"Alternative D&D Cosmologies" Topic

For a long time, the D&D cosmology was the prime material plane in the center, ether surrounds that, then the elemental planes, then the astral, and then the outer planes, all based on the various alignments.

I never really cared for this, and have experimented with many other cosmologies. After all, it is not much like any of the historical/mythological cosmologies, such as that of the Norse, where every world sits at various levels of Yygrdasil, Asgard is connected to Midgard by the rainbow bridge, etc.

In my present game, the world is a flat circle, surrounded by a sea of chaos, on which only heavily enchanted magical ships can sail. The various planes are islands in the sea of chaos.

Anyway, curious what cosmologies others have developed.

Also, a question for players of 4e. Since WOTC has tossed out many of the alignments, what is the "standard" cosmology now?

They've produced a whole book on planar travel and adventuring for 4th edition. A quick flip through tells me that they still don't know what their default cosmology is.

WotC basically dismantled The Great Wheel at the start of 4e development despite stating that they intended to keep using the Forgotten Realms, a setting which explicitly requires quite a few features of the Great Wheel.

Of course, they then went and nuked the Forgotten Realms. Literally.

Eberron , the other setting they've announced continued support for, doesn't use the Great Wheel at all.

Shedding the 1-3e spell list enabled them to ignore certain requirements that list put on the cosmology. It's a bit tough to remove the Near Ethereal when "Ethereal Jaunt" and several other spells of that sort are still on the books.

4e cosmology does appear to have a broadly co-existing realm called the Fey Wild. Folklorists would recognize this as the European realm of the Faerie. Beyond that, dunno.

WotC (back in the day) wrote a cosmology supplement for AD&D. It was called Chessboards: The Planes Of Possibility.

link

4E also has the Shadowfell, a sort of alternative realm where everything's dark and negative and sort of a downer, man. It seems to be inhabited largely by undead, necromancers, death gods and people who dress like goths.

This is from memory: 4E has the prime material still in the middle, mirrored by both the Feywild and Shadowfell, kind of how the positive and negative material planes did in other editions. It and the other planes float in the Astral Sea. Sigil is in there somewhere as well. Then there's the Elemental Chaos that surrounds the Astral Sea. This takes the place of all the seperate elemental planes. In some places certain elements are more dominant, so you still have the City of Brass in a fire dominated area, etc.

I like how they did the Abyss. At the beginning of time the gods imprisoned Tharizdun (the Azathoth of D&D kinda) in the Far Realm (cthulhu territory for D&D). But a piece of his evil fell into the elemental chaos and took root, turning into the Abyss. So the Abyss isn't really a plane, but a literal pit in the elemental chaos. Compare to Hell, which is a regular plane that exists in the Astral Sea.

And Doc Bedlam has it right. The Feywild is full of LARPers dressed as elves and fairies and the Shadowfell is where Goth and Emo kids write bad poetry about going after they commit suicide.

I remember one game that I ran years ago were the world was based on the pre-Copernican model of the solar system- The 'Material Plane' was the center of the universe, and each 'plane' was another sphere orbiting the World. So sunlight was provided by the plane of fire, the moons were the other elemental planes, and so forth. The only way between planes were magical portals (usually in fixed locations, and could only be activated when the planes were aligned correctly). I can no longer recall exactly what other planes there were beyond the 4 elemental ones, but I think I had a dozen or so.

-Will

Paizo just released their Pathfinder setting booklet on the subject. Broadly similar to the old D&D model with some visualization differences and a tighter set of deities (since they aren't using a mishmash of Earth etc deities like the Forgotten Realms were).