D&D's structured multiverse is meant to encompass all of its various worlds. The worlds of Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, and the Forgotten Realms all exist within what is called the Prime Material Plane. Indeed, even our own Earth, at least in D&D canon, exists within that plane. Beyond this, you get the Shadowfell and Feywild, moving into the Elemental Planes, then farther out into the Outer Planes followed by the Far Realm.
While I imagine that most campaigns stick with one of these worlds in the prime material, theoretically you can hop between them easily with different types of teleportation. Plane Shift might not do it (as you generally need to go to a different plane for that, and these are all technically on the prime material) but in theory, if you learn of teleportation circles or if your druid knows a big enough tree, one ought to be able to hop from one to another.
Indeed, the entire Spelljammer setting is based on the idea of crossing through various worlds of the prime material through a fantastical version of space travel in the eponymous ships. It's not quite space as we know it - the worlds exist within geocentric spheres, as medieval philosophers imagined, with the ships being able to pass between the spheres.
Magic has its own multiverse, and that multiverse actually has a name: Dominia, which to be fair is sort of outdated and while not officially de-canonized, it has largely been dropped. Magic's original setting, Dominaria, was the "song of Dominia" and was, prior to the massive "Mending" event, sat at the nexus of this multiverse.
Outside of... dammit, I'm going to call it Dominia. I started playing Magic in 1994, so I'm stuck in my ways. Outside of Dominia is a realm called the Blind Eternities, which is where the lovecraftian Eldrazi hail from.
When it comes to these "outside of everything" realms and fusing fictional universes/multiverses, I think we can consider them all to be part of the same "outer" realm. So the Far Realm and the Blind Eternities (and the Todash Darkness if you're a Stephen King fan, or the Space Between if you're a me fan) are all basically the same thing - profoundly alien and dubiously real.
In Magic, traveling between planes is a very common thing for its major characters and, officially, the players. These people are Planeswalkers, and you can probably guess what they do. Prior to the Mending, which occurred at the end of the Time Spiral block (which was also the last time I played the game much,) Planeswalkers were former mortals who had been imbued with incredible power - they were essentially gods, but at a level where they could create entire planes with their own gods. Planeswalkers were the top tier of power in Dominia.
Post-Mending, however, Planeswalkers are now mostly just particularly powerful spellcasters - still likely to be more powerful than most entities on the plane they go to, but no longer really the figures that religions would grow up around (take, for example, the Church of Serra on Dominaria - Serra was a planeswalker in the pre-Mending days.)
Anyway, in Magic parlance, each world is its own plane, and some of these worlds might even be divided into separate demiplanes. Kamigawa has a mortal and spirit world. Lorwyn sometimes transforms into its dark reflection, Shadowmoor. Theros has its godly realm called Nyx.
Now that Ravnica is going to be an official D&D setting, one wonders how exactly Dominia and the "Great Wheel" cosmology of D&D are going to fit together.
One possibility is that we now have two canonical Ravnicas - one is in Magic and the other in D&D. Yes, Jace's role as the Living Guildpact may still be important in the D&D version, but perhaps a Planeswalker means something different, perhaps suggesting that it's really that Jace can hop around between worlds in the material plane.
Magic doesn't really have alignment-based outer planes like the Great Wheel, largely because Magic doesn't use the same system of alignment. Even monocolored planes are unusual. Phyrexia, a realm of pure black mana, was destroyed, and New Phyrexia (the plane formerly known as Mirrodin, and before that formerly known as Argentum,) has now found ways for the horrifying Phyrexian process and philosophy to spread between all five colors.
There's also some potential for confusion surrounding the role of big bads. In Magic, there's really no bigger dragon villain than Nicol Bolas (which I have the Chronicles version of and got way before they decided to bring him back something like ten years later and he was just the Elder Dragon Legend that fit the colors I preferred to play.) So how does he fit with Tiamat?
It's not that I don't think that Ravnica will work as a D&D setting - frankly I'm really excited about it. But there are some weird things to think about - does this mean that Ravnica has a Shadowfell and Feywild version? Does this mean Rakdos is from the Abyss? And given that people from Ravnica, like Azor I, have gone to other Magic planes (I believe he shows up in Ixalan,) does that canonically pull the entirety of Magic into D&D?
Is Innistrad one of the domains of dread from the Ravenloft setting? Or if it isn't, would someone from Innistrad feel perfectly at home wandering Barovia?
Ultimately I realize that this is all for dungeon masters the world around to decide. But given the shift in D&D to really place everything in the same multiverse (something that is complicated by Eberron's established planes - likewise my own Sarkon setting,) it does make Ravnica's canonical inclusion as a D&D world pretty complicated.
Just think of how many worlds House Dimir can infiltrate now!
No comments:
Post a Comment