Outer Plane
In the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, an Outer Plane is one of a number of general types of planes of existence. They can also be referred to as godly planes, spiritual planes, or divine planes. The Outer Planes are home to beings such as deities and their servants such as demons, celestials and devils. Each Outer Plane is usually the physical manifestation of a particular moral and ethical alignment and the entities that dwell there often embody the traits related to that alignment.
The intangible and esoteric Outer Planes—the realms of ideals, philosophies, and gods—stand in contrast to the Inner Planes, which compose the material building blocks of reality and the realms of energy and matter.
All Outer Planes are spatially infinite but are composed of features and locations of finite scope. Many of these planes are often split into a collection of further infinites called layers, which are essentially sub-planes that represent one particular facet or theme of the plane. For example, Baator's geography is reminiscent of Hell as depicted in Dante's The Divine Comedy. In addition, each layer may also contain a number of realms. Each realm is the home to an individual deity, and occasionally a collection of deities.
Publication history
The Outer Planes were presented for the first time in Volume 1, Number 8 of The Dragon, released July 1977 as part of the Great Wheel of Planes. In the article "Planes: The Concepts of Spatial, Temporal and Physical Relationships in D&D", Gary Gygax mentions that there are 16 Outer Planes and describes the Seven Heavens, the Twin Paradises, and Elysium as "Typical higher planes", Nirvana as the "plane of ultimate Law" and Limbo as the "plane of ultimate Chaos ", and the Nine Hells, Hades' three glooms, and the 666 layers of the Abyss as "Typical lower planes". Other Outer Planes mentioned by name in the article include the Happy Hunting Grounds, Olympus, Gladsheim, Pandemonium, Tarterus, Gehenna, Acheron, and Arcadia.The Outer Planes were further "refined in the Players Handbook and Deities & Demigods ". The appendix of the Player's Handbook included an abstract diagram of the planes, and mentioned the same 16 Outer Planes: the Seven Heavens of absolute lawful good, the Twin Paradises of neutral good lawfuls, the planes of Elysium of absolute neutral good, the Happy Hunting Grounds of neutral good chaotics, the planes of Olympus of good chaotics, the planes of Gladsheim of chaotic good neutrals, the planes of Limbo of neutral chaos, the Planes of Pandemonium of chaotic evil neutrals, the 666 layers of the Abyss of absolute chaotic evil, the planes of Tarterus of evil chaotic neutrals, Hades' "Three Glooms" of absolute evil, the furnaces of Gehenna of lawful evil neutrals, the Nine Hells of absolute lawful evil, the nether planes of Acheron of lawful evil neutrals, Nirvana of absolute lawfuls, and the planes of Arcadia of neutral good lawfuls. Shannon Appelcline, the author of Designers & Dragons, highlighted that throughout the early 1980s Dragon magazine would continue to detail "some of the planes in more depth", however, "there was no overarching plan for the planes of D&D other than a few increasingly old drawings".
Both Appelcline and Curtis D. Carbonell, in his book the Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic, highlighted that information on the planes and the shared cosmology was codified in the Manual of the Planes and Tales of the Outer Planes. Carbonell wrote that project leader and designer Jeff Grubb detailed "the schematization of the planes' requisite five area: the Prime Material, the Ethereal, the Astral, the Inner, and the Outer planes. This basic structure is still used in 5e, with some changes that provide minor rearrangements and clarifications . Grubb's approach demonstrated a need to codify, while still remaining flexible, that has remained as a primary aim of the latest edition".
Carbonell also highlighted that the 1989 Spelljammer campaign setting added cosmology that "allowed travel between the different settings" such as Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and the Forgotten Realms. However, campaign settings such as Dark Sun and Ravenloft were inaccessible in this cosmology. Then in 1993, TSR wanted to do a series of books about the Outer Planes. Zeb Cook, creator of the Planescape universe, describes it this way:
So there was this huge collection of over ten years of stuff that was just kind of quietly ignored with no sense of logic to it, and we figured that 'Oh, we don't need to explain it—it's enough to say "It came from The Outer Planes. So said, 'Let's do this series of books, one about each Plane,' which would have been about 10 million books, so TSR said, 'Well, that's a good idea, but 10 million books is not such a great idea. We'd rather create a campaign world that's set in the Outer Planes,' because they had figured out by that point that worlds sold. And so they came to me, the senior designer with a huge gaping hole in my schedule, and wanted me to take this idea and execute it. 'Make us a campaign world that's completely different from all of the ones we have....'Carbonell called the 1994 Planescape campaign setting "the most complex example of the multiverse created during the varieties of 2e's AD&D settings" and wrote: "A more nuanced and sophisticated attempt at harmonization, Planescape provided an alternate way to travel between the planes than Spelljammer's science-fantasy-oriented approach". The 3rd edition Manual of the Planes detailed both the inner and outer planes. Kevin Kulp, for DMs Guild, wrote that "the authors used an approach that said 'here's how it's been done in the past, and here are other ways you can do it,' which allowed the book to avoid setting planar mechanics in stone. Instead it gave DMs a modular approach by presenting Options, a flexible strategy that pleased both 1e and Planescape fans. Vast amounts of new ideas and new locations were presented, dovetailing nicely with canon from earlier editions".
The 4th edition Manual of the Planes shifted the locations of the various Outer Planes to fit the new World Axis cosmology. However, the 5th edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide shifted most of the cosmology of the planes back to the Great Wheel model with some aspects of the World Axis model retained in the descriptions of the inner planes.
Standard ''D&D'' cosmology
The standard Dungeons & Dragons cosmology contains sixteen Outer Planes. This cosmology is outlined in the Great Wheel model where the Outer Planes are arranged in a ring of sixteen planes with the Good-aligned planes at the top, and the Evil-aligned planes at the bottom. Depictions usually display the Lawful planes to the left, and the Chaotic planes to the right. Between all of these sit the Neutral planes, or the Planes of Conflict. The center contains the Inner and Material Planes.One further plane sits in the center of the ring, the Outlands, being neutral in alignment. At the center of the Outlands is a Spire of infinite height; the city of Sigil floats above the Spire's pinnacle.
This D&D cosmology is the standard cosmology in the 3rd and 5th Editions and is the official cosmology used in campaign settings such as Planescape and Greyhawk. "It's common for gods from different campaign settings to share a plane but maintain their own space. Mount Celestia, for example, houses both Heironeous from Greyhawk and Torm from the Forgotten Realms". Many of the alternative names derive from the 1st-edition Manual of the Planes, and the in-game explanation given in the Planescape setting is that these names are used by the "Clueless", or characters from the Prime Material unfamiliar with the planes.
4th Edition differences
The 4th Edition World Axis model outlines that the mortal world is between "the Astral Sea above and the Elemental Chaos below". Most of the Outer Planes are now located in the Astral Sea. The Abyss is an exception; it is now located in the Elemental Chaos.Cosmology in campaign settings
Other Dungeons & Dragons cosmologies were developed after Greyhawk for various other campaign settings, however, "they would be subsumed under 5e's umbrella concept of the multiverse".Forgotten Realms cosmology
The Forgotten Realms cosmology was originally the same as that of a standard Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The cosmology for the 3rd edition of D&D was altered substantially so that it contained twenty-six Outer Planes, arranged in a tree-like structure around the central 'trunk' of the material plane of Toril. Unlike the Outer Planes of the standard D&D cosmology which were heavily alignment-based, the Outer Planes of the Forgotten Realms cosmology were faith-based.The planes of the Forgotten Realms were retooled in the 4th Edition to match the new default cosmology, with many of the planes or realms being relocated to the Astral Sea, and a handful now located in the Elemental Chaos. Appelcline highlighted that the 4th Edition World Axis model "had actually originated with the Forgotten Realms, which was planning a view of the heavens as early as 2005 or 2006. It was then co-opted by the SCRAMJET world design team for D&D 4e".
The Barrens of Doom and Despair plane is designed to be inhospitable to Dungeons & Dragons player characters. Even though there is little light or water, other characters from the franchise can be found here. Five deities make their homes here, including Bane, Beshaba, Hoar, Loviatar, and Talona. The Barrens of Doom and Despair consist of a single infinite plane, with no constituent layers. It links via the Astral Plane to the planes of the Prime Material and a number of portals directly connect it with Hammergrim and the Blood Rift. Beshaba's realm, the Blood Tor, links directly to the Abyss.