Perhaps I'll come up with an explanation for why they are separate (or somebody does that before me and I copy it) and make an adventure or keep it a mystery. But that is for later. (Allthough I'll definately involve the World Dragons in some way)
Personaly I'm going to keep them separated, but allow access through the Shadow plane (and Sigil of course) and perhaps some other ways I haven't thought of yet.
Another thing that interests me how the inhabitants of Sigil (and possibly other planar inhabitants) would treat the inhabitants of Eberron.
The traditional races are pretty obvious. The Shifters, Changelings and Kalashtar are pretty mundane on a planar scale (people with lycanthrope, doppelganger and psionic creature ancestry in said order). The Warforged might raise some minor interest however.
The Warforged are intelligent, sentient, living constructs created for war. They have souls however. This would certaintly raise some interest among fiends who are eager to find foo- Err... I mean customers, certain people who are interested in their construction, the people who think they are objects and the odd person whose reason I can't think of at the moment.
I guess that the Athar (created by men and yet they have souls?) and The Fraterity of Order (same reason they are interested in Modrons I guess) would be interested in them once they knew of them and other factions gaining interest shortly after that
Then there are the Dragonmarks.
The Dragonmarks are magical symbols that pass on in family lines and and all the traditional races have their own marks. Each mark has its own special power and the families have organized into Houses specialized in using their mark for business.
Some examples are House Lyrandar and House Jorasco. Lyrandar controlls weather and Jorcasco controlls healing (infact nearly all healing is done by House Jorasco as clerics are rare and would most likely be insulted if they were asked to heal for mere gold, and that's if the person who needed help belonged to the religion).
Anyone who wanted to break in to the market in would have to deal with these Houses and I guess the opposite is true.
The new class, the Artificer, deals with magical items, either creating them, destroying them for XP, or making normal items temporarily magical. As I see it they would most likely be seen as just another mage, right?
Please post your opinion. (Even if it's: Describing all this Eberron stuff was totaly un-necessary. Baaaka :P)
Or you could treat their planes as unique manifestations of that world's belief altering their sphere's interaction and connection to the planes of the wheel.
I've not read much on the setting, so I'm probably not a big help here. I may eventually get the setting, but I'm not dropping my current campaign at any point soon.
Originally posted by Joni-san
[b]As you may or may not know Eberron has a cosmology separate from the great ring/wheel of Planescape. I was wondering how you are going to deal with this?
Some of the new Eberron creatures are interesting enough that they deserve to be incorporated into the Planescape cosmology, says I. So the planes which are obviously equivalents of one another might as well be the same, in order to expediate this.
The notion of different planes coming in and out of alignment with one another is also interesting enough to become part of a Planescape campaign.
"Sigil has gateway to everywhere, including the Realms. It's not a feature of the Realms, but of Sigil."
Regardless of the world's cosmology, there's always the Great Wheel. You just may have to pass through Sigil to reach it, because it's not necessarily your world's outer, inner and transitive planes; but the Great Wheel is always there, wrapped around the ring that is Sigil.
I suppose if you use Eberron with Planescape, you can use the Great Wheel as the Outer Planes, and each of the planes from Eberron's orrery-like cosmology as the various Primes of that universe.
Originally posted by Gez
I suppose if you use Eberron with Planescape, you can use the Great Wheel as the Outer Planes, and each of the planes from Eberron's orrery-like cosmology as the various Primes of that universe.
Since most of Eberron's planes are identical to the planes of the Wheel in all but name, that seems unnecessarily complicated. Just put them where their Planescape equivalents are, and say the borders between them and Eberron occasionally become thinner (as the Planar Breaches in the Planar Handbook).
Daanvi is Arcadia. It's exactly like Arcadia. It's disingenous to pretend it's not Arcadia.
Dal Quor is the Region of Dreams. In Planescape, that means it's the Curtain of Vaporous Color. It doesn't look like an ethereal curtain to you? It doesn't to dreamers, either.
Dolurrh is the Underworld. Planescape has three Underworlds to choose from (the Forgotten Realms one, the Olympian one, and the Yggdrasilian one). They're all realms in the Gray Waste, even if they're not evil. Dolurrh has all the traits the Gray Waste has, except the evil one. Again, it seems stupid to pretend it's not a realm in the Gray Waste, unless of course you're playing in a campaign without the Gray Waste in it.
Fernia is the Elemental Plane of Fire. I mean, come on.
Irian could actually be a unique demiplane, although it could also be part of the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral.
Kythri is Limbo. If I were playing in a game where the DM tried to convince me that Kythri and Limbo were different places in the same multiverse, I would laugh hysterically for an hour. And probably not be invited back to the game, but that's neither here nor there, and it's certainly not in Limbo.
Lemannia is pretty unique. It seems to be Eberron's take on the Spirit World, which means it could be kind of a variant Border Ethereal Plane, if you go by Planescape's precedents. It could also be a realm in the Outlands.
Mabar is pretty close to the Negative Energy Plane. If it's not the Negative Energy Plane, it's a demiplane that's pretty close to it, cosmologically speaking.
Risia is the Paraelemental Plane of Ice.
Shavarath might be a chunk of Acheron or the Gray Waste that was torn loose from the Ring when the archons got involved in the fight. Or it might just be a realm in Acheron or the Gray Waste.
Syrania could conceivably be some hidden pocket-realm the aasimon have set up where the other inhabitants of the Great Ring can't easily reach them, but more likely it's a realm in the sky of Solania, the crystal heaven.
The Seelie Court moves between the upper and chaotic planes in Planescape, while the Unseelie Court in in Pandemonium. That's probably what Thelania is, unless you want to set up some kind of rivalry between the two Seelie and two Unseelie courts. Seems unnecessarily complex to me.
And Xoriat is the Far Realm.
I'm not saying that creating a seperate cosmology for a seperate campaign world is a bad idea. I just think that if you have two cosmologies in the same campaign, they should be substantially different from another to keep the PCs from getting skeptical and bored. Neither the Eberron cosmology nor the Forgotten Realms cosmology qualifies without major surgery.
The Warforged are intelligent, sentient, living constructs created for war. They have souls however. This would certaintly raise some interest among fiends who are eager to find foo- Err... I mean customers, certain people who are interested in their construction, the people who think they are objects and the odd person whose reason I can't think of at the moment.
Yeah so are Modrons and Inevitables... Pretty staple creatures from the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus
Eberron & the Great Ring aren't really that well suited for each other. Sigil could easily fit in as a Strange city with doors opening into various realms on Khorvaire.
Yes certain planes in the Eberron cosmology are similar to the established planes of the great ring... but in some respects thats just gonna happen. I for one really enjoy the new cosmology of Eberron. It's interesting and familiar (Can you say Moorecock?).
Originally posted by primemover003
Eberron & the Great Ring aren't really that well suited for each other. Sigil could easily fit in as a Strange city with doors opening into various realms on Khorvaire.
Yes certain planes in the Eberron cosmology are similar to the established planes of the great ring... but in some respects thats just gonna happen. I for one really enjoy the new cosmology of Eberron. It's interesting and familiar (Can you say Moorecock?).
I agree with you in part. If I were running an Eberron-based campaign I would use that campaign's cosmology for the sake of a more immersive Eberron experience. Might as well go into it whole hog.
But by the same token, I would use the Planescape cosmology, more or less, in a Planescape campaign, even in one that used Eberron as one of its Prime worlds. The notion of various parts of the Great Ring and the Inner Planes moving in and out of sync with the world is exotic enough without adding in unnecessary redundancies. The planes that aren't exact copies of Planescape planes could be demiplanes or whatever, to taste.
My argument would be different if this were the general Planes forum instead of the Planescape forum.
The Eberron cosmology does remind me of the one Moorcock used in his Swords trilogy and the way he used the Mittelmarch in The Dragon in the Sword. It also presents the possibility of a Conjunction of the Million Spheres, without the million part.
In a campaign that uses Monte Cook's Endless Planes cosmology, which is even more Moorcockian, I would actually be more likely to treat, for example, Kythri and Limbo as the same plane unless I had a really good idea for how they would interact as seperate but parallel worlds (maybe in one the githzerai have no ruler and all worship Ygorl).
I don't agree that really similar planes were inevitable. It wouldn't have been hard to change a few fundamental details here and there. The reason they didn't is probably that it's more convenient for the DM to be able to refer to the Manual of the Planes to get more detail on the various planes rather than having to wait for a Eberron-specific planes supplement that might not be out for years, if ever. I don't think that was a bad decision (maybe I don't want two really different variants of the Far Realm, for example), but it does mean that it would be weird and awkward to try using both cosmologies in the same campaign.
Player: Weren't we just here last week?
Originally posted by nick012000
Personally, I would say that Eberron is just another crystal sphere floating in the phlogiston. Its planes are more crystal spheres that cling to it like limpets on a ship, with connections via astral conduits as well, which increase and decrease in length when the plane is waxing and waning.
*GRIN* That's the first time that I've ever heard a plane referred to as a limpet.
