It occurs to me that, in all the D&D literature I've accumulated over the last twenty-seven years, I don't think I've ever seen anything describing how D&D's Great Wheel cosmology and the planes were created. It seems that, to their denizens, they have simply "always been." Now, some of the Prime worlds have creation myths, and some races have stories about their own origins, but I can't recall any common origin for the Whole Enchilada.
Can anyone direct me to anything I might have missed?
Wow, thank you VERY much! Apparently I had more information to start with than I realized!
Briefly, I've been trying to decide how grave the endgame threat in my campaign really is. If Sigil is to be some part of the 4E cosmology, I'm thinking of having the cosmology realign to 4E's at the end of the game. The PCs have the opportunity to save Sigil, but there's little hope for the rest of the Wheel. Though some things apparently carry forward, they may be very different from what we're "used to." (Of course, I may just run another v.3.5 Planescape game - there's plenty of material I don't have room for this time - or a 4E one kludged with the existing cosmology. Nothing's been decided yet.)
So the threat of ending creation got me thinking about where it came from in the first place. I'd like to have a "bookend" scenario, in which things wind down in much the way they began. Doing so may involve answering some of the "unanswerable" questions - the origin of Sigil, the nature of the Lady of Pain, etc. They wouldn't have to be "THE" answers, by any means, just what the NPCs who are bringing this particular cataclysm about happen to believe.
But the finish line is still a long way away, so it's all up in the air.
Does A Guide to the Ethereal Plane elaborate on the process by which probability calcifies into protomatter, and then to demiplanes, and then to planes? Or is it merely a brief exposition?
Thanks!
I forgot that Dragon #359 touches on some of these topics in its "Unsolved Mysteries of D&D" article - specifically, the "What Is the Serpent?" and "Who or What is the Lady of Pain?" sections. Conjecture ahead!
It's possible that the Twin Serpents (powers of creation, primal entities, etc.) are related to the Serpent that Vecna used to talk to (maybe he still does, I don't know)... and they also sound like the Elders/Ancient Brethren, whom are referenced in Die Vecna Die.
It seems like most of creation must have been created by forces more powerful than the gods, since deities are limited by the rules. Might these primal forces be the "Master" addressed by Lord Ao at the end of the Avatar trilogy?
In any case, it seems like the end of D&D's mythic age and the dawn of history can be traced to the defeat of the Queen of Chaos. This seems to be the oldest "event" that is a confirmed occurrence, so that can go at the end of my "timeline."
Origin stories are scattered through a bunch of different sources. The Planescape one, at least as far as the Outer Planes are concerned, can be found in Hellbound: The Blood War.
Essentially, originally there were only the abstract forces of Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil. They warred with one another for eons, and eventually blended together at the edges, forming the planes we know today. As they grew in sophistication, primal entities were born from them: the baernaloths were the progenitors of the fiendish races, but the progenitors of Law, Chaos, and Good are unnamed.
The gods didn't come into being until much later. The Fiendish Codex I and James Jacobs' various "Demonicon of Iggwilv" articles confirm that ancient fiends like the obyriths are older than any of the gods. Lords of Madness says that the aboleths ruled an empire on the Prime long before any of the gods were born.
That's the myth as told by arcanoloths in the Book of Inverted Darkness, an in-character text that can be found by the PCs in the course of the adventures in Hellbound. There are rival myths, told my much younger races. The "Serpents of Law" myth, told in-character by a sage called Crystos in Guide to Hell, says that all the multiverse was originally chaos, and the gods and planes slowly coalesced out of the primordial murk. The primitive gods eventually separated into two camps: the gods of chaos and the gods of law, and the conflict between the two caused the formation of the Outer Planes as we know them today. This isn't really that different from the Hellbound myth: just substitute "gods of law and chaos" for "primal entities born of law and chaos who precede the gods." The myth in Fiendish Codex II and the myth in the "Black Scrolls of Ahm" in Fiendish Codex I differ on the particulars (for example, the latter two don't mention the two greater powers that Crystos calls the Twin Serpents) but are essentially similar in that they tell of the gods of law shaping primal chaos into the relatively ordered system of planes we see today.
The Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix One mentions "the powers of creation" who created the Outlands and Mechanus, banishing the gods of neutrality into the plane of Mechanus and creating a region of dead-magic in the Outlands so that the gods could not disturb its balance (it actually says they banished gods from the Outlands entirely, but obviously that's not true since there are many gods on that plane, so I presume this is the origin myth for the Spire).
Elder Evils tells of a primal being called Atropos who sacrificed its life to give birth to the first gods. I'd tend to think of that as a world-specific myth, though, accurate for one campaign setting but not all of them. The best sources (most Planescape sources, the "Demonomicons," and even Fiendish Codex II) indicate that the gods were born from mortal belief.
A Guide to the Ethereal Plane presents the Ethereal as a plane of raw possibility, from which demiplanes form and eventually evolve into true, infinite planes. We can presume that this is how the Prime Material Plane formed, slowly growing from a demiplane until it met a critical threshold and became the infinite expanse of stars and crystal spheres that we know today.
It's been suggested that there's actually a straight line of causality where the Inner Planes are the building blocks of all existence and form the Ethereal Plane, which forms the Prime Material, whose beliefs form the Outer Planes in the Astral, but I'm skeptical that it's quite that simple. I suspect the Inner Planes formed from the possibilities of the Ethereal as well. The Astral is the void between the planes and really doesn't need an origin, though some have suggested it formed from the thoughts of those on the Prime. A reading of A Guide to the Astral Plane suggests that the Astral Plane was originally empty and devoid of thought, purely an interstices between planes, but thought slowly leaked into it from the planes it touches, forming thoughtwinds (and perhaps forming the Outer Planes, eventually).
"The Ecology of the Kaorti," an article by James Jacobs in Dragon #358, says "The Far Realm predates existence and life on the Material Plane - in fact, life may have begun on the Material Plane when one of the Elder Evils from the Far Realm brushed against it, and what leaked into our world became the aboleth race." That article defines the Far Realm as "what lies beyond the infinite of possibility. It is the infinite of impossibility." Compare that to the Ethereal Plane, which is possibility. The Far Realm can actually be accessed from the Ethereal in certain "ether gaps" where all possibilities collapse into a structure like a black hole (see A Guide to the Ethereal Plane).
Another thing to consider is the Sleeping Ones mentioned in The Inner Planes (page 72). "It is said by some, particularly the kuo-toa, that an ancient and venerable race roamed the planes long before any species were born. Indeed, a few even speculate that these creatures caused the multiverse itself to come into existence." Eventually they withdrew contact with the rest of the cosmos, sealing themselves in the Paraelemental Plane of Ice where they sleep until the cosmos comes to an end. The Sleeping Ones were linked by Erik Mona with the draedens mentioned in the Fiendish Codex I, a race of primordial entities who swam freely in the void before any of the planes were created before, annoyed that the multiverse was filling with stuff, they went into a deep hibernation. One draeden, Ulgurshek, went to sleep in the void where the Abyss would eventually form, and is now mistaken for a living Abyssal layer itself. The draedens were originally from the D&D Immortals Set, a gold-colored box of books designed for the original Dungeons & Dragons rules in 1987. In that cosmology, which is not the same as the AD&D/Planescape/Great Wheel cosmology, the draedens were created by the beings who created the multiverse, the Old Ones, and they went to war with the first Immortals who appeared in the cosmos from unknown parts, wanting to bring order to it. When the draedens could not defeat the Immortals, they decided to out-wait them, most of them going to sleep or retreating to distant vacuum planes until entropy claimed the immortals' creations and the cosmos belonged only to them again.