I have been evaluating the importance of having a planar cosmology. I have concluded that a planar cosmology is completely unnecessary and that the planes can be reduced to simple energy channels for spells without losing anything of value. Planes are typically empty and boring, many are redundant, and the interesting ones are limited to high level characters. If you are focusing the campaign entirely on other planes, you pretty much are limited to exploring only the interesting places like the city of brass or re-imagining the other planes as mirrors of the material plane with planar flavor, at which point you might as well be visiting the same places on the material plane. Extraplanar creatures do not actually need other planes and could live in appropriate places on the material, such as demons in the underdark, fire elementals in volcanoes, angels in the clouds, etc. (The 5e DMG refers to this idea as the "one world" cosmology.)
How often do you use extraplanar stuff? How important would you say that a planar cosmology is? Which type would you say is the easiest to work with and why?
Honestly if have to say that if you've found in your experience that the planes can to often be boring, redundant, and mostly empty and not interesting, you haven't had a GM willing to or having the time to either make their own content or just read the available material that exists to flesh the planes out beyond the paragraph or two in any given edition's DMG. I find it exceptionally inspiring, easy to riff off of, and a wealth of material out there, with the 2e Planescape material being among the best examples to be found (though the style of campaigns it supports and the atmosphere thereof may not be to everyone's preference).
I'm biased of course because I've run exclusively planar campaigns since about 2003 or so. I also wrote a lot of material for the Pathfinder 'Great Beyond' cosmology and a bunch for the D&D Great Wheel as well. No particular preference for the structure of either, depends more on which particular outsiders native to one or the other cosmology that I want to play up and dig into their history/motivations/politics more for a given campaign. Most recently I did a bunch with Pathfinder's proteans (primordial serpentine CN outsiders who seek to dissolve the universe back into the true freedom of formless, ever-changing Chaos) and daemons (NE fiends representing the concept of mortal death).
Probably the easiest kind of Planar cosmology would be if you pick a series of gods for your game world based on alignment, put them in charge of a Plane each and leave it at that. The dead go to the plane of a god based on an alignment. Then all outer planer beings get bunged into a home plane based on that alignment.
I have to say though that I've always found the complaint that the planes were boring a bit beside the point. One could equally say that the vacuum of space is boring. It's huge vast and essentially empty - wouldn't a space opera game be more interesting if all the different planets were really close together so players could just jump from one to another?
I generally find the less defined the planar cosmology, the better. I like alternate dimensions/worlds, but stuff like the D&D Great Wheel cosmology just gets in the way.
Quote from: Shemmy;1033882Honestly if have to say that if you've found in your experience that the planes can to often be boring, redundant, and mostly empty and not interesting, you haven't had a GM willing to or having the time to either make their own content or just read the available material that exists to flesh the planes out beyond the paragraph or two in any given edition's DMG. I find it exceptionally inspiring, easy to riff off of, and a wealth of material out there, with the 2e Planescape material being among the best examples to be found (though the style of campaigns it supports and the atmosphere thereof may not be to everyone's preference).
I'm biased of course because I've run exclusively planar campaigns since about 2003 or so. I also wrote a lot of material for the Pathfinder 'Great Beyond' cosmology and a bunch for the D&D Great Wheel as well. No particular preference for the structure of either, depends more on which particular outsiders native to one or the other cosmology that I want to play up and dig into their history/motivations/politics more for a given campaign. Most recently I did a bunch with Pathfinder's proteans (primordial serpentine CN outsiders who seek to dissolve the universe back into the true freedom of formless, ever-changing Chaos) and daemons (NE fiends representing the concept of mortal death).
It's actually surprising easy to make the planes interesting. Give them geography, dungeons, flora, fauna and villages of 0-level commoners just like the material plane except with an extraplanar flavor. Dark Dungeons explained the elemental planes this way, instantly making them more interesting.
Pathfinder has the redundancy problem in spades. There are eleven or twelve different tribes of demons (excuse me, "fiends") and four or five tribes of angels (excuse me, "celestials"), most of whom have no distinguishing aesthetic or behavior to set them apart. The bestiaries wax poetic about a few trivial distinctions, but they are pretty much interchangeable.
Warhammer 40k does a far better job of distinguishing its four tribes of demon. Khornate demons are bright red, spiky and viscious. Tzeentchian demons are amorphous and brightly colored. Nurglite demons are diseased and rotting. Slaaneshi demons are seductive and grotesque.
D&D/Pathfinder demons--sorry, "fiends"--look like a random grab bag of designs for the most part. The few exceptions are just ripoffs of another media: qlippoth are shubniggurath black goat squid and kytons are hellraiser cenobites. The aasimon/angels are winged humanoids, eladrin/azata are celestial fey/elves, guardinals/agathions are furries, archons are a random grab bag, and manasaputras are vaguely hindu?
Basically, very few of the exemplars/extraplanars/outsiders/whatever the heck the anal-retentive nerd terminology is in this edition... there are too many of them and to make them more difficult to track very few of them have a distinct visual identity. Unless you memorized the bestiary in advance you cannot distinguish a demon or devil, while even a non-gamer can immediately describe the aesthetic difference between the warhammer chaos demons armies.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1033955It's actually surprising easy to make the planes interesting. Give them geography, dungeons, flora, fauna and villages of 0-level commoners just like the material plane except with an extraplanar flavor. Dark Dungeons explained the elemental planes this way, instantly making them more interesting.
Pathfinder has the redundancy problem in spades. There are eleven or twelve different tribes of demons (excuse me, "fiends") and four or five tribes of angels (excuse me, "celestials"), most of whom have no distinguishing aesthetic or behavior to set them apart. The bestiaries wax poetic about a few trivial distinctions, but they are pretty much interchangeable.
Warhammer 40k does a far better job of distinguishing its four tribes of demon. Khornate demons are bright red, spiky and viscious. Tzeentchian demons are amorphous and brightly colored. Nurglite demons are diseased and rotting. Slaaneshi demons are seductive and grotesque.
D&D/Pathfinder demons--sorry, "fiends"--look like a random grab bag of designs for the most part. The few exceptions are just ripoffs of another media: qlippoth are shubniggurath black goat squid and kytons are hellraiser cenobites. The aasimon/angels are winged humanoids, eladrin/azata are celestial fey/elves, guardinals/agathions are furries, archons are a random grab bag, and manasaputras are vaguely hindu?
Basically, very few of the exemplars/extraplanars/outsiders/whatever the heck the anal-retentive nerd terminology is in this edition... there are too many of them and to make them more difficult to track very few of them have a distinct visual identity. Unless you memorized the bestiary in advance you cannot distinguish a demon or devil, while even a non-gamer can immediately describe the aesthetic difference between the warhammer chaos demons armies.
I'm really not seeing why redundancy is bad or why one would
want Demons or devils to have a consistent visual identity.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1033870I have been evaluating the importance of having a planar cosmology. I have concluded that a planar cosmology is completely unnecessary and that the planes can be reduced to simple energy channels for spells without losing anything of value.
The first part of this is definitely true. Planar cosmology is not
necessary for the game. The entire question of where angels and demons and elementals are
from is not a question that specifically needs a coherent answer (particularly one that the PCs unambiguously know) for many-to-most games. Likewise, ghosts (or potions of ethereal form or the like) can be incorporeal and undead can drain energy without any solid logic of what the 'ethereal plane' is or if there is a 'negative energy plane' or the like. These were things created to offer explanations if-one-so-desires. Frankly, it sounds kind of fun to have the PCs inquire to a Gandalf-like character as to the existence of 'other planes' (or whatever they would even have the vocabulary to ask) and said expert say something like "that's a subject of no small debate amongst the high-powered-wizard community. The best answer I can give you is that it is an open question."
The second part is really campaign dependent. I can play an entire campaign in Karameikos, and the outer planes may or may not ever enter into the game, but on the other hand, the same can be said for the Atruaghin Clans or the Empire of Thyatis (and if you don't know what those are, well, neither might the PCs).
QuoteHow often do you use extraplanar stuff? How important would you say that a planar cosmology is? Which type would you say is the easiest to work with and why?
I rarely play at the power levels where there
needs to be an answer. Oftentimes I will still use the jargon, so apparently there are at least ethereal and astral and elemental planes, and at least one place where celestial and demonic creatures 'come from,' but otherwise it's usually something that the PCs rarely see.
(OTOH, I am mostly DMing Beyond the Wall these days, and I'm deliberately trying to create a gaming experience where barons and counts contesting county boarders and merchants attempting to set up pigs-for-wheat trade deals are the backgrounds to the adventures, not battles for the multiverse).The easiest has to be 'you're not sure, and it'll only matter if you decide it's what you want to do with the campaign.'
I never use the planes as written in a published product. It is far easier and much more fun to derive planes (if there are any) from the setting as they are needed. My current setting has three planes (counting the natural one) in which the players spend a lot of time, because there are numerous portals between them. It's implied that other planes are in existence, but only reachable by high level magic or artifacts.
I'm not familiar with how the latest editions of D&D handle it, but the traditional Great Wheel is terrible design. The outer planes should be a wonderful playground, drawing inspiration from the incredibly rich myths, legends, and cosmologies of the entire world. But instead of riffing on the Celestial Bureaucracy, or Yggdrasil, or Dante's Inferno in a way that's easily recognizable but still uniquely D&D, what they did was throw all throw all those mythologies into a blender. By slicing up the planes and their inhabitants based the 17 alignments and half-alignments, they lost any sense of coherence or theme. Sure, you can come up with a reason why Set is next door to the devils, or why Loki lives in howling tunnels instead of with his families in Asgard or Jotunheim. But it's constant and never-ending demand, and the result is an incoherent mess that shatters all the existing relationships and replaces them with random connections. What they should have done is break up the outer planes by mythology. Tiamat should be next door to Marduk, not dozens of mythologies away. The Nine Worlds should be a concrete thing, devils and angels should be in opposition, and Olympus, Hades, and Tarterus should be adjacent. Group them according to their existing logic, not the arbitrary and artificial criteria of alignment.
The inner planes are even worse, thanks to the ridiculous physics and weird Platonic logic. The distance between everything is the same, which means maps are pointless. How do you forge empires, or define boundaries or trade routes, without some idea of how things relate to each other in space? That might make for a heady science novel, where the author unravels what exactly that means and what kind of organizational structures evolve, but the answer would be something almost incomprehensibly alien. And it's not like D&D ever really tried; they spend more time talking about subjective gravity than explaining how the inner planes function given those rules. I think the best approach to the elemental planes is to make them contiguous to the Prime. Travel into the deep desert or a volcano, and it gradually becomes the elemental plane fire. Under the sea, is the weird watery realm of elemental water, the underground vaults and caverns are elemental earth, and above the clouds is the plane of air. Since you start with the Prime, this grounds those realms. You don't get dumped into this world of nonsense physics and impossible contortions; no, you walk there, or fly there, or swim there, and the world subtly shifts as you go. Think faerie roads or Corwin's shadow walking. The city of Brass is this weird city over the horizon, which can't necessarily be reached by waking in a straight line, and where the rules are subtly different, instead of some bizarre floating realm where people walk on the ceilings and where the enemy's gate is always down.
But even in that case, you don't really need a defined structure. Having 17 outer planes (and many times that in levels) and 15 or more inner planes to fill up is an enormous amount of work. It's the kind of top-down plan that is great for a company that wants to sell endless splatbooks fleshing out every last detail of everything, but it's miserable for DMs who just want to run a game. Because that's an enormous amount of material to create, or an tremendous amount of canon to remember and keep straight. I think reverting back to the idea hinted at in contact other planes is an excellent way to return to a bottom-up, sandbox-style, DM- not company-friendly design. The Prime becomes exactly that, the starting point. It's world zero, where the PCs exist. Adjacent to it are other planes, which can be anything. You might have a fey Celtic otherworld, hidden inside elfhills, complete with a mirror-city in the sky. You might have a weird cold realm where time and space play tricks, from which come alien invaders. And those realms might connect to other realms, and other realms, and so on. This creates a web, where distance is defined by how many steps or intermediate realms you have to travel between to reach them. This puts a tight bound on things, because who cares what worlds are 12 planes out? You don't have to worry about that, unless the PCs head in that direction. All you need to do it create the next step, and drop a few names or allusions when they use the spell to reach further abroad. No pressure to create an entire cosmology from scratch, and you can mix or match your favorite bits because there's no pressure to fill every possible slot. Especially if you follow the hints in the spell, and make dimensions stranger the further you go.
Quote from: Pat;1033964But even in that case, you don't really need a defined structure. Having 17 outer planes (and many times that in levels) and 15 or more inner planes to fill up is an enormous amount of work. It's the kind of top-down plan that is great for a company that wants to sell endless splatbooks fleshing out every last detail of everything, but it's miserable for DMs who just want to run a game.
It's even worse than that. A top down plan carefully made as a "throw out all the assumptions and start over with a top down plan" would still have most of the problems you list, but would at least be somewhat carefully designed. The existing thing is more accurately described as, "A top down, half-baked rationalization of how to systemize stuff that a bunch of different GMs pulled out of their ass."
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1033870I have been evaluating the importance of having a planar cosmology. I have concluded that a planar cosmology is completely unnecessary and that the planes can be reduced to simple energy channels for spells without losing anything of value. Planes are typically empty and boring, many are redundant, and the interesting ones are limited to high level characters. If you are focusing the campaign entirely on other planes, you pretty much are limited to exploring only the interesting places like the city of brass or re-imagining the other planes as mirrors of the material plane with planar flavor, at which point you might as well be visiting the same places on the material plane. Extraplanar creatures do not actually need other planes and could live in appropriate places on the material, such as demons in the underdark, fire elementals in volcanoes, angels in the clouds, etc. (The 5e DMG refers to this idea as the "one world" cosmology.)
How often do you use extraplanar stuff? How important would you say that a planar cosmology is? Which type would you say is the easiest to work with and why?
I usually either don't have other planes at all, or have the planes not be something a human or the PCs that have any sort of PC-visitable place, or only maybe in a psychic trance in a way that doesn't involve traveling through a landscape, or only by things of that plane (so not the PCs), and/or it doesn't have a topography that works like out plane, and/or no PCs ever get whatever magic would let them go there, etc.
So I don't think they're important or needed at all, though they can be interesting.
I have designed and run and played in game universes where there are such planes and some of them are visitable by magic (possibly including portals or magic items or beings from other planes taking you through), but as you wrote, it multiplies the places to go (but with boundaries) which is similar to what can easily/naturally happen with a time travel game, or a setting with space travel, or even a modern game with air travel, and can happen to a lesser degree just in a big fantasy universe with normal travel (or moreso with long-distance teleportation, same-plane portals/gates, magic flying carpets, or sea travel). That is, the campaign universe contains many separated places that the players can travel between and remain in or ignore, and so the GM is in the position of having them available but the players not being able/interested in visiting them all, so it's quite possible to spend a bunch of time prepping/thinking about whole planes of existence that the PCs never go to and whose details aren't particularly relevant at all to the plane the players _are_ in, etc. I think it tends to make situations and characters become (perceived as, or actually) less relevant and get less attention because of the increased rate of "BYE! We're going someplace completely different and may never return!".
I've seen going into a faerie realm for a while lead to the whole material-plane campaign being essentially dropped and reset decades later due to time-rate differences... interesting but it also wiped out a lot of developed context, characters, situations etc from before - then there's no way to get back to the old interesting situations and characters unless there's time travel (which to me tends to be even worse because it not only multiplies the situation-jumping, but also introduces causal paradoxes or multiverse apathy - i.e who cares what happens, because someone can always go back and change events, or hop to a different history?
Hence why I tend not to have D&D-style planes, and/or to not have them available to PCs as places they can just go to.
However, Pat's conception two posts before this would avoid many of the issues I mentioned (except most people still probably wouldn't leave their usual plane).
I kind of like them as really being metaphors for connection with something that humans don't/can't entirely understand, and that don't really have the same kind of Cartesian time/space that operates as we think our material plane does, but that can still be somehow interacted with via magic and/or psychic trance.
Personally I'm really digging the Nine Realms cosmology of Age of Sigmar. All kinds of bizarro weirdness.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1033870How often do you use extraplanar stuff?
Fairly often, as I usually GM in Glorantha and use a lot of HeroQuesting, so the planes are important in that kind of thing.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1033870How important would you say that a planar cosmology is?
If you intend to use them, very important. If you don't intend to use them, completely unimportant.
They are fine as background flavour, but unless you intend to go to the planes, they are just background.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1033870Which type would you say is the easiest to work with and why?
What does that mean?
In a Norse/Germanic setting, the Seven Worlds are planes. In a Celtic setting, the Blessed Isles and Celtic Otherworld are planes. In a medieval Europe setting, Dante's Inferno/Paradise and Fairyland are planes. All are different types and all are easy to work with.
Basically, you just need rules, or ways to handle various things about planes. How do you get there? Who/What lives there? How can you summon things from the planes? What happens to a summoned creature that is killed, is it just banished back to the plane> What happens if you kill a creature on its home plane, does it die permanently?
Some interesting comments on this thread!
As always, I'd say it depends on the campaign. There's some where I leave the cosmology very open. In others, I define it pretty strictly.
Somewhere I have a modified version of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, with the main axis being that of Chaos and Law. Moorcockian and Amberite, as in our games the two were intertwined. The reason I used the Tree of Life is that I can also call it Yggdrasil and if you are a fan of more recent Moorcock, The Skrayling Tree. Yes, it is a tree. You can climb it to different worlds.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the other use for the Tree of Life. Since the Sephiroth, or Worlds, are represented by spheres, that makes it easy to edit in D&D Cosmology, specifically the one presented in AD&D 1e as well as elements from Planescape. Sure, you might have to add some extra nodes because 16 doesn't map over to 10 so well but it's not like I used the thing as a game board. And it might be a little influenced by the Grand Pattern. However the nice thing about using Moorcock as source material is that you can have different perceptions of reality and they are not necessarily wrong. You can walk from world to world along a Moonbeam path, or you can be on a shape changing spacey like ship, which dives up and down along the realities powered by a hand cranked phonograph playing a Jimi Hendrix LP and both are perfectly good ways to go. The Lords of Chaos don't care how you organize it because it harshes their collective mellow. Arioch is busy pretending he's Jagged of Canaria just so he can fuck with Elric.
We did a lot of planar based games. We did the Blood War thing, but I kind of ignored the whole Planescape Faction War bullshit. The Blood War itself was fine. Law versus Chaos? Check. It made a nice overlay. I had an NPC that was a skeleton warrior driving an Abrams around in Hell, who was organizing the forces and creating his own Engineer Corps that was extending the Iron Road to connect all the Lower Planes because he wanted to invade the Abyss with an army of devils that had vehicles and weapons from WWII era Earth. We did a lot of weird stuff.
Eventually we had characters that became gods, and sometimes the players still wanted to play them from time to time. I mean, it's AD&D. Gods have stats for a reason. :D And there was the time I ran a five year campaign where giant solar system sized worms were trying to eat the Multiverse. Sadly, they got Krynn. :D
I am a huge Planescape fan, but I wouldn't shoehorn that cosmology anywhere else.
I also like the 4e concept of planes that peek through the prime material in certain places.
Quote from: TJS;1033956I'm really not seeing why redundancy is bad or why one would want Demons or devils to have a consistent visual identity.
Ask yourself the inverse in question form. Why are a bazillion redundant demon synonyms
good? Why do you
want demons and devils to look random?
Quote from: Spinachcat;1035184I am a huge Planescape fan, but I wouldn't shoehorn that cosmology anywhere else.
I also like the 4e concept of planes that peek through the prime material in certain places.
4E's Planar Axis was my favorite of all the published settings... it made all four of the main realms (Feywild, Shadowfell, Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos) easily habitable (changing the 'infinite realms of fire, air, earth and water' into one realm where all there countless pockets of the elements (if you can call a continent made of fire a pocket) constantly interacting with each other is someplace adventurers can actually go) at least for the duration of an adventure.
That said, my preference leans more towards a more 'parallel worlds' sort of planes (like the Feywild or Shadowfell only applying to every plane). So the Elemental Chaos would be a parallel world where all the elements were turned up to eleven and each of the gods (or groups of gods) had their own parallel world and their clerics are basically living portals to the power emanating from their god's realm. The Abyss would be a shattered world where the demons rule.
And they all overlap, separated only by the fact that they all resonate at a different dimensional frequency... but where those frequencies overlap there are breaches between the worlds that beings can cross through.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037316Ask yourself the inverse in question form. Why are a bazillion redundant demon synonyms good? Why do you want demons and devils to look random?
Well, if you look at sources in medieval art and folklore about Demons, they have a stunning diversity of forms.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1037633Well, if you look at sources in medieval art and folklore about Demons, they have a stunning diversity of forms.
"My name is Legion, for we are many."
Personally, I prefer demonic forces that have no set form, but adopt whatever form they need to accomplish their purposes; either by possession or shapeshifting. Of course, I also favor this approach for angelic forces as well and the notion that the main distinction between angels and demons is whom they serve.
Quote from: Chris24601;1037784Personally, I prefer demonic forces that have no set form, but adopt whatever form they need to accomplish their purposes; either by possession or shapeshifting. Of course, I also favor this approach for angelic forces as well and the notion that the main distinction between angels and demons is whom they serve.
Back in the early days of Exalted (1e), the Fair Folk were much like this: formless entities that exist outside the world but have to construct forms (and roles) for themselves when they want to come play in reality. It made for great monsters, but fuck me if I could ever figure out how those were supposed to be playable PCs.
Playable would be Exalted's problem. I'd never make anything like that playable for PCs unless they were permanently locked into some form or another (or it was a Superhero game where that sorta shape shifting was their power).
Agreed though that for NPCs/monsters it's fantastic on both sides. You can have everything from seducers who look completely human to hundred foot tall masses of mawed tentacles and eyeballs (and winged humans in white robes to six-winged wheels of fire... actual angels are as weird looking as any demons) and they're all, technically, the same type of critter with no need to invent a new niche for it to fill in an already crowded cosmos.
Quote from: Chris24601;1037787Playable would be Exalted's problem. I'd never make anything like that playable for PCs unless they were permanently locked into some form or another (or it was a Superhero game where that sorta shape shifting was their power).
They did have a version of Fair Folk that were trapped in a single form: Mountain Folk. These were the "dwarfs" of the setting, although their rulers were tall, fit, and very attractive by human standards. These were made playable too, and (IMO) they were much more so than the baseline Fair Folk. The setting had them as allies of the Dragon-Blooded, and they were one of the few splats that could crossover with them without major power imbalance issues. As for the mainline Fair Folk, it was almost impossible to gauge exactly what their power level was supposed to be. Some of their powers had several paragraphs of text that mixed freely between fluff and crunch, and it was often hard to tell where one type of text ended and the other began. IIRC, it was the same author that wrote that Nobilis game that RPG.net loves to gush about. I recall a few players reading some Fair Folk Charms and looking at me confused while asking, "but what the fuck does it actually DO?" On several occasions, I didn't have very good answers to that.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1037633Well, if you look at sources in medieval art and folklore about Demons, they have a stunning diversity of forms.
True, but that is not the point of my question.
If you are going to arbitrarily divide demons into different species like demons, devils and daemons for an absurd reason like filling out the alignment grid, why continue to use the same random generation tables in Appendix D for all three? It makes no sense to me. You can have humans who are different alignments, so it just sounds to me like demons are demons regardless of alignment.
Now, if devils looked like
angels... or something along those lines.
Quite honestly I found the alignment grid needlessly frustrating because it led to idiosyncrasies like this. An old school Moorcockian law/neutrality/chaos spectrum is much easier for me to grok.
It depends on the campaign, but my fallbacks are:
Law: Heavenly Order/The Pits of Hell
Neutrality: The Balance/The Hateful Dead/Great Old Ones (last two NE, natch)
Chaos: The Great Abyss/True Fey
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037908True, but that is not the point of my question.
If you are going to arbitrarily divide demons into different species like demons, devils and daemons for an absurd reason like filling out the alignment grid, why continue to use the same random generation tables in Appendix D for all three? It makes no sense to me. You can have humans who are different alignments, so it just sounds to me like demons are demons regardless of alignment.
Now, if devils looked like angels... or something along those lines.
Quite honestly I found the alignment grid needlessly frustrating because it led to idiosyncrasies like this. An old school Moorcockian law/neutrality/chaos spectrum is much easier for me to grok.
That's a case of shoehorning demons into a rules system, which I have never found to be a good idea.
In non-D&D systems, Alignment is not an issue. In those systems, demons can be modelled in different ways.
For example, for Merrie England:Age of Chivalry, I used Enochian Demons and had equivalent ranks of demons and angels. That works really well for medieval European/Near Eastern settings, especially if you use Ifrits in a similar ranking for Islamic demons.
I prefer demons to be of different types, with some randomness. So, Malabranche are winged demons with claws and tails, not very random. Other demons might have very different forms and various supplements have random tables to support that.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037908True, but that is not the point of my question.
If you are going to arbitrarily divide demons into different species like demons, devils and daemons for an absurd reason like filling out the alignment grid, why continue to use the same random generation tables in Appendix D for all three? It makes no sense to me. You can have humans who are different alignments, so it just sounds to me like demons are demons regardless of alignment.
Now, if devils looked like angels... or something along those lines.
Quite honestly I found the alignment grid needlessly frustrating because it led to idiosyncrasies like this. An old school Moorcockian law/neutrality/chaos spectrum is much easier for me to grok.
I can sympathize with this, sure.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1033870How often do you use extraplanar stuff? How important would you say that a planar cosmology is? Which type would you say is the easiest to work with and why?
I continually use extraplanar realms, critters, and ideas. I adapt the Nordic extraplanar scheme, as I find that you don't really need the scads of different planes that the Great Wheel scheme provides. People start getting flustered when they have more than 5-7 choices, and I like creating within the self-imposed limitation of nine planes of existence. What I am looking for is a collection of primordial and alien realms that can provide adventuring locales that are highly different and infrequent. I'm also looking for otherworldly realms that help explain the cosmology, including the gods and physics, both magical and technological.
Quote from: Spinachcat;1035184I am a huge Planescape fan, but I wouldn't shoehorn that cosmology anywhere else.
I also like the 4e concept of planes that peek through the prime material in certain places.
Pretty much this. Planescape is a beuty in itself. My longest D&D campaign have been set in Planescape for about 6 years now.
The 4e's cosmology was actually very useable and flexible and not bogged down by special plannar rules and magic-as-physics. And you could still go and visit a lot of classic D&D plannar locations and added some new good ones. Like the Feywild and the 4e version of City of Brass. And the Shadowfell is just a more accessable take on Ravenloft/Demiplane of Dread. It is obviously more generic than PS but I don't see that as a flaw since it is to me the best (official) generic version of the planes.
My third preference of planner set up would be a very loosely simple Law vs Chaos version. The Abyss and some higher godly plane were the Law aligned deities reign and have the elemental plane to be the same as the mortal plane.
The setup I'm using for my game system's default setting is what I call the Heliocentric Planar Model. At its heart is The Source, a place of infinite potential from which all matter, energy and spirit in the cosmos originates. It's spiritual presence is visible in the Mortal World as the Sun (hence the name of the model). As this infinite potential flows from the Source, it "cools" into discrete elements (air, earth, fire, water) and then into combinations of elements (cold, storm, metal, plant) and finally at the distance of the Mortal World they are able to combine into life (air/breath, earth/body, water/blood, fire/body heat).
Primal Spirits representing each of the elements warred over the Mortal World. The losers (who came to be called demons) were cast into the Outer Darkness and a Great Barrier errected to hold them outside of Creation. But the war shattered the Mortal World's spiritual reflection so that instead of perfectly reflecting it's light, it instead scattered it across the Barrier like motes off a mirror ball... giving birth to the stars, each a reflection of some aspect of the Mortal World.
Eventually this spiritual power gained self-awareness and became the Astral Gods, whose power comes from the degree to which the Mortal World reflects its aspect (which is why the god of slaughter can get away with having virtually all of it followers wiped out... it gains power from the slaughter itself; believer or unbeliever; not the number of worshippers it has). Normally souls would flow back to The Source in death (whether they're reincarnated, broken up for raw material or enter some paradise is one of the great unknowns of the cosmos), but devout worshippers can earn a place in one of the Astral God's courts if they want a more assured afterlife (thiugh possibly less glorious if the people who say The Source is a paradise are right).
The other alternative for souls who fear The Source and will not submit to the Astral gods is to hide in the shadow of the Mortal World where the light of The Source cannot reach. These lost souls native to the Shadow World are the undead; who sustain themselves on the life of the living since the direct light of The Source/Sun would burn them to ash.
That's the gist of it anyway.
In my DCC campaign there's a set of planes based VERY loosely on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Of course, the campaign being what it is, a lot of it is a very gonzo interpretation of the same.