Manual of the Planes review

I recently purchased the 4th edition version of “The Manual of the Planes”. Playing in bizarre areas has always appealed to me (I really liked Planescape from AD&D 2nd Edition) and I wanted to see what changes were made since 3rd Edition.

At first I was disappointed that the cosmology was again heavily modified, but after I read more, I think many of the changes are for the better. The book does still mention the “Great Wheel” as a possible alternative and lists simple changes to make in order to use the older cosmology with the newer rules. This, for me at least, is a plus as I intended to still use that setup; the “rule of threes” still holds in my campaign: inner, material, and outer planes, lawful, neutral and chaotic planes, and good, neutral and evil planes, etc.

However, to make the rule of threes work even better, they added to new planes on the same level as the Material Plane (now called the “Mortal World”). The addition of the Feywild and the Shadowfell as sort of alternate realities to the mortal realm works well, in my opinion and can be thought of an ideal state, the actual state, and what could happen if the world is allowed to decay.

Speaking of Shadowfell, with the mention of dark lords and mists that trap people, it really sounds like Wizards is trying to tie in the “Ravenloft” setting more closely. While this means that it can no longer be called “The Demi-plane of Dread”, it does help to fix it into the cosmology better and, in some ways, makes it easier to justify players being sucked into it. With very few changes, the “Ghostwalk” setting could also be set here and allow players to move back and forth between it’s setting and another setting.

The addition of the “Plane of Dreams” is also cool. This allows many new adventures such as a village plagued by nightmares begs the party to enter their dreams to put a stop to these horrific visions.

A change that I have mixed feelings about is the new location for demons. It makes sense that, since they are diametrically opposed to devils, that they would be in the “Elemental Chaos” as this puts them at the farthest possible location from the devils. However, I do not like the idea of demons being elemental beings.

Sigil will still be in the “Outlands” for my campaign even though it is now a demi-plane according to 4th edition. This decision on Wizard’s part makes sense in that it is no longer associated with any plane, but putting it on the true-neutral plane also makes sense to me. I am also toying with the idea of making Sigil its own plane on the same level as the material plane, the Shadowfell, and the Feywild but this decision would break the rule of threes that was strengthened by adding the Shadowfell and the Feywild.

Another idea that I have been considering is creating a version of the material plane for each element much as the Feywild and the Shadowfell are similar to Positive and Negative Material versions of the Material Plane. So, for instance, an earth version might be very similar to the normal world, but the seas would be lava, trees would be stalagmites, the air would be dust, etc.

Overall, I will probably use a combination of the new cosmology and the Great Wheel. The Feywild and the Shadowfell will probably remain mostly as printed in the manual in my campaign; the one exception would be that Ghostwalk and Ravenloft will most likely be set in the Shadowfell even if material published later contradicts this. I prefer the older style for elemental planes, para-elemental planes, and quasi-elemental planes and will mostly use that with a few changes. For instance the Feywild will have a stronger connection to the Positive Material Plane that the Material Plane does and, likewise, the Shadowfell will have a stronger connection to the Negative Material Plane than does the Material Plane. Demons will live in a lower outer plane but I will probably restructure the outer planes from the great wheel so that the chaotic and lawful sides seem more separated; maybe the “great four pie slices”?

The changes that I intend to make will be trivial to implement and show how flexible the new system is, as well as how much thought Wizards put into combining the new cosmology with various older cosmologies. There is also a wealth of completely new material – such as placing dreams on a plane – in addition to the changes which make this book a great asset even if you are not planning on changing the layout of the existing planes in your campaign.