This does, indeedy-do, sound cool.

Quote from: Christmas ApeThis is my best suggestion.

Whoah, that's a lot to digest.  Thanks!

Pete

sounds really cool.  wonder where most of the info will end up?  DMG, probably?

now i'll have to look over both books when they come out (PH & DMG). . . (still waffling on purchasing at this early hour)

I will wait to pass judgement until in hand.  But I will say it is one of the few things I've seen from 4e discussions that didn't immediately make me say WTF?  I could see where/how it could evolve during development and it retains some potential.

How many people, do you think, will devolve the new "cosmology" back to 3rd edition rules?  That would be an interesting task for the d20Haven folks to consider...hmm....

I think it will be trivially easy to use the 3E-and-prior cosmology in 4E, just as it's trivially easy to use alternate cosmologies in 3E right now. It's setting bumph, and has only the most tenuous connections to the system.

All this is sounding unspeakably cool to me-  Elemental Chaos might be a bit of a stretch,  but I like the idea of Faerie-Land being an actual place that you might accidentally find yourself in, say, by stepping into a ring of mushrooms and such. Part and parcel of being a party's druid might be to keep up alliances and pacts with the locals in Feywild.

The Shadowfell also works very well for me-  Yes it's a little cliche' but I like the idea that the party might run into a situation where the only way out would be to slide over into the Land of the Dead, even though they might go from the frying pan into the fire in the process.

I'm keeping the Etherial and Astral planes, though... The Etherial plane has always been the source of the truly wierd for me, and will always be irrevocably tied into mages and magic.  The Astral plane similarly is the source of psionics, which exist side by side with magic in my D&D world. Neither directly affects the other, but the effects of both can be clearly felt by either party.

I saw the feywild and shadowfell and the first thing that popped into my head was Ars Magica, closely followed by the sort of thing presented in some Pendragon scenarios. Hopefully, they'll have some cool, unique features though!

Really depends whether these realms can be 'slipped' into or are actual planes that require some travel to reach.

Yeah, VERY Ars Magica.

Quote from: One Horse TownI saw the feywild and shadowfell and the first thing that popped into my head was Ars Magica, closely followed by the sort of thing presented in some Pendragon scenarios. Hopefully, they'll have some cool, unique features though!

Really depends whether these realms can be 'slipped' into or are actual planes that require some travel to reach.

Whatever the text offers, I fully intend to have them 'slip'-able.

I must admit that i've always been a fan of the great wheel. Always struck me as a new horizon to explore once you reached a certain power level. If you wanted it to, it was almost like starting a new game. Manual of the Planes was one of my fav 3e books. Not a great deal of info, but enough to get the creative juices flowing and not a great deal (in the Manual anyhow) of metaplot. "Here's a bunch of planes, here's some info about the plane and some gribblies that live there, over to you." Keep that with the new cosmology and all is hopefully groovy.

I suppose it'd be nigh-trivial to keep the Great Wheel with the new cosmology - just have it be the most stable and carefully mapped-out region of the Astral Sea. (The Abyss might be problematic, but you could say that although the Abyss originated in the Elemental Storm, it's managed to eat through into the Astral Sea, perhaps destroying the plane that formerly held its place in the Wheel.) Similarly, the established elemental planes (and the ethereal) could simply be the most stable and tied-down portions of the Elemental Storm.