Great Wheel or Great Square?

 The D&D cosmos is, of course, flexible based on the model the DM chooses. 4th Edition shattered the "Great Wheel" cosmology, but that act was, I think, largely derided, and 5th Edition mostly seems to restore the ordered system of outer planes based around the concept of alignment.

Alignment is maybe D&D's most successfully osmotic element - while people who never played D&D might take a look at a Beholder and recognize it, or they might know about the Demogorgon thanks to Stranger Things (though the Demogorgon is actually a figure of folklore that long predates D&D), but social media is frequently graced with nine-square grids sorting characters from TV shows, types of sandwich, methods for keeping your place in a book, into the nine classic "X,Y" alignments.

By the time that the Planescape campaign setting was introduced, the seventeen outer planes were codified with names and broad identities. Some of their names have changed - for example, in an effort to placate the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 90s, the Nine Hells were changed to "Baator," with different types of fiends getting new "made-up fantasy names" like "baatezu," "tanar'ri," and "yugoloth," rather than what had previously been devils, demons, and daemons (you can see why they kept yugoloth). But there were also some changes, such as changing the "Happy Hunting Grounds" to the Beastlands, presumably due to the culturally problematic aspects of the old name (which was likely an invention of white settlers basically speculating about what heaven would look like for Native Americans, which became a more widespread mythos than any legitimate indigenous religious beliefs) or Olympus to Arborea (giving the Chaotic Good plane more of its own identity and tying it less directly to the Greek Gods).

The Great Wheel is a really elegant way to organize the Outer Planes of D&D, but it also introduces the following oddity:

Is it a circle or a square?

To be clear, what I mean by this is how we would place the planes on a big chart with two axes - where the x axis is lawfulness versus chaos, and the y axis is goodness versus evil.

Oh yeah, fair warning, this is nerdier than most of my posts.

If it's a square, it would have the following consequences:

Mt. Celestia, Arcadia, Mechanus, Acheron, and the Nine Hells would all be equally lawful. Gehenna and Bytopia would be a bit lawful, and the rest not particularly lawful at all.

It seems a bit weird to me to suggest that Mechanus is not the absolutely most lawful plane in the multiverse - is it really only as lawful as the Nine Hells?

But, if it's a circle, you then get the following:

Hades is the most evil plane in the multiverse, and it, Carceri, and Gehenna are all more evil than the Nine Hells and the Abyss.

And that doesn't seem right either. It's hard to imagine a place being more evil than the Abyss.

There are a couple oddities to alignment that come up as a result here.

First, one sort of wonders whether one axis of the alignment system matters more to us than the other. I think most of us could imagine that any of the upper, or good, planes, would probably be fairly pleasant. Sure, they might be sticklers for codes of honor and rules in Mt. Celestia, but they're by definition good, which would presumably mean that they would treat you well there (if goodness is defined by behavior and not simple nature - see Diablo III: Reaper of Souls for an exploration of the distinction - I'd argue that if "goodness" were simply being made of some stuff we consider to be good, like a Celestial is, and not based on what the individual does, it's not actually good - which is exactly the sort of philosophical debate Planescape is supposed to get you to think about!) Anyway, the point is, the Upper Planes are all good and we'd probably be fine going to any of them, as they're all more or less literally heaven.

And I think when we judge a character - like an NPC - we're going to be much more concerned with what the second word in their alignment is than the first. If you were to somehow find out the alignment of the wizard that had been sending you out on quests, don't you think it'd be a much bigger deal to find out they're *gasp* evil than *gasp* chaotic? I don't think anyone would bat an eyelid at the latter case, but the former would mean really changing up what you're doing in the campaign.

So I think it's possible that the weight of moral alignment is stronger than that of "ethical" alignment (meaning the law/chaos specturm). Any of the Lower Planes is a horrible place, even if you're on the edges. I mean, Acheron's an endless battlefield where giant iron cubes bang into each other and the echoes keep ringing for eternity. So maybe our model should be more like a rectangle - all the lower planes (Acheron to Pandemonium) are on the bottom while all the Upper Planes (Arcadia to Ysgard) are on the top, and only the three morally neutral planes - Mechanus, Outlands, and Limbo - make up the middle row.

Granted, I'm not sure that even works, because while I think the Abyss and the Nine Hells are probably just as evil as Gehenna, I also kind of feel like Arcadia is meant to be a little more focused on law than goodness - it's a place of well-intentioned but somewhat arrogant adherence to the rules. And hey, Brennan Lee Mulligan described Acheron as "Orc Heaven," so maybe it's not strictly speaking evil.

One of the things that complicates this is your stance on Neutrality.

It's easy to think of Neutrality as the Vanilla alignment, the one that picks no side and simply ignores such concerns. But here's the thing we don't often acknowledge: vanilla is a flavor in its own right. In fact, vanilla is maybe my favorite smell in the world.

In fact, there's another axis of alignment that I don't think has ever been codified, but is very important: how strongly a character holds to that alignment.

Someone who is True Neutral might simply not think much about moral or ethical philosophy. They might just keep their head down, do what they need to survive, and mind their own business. But in contrast, you might have a figure like Mordenkainen, who works diligently to maintain a careful balance between good and evil, law and chaos. His neutrality is not passive, but an active choice he makes and works very hard to fight for.

And that, I think, complicates but also fleshes out the meaning of a place like Hades. Hades is the Neutral Evil plane. Now, if neutral is just "lack of a stance," it would seem to be just a plane of pure evil, and thus could be a more evil place than both the Nine Hells and the Abyss (they totally could have gotten away with just nine outer planes, but bless 'em, they make 17). But another way of looking at it is that Hades' neutrality on the matter of law versus chaos is itself an important element of the plane. This is a place where the order and protocols of law must be balanced with and checked by the spontaneity and diversity of chaos, but also vice versa.

Again, you could interpret this as "let's not get distracted from our true purpose, evil, by worrying about these concerns" or you could simply say "it is important to us that our evil wasteland maintains its own character and identity."

It's a bit easier to conceive of the lawful and chaotic neutral planes as having more emphatically neutral alignments - Mechanus is dedicated to law, and in its mechanical nature, sees moral concerns as non-issues. Limbo sees morality as meaningless, like most things.

No plane does emphatic neutrality quite as well as The Outlands, though, where every valley has a corresponding mountain, and every lake has a corresponding island.

So, did we find a resolution here? Great Wheel or Great Square? I don't know. But even though alignment tends to play a pretty minor role in most D&D games, its cosmic implications are vast when you start to get into the realms of the gods.