Planes

[CaptainPenguin]

Heya, everyone!
What cosmology, do you prefer, the D&D style with the thousand other dimensions and all that, or the mythological style with the gods on the same plane and all that?

[Kassil]

Personally, I'm in the process of building my own cosmology. You have nine Outer Planes, all locked into a rigid arangement of planes which control access of the gods to the mortal planes. Access to the Astral is controlled by Baha'Hali'Met, the Father of Dragons; the Astral contains a handful of demiplanes, including the Demiplane of Filth, which formed from the debris of all the extradimensional spaces which have ruptured from contact with one another.

The Prime is actualy a collection of countless individuals planes, all immersed in the putty-like 'soup' of the Plane of Shadow, which gives a vague reflection of each world in the region near it.

The Ethereal contains most of the Demiplanes, and controls and channels the raw power of the Elemental Planes, of which there are six: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Positive, and Negative. Each of these six is ruled by a primal deity of elemental nature (thoughtfully created by my friend, Siren).

The six elemental plane form a shell of energies around the Plane of Time itself - placed at the far end of existence from the gods, because there exists an artifact on the plane which has the potential to grant the wielder all the power of the plane...

[Ria Hawk]

I prefer the mythological version, but I can also use a multiplane type; it just depends on the way it was handled.  One of my favorites was a setting that only had a handful of gods, but each god had multiple aspects and identities (something like Greek and Roman mythology).  The thing was, these were pan-dimensional, and had avatars in other planes as well.  The plane affected the aspects attatched to the god.  So it seemed like there was an almost infinite number of gods on an almost infinite number of planes, but there were only about nine.

[CaptainPenguin]

Well, my game has the Shadow World, which is the shadow of the world. The Elemental Realms (Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Wood, Smoke, Cold, Magma, Mineral, Mud, Steam, Radiance, Salt), Astral Plane, and The Spirit World. Beneath the Material is the Underworld, the Land of the Dead. Most of my gods dwell on the Material plane but maintain houses in other places. For instance, Elhrim the Tree Lord dwells in all forests but also maintains a house in the Realm of Wood, the home of nature, and the God of Starvation and Death, Mote, maintains a mansion in the Realm of Famine within the Underworld.

[drphluid]

In general I would prefer the mythological version.  But I like the way Shadow Run puts it together with the Astral plane overlapping the physical plane, just not available to everybody.

[KingOfChaos]

I prefer to stick the the cosmology created by the Planescape campaign setting.

[CaptainPenguin]

I would like to know more about Planescape and Spelljammer. Too bad they're not made anymore.

[Kassil]

Planescape was basically just an expansion of the classic cosmology. You can pretty much get the same inforation by picking up the 3E Manual of the Planes - and I hear they've re-relased Spelljammer for 3E.

Of couse, I'll never see it, given my loathing for 3E...

[Agar]

I am ironing out a planar setting mish-mashed from final fantasy 7 and the earthdawn roleplaying system. I need to lock down my ideas for gods.

The whole thing with be a circle of three planes: the living one or corpreal, where we live of course, the spiritual or etheral, where we go when we die, and the magical or astral, where our spirits go when they "break down". The cycle is completed by things growing and being birthed, a magical process of renewal putting magic back into the living world.

I haven't really worked out that breaking down part. I figured on wizards drawing power from the astral and priests from the spiritual, so the two magics would be vastly different due to thier vastly different sources.