DC Comics Cosmology

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Kobold Avenger's picture
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DC Comics Cosmology

Out of the various relaunched DC Comics titles, they've reintroduced Swamp Thing and Animal Man, along with some of it's concepts like the Green a plant world and the Red an animal world.

Both the Red and the Green seem to planes that Animal Man and Swamp Thing respectively tap into. I know in the past Swamp Thing was sort of a Plant Elemental from the Green, even though the current series is very much about the human Alec Holland. Some in the past have sort of treated Bubby Baker the Animal Man, as some sort of Shaman. Both series seem to be setting up Alec Holland and Buddy's daughter Maxine as avatars of these planes, by entities within them.

Now would you say that some of these concepts of a plane of plant energy (yes I know there's the optional Plane of Wood) and a plane of animal energy (doesn't seem to be very related to the Beastlands) could fit into a more general PS campaign?

sciborg2's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

Oh I *really* like the Green and Red, I think they work well as planes overlapping the Prime, and perhaps all of Great Wheel. Flora and Fauna. The Beastlands and Carceri both connect to these planes, perhaps serving as a secret means of travel for those druids who seek to protect the interests of Nature in the Multiverse.

I could also see them perhaps being old, old planes, perhaps when they intermingled Fairie was born from their coupling. Plus I like the idea of ancient Sidhe lords expounding on how they are the children of the Green and the Red.

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Hyena of Ice's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

You can have an Ethereal demiplane consisting of absolutely anything.

sciborg2's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

These planes are too connected to the flora and fauna of the mortal world to be demiplanes IMO. I figure every world has a Red and Green, just as I presume each world to have a shadow and a fey reflection.

that'd be my take anyway, YMMV.

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Hyena of Ice's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

Problem is that if you create too many transitive planes, it becomes confusing. We already have the Ethereal, Shadow, Faerie, Plane of Mirrors, Tempus Prime, and Hyperreality, and one of the problems comes with determining the planar conduits between each/how each one interacts with other planes. Red and Green transitive planes in the current cosmology don't really make much sense.

sciborg2's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

Perhaps they aren't transitive, but every mortal world has them. There was an idea put forth in Vertigo Comics that every world has a Green. (It was a good arc for the Lucifer comic!)

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Hyena of Ice's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

That still sounds like a transitive plane...

sciborg2's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

How so? You can't transition to other planes.

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Hyena of Ice's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

^Huh?

sciborg2's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

I mean each Red and Green are features found on each world. They are incarnated on a world and while you can move through them you can't utilize them to cross to other worlds or other planes.

Actually, that seems like the right idea for a lot of spirit worlds.

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Kobold Avenger's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

This months issues also mention the Rot or the Black which is a force/world of decay linked to dead matter that the current villains in both Animal Man and Swamp Thing are linked to. In D&D terms this could be the Negative Material Plane or Shadowfell, to certain extents.

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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

A transitive plane is one that overlaps and interacts with another plane. (Alternate primes would not count as they do not interact with one another) The Astral would be the exception to this rule, though.

ripvanwormer's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

sciborg2 wrote:
How so? You can't transition to other planes.

You can, though, in Swamp Thing. In Alan Moore's run on the book, Swamp Thing regularly used the Green to travel to Heaven and Hell (once he figured out that this was possible), besides using it to travel to different parts of the world.

Whether this is confusing or not depends on the campaign, I think. It's probably confusing to have seventeen different Outer Planes if you aren't as familiar with the setting as some of us are, but it seems like it might be fairly easy to remember: "And connected to our world are the Green, the source of all plant life; the Red, the source of all animal life; and the Black, the source of all rot and decay. And beyond those worlds are the afterlife, which is far too complicated to get into."

The Green and the Red could both replace the Positive Energy Plane, while the Black could replace the Negative Energy Plane.

Of course, if you really want to get hardcore into the DC cosmology, there are Neil Gaiman's various realms: the Dreaming, Desire's realm (shaped like a giant androgynous human; Desire lives in the heart), Delirium (a realm of madness), Despair (a realm of shattered mirrors), Destiny's realm (a labyrinth), Faerie, the inn at World's End, the Necropolis of Litharge, the Silver City, the realms of Law and Chaos, Heaven and Hell, and so on. Mike Carey's Lucifer had a lot of weird cosmic places too, and then there are the parasitical demiplanes from Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol.

Kobold Avenger's picture
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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

There's also the Bleed a Transitive Plane between different realities, the original source most likely being Warren Ellis during his Stormwatch/Authority run, and then later expanded into being some metatextual realm involving the Monitors in the constantly told and observed story (it was Morrison who wrote that) from Final Crisis. The Bleed is probably still around even after the merging of various things from the Vertigo (not only Swamp Thing and Animal Man, but also Shade and John Constantine) and Wildstorm titles (Grifter, Voodoo, Authority/Stormwatch) into the main DCU that happened from Flashpoint.

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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

The Green and the Red could both replace the Positive Energy Plane
Problem is that plenty of lifeforms in D&D (hell, even the DC comics) are neither plants or animals-- this includes elementals, living constructs, and some types of aberrations. Not to mention microbes.

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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

Hyena of Ice wrote:
The Green and the Red could both replace the Positive Energy Plane Problem is that plenty of lifeforms in D&D (hell, even the DC comics) are neither plants or animals-- this includes elementals, living constructs, and some types of aberrations. Not to mention microbes.

True. That must mean there are other planes for the other kingdoms of life.

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Re: DC Comics Cosmology

Neil Gaiman wrote a "story bible" for DC Comics' Swamp Thing mythos, "Notes Toward a Vegetable Theology," which went unused when he backed out of co-writing that book. However, his notes were eventually published in the book Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman.

On the Green, he wrote:

"The Green is, as I see it, the collected mind of the plants on this earth. It's not quite a place or dimension, not quite a consciousness (though it can be both)."

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