It seems like only just yesterday (i.e. more than a goddamn year ago) we were covering the core Fourth Edition books in order to talk about its complete reconceptualization of D&D‘s cosmology. Sigil somehow managed to stick around in a only slightly bastardized form, but beyond that the previous edition’s multiverse barely resembled what came before—and for that matter, when it did, things were often worse, as the edition was way too into using the same words to mean completely different things. While it would’ve at least made some sense to try and fit things into the messy and inconsistent Forgotten Realms World Tree cosmology, instead we got the new and newly awful World Axis, which was somehow even more weirdly difficult to parse than any of what came before despite being theoretically pared down. I didn’t much care for it, and neither did a lot of older players; especially when combined with the edition’s wildly different game mechanics and focus on combat over roleplaying, this proved a bridge too far for a lot of D&D‘s fanbase. If you liked the game’s mechanics before, then this was no longer the game for you, and if you liked its world(s) then likewise. Which meant that D&D was for people who liked… the new pictures of orcs? I’m not sure who it was for anymore, but when Wizards of the Coast finally had enough of their lagging sales and decided it was already time for another edition, they not only rolled back the game’s mechanics to essentially another variation on Third Edition, they did the same thing with its cosmology. 

But that word “essentially” is pulling a lot of weight in that last sentence, which is the main issue with Fifth Edition’s version of the planes—yes, it brought back the Great Wheel, but at the same time kept some of the wonkiness of Fourth Edition and its “echo planes” despite the fact that these don’t mesh at all well with the Great Wheel’s classical cosmology. Don’t get me wrong, I like Fifth Edition’s version of the planes overall and find it pretty easy to use for most any purpose a DM might have, it’s just that I also find it weird to return to settings like Planescape and Spelljammer without returning fully to the cosmology they used. To longtime superhero comic book fans these decisions probably seem normal—dumb retcons are par for the course in that realm—but to me it feels like trying to have things both ways and as a result losing coherency. 

Let’s begin our look at Fifth Edition where most people will: the Player’s Handbook. Now, for the most part, this is the place you’ll find the least planar information in any of these early books, as it should be. In previous editions, it pretty much never came up until the spells and maybe an appendix at the back of the book no one but me ever read, but for the first time it’s impossible to avoid mentioning throughout due to the inclusion of tieflings as a core race. It is pretty amazing to remember Planescape’s origination of this race and now see it in the game’s most important book alongside elves and dwarves, but I think that just speaks to how appealing the core concept was. Well, kind of. I say “core concept,” because that has slightly changed here, such that tieflings are no longer people with just a tinge of fiendish heritage, instead they’re explicitly linked with Asmodeus and the devils. What’s more, they’re all pretty much the same now:

Tieflings are derived from human bloodlines, and in the broadest possible sense, they still look human. However, their infernal heritage has left a clear imprint on their appearance. Tieflings have large horns that take any of a variety of shapes: some have curling horns like a ram, others have straight and tall horns like a gazelle’s, and some spiral upward like an antelopes’ horns. They have thick tails, four to five feet long, which lash or coil around their legs when they get upset or nervous. Their canine teeth are sharply pointed, and their eyes are solid colors—black, red, white, silver, or gold—with no visible sclera or pupil. Their skin tones cover the full range of human coloration, but also include various shades of red. Their hair, cascading down from behind their horns, is usually dark, from black or brown to dark red, blue, or purple.

Gone are all of the unique possibilities for tieflings, the varied looks and backgrounds that meant no two were alike. Gone is the sense that they could never be a unified people because they’re as different from each other as they are from humans, creating an interesting diaspora of people searching for an identity outside of their race. Now, they all have horns, tails, and canine teeth. They are unified in background and to a large extent design. What’s more, I’m unclear as to whether their heritage is genetic or magical in nature, as despite the new rules about what they must all be, the cause for their traits is vague. Maybe Asmodeus has some real funky chromosomes still causing havoc in people’s bloodstreams? I guess we’ll never know.

Tieflings know that this is because a pact struck generations ago infused the essence of Asmodeus—overlord of the Nine Hells—into their bloodline. Their appearance and their nature are not their fault but the result of an ancient sin, for which they and their children and their children’s children will always be held accountable.

“Ancient sin?” Do they mean fucking a devil, or being raped by one, or striking an infernal pact? All of this is very Fourth Edition-y in that it hints at a backstory that will never be explained or even addressed again in the future. Do they have to be cursed humans, or could they be elves or dwarves? While there are new strictures on their appearances, why this is the case is excised completely. They have something to do with Asmodeus, and that’s essentially it, which is also very Fourth-y in its love for linking everything to Asmodeus rather than the plethora of other interesting fiendish individuals available. It is, in short, a bad design choice.

The book’s other main addition when compared with earlier versions of D&D also has a messy planar touch. Warlocks are clearly derived from Third Editon’s pact magic (as was true in Fourth Edition), but everything about them has been watered down and left to be defined by individuals players and DMs. Nonetheless, warlocks have all made a deal with an “otherworldly patron,” either fiendish, fey, or Lovecraftian. Now, you’re probably thinking that a character with a literal deal with the devil as the cause of their magical abilities would be fascinating, but making it so is going to be left entirely up to the players. As depicted in the book, warlocks are all kinda the same regardless of their patronage, and so the choice as to whether to follow Titania or Baphomet is largely just flavor. There’s nothing about how this deal with fiends or great old ones might corrupt a player, instead it’s just as legitimate a source of magical powers as anything else. And I get it, Third Edition’s pacts were extremely cool but not at all simple to use when designing a character, but as with a lot of Fifth Edition’s simplifications what we’re left with lose most of the original version’s charm.

I’m not going to cover individual spell changes and such—even I’m not that masochistic—but I will note that “Appendix C: The Planes of Existence” at the back of the Player’s Handbook includes three pages of prose and one page-sized diagram explaining this new conception of the Great Wheel. Its inclusion made me nostalgic for how this was done similarly in the original AD&D Player’s Handbook, but to delve into the particulars of these changes it’s time to jump to the Fifth Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, whose second chapter focuses entirely on “Creating a Multiverse” and with this spends a solid 27 pages on what this means for D&D.

In order to explain yet another retcon to the continuing mess that is D&D‘s cosmology, an explanation of sorts is included:

Sages have constructed a few such theoretical models to make sense of the jumble of planes, particularly the Outer Planes. The three most common are the Great Wheel, the World Tree, and the World Axis, but you can create or adapt whatever model works best for the planes you want to use in your game.

While this idea always seems to work—its conciliatory “everyone is right after all, it’s all the same, man” approach tries its best to keep people from asking tougher questions—in reality it fails almost completely. These varying conceptions contradict each other at every turn. They are not compatible, at all, and adventures that use one of them are difficult to adapt to another. The Great Modron March will have to be redesigned completely if you want to put it into the World Axis, no matter how much this edition might tell you otherwise. 

As to more specific changes, let’s dive in for a closer look.

First off, the Astral Plane is back to its old conception, wonky timelessness and astral projection included. Githyanki and Tu’narath are around, dead gods float through the silvery nothingness, and occasionally a psychic wind hits travellers. Essentially, it’s the Third Edition version back again, wonky gravity and all, even if the mechanics of this are hardly spelled out. 

More surprising is the return of the classical Ethereal Plane, including both the border and deep ethereal, and sans much of an explanation for how to travel between the two and what it really means—the place is just as ill-conceived as ever, yay! The Ethereal Curtains are now far more limited, and it’s not the realm of all demiplanes, but neither of these changes are too much of a problem, in fact they might even be good and make more sense than how it worked before.

Onto the parallel planes, with the Feywild we immediately hit the issue that faeries had been part of the Great Wheel and had their own Seelie and Unseelie courts there well before Fourth Edition. I also don’t feel like the description here really fits what we saw in that edition, either:

It is a realm of everlasting twilight, with glittering faerie lights bobbing in the gentle breeze and fat fireflies buzzing through groves and fields. The sky is alight with the faded colors of an ever-setting sun, which never truly sets (or rises for that matter); it remains stationary, dusky and low in the sky.

In general I don’t really understand the point of the parallel planes, as to me it’d make more sense if they were just alternative Material Planes, or perhaps were linked with the energy planes. However, I do appreciate the inclusion of memory loss and time warps caused by traveling to the plane, though less so that everyone there hates “ugly” creatures: “Ugly denizens of the Feywild, such as fomorians and hags, are almost never members of either court, and fey of independent spirit reject the courts entirely.” I always did think that most faeries were pricks, and I guess that proves it. 

The Shadowfell feels largely the same as what we saw in Fourth Edition, which means it lacks the link to other Prime Material planes, and also that for some reason it still includes the Domains of Dread. This never made sense before, and still doesn’t now since there’d have to be parallels to these in the Prime given the relationship between the planes. Do old Ravenloft fans like this change? Probably no one but me really cares either way, but it always felt like these should’ve been moved back to the Ethereal considering that there was no reason for them to be here in the first place and including them only caused logistical issues. 

The Inner Planes are in a weird place. The book wants to both have only four of them, but also to be able to feature any of the para-elemental planes it wants, too. Plus, they also still wanted the Elemental Chaos, so there’s that at the middle of things.

The four Elemental Planes—Air, Earth, Fire, and Water—form a ring around the Material Plane, suspended within a churning realm known as the Elemental Chaos. These planes are all connected, and the border regions between them are sometimes described as distinct planes in their own right.

So far, these changes probably sound minor and mostly conceptual in nature, but once you read further it quickly becomes clear that they’re not at all the same as before. This is because of a new idea, that

At their innermost edges, where they are closest to the Material Plane (in a conceptual if not a literal geographical sense), the four Elemental Planes resemble places in the Material Plane. The four elements mingle together as they do in the Material Plane, forming land, sea, and sky. But the dominant element exerts a strong influence on the environment, reflecting its fundamental qualities. 

…

As they extend farther from the Material Plane, the Elemental Planes become increasingly alien and hostile. Here, in the outermost regions, the elements exist in their purest form: great expanses of solid earth, blazing fire , crystal-clear water, and unsullied air. Any foreign substance is extremely rare; little air can be found in the outermost reaches of the Plane of Earth, and earth is all but impossible to find in the outermost reaches of the Plane of Fire. These areas are much less hospitable to travelers from the Material Plane than the border regions are. Such regions are little known, so when discussing the Plane of Fire, for example, a speaker usually means the border region.

Essentially, the Elemental Planes begin like the Prime and then gradually they become… like the Elemental Planes used to be. Maybe. At their sparsely inhabited cores. 

The reason for this change is obvious—to make them far, far, far easier to visit (and survive)—but it also strips them of their identities. They are now shadows of their former selves and also, for me at least, harder to conceptualize given that they seem to have a border of sorts with the Prime? Kind of? They’re now all like lightly themed elemental areas of the Prime, no longer alien and hostile and uncompromising.

As for smaller changes, the Wind Dukes of Aaqa are now in full force in Air, and there are a handful of new locations mentioned amongst some quickly reiterated old ones, but on the whole it’s not worth spending too much time on. Maybe some tiny adventure has visited the Inner Planes by now, but I’m not yet aware of it if so, and for the most part they’re all as infrequently visited as ever despite attempts to make them habitable by PCs. Oh, and the Isle of Dread has moved into Water from Faerie—talk about a weirdly mobile location. As a whole, though, there’s nothing here I’d really want to mesh with the older editions’ version of these planes, as they’re just not at all the same locations. This new version is the Inner Planes on training wheels, and was by far the biggest disappointment of the new cosmology.

Onto the Outer Planes, on the plus side they exist again. Yay! As much of the religious and mythological imagery has been removed as possible, which isn’t a huge surprise, but it’s still disappointing to see Mount Olympus, the River Oceanus, and Yggdrasil completely gone from the game. The Styx is still around, at least, and not in the neutered Fourth Edition conception, plus the Infinite Staircase is featured in its own section despite being a very, very peripheral method for travelling the planes until just recently, plus its relationship with creativity now seems gone. 

What I do like about the Outer Planes is that an attempt is made to make them feel special, different from the Prime in ways other than geography. There are optional rules regarding psychic dissonance for people whose alignment doesn’t match with the plane they’re on, plus a unique option for every single plane for how else they might affect visitors whose alignment matches. Aside from this, though, every plane is usually given just a brief paragraph of explanation, so it’s hard to say too much else about how they compare. They seem largely like the Third Edition versions, but there’s too little here to really judge. Does Carceri still consist of weird, concentric balls, and is the bottom of Acheron a wasteland of deadly shards? That’s beyond the book’s scope.

The final page of this chapter includes two noteworthy bits I don’t want to skip past. First is clarification that demiplanes have no particular relationship to the Ethereal Plane, instead they just kind of exist wherever. It’s a change I’m fine with, even if it means losing a lot of the Deep Ethereal’s flavor and reason for existence. In addition, there’s a few paragraphs about the Far Realm, which is codified in a way it wasn’t in Third Edition, while still remaining more mysterious and thus interesting than what we had in Fourth. Like with the Outer Planes, though, there’s no real detail to draw from, leaving that entirely to DMs. 

As for the Monster Manual, it’s time for another idiosyncratic rundown of specific changes I found noteworthy. Let’s not pretend that this is comprehensive, it’s just notes I took while reading through and making this list.

• Aarakocra – Now linked directly with the Wind Dukes of Aaqa and the Rod of Seven Parts. That part of the game’s lore was always a complete shitshow, but this particular change only elicits a shrug from me.
• Angels – Devas only have one type now, but again, *shrug*. More weird, and dumb, is that they’re all now lawful, even the ones serving chaotic good deities. “Even chaotic good deities command lawful good angels, knowing that the angels’ dedication to order best allows them to fulfill divine commands.” 
• Azers – No longer just about the fire, now they “dwell in a kingdom on the border between the Elemental Plane of Earth and the Elemental Plane of Fire—a range of mountains and volcanoes whose spires rise as a series of fortresses.” I would care about their flavor changing so much were it not that there were already so many fire-based dudes in the game. Still, seems like they’re even more just fire dwarves with this move. I do dig the backstory about them constructing the City of Brass. 
• Beholder, Spectator – Still “summoned from another plane of existence by a magical ritual,” but it fails to note that this is Mechanus. I never really understood how they were so different from other beholders and beholderkin in this way, and it looks like that remains unexplained.
• Cambion – Back, but now the offspring of any fiend, not just tanar’ri. Which makes sense given that in Fourth Edition cambions were half-devil. I do enjoy that there’s a special section here about the spawn of Graz’zt, since he’s just that into fucking humans. 
• Couatl – Now full-blown celestials, they’ve got some sort of business with a long-forgotten god going on.  However, since the god isn’t named and all of these details are left intentionally vague, I find it all pretty wishy-washy. 

• Demons – They’re retconned to being essentially revamped versions of their Third Edition selves. Quasits are now officially demons instead of their own little race, bar-lguras are now “barlguras,” and all business about tanar’ri or not is essentially gone, but that’s really it (also: was I the only one who before now thought that it was an i and not an l in bar-lguras’ name?). As a result, shadow demons are also lumped in here, but on the whole it’s a return to form.
• Devils – Like quasits, imps receive a promotion to proper devil status, and chain devils are included. All of which is to say that baatezu are likewise largely removed from the game, though as with tanar’ri it’s not really a huge loss. With both fiend-types, we’re left with essentially the core varieties, but no complaints here, as things were getting well stupid by the end of 3.5.
  
  While I’m talking about devils, now also seems like a good time to mention that there is one huge change in the devilish hierarchy: Bel is out, and the fallen archangel Zariel is now in charge of Avernus. This is explained more in detail, oddly, in Rise of Tiamat, a book I’m not otherwise covering, but which had this relevant material:
  
  “Asmodeus recently reinstated the fallen angel Zariel as the Archduchess of Avernus, reversing an earlier decision that allowed a pit fiend named Bel to take the throne. While in exile from her seat of power, Zariel was at the mercy of Tiamat—a fate that rankles her still. Despite her power as ruler of the first layer of the Nine Hells, Zariel cannot kill the dragon goddess, and she sees the summoning of Tiamat to the world as a way to be rid of her.”
• Displacer Beast – Now from the Feywild, in specific the unseelie courts. This was probably added last edition, but I don’t care enough to check on that to find out. Let’s just pretend that edition didn’t exist the same way Fifth Edition likes to.
• Dryad – Are all fey actually from the Feywild? Nothing about this entry mentions that plane, which is all well and good to me, but as always I wonder about the point of it at all when that’s the case. From here on, unless their planar nature is mentioned explicitly I’ll be ignoring fey.
• Elementals – They sure do exist.

• Empyrean – These replace titans from earlier editions in all but name. Hell, there’s even a section of their description called “Immortal Titans,” which makes me wonder if this name change was a late addition. 
• Fomorians – Now in the Underdark, not the Feydark, so I guess they’re no longer planar? Is the Feydark still a thing? I sure hope not….
• Galeb Duhr – Sometimes I really wonder why they pick certain monsters to return, and the incredibly dull galeb duhr are definitely part of this category of baffling inclusions.
• Gargoyle – They’re now elementals, with a whole backstory about how Ogrémoch (who now has an accent mark on his name that I swear wasn’t always there before) kinda accidentally created gargoyles by stomping around. Why the other elemental lords have never done anything remotely similar is never explained (and does he still have that ability?), and in general this is a pretty weird retcon for something that in no way needed a new origin story. 
• Genies – No jann return, but the core four are doing basically the same business they used to. I don’t remember marids being so fish-like, but maybe that’s just my personal conception.
• Ghost – They’re back to that classic, Ethereal Plane charm we were all hoping to see return. 
• Gith – Having both githyanki and githzerai included in the same section is sure to piss off both groups. I wholeheartedly approve! Otherwise, nothing new.

• Hags – Retain their Feywild origins from Fourth Edition. Night Hags are noted to have moved on to Hades and have some of their odder abilities returned to them. 
• Hell Hound – Entertainingly noted to be primarily from Acheron, not Hell. Clueless are so dumb.
• Invisible Stalker – Still a strange air elemental. Kinda wish they’d pulled the gag of no image again, but that’s probably a joke that only works once.
• Magmin – Another weirdo I didn’t expect to see return. They’re now fire elementals and not magma ones, but I think they’re just happy to be included at all and willing to make whatever compromises that might require.

• Mephits – Sure, most of their planes haven’t been spotted since 1999, but somehow these critters keep making it into the game. Six sneak there way into here (dust, ice, magma, mud, smoke, and steam. Wait, mud is new, presumably replacing ooze), the choices for which ones seemingly made at random.
• Merfolk, merrow – A new, planar edition to the game! Sure didn’t see that coming. Merrow are transformed merfolk living in Demogorgon’s layer of the Abyss and occasionally unleashed by the demon lord to ransack merfolk settlements. Pretty cool, and something I’d definitely use in a Demogorgon-themed campaign.
• Modrons – They’re back in a core book?! What?! Sure, it’s only the base modrons, but that’s still a hell of an exciting inclusion. They feel appropriately modron-y to me here at least, even if they’re a bit weaker than I’d like.
• Nightmare – Did they used to only be derived from tortured pegasi? Pretty sure that whole part of their lore is entirely new, and doesn’t really make sense given how many of them there are in the Lower Planes and that people casually summon them as mounts. It’s pretty crappy lore, too, so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist either way.
• Rakshasa – Back in Hell where they belong. 
• Salamanders – Now fully enslaved by the efreet and holding a nonsensical grudge against the azers. 

Slaad(i) – For some ineffable reason they’re no longer planar creatures, insead they’re “aberrations,” though thankfully they still hail from Limbo. All of the basic types are included, plus slaad tadpoles. I should also note that it was when reading the section about death slaad as being “suffused with energy from the Negative Energy Plane” that I went back to the DMG and found that yes, the energy planes exist in Fifth Edition’s cosmology, just in a weird way. They’re now kind of outside the other planes, and the entirety of their description reads as such: “These two planes enfold the rest of the cosmology, providing the raw forces of life and death that underlie the rest of existence in the multiverse.” That’s it. You can see them on the diagram from the Player’s Handbook, and if they’re ever mentioned again besides these locations I’ll be mighty surprised.

• Succubus/Incubus – They’re no longer devils or demons, they’re just general non-denominational seduction fiends now. Which makes the appearance of erinyes within the ranks of devils more than a bit baffling, but oh well. Overall, though, this change makes sense and is something I’d even consider for a Planescape campaign.
• Water weird – I guess Wizards felt that every element needed its own rando representation. In any case, water weirds are back and, umm, that probably made some people exciting.
• Yugoloth – Now this came as a bit of a surprise. Yugoloths were completely removed in Fourth Edition, to the point that Shemeshka herself was some sort of weird raavasta (who, I might note, are not included in this book at all presumably because we all hated this development). However, the actual yugoloth lore is… questionable at best. Ok, there’s no beating around the bush here, it just sucks.
  
  “The first yugoloths were created by a sisterhood of night hags on Gehenna. It is widely believed that Asmodeus, Lord of the Nine Hells, commissioned the work, in the hope of creating an army of fiends that were not bound to the Nine Hells. In the course of making this new army, the hags crafted four magic tomes and recorded the true names of every yugoloth they created, save one, the General of Gehenna. These tomes were called the Books of Keeping. Since knowing a fiend’s true name grants power over it, the hags used the books to ensure the yugoloths’ loyalty. They also used the books to capture the true names of other fiends that crossed them. It is rumored that the Books of Keeping contain the true names of a few demon lords and archdevils as well.”
  
  “Petty jealousies and endless bickering caused the sisterhood to dissolve, and in the ensuing power grab, the Books of Keeping were lost or stolen. No longer indentured to anyone, the yugoloths gained independence, and they now offer their services to the highest bidder.”
  
  What the fuck? I mean… damn, what a way to disrespect the fiends. I think they might’ve preferred being disappeared and bastardized to being done dirty like this. Needless to say, this meshes not remotely with Planescape’s yugoloths. I’m not going to even get into how weak they are in statistics (ultroloths ain’t so ultra anymore…), as the lore is bad enough on its own.

I end up feeling that these changes to D&D‘s multiverse are pretty representative of the changes as a whole that we saw with Fifth Edition, in mechanics and lore and artwork and most everything else. Which is to say that they’re fine. They’re often not the best possible decisions, and certainly not how I would’ve done things myself, but they’re generally workable and certainly far superior to what we had in Fourth Edition. It’s all a bit milquetoast and noncommittal, but that’s true for the Hasbro era of the game in general, and far from unexpected. And most fortunately of all, this is simply the foundation—just because what’s here was only middling and at times vaguely disappointing doesn’t mean that we can’t have some cool planar developments in the future. Reading/skimming through these books again wasn’t nearly as painful as making my way through the self-congratulatory works of early Fourth Edition, in that there’s at least potential. Cautiously optimistic may be a cliche, but it’s perhaps the only correct way of feeling about this start to Fifth Edition D&D.