Some questions for Afro:

1) The 3e D&DG has example monotheistic and dualistic religions in the back, but I can't actually think of any cases where similar religions show up in published settings; even the Silver Flame in Eberron, which appears to be monotheistic at first glance, is syncretic with the Sovereign Host. Do you know of any obscure settings, Spelljammer worlds, etc. that have just one or two gods, or have religions teaching that any other gods besides their one/two god(s) are fakers/demon princes/etc.?

2) Aside from the Spirit Realm of Kara Tur, the Gray and Black of Athas, and the Shadow World of Aebrynis (and kinda sorta Krynn's Ethereal Sea), are there other settings out there that have replacements for or variations on the local Ethereal and/or Shadow Planes?

3) On souls:
a) The fate of the soul after death is fairly well-defined in various materials, but the origin of souls is much less so. Aside from the information on the Wellspring in MoI and the soul fonts in Bastion of Broken Souls, is there any other information on how souls are made, how creatures are ensouled, etc.?
b) What are souls made of? Just pure positive energy (and, if one is using MoI, presumably a bit of essentia), or N parts positive energy to M parts belief-stuff, or...?

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Spoilering the derail:

Spoiler: 3e planar rules
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Quote Originally Posted by Lagtime View Post
Maybe you never played 2E or maybe you only played a homebrew version or something. But a quick list would be things like poison kills, energy drain takes one or more class levels, system shock rolls, and the start of the removal of the save or die effects.
Nope, I've played 1e, 2e, and a bit of BECMI, and the differences are really overblown.
  • 1e has instant-death poison, but only class D poisons kill on a failed save, and they do nothing on a successful save (which is made at +1 vs. assassins or +2 vs. anyone else); 3e has Wyvern Poison and Black Lotus Extract, which deal 4d6 Con and 6d6 Con, respectively, at nontrivial DCs.
  • Energy drain didn't allow a save or have a delay before draining levels, true, but (A) level loss is much less impactful in AD&D when there's less level-dependent stuff and the "catch-up effect" of being lower level is much larger than in 3e, (B) 3e negative levels are much more accessible to NPCs (e.g. enervation) so they lose severity but make up for it in prevalence, and (C) turning undead is much stronger in AD&D so level-draining undead are not nearly as threatening in practice. And remember how I said a lot of 3e changes were stuff people had been houseruling in AD&D for a while? A lot of players hated AD&D energy drain so much that DMs basically didn't use level-draining undead after the first or second time the party ran into them, so in practice the threat is overstated.
  • System shock rolls were removed as a mechanic as a unification thing, since they rolled into Fort saves along with save vs. death magic and save vs. petrification, and they were removed from the polymorph line and other spells because they were intended as a balancing mechanism to prevent your party fighter from being a storm giant all the time but it actually gave the PCs a bunch of effective save-or-dies (2e polymorph other requires 3 rolls [save vs. spells, system shock, and Int check] to not be turned into a newt and squished, 3e baleful polymorph requires just 2 [Fort save and Will save]).
  • There are plenty of save-or-dies in 3e; don't blame 3e for what 4e and 5e did later on. What it doesn't have nearly as many of is no-save-just-dies, which (A) were always an unfun idea, (B) mostly showed up in modules rather than sourcebooks, and (C) were, like energy drain, commonly nerfed or houseruled out due to player/DM dislike.


And then you had the Planescape rules for the magic item 'plus' reduction, clerics being cut off from their gods and getting few spells, and the massive spell alterations for the multiverse.
Spell alterations stuck around in the form of Enhanced, Limited, and Impeded magic traits; clerics don't automatically suffer penalties for being on different planes, but in practice 90% of clerics in Planescape games (as opposed to Clueless clerics who go planeshopping) try to worship causes, elemental gods, or gods with Outlands realms and/or go out of their way to pick up power keys to avoid or strongly mitigate the issue; and magic item plus reduction was removed not to make things better for PCs but because requiring the DM to figure out where every last magic sword was forged and how many planes away the Plane of Fire was from Carceri was a real pain.

Accessible and safe and comfortable are not all the same thing. Only the few complained that "every time my character goes off plane they die": the players that could not handle the more complex rules and settings. Even just a three dimensional fight, common on the planes, is more then some player can handle.
Considering that 3e basically assumes everyone is flying all that time past a certain level, those players would have the same issues in 3e as well.

????

The 3E rules list a couple things that might happen when a character steps through a portal safe and sound.

It does not list all the fun stuff from Planescape books like the Planewalker Handbook. And if you want FR stuff, you can check out the portals in most Undermountain books, plus places like secrets of the magister.
Again, 3e has plenty of unsafe portals. All the one-off portals o' doom like in Undermountain were converted more or less faithfully, and the basic overviews in MotP and FRCS don't go into tons of detail on making portals with more unusual effects (beyond the most common one, teleporting a PC to one place and all their gear to another, which is indeed mentioned in those sections) because 3e has build-your-own-magic-item rules and guidelines that let you add life-draining or whatever else to them if desired.