Planes as Planets

Having spent more time thinking about "outer space" in my Dwimmermount campaign, I've made a few tentative decisions on how I'm going to handle things. Chief among my decisions is to re-imagine most of "the planes" in D&D as planets elsewhere in the universe rather than as universes in their own right. In early D&D, planes are nebulous things and the term seems to be shorthand for "another world," without any codified notion of what does and does not constitute a plane. Generally, if it's somewhere other than the world in which the campaign is set, it's a plane. There are a few canonical exceptions to this -- such as Mars -- but, by and large, the term "plane" is used very loosely to describe somewhere else.

Much as I love AD&D's "Great Wheel" cosmology, its conception of the planes isn't one I want to import into Dwimmermount. I really like the esthetics of "other worlds" being, literally, other worlds. I've already established that, in the past, there was much greater communication and travel between the campaign world and Areon and Kythirea and portals to those places still exist -- and operate -- in ancient ruins and the like. Similarly, certain high level spells allow easy transit between worlds, but such magic is rare and little understood nowadays. In this set-up, summoning "extraplanar" beings like elementals is in fact summoning beings from another planet. Again, I like the esthetics of this, because it helps me to shake off the residue of other planar cosmologies by re-imagining extraplanar entities as "aliens" in the pulp sense of the term.

I think the planes-as-planets approach is useful because it doesn't (to me anyway) make the planes feel so abstract. One of the problems I've always had with AD&D's planes is that they were too closely tied to alignments and the gods. Now, there's nothing wrong with that and I think much can be done with that notion. But if what one has in mind is something more in line with The Dying Earth, for example, it's much easier to conceive of all these other worlds as, literally, other worlds. That makes it simpler for me to imagine them and (I hope) simpler for the players to do the same. As a younger person, I was always more intrigued by what AD&D called "Alternate Prime Material Planes" and, as a fan of the Harold Shea stories, I want to include more of that kind of thing in my campaign.

Ideas are still percolating but some of them are definitely starting to solidify.