Constructing D&D's Default World

[Wiseman]

I agree with some of these. (fewer celestials. Less powerful gods. Fuck alignment) and *maybe* parts of the planes (I play the inner planes as being one single mass divided that changes element depending on where you are in it. Also they're not infinite, just defined vaguely as "big as it needs to be") I do still like a lot of the locations defined in the planes an so keep the standard cosmology (the planes are just locations drifting around in the astral sea. There are even more locations I've cribbed from other settings and games that I like to throw in there.)

Entropy thing, I see as optional honestly, depending on how you portray the multiverse.

[Seerow]

I agree with some of these. (fewer celestials. Less powerful gods. Fuck alignment) and *maybe* parts of the planes (I play the inner planes as being one single mass divided that changes element depending on where you are in it. Also they're not infinite, just defined vaguely as "big as it needs to be") I do still like a lot of the locations defined in the planes an so keep the standard cosmology (the planes are just locations drifting around in the astral sea. There are even more locations I've cribbed from other settings and games that I like to throw in there.)

Entropy thing, I see as optional honestly, depending on how you portray the multiverse.

For the Elemental Planes thing, why not incorporate them into Hell? I mean for the most part they are just extreme inhospital environments that mirror similar environments on the Prime Material plane. Since Hell's whole thing is being inhospitable and awful, having frozen wastelands, firelands, stormlands, etc all makes perfect sense to me. These each seem on the surface similar to features on the Prime Material, but have their natural effects cranked up to 11, and then add infested with demons and elementals on top of it.

This also conveniently gives you a home for elementals. The cosmology already asserts that Hell is more populated than Celestia. Some people end up incarnated as various elementals instead, and get stuck in their own little corner of hell.

You could probably even go so far as having a separate demon lord ruling over each of these Hellscape Regions, though personally I favor most of the elite demons preferring to hang out in their own piece of turf (probably the firelands, just because that is what most people would associate with hell).

[radthemad4]

I don't have anything constructive to say, but this cosmology is awesome and I'll be using it in my campaigns.

[Dean]

Likewise immortal should be replaced with "really long lived". Entropy consumes everything in the fullness of time. Both Dorian Grey and his painting are equally mortal. People use immortal to mean "things that can likely live a few thousand years" and that's fine but important to say. No one in the universe can give you genuine immortality because entropy exists and a day will come when all the stars go black and all the worlds are dust.

While I like the rest of it, this sticks out a bit since, well... magic.

It's addressing a small annoyance of mine. A Vampire Spawn may be ageless but he's not really immortal. At some point he will fall 50 feet and die because the chances of him falling 50 feet exist and multiplying his chances of dying this year by infinity gets you 100%. It may seem a pedantic quibble but it's not at all. The fact that Asmodeus can die means he will die and he spends basically 100% of his effort trying to lengthen the time between now and that target date. In that way he is exactly like you. Asmodeus is mortal, he's just really long lived. A truly immortal being that had lived since the dawn of existence and would live on past the end of all existence would give zero shits, no he would give an infinitely small amount of shits, about the fate of the kingdoms of men. It wouldn't care about the rise of men from fish or of the destruction of their star and its reforming into a completely different cosmic entity the thousands of times before or the thousands of times after. A genuinely truly immortal cosmic being would have no motivations to interact with your game and probably isn't something the human mind can imagine, whereas Asmodeus or Pelor are just mortals with horns or wings. Living a thousand times longer or being a thousand times more powerful than a mortal man still makes you mortal and that's an important difference when figuring out someone's motivations.

I do still like a lot of the locations defined in the planes an so keep the standard cosmology

You should keep all the locations defined in every planar guide AND get rid of the standard cosmology. A fucking PLANE is enormous so fill it the fuck up. Celestia is way better if there's an area called "The Blessed Fields of Elysium" and "The Beastlands" and a hundred other things in it because it's an entire plane. The Beastlands become way more feasible as a place someone might ever go if you have to travel through there to get to Mount Olympia from the Kingdom of Ysgard. Celestia should be as multivariant and interesting as Earth and that means putting enough elements into it to make it more than a Planet of Hats.

For the Elemental Planes thing, why not incorporate them into Hell? I mean for the most part they are just extreme inhospital environments that mirror similar environments on the Prime Material plane. Since Hell's whole thing is being inhospitable and awful, having frozen wastelands, firelands, stormlands, etc all makes perfect sense to me. These each seem on the surface similar to features on the Prime Material, but have their natural effects cranked up to 11, and then add infested with demons and elementals on top of it.

Exactly this. Unlimited fire is bullshit but what isn't is the Lake of Fire upon which the City of Bronze sits nestled in the blazing shadow of Infernus the most active volcano in Hell. Unlimited air is bullshit but the whipping madness tinged winds of Pandemonium are awesome so make that a place in Hell too. Fill that shit up! Earth is just one planet and we've been able to tell almost every story that's ever been told on it. Use the parts of D&D's fiction that have traction and put them in places where people can interact with them. No one in the history of D&D has ever played a campaign in the Plane of Earth, it doesn't even have a wikipedia entry, it's unnecessary, but the concept of raging earth is fucking sweet so you should still make places on the planes that exist where this happens

ADDITIONAL: Thank you to everyone who said nice things

[RobbyPants]

I've been thinking up an alternate cosmology that is in many ways a combination of this mixed with After Sundown. I liked it for the sort of grimdark setting I was imagining, but I really like what you did for matching assumptions of D&D. What I'm picturing would in no way work for D&D.

I may have to use this, as well.

[vagrant]

I love the cosmology, but I'd prefer having a single, infinite elemental plane for elementals, instead of placing them in Hell. Hell is for evil demons and devils and shit, not neutral(ish) elementals.

[hyzmarca]

I love the cosmology, but I'd prefer having a single, infinite elemental plane for elementals, instead of placing them in Hell. Hell is for evil demons and devils and shit, not neutral(ish) elementals.

Or you get rid of alignment planes altogether and just have one afterlife/spirit plane for everyone. And Hell is the merely the country where devils live.

[Dean]

I love the cosmology, but I'd prefer having a single, infinite elemental plane for elementals, instead of placing them in Hell. Hell is for evil demons and devils and shit, not neutral(ish) elementals.

I can't think of any reason to keep the elemental planes. Elementals should show up anywhere where their element is particularly active. Ice elementals should be a hazard in the tundra of the Baatoran Frozen Wastes and on the icy cliffs of Ysgard's Glimmering Spires. They don't need a whole dimension that's an infinite glacier.

As you said they are neutral, Elementals should be treated like the elements. Like storms and blizzards and earthquakes they should occur wherever they are dramatically and geographically appropriate. Storms go in heaven and hell and earth and that's where your Air elementals are, not on some bullshit plane no one will ever go to that adds nothing to the universe in storytelling or verisimilitude.

[nockermensch]

Nice cosmology. Because my tastes are heavily Disgaea Yuu-Yuu Hakusho anime related, I tend to create campaigns with just a god realm, a human realm and a demon realm. What you called the void, in the cosmologies I use is usually the empty space around and away from the worlds.

One thing I usually add however is an Ethereal plane (needed to spells like Blink to work) that works triple duty as Limbo and Elemental Planes. The Ethereal is where the essence of matter originates, divided in the four classical elements. Matter radiates from four elemental poles and chaotically mixes in a vaporous substance in the middle. The solid, final forms of the matter form the observable universe, but with magic, you can etherialize your matter: Immediately you'll see basically a copy of the universe, where everything is less solid (you can enter walls, stand on air, etc).

On the Ethereal plane there's another dimension you can transverse. Explaining this to 3D beings like us is futile, but it feels natural if you're there. Moving on this extra dimension will take an Ethereal being away from the copy of the universe towards more and more difuse forms of matter, until you find yourself in a place like D&D's Limbo. From there, you can locate and move towards one of the elemental poles. The elemental planes are regions where the substance is mostly one of the elements, but with visible traces of the remaining ones. The elemental poles themselves are uninteresting, being pure sources of each element, being continuously generated and pushed forward.

[Dean]

One thing I usually add however is an Ethereal plane (needed to spells like Blink to work) that works triple duty as Limbo and Elemental Planes.

It got lost in the relocation from my notes to the final product but I use the Void for that as well. Void fills the functions of the Astral, Limbo, and Shadow plane while having the fluff of all the darkbad planes. Having the Void be what powers Blink and Shadow Walk and Astral Caravan makes all those powers have massively cooler flavor in my opinion. Transposing your body back and forth between a plane completely inimical to life seems so much ballsier and badass than the vanilla Blink. It makes using a lot of D&D's blander spells suddenly have the flavor of deep mysteries and flirting with danger.

[Hadanelith]

I shall add my voice to the choir: this writeup makes so much more sense than D&D's cosmology, I cannot even express it. Very well done.

[Username17]

I can see the appeal of the four planes model, but I don't think it works for kitchen sink fantasy. There really are a number of things that you need multiple worlds for to make kitchen sink work. First of all, you need to have villains who control entire worlds. Your Queen Beryls and King Zarkons, if you will. Since it's D&D, you're potentially going to need more than one of these assholes, so it's actually quite important that you have at least two evil worlds such that Demogorgon can own one of them and Asmodeus can own the other. You quite likely want at least one evil world that isn't owned by anyone, so that you can tell that story too.

Secondly, you're going to want to tell stories where good and evil gods live in the same world, since that's how most polytheistic mythological systems actually work. Also so that you can have realms where demons and angels are currently fighting. You likely also want to have a world where demons and angels both exist and are not currently fighting.

Basically, the bare minimum for proper kitchen sink fantasy looks something like this:



-Username17

[Eikre]

A counter-proposal:

PROTECTING THE BALANCE

Everything that ever was and everything that ever will be are on the slow descent into entropy and chaos. And nobody gives a shit. It's just not an existential concern. I mean, it's an existentialist concern, in that it will keep you up at night and make you sick with ennui or whatever, but let's get serious: Neither you nor anyone nor any thing you ever talk to is going to be around for the heat death of the universe.

But here's the deal: while it is true that, if left fallow, the Prime Material will eventually be siphoned into the void (first spiritually, and then literally) and that all the world will be dissolved in gaping eternity, that's not the way that it has to be. Prima Mundi is, at its core, an engine of creation, and if shepherded properly, it can self-perpetuate for all eternity.

Now, the precise metaphysical arithmetic of how that could work is a mystery. There are people you can go and meet- certain Faeries, for example- who claim to have a working understanding of the mechanism, but any attempt to contact them for an explanation is a terrifying Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell kind of brush with true insanity. It's very possible that, in the end, the math just doesn't work until your dementia is so complete that 1+1 equates to something other than 2.

But there are greater powers, primordial and unknowable, which have persisted since time immemorial and which will continue to persist right up to the day that the sun grows cold and the world falls silent. These are not gods. Really, to personify them at all would be a mistake. Even the presumption of a "motivation" might be imprudent. But there is an agenda, originating with these powers, to secure the perpetuity of existence, and the mortal agencies which further that agenda are supported with supernatural grants of aid and baffling revelations. Among these agencies, the brotherhood of Druids is foremost (in acclaim, if not importance).

Druids are united by their common urge to protect the wilderness and, more broadly, the cycle of nature, so it is intuitively obvious that biodiversity and the circle of life must be essential to the firmament of creation. Contrariwise, Druids are pretty disdainful of aberrations and the undead. No surprise; both categories of creature are intrinsically linked to the Void and their continual existence in the Prime Material is made possible by sustaining an open connection between the two planes. Earnest druids can also be identified by the habits of their souls; rather than being drawn to the void (and intercepted to be taken to one of the various afterlives), they return to the Prime Material where they are reabsorbed by the Animus Mundi and presumably reincarnated as a cow or something. Because of this phenomenon, Druids are occasionally romanticized as being "True Neutral," which is to say, that they are among the very few mortals who can be truly unconcerned with the choice between Good and Evil.

Beyond these three scant traits, there isn't much affiliation. Druids work to achieve the missions outlined in their own private revelations. Sometimes that means a seemingly benevolent agenda, like showing a pastoral community how to live sustainably and coexist in peace with the land, or taking up the crusade against the Horned King and his army of Cauldron-Born. Sometimes they go off on rampages, massacring pastoral communities with an army of cryptozoological horrors, or stealing children to offer as blood sacrifice because they think it's an important part of making sure the sun rises every morning. And then sometimes they're just lunatics that go and preform ritualistic minutiae in the forest, or hang out with Fair Folk and have depraved orgies. It's all supposed to add up to the same inconceivable master plot to keep the world spinning, but of course everyone's willing to make up their own minds about how much they really care about that incalculably distant goal when they're dealing with the nuance of any particular Druids' mission.

[RadiantPhoenix]

"Balance"-based "True Neutral" becomes much less offensive once you stop having it based on alignment, and instead make it between "light" and "darkness" ( http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Warriors_of_Darkness )

i.e., if you want to preserve the "balance", then, once you've killed the evil dark lord, you still have to take over his realm, but you don't have to go around kicking puppies and otherwise being an asshole, you can just, like, make a bunch of edgy heavy metal music and paint your castle dark colors or something.

EDIT: Huh, it even kind of fits, if you add in an element of keeping light and darkness separate. Maxwell's Demon and all that.

[nockermensch]

Secondly, you're going to want to tell stories where good and evil gods live in the same world, since that's how most polytheistic mythological systems actually work. Also so that you can have realms where demons and angels are currently fighting. You likely also want to have a world where demons and angels both exist and are not currently fighting.

Why these can't be continents in Earth-like worlds? Why don't the demons and angels that aren't currently fighting simply come from different countries/cultures than demons and angels that are at each others' throats?

When the ancients said the ice giants came from a "realm" of eternal cold and such, they probably had in mind what we would call a country or a region today. Making all these mythical realms into something akin to planes or planets was, IIRC, an idea of XIX century occultists like Blavatsky.

[tussock]

I like the tone of the thread, but ... like ... "D&D's Default World" should probably be the world that D&D actually produces, rather than the world-derived set of house rules you're giving us.

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So demons and angels obviously have a binomial turnover function but no age limit, and that means they are deeply paranoid and vengeful but also guarded and sleep standing in a corner against a blood-lead wall with weapons drawn and both eyes open, and the old Solars take a very long view of what really threatens the innocent. But most of them are actually pretty young and inexperienced.

The infinite size planes thing comes from the infinite multiverse of every game being independent. Each DM has their own Hell with their own Asmodeus in it, and if the PCs there kill that one it doesn't do anything to all the other lords called Asmodeus in the infinity of D&D's Hell. It's a lampshade. Your own campaign's planes are tiny, there's like six places to visit on them, a day travel apart.

And yes, a ring of 16 outer planes of up to 9 (or infinite) layers is impossible to grok. But that's also D&D, no one really understands or can grok the outer planes, even though they're really quite tiny with not much on them. There's lampshading there too, because travel out there is special, some places you have to pay the boatman and he decides where you go, others you help the needy to get where you need, others you just randomly end up somewhere, so they're tiny but hard to explore.

But I think the "lake of fire" fails as a metaphor for that: the lake is certainly tiny but it's also boundless because you're not just allowed to sail off it in your bronze boat. It's fire town and you have to do the fire stuff to move on, and even then only to the places that are allowed. You can't bind infinite Efreeti, because your game's part of the city of brass is small, and they all talk to each other about people like you.

Like Sigil is supposed to be unimaginably huge, but there's a map of it and it's really very small, just a thousand buildings or so. The dozen cults have only a few named people because they're only a few people worth naming. But it's also got a thousand portal doors that you'll never know about, so it's still unimaginably huge in it's own way, and you can walk forever and never leave town without playing it's minigame.

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In the original post you have new low-level rules, because fuck wolves being scary. Fine, in the real world ordinary people made them locally extinct with primitive tools, replacing them with domestic versions. But you've kinda lost a bunch of the monster manual along with that. And if the Orcs and Xvarts are all War3 as well, now we're down to damage spells doing nothing at all, weapons not killing people, and a bunch of other rules you'll need to change which makes things even less "D&D's Default World".

Because D&D up through Pathfinder has a man in plate armour on a barded warhorse with war-trained mastiffs being incredibly lethal to the town guard of War1's (or Ftr0's). He tells them to stand aside, they stand aside, or at least call the sheriff. Having ~2000gp to your name gives you the key to everywhere, because you're level 3 and vastly better than the Guard (who are scared of wolves and giant rats and fire beetles so adventurers can have a reason to do things at level 1).

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And there's some sort of nuclear weapon treaty thing within their own lands between all the high level casters in the world. Elminster does not port in and murder Szass Tam, but he does endlessly fuck with the trade guild of the Red Wizards when they roam about, even though he won't attack them himself as long as they stay out of the Dalelands (which they do). And if a Fighter reaches high level and takes over a place, then no one kills them either, because that's part of the deal.

Likewise, the Evil High Priests all stay home and issue orders for minor folk to go charging around the place causing trouble, in little terror cells. But no one goes and caps the problem, just keeps sending low-level adventurers to tackle the cults for XP. That's the deal.

If you rule a land and turn it into spectres, then you rule spectre-land but the surrounding places are fine, because that's the deal. Your land, your rules. If you want to invade the County of Geoff, you have to get the Giants from the hills in Geoff to do it for you. That's why the Drow are always stirring shit up with the locals, getting Orcs and such to do things for them, the Orcs count as locals.

That's not game rules, but it explains all the standard settings pretty well. Even the new ones like Eberron and Golarion.

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And you can extend that weird invisible peace treaty to the outer planes. Only out there it's meta and demons really can't just overrun Oerth by porting in because they need to get Evil people to do bad things to the innocent to bring them in. Angels are then the same, they don't solve all your problems because they're not allowed in unless Good people make great sacrifices for the innocent. That also reflects all the standard settings.

[Seerow]

In the original post you have new low-level rules, because fuck wolves being scary. Fine, in the real world ordinary people made them locally extinct with primitive tools, replacing them with domestic versions. But you've kinda lost a bunch of the monster manual along with that. And if the Orcs and Xvarts are all War3 as well, now we're down to damage spells doing nothing at all, weapons not killing people, and a bunch of other rules you'll need to change which makes things even less "D&D's Default World".

If the average person is a commoner 3, they're still looking at like 6-7hp on average. Most weapons are still one hit lethal, and wolves are still dangerous to the general populace. Yeah some Warrior 3 guards are going to be rocking closer to 12-15 hp, 3 BAB, and generally be an even match for a Wolf 1 v 1, but are they going to be going out causing mass genocide against all wolves? I doubt it.

Honestly you are overestimating what people not having literally 2hp changes in terms of things that are meant to be threats. What it does actually change is make it so creatures with 1 damage attacks (read: housecats, tiny birds, etc) aren't two shotting your average person. So a wolf that kills an average person in 1-2 hits and simply isn't going to be taken down by an unarmed or untrained human is still scary and threatening. Meanwhile a rat, raven, or cat that deals 1 point of damage and has only 2hp so can be knocked out by a solid lucky kick from your average commoner is not threatening. Which is exactly the outcome you would expect.

[OgreBattle]

What happens to your town when some wasps build a nest in the barn

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monste ... wasp-swarm

Or locusts descend on their crops

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monste ... arm-locust

[Seerow]

What happens to your town when some wasps build a nest in the barn

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monste ... wasp-swarm

A single wasp nest doesn't translate into a swarm. I see wasps all the time, but rarely more than 1-3 at a time. For a swarm you are looking at thousands. That is just not something that is going to naturally occur in a civilized area.

But yes if a wasp swarm does show up in the middle of a village, it's going to kill everyone in it effortlessly regardless of how many hit dice those commoners and warriors have.

[momothefiddler]

Likewise immortal should be replaced with "really long lived". Entropy consumes everything in the fullness of time. Both Dorian Grey and his painting are equally mortal. People use immortal to mean "things that can likely live a few thousand years" and that's fine but important to say. No one in the universe can give you genuine immortality because entropy exists and a day will come when all the stars go black and all the worlds are dust.

While I like the rest of it, this sticks out a bit since, well... magic.

It's addressing a small annoyance of mine. A Vampire Spawn may be ageless but he's not really immortal. At some point he will fall 50 feet and die because the chances of him falling 50 feet exist and multiplying his chances of dying this year by infinity gets you 100%. It may seem a pedantic quibble but it's not at all. The fact that Asmodeus can die means he will die and he spends basically 100% of his effort trying to lengthen the time between now and that target date. In that way he is exactly like you. Asmodeus is mortal, he's just really long lived. A truly immortal being that had lived since the dawn of existence and would live on past the end of all existence would give zero shits, no he would give an infinitely small amount of shits, about the fate of the kingdoms of men. It wouldn't care about the rise of men from fish or of the destruction of their star and its reforming into a completely different cosmic entity the thousands of times before or the thousands of times after. A genuinely truly immortal cosmic being would have no motivations to interact with your game and probably isn't something the human mind can imagine, whereas Asmodeus or Pelor are just mortals with horns or wings. Living a thousand times longer or being a thousand times more powerful than a mortal man still makes you mortal and that's an important difference when figuring out someone's motivations.

So when you say "entropy", you don't mean thermodynamics so much as you mean that shit happens. You're against "immortal" as in immune to death, not "immortal" as in ageless? Because then my arguments vanish entirely and I'm fine with it. But if not, I'm still not sure what you mean and probably disagree.

[Grek]

Why even have other dimensions at all? There's an entire planet, let's use it: Hell is physically located inside the planet, beneath the Underdark. You can access it by digging too greedily and too deep, by swimming down into a volcano, or by listening for the wailing of the dead while exploring the Underdark.

Hell is made up of seven interconnected chambers: Iron City of Dis (Bleak Despotism Hell) and the Free City of Pandemonium (Lawless Rampage Hell) exist underneath either pole. Around the equator are Cocytus (Watery Frozen Hell), Stygia (Falling Screaming Hell), Phlegethos (Smokey Burning Hell) and Hades (Gloomy Cave Hell). At the very center is Tartarus (Ghostly Prison Hell). Devils live in Dis. Demons live in Pandemonium. Elementals and Genies live in appropriate elemental Hell. When you die, you start out in Tartarus as a wailing ghost and wander off to one of the other Hells, or possibly get lost and eventually go mad amid the whispering darkness.

Celestia, meanwhile, is located on a cloud. It floats around the earth, and flying creatures can go to it if they have a guide or know which cloud to look for. Most don't. If you can't fly, but get invited to appear before the Gods anyways, the celestials will extend the Rainbow Bridge for you to walk aboard. If you're not invited (but have a superhumanly good throwing arm), you can try using a grappling hook and a lot of rope to climb your way into heaven. Unlike Hell, Celestia is politically unified within itself. There's separate halls for each major pantheon, but they're all in the same city and people can visit unannounced. Sometimes Thor crashes the Elven Pantheon's parties and nobody thinks that is weird.

[Ice9]

Could be interesting; I've tried something similar - an unbordered world where you can just walk to things that would normally be other planes - go out far enough into the burning desert, it becomes the realm of fire and the city of brass is there, for example.

You'd have to reduce how many and powerful the demons are though. If there are enough Balors that small groups of them could go wandering off to the surface for fun, then civilization is kind of fucked.

[Grek]

Dean's answer to that question (If a Balor gets killed on Prime, it dies for real) still applies. Just substitute "The Surface" for "Prime".

[DSMatticus]

Without planar borders or some additional arbitrarium that might as well be planar borders, there really aren't any explanations for why demons, devils, and angels aren't having their wars in your yard.

Edit: Mildly ninja'd.

[Mask_De_H]

Dean's answer to that question (If a Balor gets killed on Prime, it dies for real) still applies. Just substitute "The Surface" for "Prime".

Yeah, but CR wise a Balor is going to curbstomp good chunks of the surface world and can just port (or walk) back to their corner of Hell. If the land of death and horror is physically adjacent to where everybody keeps their stuff, you need a better reason why the former hasn't overrun the latter.