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alexandraerinHands down, one of the best inventions connected to 4E was the elemental chaos.
The pre-4E idea that you have four mostly homogeneous "pure elemental planes" that instantly kill you unless you have the magic ring of plot contrivance (or its equivalent spell) has some appealing possibilities especially from the elemental rock-scissors-paper viewpoint (though it's also partly the trope codifier for that in fantasy gaming), but at the end of the day it's kind of... boring.
But the elemental chaos? A world made up of seething, churning raw elemental stuff of creation? An endless shifting landscape that's just stable enough that you can walk across it, just familiar enough that you can have enough of a frame of reference to explore it... but constantly changing and explosively weird? Rains of acid, forests of crystal, rivers of fire, geysers of sand... floating islands, sentient storms, lightning bridges...
Pockets of stability exist where someone of sufficient will and power desires them to, so you've got cities and fortresses and primordial domains, but outside of that? It's every alien world you could imagine, at once.
And the elemental creatures who live there, instead of being homogeneous monoliths (or monopyres, or monoliquids, or monoairs), they're often paradoxical elemental mash-ups. So much more interesting than "here's a dude who's basically a golem made out of water."
And then the decision to make the Abyss the corrupted heart of the elemental chaos and demons corrupted elementals... well, if you're not going to do something like that, there's really no point in making the devil/demon distinction that D&D has always done. When they're all just "fiends" and some are Chaotic Evil but others are Lawful Evil... well, there are people who are chaotic evil and there are people who are lawful evil, so this seems like another way of saying that fiends is fiends.
But when devils are corrupted angels and who want to rule creation and demons are corrupted elementals who want to tear it down... now we're talking fundamental differences.
Of course, there's the "baby and the bathwater" issue and the fact that people coming to a game called D&D expected to have their familiar elemental planes. Trying to fit the wheel of earth/fire/air/water into a world where elements are represented by the elemental chaos doesn't really work well, which it made it awkward when they tried to staple those correspondences back into the game later in the cycle.
So, here's my approach.
First, let me talk about cosmic order and cosmic chaos. I have more or less completely thrown out the lawful/chaotic divide in the philosophical alignment system as being meaningless and incoherent, but I'm still using the cosmological concepts of order and chaos. Like 4E, I envision a planar cosmology that has the natural world/material world/prime material plane at the center surrounded by sets of opposing planar axes.
My concept is that the natural world--the center world--is "the world of balance", or "the world in the balance", depending on your viewpoint. In terms of elements, the center world is the place where the elements flow into each other smoothly to produce all the natural phenomena that make mortal existence possible. You can't find "elemental earth", "elemental air", "elemental fire", or "elemental water" in the center world because it's all mixed up in different proportions.
"Above" the center world is Dominus, the World of Order, ruled by the archons. I know that 3E used this as a class of angels basically, and 4E made them into elemental foot soldiers, but in older versions of D&D, "archons" were beings of pure order based on some of the scarier descriptions of angels. I like the idea of them as representing pure order, because "archon" means "ruler". (Same root that gives us anything-archy).
The will of the archons or the nature of Dominus causes the elemental makeup to separate into discrete domains made up of the constituent elements. They would not suffer anything so messy as earth to mix with water. Magic that summons an "earth elemental" or "fire elemental"--beings of pure elemental essence--or that calls forth a massive volume of water or earth from an extradimensional reservoir--is tapping the elemental domains of order.
"Below" the center world is Pandemonium, a word that conveniently means "place of all demons" and "absolute chaos". Pandemonium is the World of Chaos, inhabited by demons. The nature of Pandemonium prevents the elements from mixing smoothly as they do in the World of Balance, but rather than separating neatly as they do in Dominus, they clash endlessly and cataclysmically with each other. Keeping the plane navigable to mortals is the fact that chaos includes the possibility of islands of apparent order, and that the more stable a temporary configuration is, the less temporary it will be.
Now, this is separate from the "above" and "below" that divides the celestial gods and the infernal devils, and while I like the idea of multiple ways of describing the cosmology in terms of up and down that don't interact with each other, for sake of clarity I might change order and chaos to "without" and "within", thus placing the chaos of Pandemonium "inside" the world and the order of Dominus "beyond" it.
And here's a key point to all of this: the demons and the archons are, collectively, the scariest big bads of the Adventure Song cosmology. The archons aren't the good guys. They're not someone you can appeal to for help... unless the problem is demons, in which case they might take an interest but you might not be happy that they did.
The presence of the archons and the existence of Dominus exerts a continuous pull on the World of Balance which is opposed in equal measure by the demons and Pandemonium; if either side were to cease their participation in the cosmic tug-of-war, there would be no World of Balance. Its contents would either be sorted into its constituent elements, or shredded into the swirling mix of Pandemonium. Mortal life has no place in either scheme. Life as we know it is too inherently disorderly for Dominus, and represents too much order for Pandemonium.
Because of the way the three elemental worlds (order, balance, and chaos) pull on each other, Dominus and Pandemonium can both be encountered in terms of "layers", with the layers "closest" to the World of Balance bearing the greatest resemblance. These "near" planes are ones that have air that mortals from the World of Balance can breathe, landscapes they can walk through, and sights they can comprehend. The further you move towards the perfect order at the core of Dominus or the perfect chaos at the heart of Pandemonium, the less these things are true and the less Roleplaying Game Monster-y and more Unknowable Cosmic Horror-y the inhabitants become.
The pre-4E idea that you have four mostly homogeneous "pure elemental planes" that instantly kill you unless you have the magic ring of plot contrivance (or its equivalent spell) has some appealing possibilities especially from the elemental rock-scissors-paper viewpoint (though it's also partly the trope codifier for that in fantasy gaming), but at the end of the day it's kind of... boring.
But the elemental chaos? A world made up of seething, churning raw elemental stuff of creation? An endless shifting landscape that's just stable enough that you can walk across it, just familiar enough that you can have enough of a frame of reference to explore it... but constantly changing and explosively weird? Rains of acid, forests of crystal, rivers of fire, geysers of sand... floating islands, sentient storms, lightning bridges...
Pockets of stability exist where someone of sufficient will and power desires them to, so you've got cities and fortresses and primordial domains, but outside of that? It's every alien world you could imagine, at once.
And the elemental creatures who live there, instead of being homogeneous monoliths (or monopyres, or monoliquids, or monoairs), they're often paradoxical elemental mash-ups. So much more interesting than "here's a dude who's basically a golem made out of water."
And then the decision to make the Abyss the corrupted heart of the elemental chaos and demons corrupted elementals... well, if you're not going to do something like that, there's really no point in making the devil/demon distinction that D&D has always done. When they're all just "fiends" and some are Chaotic Evil but others are Lawful Evil... well, there are people who are chaotic evil and there are people who are lawful evil, so this seems like another way of saying that fiends is fiends.
But when devils are corrupted angels and who want to rule creation and demons are corrupted elementals who want to tear it down... now we're talking fundamental differences.
Of course, there's the "baby and the bathwater" issue and the fact that people coming to a game called D&D expected to have their familiar elemental planes. Trying to fit the wheel of earth/fire/air/water into a world where elements are represented by the elemental chaos doesn't really work well, which it made it awkward when they tried to staple those correspondences back into the game later in the cycle.
So, here's my approach.
First, let me talk about cosmic order and cosmic chaos. I have more or less completely thrown out the lawful/chaotic divide in the philosophical alignment system as being meaningless and incoherent, but I'm still using the cosmological concepts of order and chaos. Like 4E, I envision a planar cosmology that has the natural world/material world/prime material plane at the center surrounded by sets of opposing planar axes.
My concept is that the natural world--the center world--is "the world of balance", or "the world in the balance", depending on your viewpoint. In terms of elements, the center world is the place where the elements flow into each other smoothly to produce all the natural phenomena that make mortal existence possible. You can't find "elemental earth", "elemental air", "elemental fire", or "elemental water" in the center world because it's all mixed up in different proportions.
"Above" the center world is Dominus, the World of Order, ruled by the archons. I know that 3E used this as a class of angels basically, and 4E made them into elemental foot soldiers, but in older versions of D&D, "archons" were beings of pure order based on some of the scarier descriptions of angels. I like the idea of them as representing pure order, because "archon" means "ruler". (Same root that gives us anything-archy).
The will of the archons or the nature of Dominus causes the elemental makeup to separate into discrete domains made up of the constituent elements. They would not suffer anything so messy as earth to mix with water. Magic that summons an "earth elemental" or "fire elemental"--beings of pure elemental essence--or that calls forth a massive volume of water or earth from an extradimensional reservoir--is tapping the elemental domains of order.
"Below" the center world is Pandemonium, a word that conveniently means "place of all demons" and "absolute chaos". Pandemonium is the World of Chaos, inhabited by demons. The nature of Pandemonium prevents the elements from mixing smoothly as they do in the World of Balance, but rather than separating neatly as they do in Dominus, they clash endlessly and cataclysmically with each other. Keeping the plane navigable to mortals is the fact that chaos includes the possibility of islands of apparent order, and that the more stable a temporary configuration is, the less temporary it will be.
Now, this is separate from the "above" and "below" that divides the celestial gods and the infernal devils, and while I like the idea of multiple ways of describing the cosmology in terms of up and down that don't interact with each other, for sake of clarity I might change order and chaos to "without" and "within", thus placing the chaos of Pandemonium "inside" the world and the order of Dominus "beyond" it.
And here's a key point to all of this: the demons and the archons are, collectively, the scariest big bads of the Adventure Song cosmology. The archons aren't the good guys. They're not someone you can appeal to for help... unless the problem is demons, in which case they might take an interest but you might not be happy that they did.
The presence of the archons and the existence of Dominus exerts a continuous pull on the World of Balance which is opposed in equal measure by the demons and Pandemonium; if either side were to cease their participation in the cosmic tug-of-war, there would be no World of Balance. Its contents would either be sorted into its constituent elements, or shredded into the swirling mix of Pandemonium. Mortal life has no place in either scheme. Life as we know it is too inherently disorderly for Dominus, and represents too much order for Pandemonium.
Because of the way the three elemental worlds (order, balance, and chaos) pull on each other, Dominus and Pandemonium can both be encountered in terms of "layers", with the layers "closest" to the World of Balance bearing the greatest resemblance. These "near" planes are ones that have air that mortals from the World of Balance can breathe, landscapes they can walk through, and sights they can comprehend. The further you move towards the perfect order at the core of Dominus or the perfect chaos at the heart of Pandemonium, the less these things are true and the less Roleplaying Game Monster-y and more Unknowable Cosmic Horror-y the inhabitants become.