4th Edition Planes: Interview with the Writers of the Manual of the Planes

Continuing with our interview series on the planar options available nowadays to Planewalker...

There have been a lot of questions floating around our forums from our members on Planewalker about the planes in 4th edition, and a good bit of wondering just where their own Planescape adventures would fit best. So I wanted to get some insight from the authors of the 4th edition Manual of the Planes on their approach to the Planes, and how they feel the Planes may be best used in a game.

They were willing to sit down to a few questions over a steaming cup of razorvine tea and dish a little about what went into their version of the planes. Pretty enthusiastic about it too really! So, please take a moment to sit back and see what they have to say about their new book and how they would use it in a planar campaign.

Clueless: First off, let's give some credit where credit is due. Can you tell me who worked on the planes for 4th edition?

Rich Baker: Lots of people, really. The broad plan for the 4th Edition cosmology came out of discussions for the Forgotten Realms revision team: Myself, Bruce Cordell, and Phil Athans. Later on our World Design team, codename SCRAMJET, concepted many of the deities and sites in the planes. SCRAMJET consisted of myself, Chris Perkins, Stacy Longstreet, Matt Sernett, Michele Carter, James Wyatt, and Ed Stark. Finally you’ve got the team who actually worked on the 4th Edition Manual of the Planes: me, James Wyatt, Rob Schwalb, and John Rogers. James did the Elemental Chaos chapter, Rob did the Shadowfell, John worked on the Feywild, and I covered the Astral Sea.

Clueless: What was the design approach behind 4th edition's planes?

Rich Baker: *Maximum playability*. We wanted to make sure that every plane we described was accessible to player characters and loaded with adventure opportunities. For example, the planes of earlier editions included a number of good-aligned planes that very few DMs ever used in play, and elemental planes that were completely hostile to life. Those are the sort of things we reexamined in the new edition.

James Wyatt: Of course planes where good creatures and deities live have to exist in the cosmology, and our approach to those planes is similar to how we describe similar places in the world: They’re “points of light” in the larger darkness. Celestia or the Bright City of Hestavar are like the civilized regions of the Astral Sea, which you can use as launching points for your adventures into the depths of Hell or the ruins of Kalandurren. Of course, they can also serve as adventure locales in their own right, just like big cities in the world.

Clueless: What sort of dominant arrangement describes the 4th edition planes?

Rich Baker: I must have drawn this diagram a hundred times in concept meetings and discussions. The cosmos looks like a bobbin or wire spool, where the mortal world lies between two vast seas—the Elemental Chaos, which is the raw matter of creation from which the world was shaped, and the Astral Sea, which is the starry sea of thought and soul and conception. I call it the “World Axis” cosmology. The world also has “echoes” or parallel planes in the form of the Shadowfell and the Feywild. The Great Wheel of previous editions is gone; instead, the astral dominions and elemental domains of gods, devils, demons, etc., exist as islands (sometimes world-islands) in the Astral or Elemental planes.

Rob Schwalb: One of things I like best about the new planar cosmology is that there’s no “dead” space. Everything has a place, a purpose, and the ability to serve as an adventure site, a backdrop for several adventures, or even as a world for an entire campaign. You could, for example, run a campaign that never actually leaves the Feywild or might be confined to one of the dominions floating in the Astral Sea. This said, almost everything from the Great Wheel cosmology survives in some form or fashion, though recast to fit within the new planar structure, even if it’s not immediately apparent. The Domains of Dread now live in the Shadowfell and there are areas that can easily pass for the Negative Energy Plane. Even if there’s something absent, the new cosmology is inclusive, making it easy as heck to bolt on an “outer plane” with little trouble at all.

Clueless: What are the top adventuring stomping grounds or metropolises in the planes?

Rob Schwalb: As far as planar metropolises, Sigil and the City of Brass offer plenty of adventure opportunities, as they always have. We also created new places too. For example, I designed Gloomwrought for the Shadowfell. Inspired by the film Dark City, I created the place to be a living city, where buildings rise and fall, where streets change, gates move, where strange people maintain the city and keep it healthy, and where the populace lives in willful ignorance about the weirdness of their environs. While the city exudes an unsettling flavor, it is big enough and important enough for it to stand as a hub for Shadowfell exploration and to be a melting pot for the various peoples roaming the mortal world’s dark reflection.

Rich Baker: Some of the best adventuring opportunities out there are what we call the ruined dominions—former godly domains in the Astral Sea that have been destroyed or abandoned. Some examples are Pandemonium, which once was the dominion of Tharizdun, the god of madness; Shom, a desert plane filled with mysterious monuments; or Pluton, which was once the realm of Nerull, god of the dead. You could have almost *anything* out there, and it’s a great challenge to throw at epic-level characters.

Clueless: Is the concept of 'belief affects reality' still a large part of the new planes?

Rich Baker: Not so much, really. This isn’t about revisiting the Planescape Campaign Setting; it’s about creating adventures in the planes for heroes who begin in the mortal world. That said, Sigil still boasts a number of factions, many organized around strange philosophies.

Clueless: What is the major conflict in the 4th edition planes about?

Rich Baker: The gods versus the primordials. The gods had their origins in mighty astral spirits back in the very beginning of things; the primordials are incarnations of elemental power. Gods and primordials together created the mortal world long ago, and then fought over it. Even though the gods came out on top, the primordials and their minions still represent a grave threat to the mortal world and the godly dominions. Most primordials are bound or hiding, but crazy bad guys are just always trying to let one out.

James Wyatt: There’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a few years now, that you might have a campaign where you spend the first 20 levels of your career fighting evil, particularly devils or the servants of evil gods. When you get into epic levels, though, you suddenly find that you have to join forces with the evil guys you’ve been fighting in order to stave off a much more significant threat, which are the primordials. Good and evil want to rule the world, and they fight together over how to do it. The chaotic forces of the primordials, though, want to tear the world down and completely destroy it, which would leave good and evil nothing left to rule.

Clueless: What are the top planar races?

Rich Baker: You’ll still run into plenty of demons, devils, githyanki, and other such planar denizens. We’ve re-imagined some other races. For example, the eladrins—formerly the Chaotic Good equivalent of demons or devils—are the chief civilization of the Feywild, the Plane of Faerie, in the 4th Edition cosmology. Many eladrins are basically “high elves,” not all that different from people who live in the mortal world. But noble eladrin are often “archfey,” every bit as powerful in their own right as archdevils or demon lords.

James Wyatt: There are some new faces in the planes as well—I’m thinking particularly of the archons, a new race of elemental soldiers introduced (in fire and ice varieties) in the Monster Manual. Efreets are major power players in the Elemental Chaos now, with the City of Brass being the most significant (and stable) settlement there. And angels, of course, are the servants of the gods—all the gods, not just the good ones.

Clueless: Who are the top leaders of the planar races and what are they trying to accomplish?

James Wyatt: Gods, demon princes, primordials, archdevils—including Asmodeus, who is also a god, the archfey of the Feywild, the rulers of the efreets, the githyanki lich-queen . . . They all have their own agendas, to be sure. In general, the folks in the lower third of the cosmology would like to destroy the middle third and perhaps the upper third as well, if they can get to it. Primordials are at least potentially creators as well as destroyers—they’re not opposed to the existence of the world, just to it being such a calm and stable place. Folks in the upper third of the cosmology espouse ethical ideas and advance specific portfolios of interests, trying to spread their influence through the world or control it. Folks in the middle are a lot harder to characterize.

Clueless: What are the best sorts of plot that the 4th edition planes would be open to in a game?

Rich Baker: Well, first and foremost, we want the game experience of the planes to be more epic, more grand, but not necessarily a different game. So you don’t go to the planes because you’re tired of fighting monsters, stopping villainous plans, and recovering awesome magical treasures. Of course, being on the planes means that you can run into all sorts of things you couldn’t do in the mortal world. For example: Sail the Astral Sea in search of the dominion of a dead god; chart the termini of an ancient cosmos-spanning portal network guarded by maruts; battle a demon prince on an icy glacier-island in the maelstrom of the Abyss; or duel long-dead legendary heroes on the jasper stairs of Hestavar over affairs of honor.

Clueless: How would you - from an old Planescape point of view - use or adapt the new setting to get that Planescape feel in your home game?

Rob Schwalb: I mentioned this earlier, but I think the degree of adaptation required to run a classic Planescape campaign is a lot less than it might appear. As a D&D grognard, I’m still a big fan of the Great Wheel cosmology. In my Greyhawk campaign, I still use it and I haven’t had to do much, if any work at all, to adapt it. Each of the outer planes live in the Astral Sea and each is a dominion. The Outlands/Concordant Opposition functions as a neutral ground, a place within the Astral Sea that touches all other Dominions.

The elemental planes also survive as regions in the Elemental Chaos. If you travel in a particular direction far enough, you might just enter a realm of pure fire, pure ash, pure ooze, etc.

I think the trickiest thing for me is the Ethereal Plane, but really, how hard does it have to be? If I need it, I can just say insubstantial creatures are all native to the Ethereal Plane. If the PCs travel to the Ethereal and encounter one of these critters, the monster just loses the phasing and insubstantial qualities.

Sure, there’s some adaptation, but much of it just examining the new cosmology through an older lens.

Rich Baker: You’d have to tinker with some monster origins, too. For example, we re-imagined demons as destructive creatures essentially elemental in nature, while devils are still fallen angels. To return demons to their 2nd or 3rd Edition place, you’d have to change them from elementals to immortals. (But we think they work pretty well as engines of elemental destruction, really!)

Clueless: What would be the race/species to feature in your ideal home game?

Rob Schwalb: Githyanki, githyanki, githyanki. I’m still kicking around a one-tier, all-githyanki campaign where the players are kicking around in Tu’Narath.

Rich Baker: I love the fomorians. They’re the big nemeses on (well, under) the Feywild. We’ve moved the fomorians much closer to their roots in Irish myth, so they’re not just big dumb beaters anymore—they’re beaters with horrible magical powers and cavern-kingdoms full of hapless slaves.

James Wyatt: Let’s not forget the Far Realm . . . In my Dungeoncraft column in Dungeon magazine, I’m building a campaign around the influence of the Far Realm in the world, using the 2nd edition adventure The Gates of Firestorm Peak as the paragon linchpin of the campaign.

Clueless: What in the planes holds 'the nifty' for you?

Rob Schwalb: I’m hot for the Astral Sea. Yes, not much goes in the Sea itself, but there’s so much room for design. You can easily add new dominions. You can resurrect old concepts. Heck, you can sail the Astral Sea and maybe find your way to another world… the Realms, Eberron, Oerth, wherever.

Rich Baker: Portal-hopping. I love setting up stories where the heroes look at the glowing gate and steel themselves to step through, not really knowing what’s on the other side. You can show off the incredible diversity of the cosmos in an adventure set around a portal network.

James Wyatt: What doesn’t? I’m particularly excited about the Elemental Chaos since I worked on that chapter of the book, but I want to do so much with the Feywild, with Hestavar, with abandoned dominions in the Astral . . .

Clueless: What’s the coolest location on the planes?

Rob Schwalb: Gloomwrought of course ?. Nine Hells are pretty sexy too, but then I’m partial.

Rich Baker: Ummm, I really dig Gloomwrought too. It’s a dark Venice on a shadowy sea. If you can’t get your emo on there, you can’t get it on anywhere.

James Wyatt: City of Brass. If it was cool enough for the cover of the 1st edition DMG, it’s cool enough for me.

Clueless: Is there anything in book that we haven't touched on yet, that you think we just shouldn't miss out on hearing about?

Rich Baker: We re-imagined many old staples of the D&D cosmology and came up with exciting new takes on them. For example, the Nine Hells aren’t nine infinite planes stacked up like pancakes on top of each other; they’re continent-sized caverns in a sullen, volcanic orb, each one deeper than the last. Hell works best as an underworld, but most of the layers of the Nine Hells in previous editions weren’t even caves. That’s the sort of reconcepting we applied throughout the new Manual of the Planes. And we added scores and scores of new, never-before-seen locales, planes, villains, and so on—even if you’re an old planar pro, you’ll find exciting new stuff in the 4th Edition book.

Clueless: What were your inspirations? What was the music you were listening to as you wrote, or any influences from literature?

Rob Schwalb: It’s not a secret that I’m a metal head. I designed most of the Shadowfell chapter in the MotP and I found my musical tastes were quite helpful in getting in the mood. My Dying Bride, Cannibal Corpse, Vader, Krisiun, and Dissection were all staples in my musical diet. I also drew a lot from Terry Gilliam’s films: Time Bandits and Baron Munchausen always come to mind when I run, write, and think about planar adventures.

Rich Baker: Well, the first inspiration was of course the earlier editions of Manual of the Planes. The first one rocked my world when I was about 17 or 18, and I wanted to make sure the new one didn’t lose that awesome.

And that concludes our interview with the writers for 4th ed Manual of the Planes - I want to thank Wizards, and Rich, James and Rob for giving us this opportunity to pick their brains on the new book! If you're curious about Wizards, the Manual of the Planes, or any of their other products - check out the links below!

Wizards of the Coast Website

Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition

The Manual of the Planes  (4th)