(Other) Effects of "Die Vecna Die"

Psh. The spellplague was a localised event, a Prime concern of a Prime world.

The 2e to 3e changes were:

- The Astral Plane now connects to every plane in existence, rather than just the Prime and the Outer Planes.
- The paraelemental and quasielemental planes no longer exist (except as an optional rule).
- The Deep Ethereal Plane no longer exists (except as an optional rule).
- The Demiplane of Shadow became the Transitive Plane of Shadow (a full plane in its own right, and usable to travel between cosmologies).

More importantly, early 3e changed the basic philosophy of the game from "This is what the planes look like" to "Let's help you design your own cosmologies." The first 3e Monster Manual barely mentioned the planes at all, except the Abyss, the Ethereal and Elemental Planes, and the Nine Hells. Otherwise there were vague references to "planes of chaos" or the like. The 3.5 version changed that, adding in specific plane names (and there was a similar shift toward more specificity between the 3.0 and 3.5 DMG).

I don't think at the time Die Vecna Die was published they'd firmly decided on what the default 3e cosmology would look like, but I think those words were intended as examples of things that could change in case the DM wanted to switch around the cosmology - and might change when WotC finally got around to defining things.

Previous threads on this subject:

/forum/in-game-explanation-change-over-or-not /forum/die-vecna-die-canonical-4e-draconomicon-ii

I haven't seen any suggestions, here. I use this Sigil calendar, though, and I would suggest putting it in the week of Mortis.

"One might expect any public event which occurs during the month of Mortis to be a rather solemn or formal affair. It is true that more public funerals take place during this month than any other. A fair number of memorial services which commemorate large battles or disasters with high body counts also occur. But this is only one side of the coin. The Dustmen aren't the only group in the multiverse to not be afraid of Death and to view it as a positive thing. Thus, for every funeral and gathering of mourners, there is also a celebration."

Possible names might include Chaining, Rechainment, or Rechaining (a reference to Vecna's title "the Chained God"), or Maiming or Remaiming (a reference to his title "the Maimed God"). I kind of like the Festival of Maiming the best, with corpses (or, in secret, live victims) dragged through the streets, their hands and eyes amputated while spectators cheer. Cultists of Vecna would take the opportunity to celebrate their god's ascension to the status of lesser deity with the same rites.

None, officially. I suppose it comes down to which ones you don't like, or simply think would be more interesting hidden away. It might make an interesting plotline if Arcadia vanished and the Harmonium shifted its primary mission to seeking it out. Or perhaps Pandemonium has become detached from the Great Ring, the treasures and prisoners of Agathion more lost than ever.

As above. What planes do you think would be more interesting in combo form? I might choose two planes that are very different, but not opposites. How about Ysgard and Carceri combining to form a prison for both the Norse jotuns and the Greek titans, with the good-aligned powers of Ysgard moving to Arborea?

One (or more) of the paraelemental or quasielemental planes, surely, as they tend to be more distinctive in my mind (and they're mostly absent from 3e). Mineral might be a good choice, since then there'd be an issue of lost treasures to seek out. Imagine a world where mountains and forests of crystal and gemstones spring up overnight, trapping the once-fertile lands in glistening and metallic plains. Vacuum would be a poor choice, since the effects of a mass of vacuum on a world would render it too inhospitable (assuming this destroyed the atmosphere) to be of much use, while looking visually uninteresting. Lightning might also be a visually arresting choice; having both Lightning and Mineral land on the same world might make for an interesting conflict between the two inner planar forces, and a campaign perhaps to set things aright. While you're at it, you might consider putting all four of the positive quasielemental planes on the same world. I'd leave the negative quasielemental planes alone for the sake of the Doomguard towers, but crashing them into a planet might appeal to the Doomguard sensibility and looking for them might give them something to do. Maybe all eight quasielemental planes hit the same planet! The paraelemental planes are more likely to have survived, since paraelementals were included in the 3rd edition Manual of the Planes, the Plane of Ice got a short writeup in that book, and they make more sense as border regions between the four elemental planes.

Which world? We don't know. An obscure one, according to Die Vecna Die!, but I'd be more tempted to choose a major one like Krynn or Oerth, just for the joy of messing up something that was once a well-loved and highly detailed campaign area. Aebrynis, the world of the Birthright campaign, essentially disappeared with the coming of 3rd edition. Even Mystara got a mention or two in 3e-era Dungeon Magazines (and arguably in Elder Evils, since several of the basic D&D modules that world was based on got an upgrade), but Aebrynis disappeared entirely, its last novel turned into a Forgotten Realms novel. So maybe Aebrynis was destroyed by inner planes crashing into it.

Half-worlds were more like demiplanes in Die Vecna Die!, of extremely finite extent. But the 3e Manual of the Planes did reintroduce the idea of alternate Material Planes, connected by the new Plane of Shadow. With 3e, the Forgotten Realms, Oerth, Eberron, Krynn, the Ghostwalk world, and the Earth of the Urban Arcana setting were all on separate planes, and shadow walking (or shadowgates) were the only way to cross between them.

The "near realms" are probably new campaign worlds like Eberron and Ghostwalk, and the new planes connected to them, as well as some of the new optional planes described in the 3e Manual of the Planes: planes like Faerie, Time, and Dream. The Far Realms were already known in 2e, but of course they became more commonly used. Since Bruce Cordell co-wrote Die Vecna Die!, he may well have been alluding to the Far Realms he created in that sentence.

Orcus was reborn with 3rd edition. In the Forgotten Realms setting, the dead god Bane was reborn. Those are probably the big two.

Various Elder Evils (the ones worshiped by the aboleths and the ones in the book Elder Evils) are also possibilities. Kyuss returned (eventually) in the Age of Worms adventure path.

At the end of Die Vecna Die, the demigods Iuz and Vecna are both "lost," since Iuz had been consumed by Vecna to fuel his apotheosis and Vecna was banished from Sigil after his defeat. Both reemerge (Vecna with more power than before) within the next campaign year.

You're misremembering stuff slightly, Rip. Half-worlds were alternate realities in Die Vecna Die, connected to the Prime through Tovag Baragu. They were only of finite extent because the multiverse was reaching potential apocalypse, and so those alternate realities were somewhat collapsing, with the finite areas around the Baragu portals being the only remaining regions of existence in those worlds. But the implication is before these events started happening, they existed as full alternate worlds.

I think that's the opposite of what the adventure says. What the text says is, "They are distinct planes, but they remain unfinished, or at least not fully realized."

They might someday become full alternate realities, but as now they're merely half-worlds, similar to demiplanes in the sense that they're finite. The adventure emphasizes that they don't exist in the Ethereal Plane as standard demiplanes do, but they meet the 3rd edition definition of "demiplane" (which doesn't require that demiplanes be in the Ethereal) because they're non-infinite planes.

The adventure doesn't suggest, as far as I can tell, that they're formerly infinite planes that have collapsed, but even if they were, they're only half-worlds now. I think instead, what's happening is that Vecna's future meddling with Sigil (he's still trapped in Ravenloft at this point in the adventure) has affected the timestream and retroactively begun creating these half-worlds. That is, one of the consequences of the epilogue of Die Vecna Die! is the creation of the half-worlds the PCs enter earlier in the adventure. There may well be more in the future, of course, springing from the same event.

This isn't the only time the phrase "half-world" has been used in the D&D canon. In Dead Gods, a group of khaasta dwell in a half-world called Naphraks. "Naphraks is one of the small domains known by a select few cutters as half-worlds - special demiplanes accessible only by traveling the World Ash. Many half-worlds are unoccupied, while others are used as secret layers, refuges, lairs, and even prisons. Some graybeards think that Yggdrasil itself (or herself, as the ratatosk say) creates the half-worlds. 'Course, a lot of these same bashers claim the tree spawned all of the planes like fruit."

So in that case, too, "half-world" is used to describe an immature, still unfinished plane of existence, like a demiplane but not connected to the Ethereal.

I think there's something to that. Making them of finite size definitely makes them easy to handle as dungeon-type encounters, rather than risking the player characters going far afield. I don't know if Bruce Cordell and Steve Miller ever seriously intended to use full alternate realities or whether they hit on the idea of using half-worlds right away.

The concept of unfinished alternate realities occurs elsewhere in Bruce Cordell's work, too. In Dawn of the Overmind, the third adventure in his illithid trilogy, features a "stillborn multiverse" that represents an alternate reality where the illithid empire never fell. Because it's a stillborn multiverse and not a born one, I assume it's not an infinite expanse of parallel realities, but something more like the half-worlds of Tovag Baragu, unfinished. As with Tovag Baragu's half-worlds, it hasn't collapsed; it never fully came into being. The illithids mean to change that.

In any case, the reason I made the distinction between half-worlds and fully realized alternate realities is that I don't think the epilogue of Die Vecna Die! is necessarily pointing toward the "infinite material planes" concept found in various 3rd (and 1st) edition rules. It specifies that they haven't yet solidified into full alternate dimensions - perhaps they will, at some point, and perhaps we can now safely said they have. But rather than the designers toying with the idea of alternate realities and then giving it up, I think they toyed with the idea of giving the DM the option to introduce lots more half-made "dungeon room realities," and then basically never used the concept again. If they changed their mind about anything, I think it was the idea of using half-worlds instead of whole worlds. Actual alternate realities appear in 3rd edition, from the "myriad worlds" cosmology in the 3e MotP to the idea that alternate material planes are connected by the Plane of Shadow used in a variety of places, most prominently d20 Modern's Urban Arcana. The adventure "Mask of Diamond Tears" in Dungeon #143 and Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk both use the idea of "evil" realities where history took a darker turn to explain the opposite-alignment doubles characters encounter while exploring the Plane of Mirrors. Apparently the Plane of Mirrors can access alternate histories.

BTW, I'm thinking that maybe Hoar is a Faerunian aspect of the goddess Nemesis (hell, there was even a specialty priest of Hoar kit called a Nemesis...)