My goal with the Codex of the Infinite Planes is to dig into each separate plane with an eye towards making it accessible for DMs and interesting to explore for PCs. A lot of the planar information I’ve digested over the years I’ve found to be not usable information, and Planescape for me had an attitude about it that was just off putting to me (I understand that this is just me, however). I’m glad Planescape exists, but that attitude kept me from really running anything in it.

D&D 3rd Edition brought the planes into the general setting, much more like it was with 1st edition, and the 3E Manual of the Planes was an excellent resources. A lot of solid nuggets of information spread across the planes, but I still feel there was a bit too much “planar wonkiness,” especially in the part alignment played for many of the planes. Plus, the sourcebook covered all the planes, plus prestige classes, plus spells, plus monsters, so the book was tight and didn’t get into the level of interesting detail I wanted.

4th Edition’s cosmology changed so much, and by that time I had moved on to other games in my personal and professional life so I didn’t pay it much mind. In picking up some of the sourcebooks for the Plane Above and the Plane Below, the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos, and I find a lot of content holds up when you look at it as distinct pieces. It was actually the 4th Edition Manual of the Planes that held the level of detail I wanted on the planes, it was just in support of a cosmology that I didn’t like personally.

Core 5th Edition seems to have come back around to the 1st and 3rd Edition cosmology’s as a base, though the World Axis theory is still there. But I felt it was time to start digging into the interesting sites, and I had already worked on the Plane of Fire (see previous post on the history for that) so why not clean it up? So I did and put it up on the DMs Guild in its shiny new format, with new content and a few pieces of stock art.

I’ve been tinkering with how I wanted to structure these articles. Was I really going to work on each plane and try to get a 15K word article about each one? I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it before I pushed up my road map, so I jotted down some notes but kept my head down on the rest of the Inner Planes. The Plane of Water flowed easily, and I managed to unearth cool stuff about the Plane of Earth as well. Some family health issues pulled me away a bit after that but I’ve been coming up with interesting things on the Plane of Air and the end is in sight on that one. Where to from there?

Here’s what I’ve been thinking, and this is all subject to change if I get better ideas or have to pivot for some other currently unknown reason.

• Volume 4 Plane of Air – nearly done, should be complete in less than a week
• Volume 5 Border Elemental Planes – I’m going to lump the planes of Ash, Ice, Magma, and Ooze into one supplement as there aren’t a lot of things happening on each to justify their own volumes. Likely it’s still going to run small though, so it will likely be priced lower too.

These first five volumes wrap up the Inner Planes. Next I’m going to try and tackle the Transitive and Reflective Planes, so the next few in the series include …

• Volume 6 Astral Plane – Loads of cool stuff about the Astral Plane out there
• Volume 7 Ethereal Plane – Going to be interesting diving into this one
• Volume 8 Plane of Shadow – One of the biggest contributions from 4E was cool information on the Shadowfell, now known as the Plane of Shadow.
• Volume 9 Plane of Faerie – The Feywild was a popular spot for 4E and again there’s some super interesting things here that deserve another look.
• Volume 10 Plane of Dreams – This one I’m excited about as there isn’t a lot of information about it at all!

Those are the Transitive and Reflective Planes. After that I’m planning on the Outer Planes, which are likely going to be in alphabetical order, again with an eye towards making them fun and interesting sites of adventure rather than just “the home of gods and pure philosophical energy.”