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Post by meribson on Jun 24, 2017 23:35:40 GMT
While compiling a good 6 inch stack of notes combined with a few megs of additional notes and blog posts for my first gaming book, I became curious.
Do you have a homebrew cosmology for your home games, use something from real world mythology, or just go with the Great Wheel that Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk use?
When I'm not on my phone I'll give an overview of the cosmology of my setting.
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Post by lasersniper on Jun 25, 2017 5:11:14 GMT
Creating my own is part of the appeal of the job. One of things I put out as a goal for myself is when I create a new setting or world, I try my hardest to make it as original. It doesn't HAVE to be. If there is an idea I or my players want to run with, that is more important to me in the long run. But when I get to create a new world, I like to see the discovery and wonder my players faces and in their voices as they realize this is a concept they haven't explored before. Now my players don't always find out the real/true cosmology of my worlds, but I love to make them. Now when it comes to rumors and local beliefs of the worlds existence, I pull liberally from pre-existing works. It is hard to come up with original and interesting ideas. So when populating my world with the "fake" stuff, I tend to be a little less then creative. Change a few names here, a couple domains there, this holy champion is now female. Badda-bing badda-boom you got yourself a legend of the creation of the world. So yeah, in my worlds if it sounds familiar, it probably isn't the true story. Or at the very least not the complete full story.
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Post by dmcaleb on Jun 27, 2017 0:56:24 GMT
I REALLY struggled to make a 'good enough' cosmology. And eventually ended up with the following. It allows me to have Aether flying ships, so it makes me happy at least.
The two planes of existence in my Campaign Setting are the material plane and the spiritual plane. Each plane has three distinct layers and share several other qualities.
Aether) This is the empty space where zaratan swim. Drift) The drift is made of thousands of branching currents that expedites aether travel. Gravity) Gravity pulls uniformly down in both the material and spiritual planes. Nexus) This is the focal point of all the aether drifts. Zaratan) These are colossal space turtles that swim through the aether. Every World (Toril, Eberron, Krynn, the Feywild etc) lives on the back of its own zaratan.
Material Plane The material plane is the land of the living. Throughout the vast cosmos there is a zaratan that reflects just about any kind of culture imaginable.
Oblivion) There are not that many entities in the distant sky. It is simply a bleak emptiness with horrors waiting to descend.
Miderra) This is the land of the zaratan. Most civilizations and the Nexus exist here.
Abyss) When a zaratan dies its sun fades, it stops producing elements, and the creature sinks into the abyss. This grey land of death hides countless lost civilizations.
Spiritual Plane The spiritual plane is the land of the dead. Throughout this entire plane are signs of the unending war of souls.
Elysium) This is the land of the gods. Spirits that share the beliefs of the gods or struggle through Pandorum make their way here.
Pandorum) This land of chaos is where most souls go when they die. The soul then either struggles into Elysium or falls to Gahenna. Angels and Demons eternally war here for control of the souls.
Gahenna) This is the home of demons and heretics. It is a place of misery, pain, and hatred.
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Post by dmgenisisect on Jun 27, 2017 10:54:08 GMT
I use an astral plane ruled with six elemental planes (life, death, fire, water, earth and air) each ruled over by a primordial elemental deity and a region of the astral plane which is less dense which is co inhabited by the material and ethereal planes. The planes were once 'infinite' in the sense that you could travel for ever in any direction but they still had well defined centers (with the planes becoming less dense as you travel outwards). But after the gods had a bit of a war all the planes including the astral plane are finite spheres (including the astral plane). You can literally see the astral plane in the sky from the material plane and can walk into it by going of the edge of the plane.
The is no 'afterlife' plane. On death you soul is consumed by the negative energy plane though divine intervention can still pry it free there is a limited period where your soul is recoverable.
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Post by meribson on Jun 28, 2017 4:53:30 GMT
A little later than I originally planned, but my setting's cosmology as far as the priests and mages believe is as follows:
The largest plane is the River of Dreams, and all but elves touch the edges of the boundary between it and the Material while they sleep. All other known planes exist within it like sandbars in a river. When summoned to the Material, the inhabitants of the River take the form that is most similar to their own: water. Yes, this settling lacks the 4 elemental planes, each of the 4 elementals come from a different than standard plane.
The Material is more or less the same as it is in most settings.
The first of the different planes is the underworld: Zarth. Zarth is not just the plane, he is the god of death. Slain after a failed coup against his father Erb, Zarth's corpse was turned into a plane that the souls of the dead are drawn to. There they must try to reach a departure point, like an airport terminal. If they take to long, they will be captured by Zarth's former servants and converted into one of them: fire elementals.
Next we have Urzalak. Home to all forms of fiends, the lowest native entity on the totem pole actually isn't a type of fiend: earth elementals. The seven demon lords and five archdevils wage a never ending war for supremacy of the plane.
The last plane is Yinnola, home to celestials and air elementals. Being the furthest "downstream" from the Material plane, its inhabitants are the hardest to summon as you are fighting against the "current" of the River of Souls the entire way. As such little is known about it to scholars. That's the inuniverse explanation for why I don't have as much on it as Urzalak. In truth, celestials are boring.
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Post by randosaurus on Jun 28, 2017 5:56:59 GMT
My cosmologies are a mess. I love planar geometries, the term 'coterminous', and making up rules for regions where planes overlap. I end up with arcane sketches to help visualize their arrangements: I use the sketches to help arrange the relationships, but players can't really expect to have a full understanding of the cosmology. I'm comfortable with keeping players in the dark on the details; extraplanar travel is fraught with risk and peril, undertaken by only the most confident or imperiled PCs. This makes sense in-game; almost nobody would know what lies at the furthest reaches of reality. The above correspond to 9 planes of alignment and are superimposed on 8 elemental energy planes arranged at corners of a cube. I have never made up names, the math & geometry is already all I can keep organized.
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Post by dmgenisisect on Jun 28, 2017 8:09:43 GMT
***Sorry about not using formatting but my phone doesn't really support it...*** I actually did something similar Randosaurus inspired by this thread: dungeonmasterblock.freeforums.net/thread/1831/plane-creation-helpI placed a plane for each of the 9 core domains on a trefoil knot inside the knot is the 4 elemental planes and this settings 3 para-elemental planes (dust, smoke, cold) and 3 quasi-elemental planes (ash, cloud/vapour, ooze). It's hard to visualise but I'm embedding it on a four-sphere such that it also cuts the 'outside of the knot into three coadjacent planes (prime material, ethereal, shadow). I'm still playing around with it but I'll probably put some stuff on the design up here when it's in a more or less complete state. I've also put up another cosmology I toyed around with for a little while on here, see world of Fairie thread for details.
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Post by dmgenisisect on Jun 28, 2017 10:02:02 GMT
This actually reminds me of something... I like outlining worlds as youth be able to tell, but I never get to either; A) Fully flesh them out becouse B) I'll never get a chance to use them all
I was thinking about putting together a campaign setting which is a whole bunch of different cosmologies connected together ala Critical Hits verticies. Could offer a good chance for collaboration we could all flesh out different verticies...
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Post by randosaurus on Jun 29, 2017 5:55:05 GMT
This actually reminds me of something... I like outlining worlds as youth be able to tell, but I never get to either; A) Fully flesh them out becouse B) I'll never get a chance to use them all I was thinking about putting together a campaign setting which is a whole bunch of different cosmologies connected together ala Critical Hits verticies. Could offer a good chance for collaboration we could all flesh out different verticies... I wasn't familiar with the Critical Hit cosmology; I haven't yet listened. This was some interesting reading to start on: CH World Building archiveThe 12 vertices they mention make intuitive sense; I made up a d6 arrangement with 12-vertices to determine some deities and subordinate demigods here: Divine Family TreeThere is so much random yet specific imagery and detail, I think that Rodrigo person must have some sort of organizing principle towards what sort of content and details occur in the built up vertices. I too share an inability to use all the oubliette worlds I make up, but I compromised and made the entire setting about plane-jumping powerbrokers. Planescape with economics. Each setting I write up is a snowglobe portion of a larger world/plane. In a reality of straightforward planar travel, my logic was that transportation would be easiest accomplished by leap-frogging across the stable pockets of intersecting planar space. Any intersection of ley-lines or convexity of planes will naturally just get built up as an interplanar hub. Like they are travelling from space port to port, adventurers don't ever really see the space between. Of course some snowglobes exist in the same realities, so adventures sometimes just require the party get out and walk two-towns over, so to speak. I'll try diagramming out your trefoil best I can based on your description; you can tell me if I'm way off.
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Post by dmgenisisect on Jun 29, 2017 9:52:06 GMT
I don't think it would help but these are my super messy and super poorly photoed rough notes.
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Post by randosaurus on Jul 7, 2017 6:18:46 GMT
I don't think it would help but these are my super messy and super poorly photoed rough notes. Give this a try-- 1) Fire (red), Air (blue) and Water (violet) planes overlap, viewed from first angle, each overlaps in a transitory plane. All three overlap at the center. 2) Viewed from second angle, on an orthogonal, much of the fire plane is occluded. 3) Add the Earth (brown) plane balanced on each of the other 3 planes. Still viewed from the side, but the 4 elemental planes are arranged like a d4. Return to the first angle, now with helpful solid transparencies and outlines of the planes. You can see here the overlaps of 2 planes (6 of them) and overlaps of 3 planes (4 of them). One of the 3-plane overlaps is hidden below the region at the center. You can't see it in this projection. The region at the center is a rounded d4 where all four elemental planes overlap-- obviously the Prime Material plane. You could rotate the figure to see the arrangement of each side of the d4. Remember that one plane is always occluded behind the other 3 (so I left them off the diagram). This is to illustrate that each 2-plane and 3-plane overlap is actually the same shape. This is missing from the above figure.
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Post by dmgenisisect on Jul 7, 2017 12:19:43 GMT
Though it's an interesting idea, it really isn't the knot... I'll try to find a better way of drawing it out...
We should add that to the list though, The Pyramid.
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Post by randosaurus on Jul 8, 2017 4:40:20 GMT
Though it's an interesting idea, it really isn't the knot... I'll try to find a better way of drawing it out... We should add that to the list though, The Pyramid. Oh there's more, but I can only attach 3 at a time and I ran out of brain power. Once you can imagine the pyramid you need to turn it on its side. It helps to pick up a d4 and rotate it like so: On this projection, you can make the 3-dimensional d4 into a 2-dimensional cross: You can recognize the familiar 3x3 alignment table here. The Neutral alignment plane is mostly coexistent with the Prime material plane, but there are small portions coexistent to each para- and quasi-elemental plane. The Prime material plane is coterminous with each of the Neutral step alignment planes- that is, there is a single ingress point from Prime to each of the NG, CN, LN, NE planes. Each of the corner alignments are associated with 2 elemental: Lawful Good = Earth & Water Chaotic Good = Water & Wind Lawful Evil = Earth & Fire Chaotic Evil = Earth & Air Additionally, the Neutral plane is coterminous with each LG CG LE CE plane at a single point, in each case inside one of the para-elemental planes. LE can be accessed from the Fire + Earth plane, perhaps the fabled City of Brass. I could list out all of the regions and planes and transitions but there a lot. It's all just an organizing principle, and the important aspects are which planes overlap, which are transitions, and which meet only at a certain point.
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Post by dmgenisisect on Jul 8, 2017 13:34:38 GMT
That's pretty cool! I rarely consider 'alignment' planes because I tend to replace the traditional alignments/get red of them entirely. I decided the best way to map the knot cosmology was to forsake the quasi-planes as the mess up the map too much, I leave it as an exercise for the reader to put in all the boarder worlds. The middle three worlds go through the para-elemental planes, and the quasi elemental planes are sandwiched between the transitory planes that cross over each other. The whole thin is on the 'surface' of a 4-sphere, so the Material, Ethereal and Shadow (Should rename it to Penumbrael for symmetry) planes all intersect. Hence why travel to them is possible from the Material planes.
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Post by meribson on Jul 13, 2017 23:39:18 GMT
Yesterday morning I updated the blog with a post providing an overview of a plane: the River of Dreams. When I get home I'll provide a link.
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