Cosmologies - Yours & Mine

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.

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.

***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-help

I 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.

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 archive

The 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 Tree

There 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.

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.

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.