From here:

QuoteSecret worlds and invisible domains surround the world of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Godly dominions, elemental chaos, shadow kingdoms, and faerie realms are all part of the world. Most mortals know little of these things, but heroes are a different matter. Heroes often find that adventure calls them to distant and strange dimensions indeed.
The Feywild

The closest of these alternate worlds is the Feywild, or the realm of faerie. It is an "echo" of the mortal world, a parallel dimension in which the natural features of the lands and seas are arranged in much the same configuration. If a mountain stands in a given place in the mortal world, a similar mountain stands in a corresponding place in the Feywild. However, the Feywild is not an exact reproduction. Built structures and terrains are not copied in the faerie realm, so a valley dotted with farm fields and towns in the mortal world would simply exist as untouched, unsettled woodland in the Feywild.

The Feywild's many vistas can catch your breath with beauty, but the Feywild is far from safe. Heroes visiting to Feywild might encounter:

    * A mossy forest glade where evil druids spill the blood of hapless travelers over the roots of the thirsting trees;
    * The tower of an eladrin enchanter;
    * A fomorian king's castle in the dim, splendid caverns of the faerie Underdark; or
    * A maze of thorns in which dryad briarwitches guard an evil relic.

The Shadowfell

Just as the Feywild is an echo of the natural world, so is the Shadowfell. However, the Shadowfell mimics the mortal world in a different manner. The Shadowfell is the land of the dead, where the spirits of the deceased linger for a time in a dark reflection of their previous lives before silently fading beyond all ken. Some undead creatures are born in the Shadowfell, and other undead are bound to it, but some living beings dwell in this benighted realm.

Like the Feywild, the Shadowfell also reflects the mortal world imperfectly. Towns, castles, roads, and other objects built by mortal kind exist in the Shadowfell about where they should be, but they are twisted, ruined caricatures. The shadowy echo of a thriving seaport in the mortal world might be a dilapidated, desolate port whose harbor is cluttered with the rotting hulks of shipwrecks and whose busy wharves are empty except for a few silent and furtive passersby. In the Shadowfell, heroes might venture into:

    * A necromancer's tower;
    * The sinister castle of a shadar-kai lord, surrounded by a forest of black thorns;
    * A ruined city swept by long-ago plague and madness; or
    * The mist-shrouded winter realm of Letherna, where the fearsome Raven Queen rules over a kingdom of ghosts.

The Elemental Chaos

All of the cosmos is not tied to the mortal world as closely as the Feywild or Shadowfell. The natural world was created from the infinite expanse of the Elemental Chaos (or Tempest, or Maelstrom), a place where all fundamental matter and energy seethes. Floating continents of earth, rivers of fire, ice-choked oceans, and vast cyclones of churning clouds and lightning collide in the elemental plane.

Powerful beings tame vast portions of the chaos and shape it to their own desires. Here the efreeti City of Brass stands amid a desert of burning sand illuminated by searing rivers of fire falling through the sky. In other places in the Elemental Chaos, mighty mortal wizards or would-be demigods have erected secret refuges or tamed the living elements to build their domains.

Elemental creatures of all kinds live and move through the Elemental Chaos: ice archons, magma hurlers, thunderbirds, and salamanders. The most dangerous inhabitants are the demons. In the nadir of this realm lies the foul Abyss, the font of evil and corruption from which demonkind springs. The Abyss is unthinkably vast—thousands of miles in extent—and in its maw swirl hundreds of demonic domains, elemental islands, or continents sculpted to suit the tastes of one demon lord or another. Within the Elemental Chaos, heroes might explore:

    * The crystalline tower of a long-dead archmage;
    * A grim fortress monastery of githzerai adepts;
    * The diseased Abyssal continent where Demogorgon rules amid ruined temples and bloodthirsty jungle beasts; or
    * A vast polar sea lit only by the cold glitter of icebergs and flickering auroras, in which the frozen stronghold of a frost giant warlock lies hidden.

The Astral Sea

One final extradimensional realm touches on the mortal world: the Astral Sea. If the Elemental Chaos is the manifestation of physicality, the Astral Sea is a domain of the soul and mind. The divine realms, the dominions of the gods, drift within Astral Sea's unlimited silver deeps. Some of these are realms of glory and splendor—the golden peak of Mount Celestia, the verdant forests of Arvandor.... Others belong to dark powers, such as the Nine Hells where Asmodeus governs his infernal kingdom. A few astral dominions lie abandoned, the ruined heavens and hells of gods and powers that have fallen.

Only the mightiest of heroes dare venture into the dominions of the gods themselves. In the Astral Sea, heroes may find:

    * The iron city of Dis, where the devil Dispater rules over a domain of misery and punishment in the second of the Nine Hells;
    * An artifact guarded by race of cursed warriors whose castle of adamantine overlooks the war-torn plains of Acheron;
    * The black tower of Vecna, hidden in the depths of Pandemonium; or
    * A dragon-guarded githyanki fortress, drifting through the silver sea.

No one is knows how many astral dominions there are. Some dominions, such as the Nine Hells, are the size of worlds. Others are no larger than cities, rising like shining islets from the Astral Sea. Several dominions have been ruined or abandoned, usually because the gods who made them were destroyed or forgotten. What sorts of treasures—or perils—might slumber in such places, only learned sages could say.

This goes a hell of a long way to demolishing the slightly-too-nailed-down metaphysic of, say, Planescape or the 1E Manual of the Planes and throwing in more of the sense-of-wonder and infinite possibilities of the original conception of the planes - and I really like the way they've associated the elemental planes with raw physicality and the astral planes with more abstract concepts.

(And I have to say, I won't be weeping any tears for the disappearance of the Ethereal Plane. I never could understand the material difference between that and the Astral Plane.)

I've been pretty excited about it. My current D&D group are very negative about the new edition since the announcement, but they all really like the new cosmology too.

That is very cool. I want to adventure there. I want to explore the domain of a long dead god, a long dead faith, with ruins adrift in the astral realm. Yea, cool.

Pretty cool. Far from original, but so what?

-=Grim=-

It does sound pretty cool, I like the fairy land, makes use of many existing myths.  But this point made me chucle:

Quote...The Abyss is unthinkably vast—thousands of miles in extent—

I don't know about you, but the US is about 3,000 miles across, certianly neither unthinkably vast nor undrivably vast.   I think they should add some more zero's hundreds of thousands of miles in extent, now we're getting to a scale comparable to the distance between the Earth and moon.  That's pretty unthinkable when crawlng with demon kind.

I like it. I wonder if there's still going to be a link with alignment somehow.

Quote from: Warthur...(And I have to say, I won't be weeping any tears for the disappearance of the Ethereal Plane. I never could understand the material difference between that and the Astral Plane.)

Here, here.  House ruled out that old nugget long, long ago.  My ethereal plane is just the space between spaces, you know the ether.  A little extra dimension things can go in and out of, you can use to "short-cut" the normal three dimensions, but not a separate area where things float out there in the ether.

Quote from: Warthur(And I have to say, I won't be weeping any tears for the disappearance of the Ethereal Plane. I never could understand the material difference between that and the Astral Plane.)

IIRC, there are a Hell of a lot spells that use the Etheral Plane in them. I wonder how they will modify the spells after they get rid of the plane.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineI like it. I wonder if there's still going to be a link with alignment somehow.

 I would hope, or you could certianly house rule, that gods of similar outlook for some reason maybe lost to time, wrested areas out of the chaos to form the heavens just as demonkind wrested areas out of the the chaos to form the Abyss.  

Maybe there is some beneift to banding together, a non-linear effect on the power of the area you control that protects you.  This maybe why the demons are all in one place; purely out of a sense of self preservation even though they hate being crowded and near each other.  Because if they don't stay in thsi "safe space', the other forces would hunt them down one by one if they had scattered realms.  LE and NE to enslae them, G to destroy them.  Of course this has got to make a demon real mean like.

The whole creating a space sound svaguely familiar, something to do with soul wells, and creating a place in the afterworld from the amount of souls you have in your "well."

Quote from: jeff37923IIRC, there are a Hell of a lot spells that use the Etheral Plane in them. I wonder how they will modify the spells after they get rid of the plane.

Considering that the whole spell system is getting redone I doubt that will be hard.

-=Grim=-

Quote from: jeff37923IIRC, there are a Hell of a lot spells that use the Etheral Plane in them. I wonder how they will modify the spells after they get rid of the plane.

Well, it's possible you could still "go ethereal" without the ethereal being a plane.

-O

Heeeeyyyy, could this be the first thing I will like about 4e? Looks like it! Although the names are typical Cheesy Fantasy nonsense (Feywild? Shadowfell? :confused: ), but they look interesting, and what's better, adventurable. One of my biggest problems with the Great Wheel structure, especially as it was presented in Manual of the Planes, is how it discouraged planar adventuring. The planes were mostly uninteresting and deadly. This stuff looks like normal characters may visit them on 5th level or so, and survive. Nice! :cool:

I think its better in some ways and worse than others when compared to the "great wheel"; but mainly its got a couple of mistakes about how its structured that makes me think its no better and possibly worse than the GW.

I'll post more about this on my blog sometime relatively soon, in the next few days.

RPGPundit

Actually it feels not grandiose, but waaaay smaller. Dunno why, just comes of rather smallish in scope.

Quote from: XantherI don't know about you, but the US is about 3,000 miles across, certianly neither unthinkably vast nor undrivably vast.   I think they should add some more zero's hundreds of thousands of miles in extent, now we're getting to a scale comparable to the distance between the Earth and moon.  That's pretty unthinkable when crawlng with demon kind.

Yeah, there was a response to that concern in an ENWorld thread. He meant more like Jupiter's tens of thousands, just worded it badly.

There's also the argument that 3000 miles sounds small when you talk about it being the USA, and much larger when it's 3000 miles of demon-infested hostile planar terrain you travel through on foot.


As with 90% of the tidbits they've released, I'm excited about the new cosmology. In fact, the most excited about it above all other tidbits. And I really don't care what that makes me.