BrainStream: Planes, Manes & Monodrones

[bkdelong]

Well, since the DNC has been over....you'll notice a complete lack of postings of late. Work has been ramping up to our early September publication date & I've been spending a bit more time with Will and my household responsibilities. What free time I have left is spent in the realm of Planescape.

What is that you might ask? Well, Planescape is a setting from Dungeons & Dragons - the pride of nerds & geeks everywhere. But instead of the usual Swords & Sorcery, you get Angels & Demons and a little in between - something that very much appeals to my fascination with spirituality.

Let me give you a quick lesson in Planeography - the study of the planes - as it pertains to D&D's Planescape. The dimension on Earth that we currently live on is the Prime Material. Any other planets, (or worlds in the D&D setting) would be considered Prime Material. It is the traditional location that we live in.

Then you have the Inner Planes or Elemental Planes, the Outer Planes or Spiritual/Alignment Planes and the Transitive Planes. From the Prime Material plane, you have to go through the transitive Ethereal Plane to get to the Inner Planes. The Ethereal Plane is where what we think of as ghosts and spirits would live. It's the physical essense of spirit once we "pass on".

The Elemental Inner Planes are exactally what you think - Earth, Air, Fire Water as well as the Positive & Negative energy planes. And everything in between - the Paraelemental Planes of Ice, Magma, Ooze & Smoke as well as the Quasielemental Planes of Lightning, Radiance, Steam, Ash, Dust, Salt, & Vaccuum.

If you want to go the other way from the Prime to the Outer Planes, you must cross the Astral Plane...which I see as the sort of "mental" transitive plane i.e. Astral Projection or Astral Travel. Your consciousness travels to the Astral - your physical body never does.

The Outer Planes are my favorite. In D&D, you have what are called alignments which essentially represent ethics & values - Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic & Good, Neutral, Evil. Pair them up and you get 9 different possibilities - and an Outer Plane for each alignment. Each alignment also shares a plane with the other alignments around it:

• Lawful Good: Mount Celestia


• Bytopia


• Neutral Good: Elysium


• Beastlands


• Chaotic Good: Arborea


• Ysgard


• Chaotic Neutral: Limbo


• Pandemonium


• Chaotic Evil: Abyss


• Carceri


• Chaotic Neutral: Gray Waste


• Gehenna


• Lawful Evil: Baator


• Acheron


• Lawful Neutral: Mechanus


• Arcadia

And the above list makes a circle With Mechanus sharing Arcadia with Mount Celestia.

Then there's the True Neutral plane of the Outlands which has a "Gatetown" that leads to all the other Outer Planes. Finally, inside the Outlands is an infinite spire - the top of which hovers the great torus-shaped Planar metropolis of Sigil.

Crazy stuff. And what's even cooler is there's thousands of creatures in the Outer Plane - each "resident" of said plane having the alignment of the plane itself. For instance - Devils are Lawful Evil, Fiends are Neutral Evil, & Demons are Chaotic Evil. Fascinating. I'm sure it's similar for various types of Angels and such however you don't often come across Celestials, Guardinals etc. when "fighting monsters".

Other than the Ethereal and Astral Transitive Planes, there is the Plane of Shadow and thought to be a Plane of Void or nothingness as well.

So what does this have to do with my project? For about 3 years now I've been working with the City of Doors Initiative to create an online Role Playing Game adventure set in the Planar metropolis of Sigil using the Neverwinter Nights computer game. We've had lots of ups & downs but we're finally starting the final push to wrap up our first module as well as doing some heavy concentrating on our next project which has really got me excited. As soon as I can release more information on it, I will.

I did want to note one thing that has be absolutely outraged with regard to D&D. A few years ago, Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast - the company that makes D&D - and ever since then, it has steadily gone downhill. Wizards has licensed their Planescape setting to Planewalkers - a group of dedicated fans who are bring the campaign from 2nd Edition, (where it was abandoned by Wizards), up to 3.5 Edition - where all the other D&D stuff is now.

Wizards has, however, recently released a new product called the Planar Handbook to keep their fingers in the Planar cosmology. One of the changes in this book is a small line item mentioned only in passing - the Mechanus Eye.

Here's the description: "This 2-inch diameter metallic orb resembles an eye, though streamlined and idealized. These eyes are purportedly salvaged from secret graveyard cogs on Mechanus, where a demolished race who once claimed the plane now lies forgotten."

Sounds interesting and mysterious, right? No one's ever heard of an extinct race that controlled the lawful neutral plane of Mechanus before the Modrons so someone thought to ask the authors in a chat.

shemeska says, "First of all as one of the writers for Planewalker.com I have to extend a thank you for the inclusion of Faction material, Sigil, and other references from Planescape. As for my question though, why no mention of the Modrons? We only had a tiny reference to them in the MotP, and while there was a web enhancement giving them stats, they've gotten remarkably little exposure despite being the dominant exemplar race of Mechanus."

wotc_andy says, "Modrons, modrons, modrons...the D&D team decided early on in 3E design & development that modrons didn't reflect the direction that we wanted the game to be heading in."

wotc_andy says, "While there are no doubt plenty of ways to portray modrons as something other than goofy-looking polyhedrons, that's a very hard sell."

shemeska says, "..."

wotc_bruce says, "We decided to give more time and development to formorians--those who enjoy modrons have an incredible number of sources to draw upon in regard to them."

...

grayrichardson says, "On page 77 the description of the Mechanus Eye says it is salvaged from an extinct planar race that used to control the plane. Is this a wink towards the Modrons, are they all dead now? Or another race?"

wotc_andy says, "; )"

wotc_andy says, "/ga"

grayrichardson says, "heh heh"

wotc_gwendolyn says, ""Purportedly" It gives a DM lots of wiggle room./ga"

wotc_bruce says, "The reace is referred to as "demolished" not extinct. That might be overstating things, if indeed this is a reference to modrons :-)."

grayrichardson says, "Care to share any speculations as to what happened with them?"

wotc_andy says, "I don't know that any such speculations have occurred. In fact, maybe it didn't happen at all. /ga"

wotc_gwendolyn says, "No comment./ga"

wizo_unicorn says, "Shem, your comment?"

wotc_andy says, "Although you could probably cast some blame on the uber-deities JoT, MoCo, and SkWill. : ) /ga"

Shemeska says, "I didn't expect it to recreate the Planescape setting, but when it deviates from the material that forms the basis for it, I get curious for a reason. Even if it's just 'so and so didn't like it so...' Some little bones to speculate upon as in game reasons to work with"
You say, "/ga"

Demolished, eh? OK - as they said, there is plenty of material to work with if people want to play with Modrons. In fact, when Manual of the Planes was released in the late 1990s, they also added a Web Enhancement specifically about the Modrons. Their "new direction is disappointing and way too convenient however. Page 2 of the document states that there are (or were) 363 Million Modron residing in Mechanus.

Hmmm. To each their own, I suppose.

[BrainStream]
(Permanent link to this entry)

Comments

[ex-desertson422.livejournal.com]

Interesting reading, sir....but one question:

:puppydog eyes:

LJ-Cut, please?

:)

[alun-clewe.livejournal.com]

Personally, I agree with you about the modron thing - I think modrons were a very interesting part of the Planescape setting, and I don't like the move to shove them aside in 3E. But the way I look at it is, 3E isn't Planescape. The default 3E cosmology is not the Planescape cosmology. If the Forgotten Realms can have its own cosmology, then so can other worlds, and the default 3E cosmology is nothing more nor less, as I see it, than the Greyhawk cosmology.

Of course, whether or not having all these different cosmologies is a good idea is another matter, but in any case that's already an established part of 3E. (My take on it is... well... a little complicated, but what it boils down to is that they're all just due to different ways of looking at things, and that a character sees the cosmology he, or his world, believes in...)

All this isn't to say, though, that I'm not still disappointed about some of the changes to the planes in 3E (modrons included). I'm just trying to rationalize them.

(Not particular happy about the dismissal of the Para- and Quasielemental Planes, either...)

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

Sorry about that - I forget that my blog posts get cross-posted from MovableType to LiveJournal.