this one requires a bit more talk talk, so…
PDF: http://www.wyrlde.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/upd-plane-Ref.pdf
So, over the last five years, I have been bobbling around within the Planes in my head, and they all had slightly different feels and senses and I needed a way to effectively make them distinct — but also to be able to speak to the way that different planar energies work and address the ways that denizens of them operate.
And then it hit me — I could use more than the complex system of the alignment to identify them, I could use the distinct aspects of emotion, because Those have an impact and fits better with role playing structures than traditional good and evil and gives it a whole narrative quality that is fun to play with.
And that was the big one. The truth is that I wanted to have seven Dimensions for each of the planes, but I couldn’t come up with enough names for the assorted planes and wasn’t going to do a huge thing about it so I left it at four and ran with that.
But now I have the emotion bit — and I totally snagged that from the now traditional emotion wheel stuff because it works perfectly for this, albeit with some minor tweaks.
That also gave me a reason to look at the whole “life after death” thing, and so that popped in, and lastly I opted to toss in the Magical Schools. For School, Ephemeral gets Enchantment.
In short, I have managed to get the Planes aligned with people, and to establish the way that how you feel is where you are headed, which creates a very different underlying perspective than normative D&D does.
