Another widely used concept that can fall under fire: outer planes. A plane for each alignment, along the axes of law/chaos and good/evil, with its own race of anthropomorphic personifications, with additional races of petitioners. The concept is detailed enough that WotC probably has a valid copyright claim, and Pazio can't avoid this just by reducing the number of planes from 18 to 9.
It's hard to say how far that can go, even the D&D planes are highly derivative of middle age texts like Dante's Inferno, Kaballah, Greek and Norse myth and the like. Certainly there are parts of it that could be protected, but I'm reasonably certain that you could rip a great deal of it if done intelligently and they'd have no basis for a claim.
Yeah, D&D certainly took a lot of influence from mythology but it’s not the same thing as that mythology. D&D put enough of a spin on it that it falls into the “exty points of similarity” trap.
9 alignments split along 2 axes of law/chaos and good/evil
At least 1 afterlife plane for each alignment
Each plane has at least 1 race of specific anthropomorphic personifications
Each plane has petitioners who are the transformed souls of individuals with that alignment who have forgotten their mortal lives
Worshippers of gods get to live on that god’s estate, even if it’s a different alignment
Angels form their own race native to all upper planes
3+ upper planes inhabited by 3+ races of “celestials” (not!angels)
3+ lower planes inhabited by 3+ races of “fiends” (not!demons)
A plane of order inhabited by robot people
A plane of chaos inhabited by amphibian/reptile people
A plane of neutrality inhabited by… those neutral people from Futurama
Etc
I’m pretty sure that crosses into copyright infringement without the OGL. In fact, I don’t think the original SRD even included any outer planes
Altho WotC never tried suing Paizo even when they invented their own great wheel without SRD basis so it’s unclear if they really have an enforceable claim
As for the inner planes... fey and elementals shouldn't be distinct creature types imo, especially since the idea of elementals was originally codified by Paracelsus and meant to classify fairies (and quite frankly you could apply an elemental association to any magical monster). I think fairies can exist as their own thing distinct from angels and demons, personifying the natural worlds that arose as the result of the conflict between order and chaos, altho obviously the specifics can vary by setting. The inner planes I'd reimagine as Fairyland, roughly divided into the Summerlands for the Seelie Court and Winterlands for the Unseelie Court. The actual environments could replicate any of the absurd locations from the original elemental planes, such as volcanic wastelands inhabited by fire nymphs, undersea kingdoms peopled by merfolk, cloud cities full of winged folk, underland peopled by anthropomorphic playing cards, primeval forests ruled by beast lords and plant lords, dark shadowlands haunted by shadow fey and specters, etc.
I mean, that's the NeverNever from The Dresden Files pretty much to a T.
Still, as much as I've grown to hate the sort of soulless high-fantasy comic book/anime gonzo mishmash that has become D&D in the last couple decades, which might end up the subject of a post of it's own, I don't wanna go back to some sort of primordial pre-Fantasy fantasy. Along the same lines as the discussion about the arcane/divine magic divide... and I say this as a person who adores settings like Harn and such that try to be more grounded/low fantasy settings... I think a certain amount of the charm and staying power of D&D is some of the weirdness like elementals and a multitude of planes. You don't have to copy how D&D does it precisely, or even all that close if you don't want to, but... I don't think we need to, or even should try to, purge them entirely. Unless its for your own specific setting, sure, then do whatever, but if we're talking about some sort of platonic OSR-y form of the game, I think those things kind of have a place, even if they are hallowed bovines.
I’m suggesting it more as a way to avoid potential copyright claims based on D&Disms
If you prefer all that idiosyncratic OCD nerd stuff, then don’t let me stop you
I mean, that's the NeverNever from The Dresden Files pretty much to a T.
Still, as much as I've grown to hate the sort of soulless high-fantasy comic book/anime gonzo mishmash that has become D&D in the last couple decades, which might end up the subject of a post of it's own, I don't wanna go back to some sort of primordial pre-Fantasy fantasy. Along the same lines as the discussion about the arcane/divine magic divide... and I say this as a person who adores settings like Harn and such that try to be more grounded/low fantasy settings... I think a certain amount of the charm and staying power of D&D is some of the weirdness like elementals and a multitude of planes. You don't have to copy how D&D does it precisely, or even all that close if you don't want to, but... I don't think we need to, or even should try to, purge them entirely. Unless its for your own specific setting, sure, then do whatever, but if we're talking about some sort of platonic OSR-y form of the game, I think those things kind of have a place, even if they are hallowed bovines.
Honestly, I question the need for Otherworlds at all. The use of Otherworlds in fiction is typically to bring someone from the mundane world into a place where magic and fantasy things exist.
That’s called the “prime material plane” in just about every campaign I’ve ever run. Wizards, dragons, fairies, giants, volcanoes spewing endless rivers of lava, vast underground realms, islands floating in the sky.
In Greek mythology Olympus wasn’t on another plane; it sat upon that particular mountain over yonder.
So that’s pretty much what I did. There’s a planar cosmology (called the Heliocentric Planar Model by Arcanists and Eggheads), but it’s entirely theoretical in the way every real religion’s positioning of Heavens and Hells is because… here’s where it gets good… only spirits (divine, damned or dead) can go there.
All those conflicting religions in the setting? What happens after you die? You have to take all of those things on faith, just like real people do. Which means people have to behave more like how we understand people to behave (where all those questions are open and depend on faith) versus how they would when the answers to life, the universe and everything are just a plane shift spell away. Even agnostics and atheists are plausibly possible.
Instead all the wilder elements you go to the other planes for are found in the Mortal World… which is itself the Otherworld for our imaginations.
Oh, totally. If you’ve been consuming it for years then it seems normal, but D&D is quite frankly bizarre when compared to its historical, religious, folkloric and literary inspirations. It’s become its own self-iterating genre divorced from what came before it.
I’m not a fan of sacred cows. It’s long ago crossed the appeal to tradition fallacy. Fans maintain this stuff because that’s how its always been, rather than because it has any practical reason to be maintained. They just take it on faith without thinking about it.
That’s fine. But what really irks me is when nerds refuse to acknowledge that they are using the appeal to tradition fallacy. It’s an excuse to uncritically consume approved media and hate on anything that doesn’t toe the party line for petty trivial reasons (i.e. the worst parts of edition wars). It’s a religion that strangles creativity and I despise it.
Instead all the wilder elements you go to the other planes for are found in the Mortal World… which is itself the Otherworld for our imaginations.
Again, that's fine and great if you want to do a setting like that - there have been plenty of fantasy settings published without "planes".
But if the OSR is trying to replicate the classic D&D experience in some meaningful way, well, planes have been an element of D&D for a long time. I don't think you can just let them go that easily.
What has the OSR done with planes? I seem to recall that PF is the only game that actually has the full gamut of points of similarity. Every other OSR game either ignores the planes or simplifies them even further.