Types of Planes
In today’s Manual of the Planes preview, we introduce various types of planes the book covers, as well as the planar law of mutability.
Talk about this excerpt here.
1) There's nothing really new here that wasn't already present in earlier versions of the planes. This is all pretty generic stuff.
2) Sigil as a Demiplane isn't a bad way to go, assuming we judge that by their use of what a demiplane is. I still think it would have been best to have it as an Anomolous Plane, just to hype its utter mystery as to what the hell the place actually is, but it works.
3) Color me confused. There's a Pluton and a Carceri as Astral Realms, but yugoloths couldn't remain a distinct group of fiends on their own? They had to be warped and forcefit into being either devils or demons? Cute.
4) I will give the artist their due credit on the artwork for the planar map, because it's really nice. Not a fan of the 4e cosmology, but that artwork is spiffy.
More tough love (or abuse) once the book itself is out and I read it in the store.
Let's just hope that they release a planar setting that players will actually want to play in.
Hey on the map at the bottom on the excerpt it shows the nine hells in the astral sea.
It's not a mistake. The Nine Hells are a divine dominion in the Astral Sea. The Astral Sea is where (almost) all the gods live, not just the good ones. The contrast between the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos is one of pure spirituality and pure physicality, not one of good and evil.
When 4th Edition came out, the Forgotten Realms suffered the Spell-Plague and their cosmology changed quite drastically (Mystra died, Asmosdeus became a deity, the Abyss was cast down into the Swirling Elemental Chaos and, and the 9 hells were placed into the Astral Sea).
So, have the planes suffered a similar adjustment? Has the Cage, the Ringed City, broke free of the Outlands and spiraled into the Astral Sea? Does the Lady of Pain still reign? Or does it just exist there as though no history has occurred? Did the Faction War ever happen? Is Wizards of the Coast going to deal with the history of Sigil or is it going to be a matter for DM's to adjudicate?
So, have the planes suffered a similar adjustment? Has the Cage, the Ringed City, broke free of the Outlands and spiraled into the Astral Sea? Does the Lady of Pain still reign? Or does it just exist there as though no history has occurred? Did the Faction War ever happen? Is Wizards of the Coast going to deal with the history of Sigil or is it going to be a matter for DM's to adjudicate?
The 4e core PoL planes are their own thing without any assumed continuity to any previous cosmologies. Whatever Sigil they place into the 4e cosmology was simply never atop the Infinite Spire, it always existed as whatever the 4e designers change. It's not really a retcon, it's like an Ultimate (insert comic book name) version of a comic book, an alternate version, etc.
I really, really doubt that WotC will be giving Sigil much detail in 4e. They'd always be compared to the previous material that gave entire books to the city, or even whole books to its groups or individual people therein. I suspect we'll see a half page, maybe a page, with something pretty generic about the city and trying to gloss over the inherent differences that such a ripped-away-from-its-moorings Sigil might possess.
But I might be wrong. Michelle Carter might have been able to drag some of the 4e design team into doing the city some justice. But based on planar content done by some of the 4e designers in late 3.x with the Planar Handbook, I expect something relatively vanilla and not majorly in depth. I might be wrong.
And if they wanted someone to go into detail on it for say the DDI who has a bit of experience with the topic and other things planar, you know... *bats eyelashes* But I've not had luck with submissions to Dragon (during the WotC e-zine period at least), so that's probably a shot in the dark. But I'd jump at it in a heartbeat (and it would shut me up something fierce about any complaints about WotC too if they let me play in that sandbox).
Are they "parallel dimensions" or different planets?
Inferably, to my surprise, it seems they are different planets that are a "finite distance" away from eachother.
Huh. Planets within a scifi worldview of the universe. I dont mind it. One can still interpret the presence of parallel dimensions (just because the astral counterparts are a finite distance from eachother doesnt necessarily mean the mortal ones are too.) Either way, one would still need magic or "portals" to teleport (via Feywild?) from one "world" to the next. Gamewise, its all the same, but cosmology matters, meaningwise.
Under the SpellJammer system, each "world" and it's solar system (and even it galaxy in some cases) were contained in hugungous "Crystal Spheres". Each of these Crystal Spheres were separated by space/ether/something.
Travel from world to world could be done via the transient planes, or by taking a spelljammer between these crystal spheres.
The spheres contained "everything" particular to a world - planar cosmologies, pantheons, laws of magic, etc.
Was very mindbending.
So, the relationship between the "known" "mortal worlds" - that is, the various campaign settings, like Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Core, Grayhawk, etcetera
Are they "parallel dimensions" or different planets?
In 2e they were explicitly planets all contained within the same common material plane. 3e was mixed in how it handled them. Eberron was created from the start as its own thing fully divorced from the other worlds. Some settings like FR which had for their entire lives in print been intimately associated with that idea of a common material plane and linked worlds... was abruptly retconned into a new cosmology and with little to no association with other settings (and bits of its history that relied on that sort of connectivity got glossed over as much as possible). But other books like Lords of Madness and Fiendish Codex I (both often seen as some of the best written 3.x books) went out of their way to reintroduce such interconnectivity and cross pollination between settings that 3e had tried to downplay [note that those books were largely written by freelancers who now make up much of Paizo publishing, rather than being in-house WotC writers who by that point were working on 4e].
I expect 4e to continue that trend of divorcing each setting from others, especially so in the case of previously published settings, even if they had a history of cross-linkage or being planets within the same material plane. Of course the 4e default PoL world is its own thing entirely, since it was never part of that earlier metasetting, and they've gone out of their way to give it a new cosmology of its own etc.
:D Regarding the various settings, I hope Core consolidates that Spelljammer brain-ouch.
Different settings are always tricky business.
The nice thing about Core is, its easy to "import" other settings.
- You can assign a constellation of "points of light", whose towns and surrounding hinterlands have Forgotten Realms cultures. Likewise, Eberron, and so on.
- Its also possible to have "anomolous" or "demi" planes, like Janus Gull or like Dreams, to handle mysterious or discrete settings.
- Finally, an entire planet is a reasonable option, which is probably how Id handle a switch to an immersive FR campaign.
- If theres both an FR city and an FR planet, its easy to retcon teleport-colonies.
- Then as if the Natural plane wasnt enough room, theres Astral Sea, Elemental Chaos, Feywild (wherein Il include a Harry Potter style setting), and Shadowfell.
All very nice.