There are planes you just can’t get rid of. The Nine Hells. The Abyss.
That might be it.
Maybe I’m being a little bit draconian, but hear me out. If you look at the planes as a marketing exercise, let’s say you have limited funds and can only create detailed supplements for a handful of planes, which ones are you going to pick? It’s going to be those two. These are the planes the players are going to want to visit. They’re dramatic, chocked full of danger, brimming with unwavering evil enemies—they are the dungeon expanded.
While nerds like me (and probably you) see the game as this patchwork of works and ideas, most people play D&D as a means to an end—t o blow off some steam, to beat down evil creatures, and make off with the booty. Of course the motivations of individual players vary, but most clerics players could give a crap about where or how they became conduits of a deity’s power. Just point to the undead, and they will provide radiant firepower.
And there is nothing wrong with this. In fact you want a large number of people playing your game (or participating in your entertainment exercise no matter what it is) who simply just enjoy it. They don’t need to know the grand history of the Forgotten Realms. They don’t even need to know about the Blood War…at least not until it pops up as a justification for adventure.
But this is the funny thing about the planes. They aren’t there for those players…at least not directly. RPGs are complicated because they actually have at least two different interfaces and two different users. There are the products for players. Those books are primarily toy catalogs. New things that spark the imagination in the ever elusive goal of making every type of character anyone would want to make. Those products expand as, in the case of D&D, the fantasy genre expands. Want to play Gandalf? Tim? Legolas? Galahad? King Leonidas? Ned Stark? Bill the Vampire? D&D can handle it.
The trap is that these books, when successful, sell a bunch more copies than any other product in RPGs. And copies like to sell a bunch of copies of stuff. I mean who wouldn’t. This only becomes a problem when you look at those poor DM centric products and someone asks the question, how can we make these things sell like the player books?
And then it all just fucking burns.
A bit dramatic? Maybe. But the real problem is that not only do DM-Centric products garner fewer sales, they are harder to get “right.” Why, well there are at least two different groups of DMs.
The first group that crunch center of hardcore D&D DMing nerds. I’ll stand up; I’m one. There are some days that D&D annoys the living crap out of me. Why couldn’t have I taken up gardening? Bah! D&D is awesome. It’s creative, it’s social, it’s engaging. Video games are neat, but give me my old fashion RPG any day.
The second group consists of those reluctant DMs. DMs who do it because it is their turn in the round-robin. The DM who is running D&D Encounters or Living Forgotten Realms, the DM who does it because they have to do it; because if they don’t other people don’t have fun.
Graphically striking, inventive, and fun, Planescape was a breath of fresh air into the D&D planes.
There’s overlap between these two groups. Often those hardcore DMs become reluctant DMs for an event or two, or twenty. Reluctant DMs may actually become motivated to be those hardcore DMs.
Often the hardcore DM and the reluctant DM want different things from their DM-Centric product. Both enjoy tools for their game table, and there has always been a market for good tools for D&D; from dice, to minis, to DM screens, to initiative trackers, to tiles and mats. But the reluctant DM is not interested in books on setting material (at least not most of the time). That’s the stuff for the hardcore DM and his wayfaring cousin the reader. And that’s why we see so few of it these days. Not only does it serve only a fraction of potential sales, it’s actually harder for that group to get on board with a single product. That’s why you had a proliferation of settings in 2e. I think they were always looking for right combination to get as many of those people on board. I also think there was some aggravation that Forgotten Realms came closest.
But I think you can still make hardcore game products for hardcore DMs. I think Pathfinder is actually doing it (and will continue to do it with the success of Paizo’s player-centric books), but I actually think there is room in the market for at least two or three other world-building companies. They’ll never get huge, but I think you can squeak by a geeky good living as long you manage it correctly.
The more I play with the current 4e planes, the more I think they were designed for the wrong D&D user… I think they are a player and reluctant DM solution to a hardcore DM problem—creating a fun and coherent setting that they can uses or steal from. Heck if Warhammer 40,000 can do it (and that’s got orcs in space) D&D can do it. In fact it has done it in the past.
So what is my all time favorite DM-centric story project? Planescape. Though sometime silly (the cant can be a bit much at time) and obviously a reaction to Vampire: The Masquerade, it Battlestar Galactica’d the planes before Battlestar Galactica did it to itself.
And now that you know my biases, here’s a question for all you hardcore DMs there. What would the best planar supplement look like? What do you desperately want from the D&D multiverse? Which version hits the spot?
Manual of the Planes, the first one, is my favorite. I appreciate Planescape, but it was secondary to the way information was provided in MoP. In terms of what I would like, I think I want ideas. The elemental planes have always been my favorite (maybe due to ToEE) and I always wanted more “stuff” within all that space. I want more great encounters, more cool locations, more linked adventures, more lore. MoP just set it up really nicely and then needed a better cousin that could complement it and really facilitate adventure in those areas. Also, I want complexity that is simple – for example, I want to fully feel different fighting in a plane of water in three dimensions and have that be totally different than the plane of air/fire/earth in three dimensions. But, the rules should be simple. Simple plus flavor with plenty of showing the way so that planar excursions feel totally rich and new and yet just about any DM can do it.
There are a lot of things I like about the original MotP, but I felt like it dealt with it too clinically. That’s why I like Planescape so much. It had all that stuff with an interesting story and setting.
Let me say two things here up front. First, I love 4E, and it is my chosen edition. Second, I tend to ramble, so the below can be summed up as “Give me something new in my DM setting books and make sure that it is relevant to the levels that I am gaming at currently”. (feel free to read the rest if you like, as it expands this to a large extent)
I’m a relatively new gamer (I started just after 3rd Edition hit the scene), and what I really look for in a DM setting book is novelty. I’m actually so tired of the Abyss and the 9 Hells that convincing me to pick up a book on either would be difficult. Those two locations to me seem to be almost tapped out in terms of creativity. Most of the books on either location are devoted to rehashing the ideas of past editions into the new edition’s format, and that can get boring. The non-boring parts of the book are the totally new creations. (like Oublivae and her new realm)
I need books that offer me completely new things, and that’s why the DM setting book that I like the most from this edition is hands down Underdark. The entire mythos of Torog permeates the book, and being a totally new construct for this edition it lends a shininess to the whole book. It feels fresh and original, and not like a rehash. which makes the book even more impressive since I had given up on the Underdark as a setting since it seemed even more tired than the Abyss and the 9 Hells.
The other main issue that I have is that I want a DM setting book that is relevant to the levels that I am playing at. I have yet to reach the Epic tier in any game that I am playing in, and the Abyss and the 9 Hells have always been Epic level planes. I know that there are a host of Devils and demons that I can use at any tier, but if my PCs are actually venturing into these extremely hostile environments, it’s basically an Epic campaign at that point.
The 2 books that I have been waiting on for the entirety of this edition are the books detailing the Shadowfell and the Feywild. They are totally new for this edition and we have only heard snippets about them here and there in other products. (a lot of what we have heard is in the previously mentioned Underdark book and the woefully low page counts in the Manual of the Planes) They feature completely new gods, races, interactions, and most importantly, they would be highly relevant to my Heroic/Paragon campaigns immediately upon release.
The other plane that I have been desperately wanting more detail on since 3.5 is the Plane of Dreams from Eberron. I want to see all of my quori nightmare creatures in print, and to have the Plane of Dreams as a full fledged plane to adventure in, not just as a 2 page spread in the Manual of the Planes, and a passing mention in the Eberron campaign setting. It was the most depressing part of 4E Eberron for me, and I am still holding out for at least a Dragon/Dungeon article with more crunch/fluff.
I’m glad you liked Underdark. That was a hard book to get working together. While at first I was not convinced that Torog could play star, and Rob Heinsoo was gracious enough to listen to the development team’s concern and make changes, the goal was to have Torog worm its way through that book.
I actually think that having a large, complex multiverse gives more room for those people looking for novelty while you can still give the grognards the places they like.
I don’t dislike the new cosmology, I just want something bigger, with more working parts, and that looks a little like the older one of yore. I got this comment on Twitter:
phoenix_red @NeoGrognard I usually just assume that all the different cosmologies are interpretations that scholars in the relevant setting argue about.
I like this idea a lot too. The idea that who knows what the cosmos look like, the models we have are the people of the setting taking their best guess (through our own fictional narrative, of course). It’s like a dream in a dream. I feel like I’m watching Inception all over again.
THAT is a pretty cool idea in and of itself. Afterall, other than adventurers who really travels the planes? I could even see a campaign that’s designed with the goal of actually mapping them being the overall quest.
I’m not at all against the old structure either. It’s just that at this point in my D&D career, those options are old hat. As much as I love what Gary, Dave, and all of the other authors have done since the beginning of the game, I want to see what the current WotC staff and freelancers bring to the table.
However, I’ll take whatever you guys do have the time to give me, and I don’t begrudge these people their new Abyss and 9 Hells books. I just hope to see the Shadowfell, Feywild, and Realm of Dreams get their day in this edition.
I consider myself a reluctant DM, but I expect that I will soon cross that magical threshold into hardcore DM sometime soon in my life. In my opinion, I love the depth and complexity of Planescape, too. While I never was able to actually play a single encounter using Planescape, I still bought the books because I loved the fluff of the setting. I loved that it tied all of these disparate pieces together in something coherent.
I think the D&D multiverse has simplified too far. While the concept of demiplanes and the like recover some of the original tenets of Planescape, I think most of us are going to end up homeruling the current 4E multiverse to look more like its predecessors.