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ArgentumRegio
2018-06-11, 09:20 PM
I'm an old school D&D guy. DM since 1978.

My games library stopped growing at 3.5e for reasons.

I'm not up on the latest versions so I'm asking you other readers here to help me wrap my head around something.

Old school Planes would have it that the various (infinite) Prime Material Planes are each universes unto themselves and may have not only different histories but also differing laws of physics. Old school would have it that these planes are touched at all points by the Ethereal Plane, which also touches on all points to the Elemental Planes. Old school would have it that the Astral Plane works similarly to the Ethereal Plane does with respect to the Outer Planes. All of this paragraph hinges on me being the 'old' part in old school here, not mis-recollecting the details. :D

A fellow recently posited that they could - based on the core rules of 5e, walk from any Prime Material plane to any Elemental Plane.

The citation was thus: 5th edition DM,s guide, pg 52 under Inner Planes states "The Inner Planes surround and enfold the Material Plane and it's echoes, providing the raw elemental substance from which all worlds were made. The four Elemental Planes- Air, Earth, Fire and Water- form a ring around the Material Plane, suspended within a churning realm known as the Elemental Chaos. These planes are all connected, and the border regions are sometimes described as distinct planes in their own right. At their innermost edges, where they are closest to the material plane (in a conceptual if not literal geographical sense), the four Elemental Planes resemble places in the Material Plane."

Have they changed things so much that the Ethereal Plane is not a thing anymore? What's this 'all the planes are connected' stuff? It used to be you needed magic such as Plane Shift, or Etherealness, Gate, Portal (spell/effect/access), etc. to transit to another (Inner or Outer) Plane. Has this all changed? Or is something missing here?

KillianHawkeye
2018-06-11, 09:44 PM
It seems that 5e is using a mix of 4e and pre-4e cosmology, what with the repositioning of the Elemental Planes and references to the "Elemental Chaos".

But it's been possible to traverse the planes without powerful magic at least since the days of 2e Planescape, where there's just a bunch of natural portals connecting pretty much everything (if you have the proper keys to use them).

I'm pretty sure the Ethereal Plane is still around in 5e, too. There's just no reason to get rid of it.

Anymage
2018-06-12, 12:33 AM
DMG P.48 mentions the ethereal.

Long story on the changes cut very short, TSR era D&D (and by extension 3e) often embraced conceptual symmetry over having places where cool stuff happened. For better or worse, 4e decided to overturn lots of that, insisting that every place that existed had to work as a cool adventure locale. 5e, very consciously hewing to tradition, tries to combine both 4e and classic ideas as best as possible.

Eldan
2018-06-12, 02:44 AM
They probably mean "connected" more in the Planescape sense that there's magical regions where it's possible to easily cross from one plane to another. Like accidentally wandering into the faerie world in mythology by taking the wrong turn in the forest.

Blacky the Blackball
2018-06-12, 04:29 AM
I'm an old school D&D guy. DM since 1978.

My games library stopped growing at 3.5e for reasons.

I'm not up on the latest versions so I'm asking you other readers here to help me wrap my head around something.

Here's a simplified summary of how the planes have changed from edition to edition, in case that helps:

In the "three books" of OD&D, we have a simple scale of ascending afterlife realms with seven heavenly planes "above" us and nine infernal planes "below" us. Souls travel through the Astral plane to get to them, but there's no spells that enable living creatures to travel from one plane to another.
The OD&D supplements and magazines add the Ethereal and inner planes (Elemental and Energy) although the inner planes are not organised in any kind of strucure. They also introduce the "Great Wheel" of outer planes, with many other afterlife locations and abodes of the gods. The outer planes are all based on real-world mythological places (Heaven, Paradise, Elysium, Happy Hunting Grounds, Asgard, Olympus, Limbo, Pandemonium, The Abyss, Tarterus, Hades, Gehenna, Hell, Acheron, Nirvana, and Arcadia). Of the outer planes, only Heaven and Hell have multiple layers.
Core AD&D organises the inner planes into a cube, adds mulitple layers to most of the outer planes, and adds the plane of Concordant Opposition in the centre of the great wheel.
The AD&D Manual of the Planes (with help from the various monster books) adds para-elemental planes on the borders between the elemental planes (Ooze between earth and water, Ice between water and air, Smoke between air and fire, and Magma between fire and earth). It also adds a whole bunch of quasi-elemental planes on the borders between the elemental planes and the positive energy plane (Radiance, Lightning, Steam, and Mineral) and between the elemental planes and the negative energy plane (Ash, Vacuum, Salt, and Dust). Together, the inner planes now form a rhombicuboctahedron. It also splits the ethereal plane into a single "deep" ethereal and a "border" ethereal for each plane it touches; and it also introduces the Plane of Shadow and the Plane of Time as independent planes floating in the ethereal but not connected to the inner planes. It's also this book that gives us many of the iconic descriptions of the planes - Nirvana as full of clockwork gears, the Twin Paradises as having two planes facing each other, Limbo as a realm of swirling elemental chaos, and so forth.
Planescape (for 2e AD&D) mostly keeps the same planes as the AD&D Manual of the Planes, but - partly in line with its renaming of demons and devils (to avoid offending concerned mothers) and partly in order to be able to copyright the names of the planes - renames most of the outer planes (e.g. Hell becomes BaatorTM, Nirvana becomes MechanusTM, the Happy Hunting Grounds become the BeastlandsTM, the Twin Paradises becomes BytopiaTM, and so forth). It also changes the nature of the plane of Concordant Opposition (while renaming it to the OutlandsTM and adds the city of Sigil to its centre.
Third edition ditches the quasi- and para- elemental planes, making the inner planes simpler, but otherwise changes little from the Planescape version.
Fourth edition completely re-writes the cosmology, while simplifying it - although most of its elements are recognisable from the earlier versions. It drops most of the planes completely, and re-arranges and renames those that are left. You end up with the prime plane sandwiched between the Astral Sea (formerly the Astral Plane) above and the Elemental Chaos (formerly Limbo) below. The Abyss is now a corrupted part of the Elemental Chaos, and many of the other former outer planes are now locations within the Astral Sea. The inner planes have mostly gone (replaced by the Elemental Chaos), but the Plane of Shadow has been upgraded to the Shadowfell and the Feywild is introduced, which is based on the second layer of Asgard (or YsgardTM).
Fifth edition now uses a compromise between the fourth edition cosmology and the one shared by the earlier editions. The inner planes are back, with both elemental and para-elemental (but not quasi-elemental or energy) although the diagram of them now shows them arranged like a pinwheel rather than a cube, and in a nod to 4e it refers to them collectively as the "Elemental Chaos" rather than the "inner planes". The Great Wheel is also back, using the post-2e names for the planes. However, 4e's Feywild and Shadowfell have remained.


Old school Planes would have it that the various (infinite) Prime Material Planes are each universes unto themselves and may have not only different histories but also differing laws of physics. Old school would have it that these planes are touched at all points by the Ethereal Plane, which also touches on all points to the Elemental Planes. Old school would have it that the Astral Plane works similarly to the Ethereal Plane does with respect to the Outer Planes. All of this paragraph hinges on me being the 'old' part in old school here, not mis-recollecting the details. :D

That's pretty much right, although whether there was a single Ethereal touching all the parallel primes or whether they each had their own Ethereal (or even each had their own entire set of inner planes) was inconsistent. They definitely all shared a single Astral plane though.


A fellow recently posited that they could - based on the core rules of 5e, walk from any Prime Material plane to any Elemental Plane.

The citation was thus: 5th edition DM,s guide, pg 52 under Inner Planes states "The Inner Planes surround and enfold the Material Plane and it's echoes, providing the raw elemental substance from which all worlds were made. The four Elemental Planes- Air, Earth, Fire and Water- form a ring around the Material Plane, suspended within a churning realm known as the Elemental Chaos. These planes are all connected, and the border regions are sometimes described as distinct planes in their own right. At their innermost edges, where they are closest to the material plane (in a conceptual if not literal geographical sense), the four Elemental Planes resemble places in the Material Plane."

This fellow is mostly wrong.

There are occasional points (e.g. in the heart of a volcano or deep in the sea) where there might be a natural gate/vortex/wormhole/call-it-what-you-will that directly connects the Prime to one of the Elemental Planes, but most of the time you still need to Plane Shift there or go through the Ethereal. That's always been the case, though.


Have they changed things so much that the Ethereal Plane is not a thing anymore? What's this 'all the planes are connected' stuff? It used to be you needed magic such as Plane Shift, or Etherealness, Gate, Portal (spell/effect/access), etc. to transit to another (Inner or Outer) Plane. Has this all changed? Or is something missing here?

You still do need that. They haven't changed that much. Even the bit where you can now walk from the Plane of Air through the border region of ice to the Plane of Water is fundamentally no different to how it was in the AD&D Manual of the Planes. You always used to be able to do that.

What they have done is make the elemental planes a bit more hospitable. There is the concept of being "close to" or "far away from" the Prime - and the conditions in the elemental planes are less extreme if you are close to the Prime, making it easier to set adventures there. But even at their closest to the Prime, you can't simply walk there; you still have to go through the Ethereal or Plane Shift.

PairO'Dice Lost
2018-06-12, 05:12 PM
Long story on the changes cut very short, TSR era D&D (and by extension 3e) often embraced conceptual symmetry over having places where cool stuff happened.

This is a pretty unfair characterization. All of the planes in AD&D and 3e already were cool and well-detailed adventure locales; for instance, the Inner Planes are often described online as "big stretches of boring elements where nothing happens," but in fact they got good writeups in the 1e and 2e Manual of the Planes, and the 2e book Inner Planes went into detail about a handful of famous sites, common monsters, genie civilizations, links to other planes, and so forth for each of the six planes, including planar metropolises where characters without fire resistance, flight, water breathing, or similar protections can survive when arriving on the plane.

The perception of planes being largely uncool comes from the lack of modules set anywhere but the Lower Planes (since no one wants to write a module about barging into the Seven Heavens and killing archons), because fiends being evil doesn't have to be explained, demons look cooler on module covers, and so on. As a result, most people can name the Lower Planes and a few fun layers for each, place them in order in the Great Wheel, and name some iconic planar lords, while they mix up the Upper Planes and their planar lords and can't remember all of the para- and quasi-elemental planes, and grumble that nothing ever happens there.

Though, ironically enough, the Lower Planes were overused to the point of becoming a bit uncool themselves. The same thing happened with the Far Realm in 4e splatbooks and the 4e Forgotten Realms novels: suddenly Far Realms monsters were the big threats du jour and it went from a nice taste of horror and a fertile playground for the imagination to "Man, we're getting 'eldritch geometries' and 'squamous tentacles' again?"

Combining the Inner Planes into the Elemental Chaos in 4e was a big misstep, I think. Oh, yay, you don't have single themed environments, you have mixes of elements...well, guess what, the name for a place where you can run into earth and water and air and mud and plants all in the same place is the bleeping Material Plane! They sacrificed a lot of adventuring potential by making the planes more "accessible" and it didn't really pan out.

Darth Ultron
2018-06-12, 05:27 PM
Have they changed things so much that the Ethereal Plane is not a thing anymore? What's this 'all the planes are connected' stuff? It used to be you needed magic such as Plane Shift, or Etherealness, Gate, Portal (spell/effect/access), etc. to transit to another (Inner or Outer) Plane. Has this all changed? Or is something missing here?

The Elemental Planes as a Ring around the Prime Plane goes all the way back to the 1E Players Handbook. Though by 2E the Elemental planes were a sphere with the Prime as the core and the Ethereal all around(and the mantle too).

The Ethereal Plane has always been the 'ocean' where the Inner Planes float.

And 'all' the Planes have always been 'connected', more or less.

2E Planescape had the idea that one could ''walk'' from Plane to Plane, to make the Multiverse more accessible to non-spellcasters. Though it was not pure ''mundane'' walking as you would need to take a Gate at some point. And Planescape had the idea that there were plenty of Gates around to be found and used by the non-spellcasters.

4E and 5E have kept the more Accessible Planes idea.

Millstone85
2018-06-15, 10:07 AM
Fifth edition now uses a compromise between the fourth edition cosmology and the one shared by the earlier editions. The inner planes are back, with both elemental and para-elemental (but not quasi-elemental or energy) although the diagram of them now shows them arranged like a pinwheel rather than a cube, and in a nod to 4e it refers to them collectively as the "Elemental Chaos" rather than the "inner planes". The Great Wheel is also back, using the post-2e names for the planes. However, 4e's Feywild and Shadowfell have remained.This was a very interesting summary of the editions, but I know that part is wrong.

In 5e, the Inner Planes include:
* the four Elemental Planes of Fire, Air, Water and Earth.
* their border regions of Ash (not Smoke), Ice, Ooze and Magma.
* the Elemental Chaos, which isn't a collective name for anything.

The Elemental Chaos is connected to the "outermost regions" of the Elemental Planes, where they are uniform expanses of elemental powers. These expanses collide in the Elemental Chaos, making it an hostile environment even for elementals themselves, let alone for adventurers. Between this and the loss of the Limbo aspects of the 4e EC, I am not sure why 5e has an EC.

As a side note, 5e does have energy planes, Positive and Negative, in addition to the Feywild and Shadowfell. However, they are not considered to be among the Inner Planes.