really exist in my world? No. Because Seinfeld is make-believe, and happens to *borrow* many elements from real life for its fictional setting, while altering or making up others (the real Rudy Giuliani never launched a personal crusade against false advertising on fat-free frozen yogurt; the real George Steinbrenner neither looks nor sounds like that; there's no such clothing company as "J. Peterman"; etc.) Saying that the presence of the Draconic Pantheon in Eberron proves that Eberron and Greyhawk are supposed to be in the same universe is like saying the presence of Mulder and Scully on that episode of the Simpsons proves that X-Files and the Simpsons were the same universe, or that the presence of the Olympian Pantheon in Forgotten Realms proves that FR, Xena: Warrior Princess, Wonder Woman, and the actual real-life ancient Greece are all in the same universe. I'm actually really sick and tired of authors not being able to simply reuse characters, locations, plot elements, and so on in new works because they just *like* them or want to make a humorous cameo or find it useful to reuse them, without a whole bunch of people piling on it as evidence that the two books are therefore in "continuity" with each other. Screw continuity. It's this kind of stupid argument that lets you prove that all TV shows take place in a fictional reality that exists inside the head of Tommy Westphall, the autistic boy from St. Elsewhere. (Look it up. It's hilarious.)
Psionycx 05-26-07, 12:51 AM	So in other words, the characters or Frasier and Lilith on Frasier are not the same characters as on Cheers?
ArcTan 05-26-07, 05:15 AM	So in other words, the characters or Frasier and Lilith on Frasier are not the same characters as on Cheers? Frasier was directly intended to use the same characters as Cheers, although, even then, you could argue that the concept of who Frasier was and what his background was supposed to be changed a lot on the new series. There are certainly people who were fans of Cheers who weren't fans of Frasier and therefore don't really consider Frasier "canon" or "in continuity". When it comes to Frasier and Cheers, the *original creators* of Frasier certainly intended Frasier to be in the same continuity as Cheers and to pretend that it was all the same story with the same characters, though that certainly didn't prevent them from changing some things from the get-go that they had to later retcon (Frasier's dad being a working-class cop and alive rather than a scientist and deceased). On the other hand, the original intention of Keith Baker in making Eberron was to create a world that used a lot of D&D ideas but was clearly not intended to actually be in continuity with Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, or to include the events of those settings in any major way into the story. Some of the new setting elements seem designed to be as *in*consistent with the Great Wheel as possible (putting Balors and Pit Fiends together in Fernia; eliminating the concept of gods as physical beings with divine rank; putting all souls together on Dolurrh instead of sorting them by alignment; etc.). Saying that, nonetheless, we have to figure out some convoluted way to link Eberron and the Great Wheel together because Eberron and the Great Wheel both have the Draconic Pantheon, or because one of the people who worked on PGtE mentioned that the Orcs used to have a god called "Gara'umsh", or, hell, because Eberron has Humans in it and "two populations of the same species implies interconnection", is stupid. It's the same kind of logic that leads us to the Tommy Westphall hypothesis. (I.e. all shows are inevitably connected by links through links to St. Elsewhere, and St. Elsewhere is a show that established in its series finale that none of its events were "real" and all took place inside Tommy Westphall's mind, so... all TV shows take place in Tommy's head?)
ArcTan 05-26-07, 05:18 AM	Also, the Undying Court *doesn't* spend time on the Astral Plane, IIRC. They live on the Material Plane, in Aerenal. The only beings we know of who spend time on the Astral are the githyanki, who indeed may come from another world (but don't talk much about it with outsiders).
ArcTan 05-26-07, 05:22 AM	Also, of course, by your logic, the idea that two populations of the same species implies interconnection would mean that Eberron takes place in the same multiverse as not only Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, but also Vampire: the Masquerade, Dark*Matter, Gamma World, Star Wars, Star Trek, Frasier, Cheers, My Best Friend's Wedding, The Simpsons, South Park, Schindler's List, Catcher in the Rye, Journey to the West and the Iliad. Since all of these worlds feature the human species.
Psionycx 05-26-07, 11:47 AM	You are incorrect about the Undying Court ArcTran. I invite you to revisit the Eberron Campaign Setting book and more specifically the descriptions of the Ascendant Councilors (page 276) and Undying Councilors (page 301) where it very clearly states that both types of deathless spend the majority of their time astral projecting. Their bodies may sit in Aerenal but their spirits are only there part of the time. Obviously, based on the existence of magic and psionics that provide access to the Astral, other beings can venture there as well. Now, I never said that the common races, or more interestingly specifically named gods, were absolute proof of anything. I merely said they were evidence. However, most of your comparisons are invalid, since you are raising as evidence mostly television shows, most of which come from different sources. I referenced Frasier specifically because it was a case of a separate show that was nonethless part of the same continuum. However, I must remind you that this is all D&D here. Whether you're playing in Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance or Eberron you're still playing D&D. Historically, until very recently, it was openly acknowledged in (A)D&D that all these campaign worlds were openly a part of the same universe. Not very surprising since they were all being cranked out by the same parent company and a lot of the game designers worked on more than one world. 3E certain has brought with it a desire to keep the sandboxes separate although this has a very unnatural feel to many players and DM's who've been at this for a long time. Individual DM's are free to do as they choose. Many will want to keep their worlds utterly self-contained to avoid confusion or cross-pollination. That's a major reason the whole idea of self-contained cosmologies has arisen. If that is their preference then by all means that is how they can play it. But in keeping with the original purpose of this thread, there is indeed evidence that Eberron has some connection, however tenuous, with worlds beyond. Similar races, specific deities and references to the daelkyr invading other worlds imply that Eberron is not alone in existence. In 1E it was generally assumed that different campaign worlds were different Prime Planar alternate realities. In 2E it was assumed that they all occupied the same Prime but different mini-cosmos "crystal spheres" in a kind of Aristotlean cosmology. In 3E we may be back to alternate realities again. But it's worth noting that pretty much all the 3E cosmologies have Astral, Ethereal and Shadow transitive planes, regardless of the spread of the rest of their planes. So maybe one can reach the other cosmologies with enough determination? Who knows?
ArcTan 05-26-07, 12:27 PM	You are incorrect about the Undying Court ArcTran. I invite you to revisit the Eberron Campaign Setting book and more specifically the descriptions of the Ascendant Councilors (page 276) and Undying Councilors (page 301) where it very clearly states that both types of deathless spend the majority of their time astral projecting. Their bodies may sit in Aerenal but their spirits are only there part of the time. Obviously, based on the existence of magic and psionics that provide access to the Astral, other beings can venture there as well. Thank you for reminding me of that. However, the fact that they spend time using astral projection doesn't mean that they're actually on the Astral Plane during that time. It says that they "explore the universe" with astral projection, which I take to mean exploring all the planes, using the Astral Plane as a conduit. In any case, it's moot. The Astral Plane does not connect different cosmologies, only different planes in the same cosmology. The Plane of Shadow is the plane that connects different cosmologies. The 3e MotP is extremely clear on this matter. Now, I never said that the common races, or more interestingly specifically named gods, were absolute proof of anything. I merely said they were evidence. However, most of your comparisons are invalid, since you are raising as evidence mostly television shows, most of which come from different sources. I referenced Frasier specifically because it was a case of a separate show that was nonethless part of the same continuum. Well, yes, and The Simpsons and The Critic, which were made by the same people and actually did have a crossover, are nonetheless not in the same continuity (Matt Groening explicitly said so). Hell, Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man aren't in the same continuity, even though they're made by the same company, populated by the same characters and both called Spider-Man. The *point* of Ultimate Spider-Man, in fact, was that people wanted to do a comic book about Spider-Man that wasn't in continuity with all the other comic books about Spider-Man, which they are, in fact, allowed to do. However, I must remind you that this is all D&D here. And the point is that D&D is a game system, not a world. All the different books published for GURPS are all GURPS, but no one tries to claim that every GURPS setting is linked to every other one. Whether you're playing in Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance or Eberron you're still playing D&D. Historically, until very recently, it was openly acknowledged in (A)D&D that all these campaign worlds were openly a part of the same universe. Not very surprising since they were all being cranked out by the same parent company and a lot of the game designers worked on more than one world. ...And now they've changed their minds about that. Not very surprising considering there were more than a few designers and fans who openly complained about Planescape designers making changes to Greyhawk deities or Ravenloft designers sticking Lord Soth in the Demiplane of Dread. 3E certain has brought with it a desire to keep the sandboxes separate although this has a very unnatural feel to many players and DM's who've been at this for a long time. Individual DM's are free to do as they choose. Many will want to keep their worlds utterly self-contained to avoid confusion or cross-pollination. That's a major reason the whole idea of self-contained cosmologies has arisen. If that is their preference then by all means that is how they can play it. But in keeping with the original purpose of this thread, there is indeed evidence that Eberron has some connection, however tenuous, with worlds beyond. Similar races, specific deities and references to the daelkyr invading other worlds imply that Eberron is not alone in existence. Keith Baker has specifically said, when asked, that Eberron intentionally contains "echoes" of things from other D&D worlds so that people who've played other D&D settings will find it familiar, but that officially Eberron is not supposed to be in continuity with any other world. I choose to take him at his word on this. The only reality here is what the creator of the setting actually says he intended. Everything else is personal preference, and if you *want* to walk through the Plane of Shadow one day and end up in Krynn, it's totally your business. In 1E it was generally assumed that different campaign worlds were different Prime Planar alternate realities. In 2E it was assumed that they all occupied the same Prime but different mini-cosmos "crystal spheres" in a kind of Aristotlean cosmology. In 3E we may be back to alternate realities again. In 3e we are explicitly back to alternate realities and no binding meta-reality to link them together. Eberron and Forgotten Realms are alternate realities in the sense that Eberron and d20 Star Wars are alternate realities. I.e. you can make up crossovers between them all you want, but none officially exist, and the design of the settings doesn't take official crossovers into account. There are a lot of unanswerable questions about linking Eberron to FR. An Eberronian who went to FR would discover that gods, in general, *do* unequivocally exist and determine the fate of the cosmos, and that his gods are just hidden for some reason. That would rock one of the most basic assumptions of the Eberron setting to the core. How should it play out? What does it really mean? Those are questions the Eberron setting can't or won't answer. They're not supposed to come up, because in Eberron it's assumed that the gods are hidden and will remain hidden and this is universally true because Eberron is the whole world. If you want to screw with that, then you're screwing with the basic assumption of the setting. Which is fine -- make up the baseline reality of your crossover universe if you want -- but don't expect or ask the setting to do it for you, because I don't want it to. Any more than I want an official, canon explanation of how D&D magic relates to the Force, or a detailed explanation of what happened when characters from d20 Dark*Matter opened a gateway to Eberron. But it's worth noting that pretty much all the 3E cosmologies have Astral, Ethereal and Shadow transitive planes, regardless of the spread of the rest of their planes. So maybe one can reach the other cosmologies with enough determination? Who knows? Well, I know, because Keith Baker knows, and he's said on these forums that the answer is "Officially no, and it's not intended to be possible, but you can do what you want". *Officially* the line is that other worlds may exist -- the gith may come from another world, or they may come from a prehistoric version of Eberron, no one knows -- but the planes of Eberron all orbit around Eberron and relate solely to Eberron as far as we know (Xoriat may be an exception, but Dal Quor definitely isn't) and there are no known ways to travel to other worlds. Now, officially, the Plane of Shadow is unchanged in Eberron, but that's really just as much for convenience as anything else. (This is one of my big points -- just because my homebrew setting has an Astral and Ethereal and Shadow in it because I'm lazy doesn't mean you can assume my homebrew setting has a connection to Sigil and look for it, if you're playing in one of my games.) *If* it's possible to reach other Primes through Shadow, it's never been done, and is probably extremely difficult and/or impossible -- or else why haven't any planar explorers shown up on Eberron through Shadow yet? You're free to run a game where people travel to other worlds through Shadow. I'm not saying I'm totally against running such a game. But to be true to the published world, you'd have to explain how and why the ways through Shadow are so difficult, such that we've never seen anyone get to Eberron through there. (And have some sort of credible explanation for the differences between the other world and Eberron, or else run the *reactions* to a totally different multiverse that runs on different assumptions in a realistic way.) It's the same way with spelljamming. Officially flying around through space isn't impossible in Eberron -- but Keith's specifically said that the Ring of Siberys is designed to make it nearly impossible for any ship to fly through Eberron's upper atmosphere without being damaged or destroyed by magical effects -- so that if you *want* spelljamming to happen, it's going to be something rare and wondrous and a big deal. (The toughest part about Spelljammer to swallow was the idea of gigantic starfaring civilizations ploughing the phlogiston and regularly traveling from Realmspace to Krynnspace to Greyspace and back, and this somehow not making an enormous, world-changing impact on those campaign worlds.)
Psionycx 05-26-07, 01:24 PM	Back in ealier centuries people came back from Africa and the Americas with all kinds of fantastic stories of impossible places that they had supposedly been to. And some people wholeheartedly believed them. Many more considered their stories to be interesting but didn't devote too much thought to them. Still others dismissed their stories (often correctly) as mere fantasy. So let's assume that travel between cosmologies is not as easy as hopping on the lightning rail. Let's say, for consideration, that someone from Eberron managed to traverse the planes to reach Oerth or Toril and discovered, for example, that their gods are so interventionist that their reality is indisputable. What then? Well, it might be a shock to the system for the person from Eberron. The whole core of their own religious beliefs might be shaken. But then what happens? They make the long journey back to Eberron and try to tell others about this strange world they discovered where the gods walk openly. And doesn't this prove that the Sovereigns and the Dark Six are not real? But of course this strange world is far, far away and not a journey that most people on Eberron could even consider making. So do they believe this planar explorer's strange tales? Probably most would not. So this person claims to have gone to another world? What of it? People claim to have visited underworld cities in the depths or Khyber or fantastic locations in Xen'Drik, Sarlona or Argonnessen. This all makes for fun tabloid reading in the pages of the Sharn Inquisitive, but most people won't take it very seriously. After all, even if the explorer met a god from Oerth or Toril in person, that god may not be able to extend their presence into Eberron. The universe is funny that way. Athas had the same problem. So a real god from another world couldn't automatically swoop in and shake up the theological landscape. The explorer might come to be seen as one of the countless people who went on too long of a trip and came back crazy. They might be seen as a mad would-be prophet or just a general crank. Likewise, exchange of magic or technology isn't always world shattering. People continue to return to adventures in Xen'drik with strange ancient magical and technological devices all the time. Would something from another D&D world be all that bizarre in comparison. Export isn't a big problem either. Long forgotten by later gamers, Greyhawk had historical links to technological worlds. There was one old 1E adventure where the "dungeon" was actually a crashed starship filled with robots, advanced tech and captive "aliens"! The quasi-deity Muryland dressed like a cowboy and wielded six-shooters! The 1E Dugeon Master's Guide actually contained suggestions for handling crossovers from AD&D to two of TSR's other RPG's, a cowboy western one and a sci-fi one. For these kinds of innovations to become a permanent part of society they need to be sustained. An artificer from Eberron would have to take up long term residence there to make a permanent impact on magical science. Simply dropping off some magical gadget would not in and of itself revolutionize Oerth's magical culture any more than the presence of stray technological artifacts has resulted in an explosion of science. Because getting from world to world usually involved some legwork, it wasn't something undertaken by the masses. And many people don't devote much thought to it. Natives of Oerth know that clerics of Celestian are supposedly travel through space. But few people really know for a fact that many of them really do in fact do so. The analogy used at the time was that in our modern world many people know that we can travel into space. But how many people personally know an astronaut? There's still a sizeable chunk of people in the U.S. that believe that the moon landing in the 60's were all just an elaborate government hoax! So the individuals that get the most impact from inter-world travel are the PC's. It is a role-playing opportunity to that often lets them get a clearer view of their own world by contrasting it to a different one.
ArcTan 05-27-07, 03:09 AM	Export isn't a big problem either. Long forgotten by later gamers, Greyhawk had historical links to technological worlds. There was one old 1E adventure where the "dungeon" was actually a crashed starship filled with robots, advanced tech and captive "aliens"! The quasi-deity Muryland dressed like a cowboy and wielded six-shooters! The 1E Dugeon Master's Guide actually contained suggestions for handling crossovers from AD&D to two of TSR's other RPG's, a cowboy western one and a sci-fi one. I think a lot of us forgot that kind of thing on purpose, dude. (Don't forget Gygax's module where you come to real-world London to steal the Mace of St. Cuthbert from a museum.) And some of us *didn't* forget it, but instead remembered it and brought it up every time we felt like explaining to new players "Hey, if you think the game has dumb things in it now, wait'll you hear about this Barrier Peaks adventure, with the robots and the power armor". So the individuals that get the most impact from inter-world travel are the PC's. It is a role-playing opportunity to that often lets them get a clearer view of their own world by contrasting it to a different one. Some people like that, some people don't. However, if a setting hasn't been *designed* to take the idea of crossover and a metacosmology into account, then it's better to let that kind of thing be the exception and not the rule.
CannibalSmith 05-27-07, 03:27 AM	And the point is that D&D is a game system, not a world. All the different books published for GURPS are all GURPS, but no one tries to claim that every GURPS setting is linked to every other one. *cough* Infinite Worlds *cough*
ArcTan 05-28-07, 06:06 AM	*cough* Infinite Worlds *cough* All right, no one *should* try to claim that every GURPS setting is related to every other one. *sigh* What about White Wolf? They've still been smart enough so far to say that Exalted and World of Darkness are separate, right? It's not like Ravenloft became part of the World of Darkness, right? (Even though it began to look kind of similar in certain ways, but hey, that's why they got the license in the first place.) Continuity did objectively ruin World of Darkness, by the way.
Psionycx 05-29-07, 11:05 PM	I think a lot of us forgot that kind of thing on purpose, dude. (Don't forget Gygax's module where you come to real-world London to steal the Mace of St. Cuthbert from a museum.) And some of us *didn't* forget it, but instead remembered it and brought it up every time we felt like explaining to new players "Hey, if you think the game has dumb things in it now, wait'll you hear about this Barrier Peaks adventure, with the robots and the power armor". Some people like that, some people don't. However, if a setting hasn't been *designed* to take the idea of crossover and a metacosmology into account, then it's better to let that kind of thing be the exception and not the rule. Of course, one could also argue that a technomagical steampunk setting with magically-powered trains, magical printing presses cranking out newspapers and all kinds of pulp genre accoutrements is also dumb. Yet here we all are enjoying ourselves. You have to remember that the 80's in particular were the golden age of cross-genre. Putting Greyhawk aside for a moment overlaps between magic and science were very popular in movies, cartoons and other fiction in those days. Sci-Fi & Fantasy were joined at the hip. Besides, once Gygax and friends were gone the TSR wags turned Greyhawk into a stultifyingly boring mess that was either a bunch of low level walk-fight-walk-fight or else mired up to one's hips in politics. It wasn't a huge surprise everyone ran, not walked, to Forgotten Realms, especially once they started layering on the munchkin factor over there. Old habits are hard to break though. For about 20 years I'd played in a unfied cosmology and had a blast before 3E came along. So you'll have to forgive me for having a low opinion of some of 3E's more pointless aspects. Regardless, DM's will do whatever they choose, so anyone that decides that it is possible to come and go from Eberron will do so. Those that want a fishbowl will keep it that way. It's really that simple.