Kuunari

Paul over at Blog of Holding has a really interesting series of posts where he has graded the 4e cosmetology and the great wheel of earlier editions. They were really thought provoking, and I thought most of his grades were pretty spot on at least as far as the locations being good for adventuring is concerned. I might not agree with his conclusions though.

He comes down pretty hard on the Great Wheel as a place that wouldn’t be very fun to adventure in. Having been a huge Planescape fan, I might have to disagree. While I agree that many of the places he mentions (the elemental planes, the positive and negative energy planes) won’t be fun to adventure in, I think that’s kind of the point. The idea is that, is a player supposed to be able to go every where in a campaign, or are there places they just can’t go, no matter what.

Ultimately, I tend to view D&D cosmetology to be very malleable. The players are never going to walk from Sigil to one of the evil planes, or from the plane of water to the plane of earth. Instead it’s going to be through some form of magical means that they will arrive at a new location.

So how it’s organized matters less to me, than how I can apply it to my story I’m telling as a player or as a DM. Sometimes that includes having a villain threaten to send a player to the negative energy plane to die. And sometimes it’ll include the players adventuring in the Feywild or Astral Sea or in Sigil or Bytopia. Ultimately, the planes are meant to encompass all possible belief and possibility, so if things don’t always make sense to the players, I feel like it isn’t supposed to, berk. (Just a little planescape reference…)