Back to Building: Planar Architecture Revisited
Hello again, everyone!
It's been a while since I've posted my worldbuilding ideas, so I thought I'd head back to that for a bit. Today, we're gonna talk about the planes of existence.
I wrote before about how there's a fairly ridiculous number of planes in "stock" D&D worlds, and how I'd rather there be a smaller number. I've had that notion percolating in my brain for a bit, and I've got some ideas. The core of my ideas is this: what if the "material plane" was not technically a plane of its own, but rather the area of overlap between the other planes?
Let's break it down. First, imagine a multiverse with only four planes. One is the Feywild, which I imagine as being full of life-force and nature magic and enchantment and so forth. I mean, it's literally named after the "fey" which is another word for faerie-type creatures.
Another is sort of the dark mirror of the Feywild called the Shadowfell. This is a dangerous and hazardous place to even exist in, full of necrotic energy and other nastiness. Maybe it's entirely non-habitable, or maybe populated only with nasty monsters?
The third plane is a place of elemental forces: fire, ice, lightning, and so forth. This too might lack sentient (or any) population and is mostly just a place that's full of magical energy of an elemental sort, all mixing and churning violently.
Finally, we have the celestial plane. Full of light and life, this is the home of angelic creatures: presumably sentient yet consistently "good" and of a culture entirely alien to everyday mortals.
Now, imagine that these four planes intersect and overlap like some kind of four-dimensional Venn diagram. Each plane has regions influenced significantly by others. For example, there are regions of the celestial plane that are heavily overlapping the Shadowfell, which shifts the region into more of a hellscape and is the source of demons and such. This offers sources of various types of monsters (and extraplanar conflicts, if the campaign starts plane-hopping) without a mind-bogglingly over-wrought cosmology.
And finally, where all four planes intersect and mix in (approximately) equal measure, you have a diverse planar soup known as the material plane. In effect, the world where the bulk of D&D happens is comprised of a mix of Fey magic, celestial energy, shadowstuff, and elemental forces.
Of course, even within the relatively even mix of planes, there are still areas with slightly more or less influence of a given plane. For example, there might be an "enchanted forest" that has a higher ratio of Feywild in the mix, which has the effect of more mortals in the area being born as elves or gnomes (or other fey-related creatures) and having a greater chance of encountering faeries or even a gate to the Feywild proper. Elsewhere, you might find a wasteland heavily influenced by the elemental plane and the Shadowfell, where the dead don't stay down and a volcano may produce vicious fire elementals.
I'm still working on how the mortal races fit into and are affected by this cosmology. Fey-inspired races are easy, and I've had the idea that maybe tieflings in this world are elemental rather than fiendish, but beyond that I'm still scratching my head. Are dwarves connected to earth-heavy regions of elemental influence? Where do orcs fit in? Dragonborn? Were the races created by the gods to work together and use their various strengths to tame the land? Feel free to let me know if you have ideas about that part!
That's it for today. Until next time, take care of each other, okay?
It's been a while since I've posted my worldbuilding ideas, so I thought I'd head back to that for a bit. Today, we're gonna talk about the planes of existence.
I wrote before about how there's a fairly ridiculous number of planes in "stock" D&D worlds, and how I'd rather there be a smaller number. I've had that notion percolating in my brain for a bit, and I've got some ideas. The core of my ideas is this: what if the "material plane" was not technically a plane of its own, but rather the area of overlap between the other planes?
Let's break it down. First, imagine a multiverse with only four planes. One is the Feywild, which I imagine as being full of life-force and nature magic and enchantment and so forth. I mean, it's literally named after the "fey" which is another word for faerie-type creatures.
Another is sort of the dark mirror of the Feywild called the Shadowfell. This is a dangerous and hazardous place to even exist in, full of necrotic energy and other nastiness. Maybe it's entirely non-habitable, or maybe populated only with nasty monsters?
The third plane is a place of elemental forces: fire, ice, lightning, and so forth. This too might lack sentient (or any) population and is mostly just a place that's full of magical energy of an elemental sort, all mixing and churning violently.
Finally, we have the celestial plane. Full of light and life, this is the home of angelic creatures: presumably sentient yet consistently "good" and of a culture entirely alien to everyday mortals.
Now, imagine that these four planes intersect and overlap like some kind of four-dimensional Venn diagram. Each plane has regions influenced significantly by others. For example, there are regions of the celestial plane that are heavily overlapping the Shadowfell, which shifts the region into more of a hellscape and is the source of demons and such. This offers sources of various types of monsters (and extraplanar conflicts, if the campaign starts plane-hopping) without a mind-bogglingly over-wrought cosmology.
And finally, where all four planes intersect and mix in (approximately) equal measure, you have a diverse planar soup known as the material plane. In effect, the world where the bulk of D&D happens is comprised of a mix of Fey magic, celestial energy, shadowstuff, and elemental forces.
Of course, even within the relatively even mix of planes, there are still areas with slightly more or less influence of a given plane. For example, there might be an "enchanted forest" that has a higher ratio of Feywild in the mix, which has the effect of more mortals in the area being born as elves or gnomes (or other fey-related creatures) and having a greater chance of encountering faeries or even a gate to the Feywild proper. Elsewhere, you might find a wasteland heavily influenced by the elemental plane and the Shadowfell, where the dead don't stay down and a volcano may produce vicious fire elementals.
I'm still working on how the mortal races fit into and are affected by this cosmology. Fey-inspired races are easy, and I've had the idea that maybe tieflings in this world are elemental rather than fiendish, but beyond that I'm still scratching my head. Are dwarves connected to earth-heavy regions of elemental influence? Where do orcs fit in? Dragonborn? Were the races created by the gods to work together and use their various strengths to tame the land? Feel free to let me know if you have ideas about that part!
That's it for today. Until next time, take care of each other, okay?
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