Planar Chaos
Today I'll start with a tautology: a story which takes place in a fantasy world will take place in that fantasy world.
Now, let me amend it slightly: a story which takes place in a fantasy world does not take place in some other world.
The point I'm so clumsily shambling toward (with an improbable overuse of colons) is this: why would a story — especially a fantasy story where the author already got to tailor-make the setting — need more than one world?
If you've never stumbled into the tiny handful of fantasy stories that involve more than one world, you might not even know what I'm talking about. Usually, "the world" is a big enough setting to handle a story. Even in the works of Tolkien, in which the world of "Middle Earth" has that name for a reason, the additional realities are mostly unseen history that you don't even need to know about in order to understand what's going on in the primary narratives (four whole books' worth).
So what the hell is going on with Dungeons and Dragons?
The overwhelming majority of gameplay (and thus, the stories being told) will take place on the "Material Plane" — what we normally think of as the universe. But then there's also a dark mirror of the Material Plane called the Plane of Shadow (remember "the Upside-Down" from Stranger Things?) and then a more life-filled mirror called the Feywild (where elves and pixies and so forth come from). Okay, cool, so there are a couple of mirror worlds. But we're not done!
There's also a plane of existence where all the angels and other inherently-good, "celestial" beings are from, and similarly an infernal plane for all the demons and devils and whatnot. In some settings, these two planes are subdivided along the law/chaos alignment axis, meaning there are three each of the celestial and infernal planes, bringing our running planar total to nine planes of existence.
But we're still not done! There are also the elemental planes of earth, fire, water, and air. Yes, each of these four gets it own plane. Each of these is the home or source of approximately one monster that your heroes might encounter (but they'll encounter it on the Material Plane, because by the time they're high enough level to survive existing on an elemental plane, these monsters won't be a challenge anymore). So we're up to 13 planes.
Then there's the Ethereal Plane, where everybody's a ghost; the Astral Plane, where everything's shiny or something; and then there's usually a Positive Plane and a Negative Plane, which are about as interesting as their names.
Why do we need almost 20 planes of existence for a game of D&D? I'm still trying to figure this out. I mean, when characters get powerful enough (which is only a subset of all campaigns), their stories might involve traveling to other planes to solve bigger-than-the-end-of-the-world plotlines. But even if they do, they'll probably pick one or two to house the conflict and still ignore like 15 planes. That's an awful lot of leftovers.
But the annoying thing is that if you try to canonically remove those excess planes from your setting, then it pokes a bunch of little holes in the game. Multiple player races reference ancestry in the Feywild. The "blink" spell flickers you back and forth between the Material Plane and the Ethereal Plane. Every time cultists want to summon something nasty, the nasty thing is being summoned from another plane.
The planes in D&D are like a tangled wad of cords in the space behind your computer desk or entertainment center: you can completely ignore the whole mess and everything still works fine, but if you want to actually try and clean things up then you've got a lot of frustrating disentanglement ahead of you.
I've been pondering recently how to handle the planar landscape for my own setting, and (as is typical for this blog so far) I haven't completely figured it out yet. So here I am, talking it out as I go. I figure the first thing to do is triage: deciding which planes are worth saving and which ones are better to cut loose and patch the hole.
I like the idea of a planar home to angels and demons. Including angels and demons in a fantasy game is cool, but giving them homes on the mundane world kind of waters down their identity and making them space aliens could feel a bit weird, so their planes legitimately add something to the setting. I'll keep them, though it's worth noting that it could be fun to have all the angels and demons and whatnot live on a single plane instead of being sorted out. I'll have to let that simmer a bit.
The elemental planes? Meh. What do they really add? It's easy to imagine elemental creatures being created, or having homes on earth where all of those elements exist anyway. For adventuring sites, you can already adventure in a volcano, under the sea, on a sky-castle, or in subterranean caverns. These planes add very little and are almost zero work to remove, so they're gone.
The Feywild and the Shadowfell are probably keepers. Although their presence is fairly nonessential (we don't need them as homes for key creatures as badly as the Celestial/Infernal Planes), they're also probably the best candidates for actually taking the players' characters outside the Material Plane. The Feywild draws on the classic fairytale trope of an unseen world of mystical creatures that's prevalent in multiple real-world cultures, and the Shadowfell serves as a sinister, familiar-but-kinda-wrong setting for a darker chapter in the protagonists' stories (not to mention the popularity boost from Stranger Things). These two actually offer us something, so they're in.
The rest of the planes (Ethereal, Astral, Positive, Negative, and any I missed) seem entirely unnecessary. They have little to no impact on a typical game, and really serve no major purpose that I can see. I mean, it's possible that later on while I'm brainstorming cosmic history I could have an idea that calls for one or more of these, but that would be the only reason to include them. Thus, for the time being, I'm considering them gone.
Now, I want to be clear: I'm not saying there's anything wrong with using, liking, or otherwise being invested in any or all of these planes. Any one of them could be absolutely integral to the right setting or plot. I'm just saying that for me, for the kind of setting I want to write, the ones which seem most relevant to my preferences are the Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the Celestial and Infernal Planes. Along with the Material Plane, that's five universes, which feels like plenty to set the stage for some great fantasy adventures.
When I started this post, I was planning on talking about how I might have these planes arranged in the multiverse, how they've interacted in history, and what effects they've had on bringing the Material Plane to the state it's in when gameplay starts happening. Buuuuuut I've already been talking for a while, so I think I'll save that for a future post.
In the meantime, thanks for reading! Take care of each other, okay?
Now, let me amend it slightly: a story which takes place in a fantasy world does not take place in some other world.
The point I'm so clumsily shambling toward (with an improbable overuse of colons) is this: why would a story — especially a fantasy story where the author already got to tailor-make the setting — need more than one world?
If you've never stumbled into the tiny handful of fantasy stories that involve more than one world, you might not even know what I'm talking about. Usually, "the world" is a big enough setting to handle a story. Even in the works of Tolkien, in which the world of "Middle Earth" has that name for a reason, the additional realities are mostly unseen history that you don't even need to know about in order to understand what's going on in the primary narratives (four whole books' worth).
So what the hell is going on with Dungeons and Dragons?
The overwhelming majority of gameplay (and thus, the stories being told) will take place on the "Material Plane" — what we normally think of as the universe. But then there's also a dark mirror of the Material Plane called the Plane of Shadow (remember "the Upside-Down" from Stranger Things?) and then a more life-filled mirror called the Feywild (where elves and pixies and so forth come from). Okay, cool, so there are a couple of mirror worlds. But we're not done!
There's also a plane of existence where all the angels and other inherently-good, "celestial" beings are from, and similarly an infernal plane for all the demons and devils and whatnot. In some settings, these two planes are subdivided along the law/chaos alignment axis, meaning there are three each of the celestial and infernal planes, bringing our running planar total to nine planes of existence.
But we're still not done! There are also the elemental planes of earth, fire, water, and air. Yes, each of these four gets it own plane. Each of these is the home or source of approximately one monster that your heroes might encounter (but they'll encounter it on the Material Plane, because by the time they're high enough level to survive existing on an elemental plane, these monsters won't be a challenge anymore). So we're up to 13 planes.
Then there's the Ethereal Plane, where everybody's a ghost; the Astral Plane, where everything's shiny or something; and then there's usually a Positive Plane and a Negative Plane, which are about as interesting as their names.
Why do we need almost 20 planes of existence for a game of D&D? I'm still trying to figure this out. I mean, when characters get powerful enough (which is only a subset of all campaigns), their stories might involve traveling to other planes to solve bigger-than-the-end-of-the-world plotlines. But even if they do, they'll probably pick one or two to house the conflict and still ignore like 15 planes. That's an awful lot of leftovers.
But the annoying thing is that if you try to canonically remove those excess planes from your setting, then it pokes a bunch of little holes in the game. Multiple player races reference ancestry in the Feywild. The "blink" spell flickers you back and forth between the Material Plane and the Ethereal Plane. Every time cultists want to summon something nasty, the nasty thing is being summoned from another plane.
The planes in D&D are like a tangled wad of cords in the space behind your computer desk or entertainment center: you can completely ignore the whole mess and everything still works fine, but if you want to actually try and clean things up then you've got a lot of frustrating disentanglement ahead of you.
I've been pondering recently how to handle the planar landscape for my own setting, and (as is typical for this blog so far) I haven't completely figured it out yet. So here I am, talking it out as I go. I figure the first thing to do is triage: deciding which planes are worth saving and which ones are better to cut loose and patch the hole.
I like the idea of a planar home to angels and demons. Including angels and demons in a fantasy game is cool, but giving them homes on the mundane world kind of waters down their identity and making them space aliens could feel a bit weird, so their planes legitimately add something to the setting. I'll keep them, though it's worth noting that it could be fun to have all the angels and demons and whatnot live on a single plane instead of being sorted out. I'll have to let that simmer a bit.
The elemental planes? Meh. What do they really add? It's easy to imagine elemental creatures being created, or having homes on earth where all of those elements exist anyway. For adventuring sites, you can already adventure in a volcano, under the sea, on a sky-castle, or in subterranean caverns. These planes add very little and are almost zero work to remove, so they're gone.
The Feywild and the Shadowfell are probably keepers. Although their presence is fairly nonessential (we don't need them as homes for key creatures as badly as the Celestial/Infernal Planes), they're also probably the best candidates for actually taking the players' characters outside the Material Plane. The Feywild draws on the classic fairytale trope of an unseen world of mystical creatures that's prevalent in multiple real-world cultures, and the Shadowfell serves as a sinister, familiar-but-kinda-wrong setting for a darker chapter in the protagonists' stories (not to mention the popularity boost from Stranger Things). These two actually offer us something, so they're in.
The rest of the planes (Ethereal, Astral, Positive, Negative, and any I missed) seem entirely unnecessary. They have little to no impact on a typical game, and really serve no major purpose that I can see. I mean, it's possible that later on while I'm brainstorming cosmic history I could have an idea that calls for one or more of these, but that would be the only reason to include them. Thus, for the time being, I'm considering them gone.
Now, I want to be clear: I'm not saying there's anything wrong with using, liking, or otherwise being invested in any or all of these planes. Any one of them could be absolutely integral to the right setting or plot. I'm just saying that for me, for the kind of setting I want to write, the ones which seem most relevant to my preferences are the Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the Celestial and Infernal Planes. Along with the Material Plane, that's five universes, which feels like plenty to set the stage for some great fantasy adventures.
When I started this post, I was planning on talking about how I might have these planes arranged in the multiverse, how they've interacted in history, and what effects they've had on bringing the Material Plane to the state it's in when gameplay starts happening. Buuuuuut I've already been talking for a while, so I think I'll save that for a future post.
In the meantime, thanks for reading! Take care of each other, okay?
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