The final barrier in between the Inner and Outer Planes, the Astral Plane is known for three things: serving as a way to travel to the Outer Planes without direct portals, being the home of the githyanki, and house the spectacular graveyards of dead gods. Aside from these, it is a complete non-entity in the Great Wheel.
...Yeah, talk about your ringing endorsements, huh?
The Astral Sea:
The nature of the Astral Sea was touched upon in the Elemental Chaos chapter, so the flavorful opening of this chapter is much shorter. It reiterates that the Astral Sea is the polar opposte of the Chaos; a placid ocean of smooth silver, unchanging and eternal; a realm of thought and spirit. The gods spontaneously manifested from this place, just as their primordial counterparts arose in the Chaos, and were initially preoccupied with the refinement of creation and the subsequent Dawn War. It wasn't until afterwards that they turned their eyes towards shaping the Astral Sea in further imitation of the world between.
Just as they had earlier to create the angels, the gods took the tiniest fragments of creation-stuff and mixed it with the pure astral essence of thought and ideal, crafting miniature worlds that reflected their creators' natures. Thus were born the Dominions, where the vast majority of gods, angels, devils and other immortal creatures still reside to this day, set apart from the world but drawn to the affairs of mortals.
Adventuring in the Astral Sea:
The Astral Plane, we're told, has long been one of the weirdest elements of traditional D&D, ever since an early and influential article in the pages of Dragon first described it as a realm where beings traveled by sheer act of will - and thusly speed there was determined by intelligence. Unfortunately, this weirdness was to its detriment rather than its advantage; the unique rules demanded of adventuring in the Astral Plane tended to be clunky and frustrating. Worse, as it mentions in passing, it tended to be dull because the Astral is defined as all but empty, with only the githyanki representing interesting encounters. Whilst the Astral did represent a way to move through the multiverse around the normal portal-based system, it was mostly a "forced" visit - the Astral was where players went when they didn't have any other choice.
Ironically, this subtopic implies that the designers themselves feel that even they can't make the Astral Sea inherently more adventuresome in and of itself. Instead, the design goal is apparently to simplify the Astral Sea and make it vastly easier to get around it to where the actual points of interest are - the thriving astral civilizations and the ancient divine dungeons that litter the plane.
In fact, I'll quote the paragraph so you can read it yourselves:
That’s because the Dominions are where the adventure is. Why spend hours or days traversing a featureless silver sea when you can climb Mount Celestia or explore the vast ruins of Kalandarren? We expect Dominions to be a relatively common destination for epic-tier characters, whether they’re challenging one of the Dukes of Hell to free an imprisoned servant of their deity or seeking the forgotten name of the Raven Queen in what might once have been her Dominion.
In essence, Dominions take up much the same role that the Outer Planes in general did during the days of the Great Wheel. One element that has crossed over from the Elemental Chaos' redesign is that Dominions are more inherently hospitable compared to some Outer Planes. That's not to say that you don't still need to obtain some magical protections or assistance - if you're going to raid the Iron Fortress of Dis in the Nine Hells, stocking up on fire protection is still common sense! - but the World Axis doesn't rely so much on inherently lethal "planar systems" or other convoluted gotchas that can screw you over.
The Gods:
This topic talks in depth about the design process that went into creating the 4e pantheon, covering why it looks the way it looks.
Initially, Scramjet actually considered just giving players access to generic "domains" style mechanics to let them build and customize their own pantheons from scratch, with a few sample pantheons for good measure. This idea was dropped when they then realized that this would make it problematic to design official art and adventures, and to an extent even monster lore.
In essence, they were going to need a default pantheon anyway just to frame their base-setting around, so they cut out the middleman.
Once that was decided, they began to sit down and tackle just what a core pantheon needed. The foundation for this idea was the recognition that there are some gods in D&D that are just so central to its identity, regardless of worlds; settings lacking the likes of Corellon, Lolth, Moradin, Gruumsh, Bahamut and Tiamat are defined as "eccentric" or "outside the norm" by their inherent lack of those gods - thanks to a combination of Planescape and the popularity (and similarity) of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, those gods were cemented in D&D's collective perception.
To start with, the Scramjet team began by listing all of the divine roles they would need to fill to create a pantheon. This then led to them making a new decision: to step away from historical vermisilitude in favor of player support.
See, traditionally, D&D takes up the "historically accurate" approach to polytheism, where there are deities for all manner of little aspects of peoples' lives. The problem is that, whilst this might be more realistic, players generally aren't going to care much about, or get much use from, the deities that aren't actively involved in either supporting adventurers or fostering evil cults. The author of this subchapter even talks about how they once played a Cleric of Chauntea, the Earth Mother/Harvest Goddess of the Forgotten Realms, and found that their patron goddess actually had very little guidance for an adventurer.
So, the result was that the team decided to focus the core pantheon on gods with broader portfolios that would be of more interest to either PCs, enemies, or both. Nothing prevents a DM from creating gods with a more civilian-centric outlook - the status of "Exarch", or "subservient lesser god", basically exists for this - but D&D 4e would not be spending page space on them. After all, realistically, why is a priest of Eostre, pacifistic goddess of birth, fertility, love and spring, going dungeon-delving?
The next major step was to do something even more radical: sheering gods from their racial restrictions. Part of the reason why the pantheons of the Great Wheel could get so sprawling and yet make relatively little impact is that many of the deities in it exist to reiterate one concept for different races. For example, dwarves have four different war gods in their racial pantheon, the Morndinsamman. To the Scramjet team, this seemed wasteful - we're not actually told why they came to this conclusion, but the result was that the racial mini-pantheons were likewise sent to the chopping block, surviving in concept as exarches and instead uniting all races through a shared pantheon.
Which, in an aside, isn't all that new; Dragonlance did this back in the 80s, where every race's and culture's pantheon was just the default 21 gods wearing new faces and names.
Finally, we're told that choosing which gods were going to be used for the pantheon took the longest time. Included but rejected were the names of real-world historical deities, such as Set. In the end, since the original "core of the core" were the gods Corellon, Moradin, Lolth, Gruumsh, Bahamut and Tiamat, the decision was made to continue their tradition of mixing elements from both Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms (though they claim that only Bane is a Faerun "migrant"), with a smattering of new deities... well, new faces on older concepts; the Raven Queen has been likened to Wee Jas by Greyhawk fans, and Zehir seems based on past "Set analogue" gods like Merrshaulk.
In Focus: Bahamut
As discussed in our previous topic, the Scramjet team had several goals with designing the new "core pantheon"; to make the Dawn War pantheon feel more unique, to give each god multiple roles, and to move away from racial exclusivity when it came to gods.
One of the first gods that changed as a result of this was Bahamut. Originally defined as the patron god of metallic dragons, Bahamut edged aside Heironeous, the god of justice, nobility, righteousness and honor from 3e's faux-Greyhawk core setting and took his place. In fairness, I think Bahamut had picked up some associations with being a "paladin god" in 3rd edition already - possibly bleed over into the D&D subconscious from his Dragonlance counterpart Paladine, who there is portrayed as the Chief God of Good who happens to manifest as a platinum dragon. But this isn't mentioned in this subchapter, which treats the change as something new to 4th edition.
As a result, the World Axis version of Bahamut may be strongly associated with dragons, but he's not exclusively portrayed that way. He has appeared, and will continue to appear, as a platinum-armored human paladin, a noble dwarven warrior with a shining platinum beard, and a graceful eladrin warrior in gleaming platinum chainmail. Whatever his form, Bahamut is the champion of honor and justice, calling upon the faithful to protect the weak wherever they are found.
By extension, metallic dragons are no longer exclusively worshippers of Bahamut. They respect him, and at least one creation myth claims that he created them to protect the young races of the world from the rampaging Primordials during the Dawn War - a myth many metallics pay lip service to, even if they have strayed far from the morality that the myth promotes. But they have much more religious freedom than in the Great Wheel; metallics worshipping Tiamat, the luck god, the god of knowledge or the god of storms attract no special divine wrath or even particular attention. As with humans, a dragon's choice of deities has more to do with its beliefs and ideals than with its race.
In Focus: The Raven Queen
In contrast to the above, this short subtopic is purely flavorful, describing the new Dawn War goddess of death, fate and winter. Her name is forgotten, and she is regarded with fear rather than love. Associated with ravens and crows, her symbol is used by fearful mortals to try and ward off the baleful influence of Vecna and Orcus from graves and mausoleums. Orcus is her sworn enemy, and their cults fight constantly.
Angels:
This subtopic opens by acknowledging that "angels" as a direct concept have never played a big part in D&D. It asserts the term was never even directly included in D&D until 3.5's Monster Manual - which is a simplification, because in fact angels were name-changed into Celestials during the 1e to 2e switchoever thanks to the Satanic Panic. But we don't need to focus on this.
The big issue with previous Celestials was that, whilst they filled an obvious niche as servitors for the deities, they were essentially background figures. A typical D&D party was rarely likely to encounter them as anything more than quest-related NPCs, and even less likely to see them on the battlefield without a storyline about the angel being deceived or having fallen - a storyline that the author (Mike Mearls, incidentally) notes could quickly get hackneyed if overused.
As the subtopic reminds us; one major goal for 4e's Monster Manual on a development level was to create both clearer distinctions between the various existing monster groups, and to create new groups to fill a gap in the game's setting. Because of how the Great Wheel's Celestials were handled, at least from the Scramjet team's perspective, there was a big gap in the planar monsters category for a monster grouping that both acted as servitors to all of the gods of the pantheon AND would be an easily-utilized threat to the average D&D party.
Initially, they considered simply redesigning the devas and archons of the Great Wheel into filling this role. However, they decided after some experimentation that the legacy lore from both of these monsters would end up muddying their role - for example, what to do with planetars and solars? Thusly, the decision was made to scrap them (and, in turn, every other Celestial, including things like Guardinals) and start over fresh with a new Angel monster type.
The defining attribute for the new World Axis Angel was that it had to be something didn't immediately scream "good" or "evil". Angels were designed as servants for the entire pantheon. So, whilst there were going to be different types of angels, those types would have to be broad enough in terms of service that they could be useful to most if not all of the gods. The result was that the 4e angel was split into roles such as Battle, Vengeance, Protection and Death.
The side effect of this was that it ended the Great Wheel tradition of evil gods being served by demons or devils, depending on where they fell on the Law/Chaos spectrum. This was seen as beneficial, as it allowed each monster grouping to more solidly define itself and be a recognizable faction in its own right.
The key to making the angels of the World Axis work, we're told, is that they had to be scary opponents and unsettling allies. Angels may be concerned with mortal affairs, but they are not human - an Angel of Battle will lead mortals to war, but it cares little for their hurts, fears and desires. It exists only to serve its master embody its ideals.
This is where the design for the World Axis angel came from; human-like only in an abstract sense, devoid of a real face. Divine servitors who are cheery, humanlike and loving are still possible within the game, we're assured, but they are never angels. To quote:
Angels are the cold, clinical expression of a deity’s plans. They are the frontline warriors in the wars among the gods, and generals and champions for mortal followers. An angel has more in common with an artificial intelligence than a true living creature.
Why Aren't Angels Good?
Continuing the angel discussion, now we talk about what the designers acknowledged would probably be the most controversial aspect of the new angels: their utter conceptual embrace of the new reality that 4e's World Axis is not built around the alignment grid.
I think I need to take a moment here to emphasize just how radical and revolutionary an idea that this was! The Great Wheel's been around since AD&D 1e's Manual of the Planes, and it was firmly established as rooted in the contrast between Law, Chaos, Good and Evil even back then. Almost every different species of planar being was what I call an "Exemplar", a living manifestation of a specific alignment combination - even sticking to just the Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic Good and Evil sets, we had demons, devils and yugoloths fighting for Team Evil and archons, eladrins and guardinals fighting for Team Good, with a god's servants being based on where they stood in this grid. Even when 3rd edition came out, the biggest change it made was inventing a new set of Celestials - the Angels - as an "Any Good Alignment" breed of Celestial.
That means that this paradigm lasted from 1977 to 2008. That's Thirty One Years! It didn't matter how old you were, when you got into D&D, what edition brought you in or how you got in; you learned this paradigm off by heart. It was familiar to so many people.
And yet... did it work? In the opinions of the Scramjet team? No, it didn't. So it needed to be fixed.
The decision to make Angels an Unaligned race defined by their service to the pantheon as a whole was born from two factors, at least so we're told. These factors were:
Making named fiends more important to the game.
Making angels opponents that player characters would want to fight.
Whilst evil deities in the World Axis might still use demons or devils in their plans, they do so as allies, not by using them as vassals. This centers the importance of demon lords and archdevils as planar threats in their own right. And by giving angels a neutral status, that means that when players go up against evil godly foes, they will have a chance to fight angels, which is something that you could rarely do with archons or guardinals.
That is much more interesting, in both the Scramjet team's opinion and my own, then just having a big bunch of monsters who take up space in the Monster Manual simply to say that good gods have minions of their own beyond your heroic PCs.
How Devils Changed:
As we discussed back in the Abyss chapter review, 4e really wanted to come up with ways to make demons and devils feel more unique in the cosmology and at the table. This particular subtopic examines three key conceits that the Scramjet team came up with to guide devilish stats and combat tactics so that fighting devils would feel very differnt to fighting demons. It's only three paragraphs long, one for each conceit, so I hope nobody will mind my quoting it in its entirety...
Demons Are Chaotic, Devils Are Organized
This principle draws directly from their flavor, but we wanted more mechanics to back it up. Demons are generally tough brutes who fight alone or in disorganized mobs. Devils are cunning tricksters and tacticians who use coordinated tactics. Their powers are usually subtle tricks and tactical stratagems that catch an opponent by surprise or ruin the best laid plans. The succubus became a devil in 4th Edition because of this emphasis, since the succubus is synonymous with temptation, trickery, and deceit.
Demons Kill, Devils Subvert
A demon overcomes an obstacle through the application of force and overwhelming strength. A devil uses trickery and subtle powers that control or frustrate his enemies. A devil might use poison to deliver a deadly attack that slowly saps a victim’s mental and physical strength, while a demon simply draws on its mighty claws or a searing blast of fire. Owing to their strict caste system and strong, centralized organization, many devils emphasize teamwork and combination attacks. Powerful devils command legions of their lesser minions, forming small armies and groups that work in concert to overwhelm even the mightiest foes. Compared to demons and dragons, devils are individually weaker and less skilled. However, when they are encountered in numbers, their tactical cunning and teamwork make them fearsome opponents.
Demons Are Tough, Devils Are Slippery
In battle, a demon absorbs attack after attack. Its sheer toughness and shifting, chaotic nature allow it to soak up an enormous amount of damage. Devils are more fragile, but landing a telling blow is difficult at best.
It ends with an assurance that, for all these changes, devils still maintain a fairly strong base in their Great Wheel depictions; their basic look, the different typings and their hierarchy all remain intact, we're told.
Asmodeus as Deity:
I have to quote the opening paragraph to this subtopic, because I just can't think of any better way to open this:
Since the publication of the 1st Edition Monster Manual, Asmodeus has stood out as one of the greatest villains in the D&D game. He leads the devils and rules the very depths of Hell itself. Yet, when’s the last time you saw an adventure that pitted the heroes against his machinations?
Moving on from this, we're told that one of the big goals with the new cosmology was to give each of the major factions of enemies their own different feel, and to provide almost a full campaign's worth of opponents. With devils firmly removed from their former place as go-to lackies for Lawful Evil deities, it was decided that Asmodeus now had the room to fully shine, and promoting him from "merely" first of the Archdevils to a full-fledged God of Sin in his own right would emphasize just how powerful he is, and that he is as deserving of respect and fear as any of the other major players in the cosmology.
That's... pretty much it. In a rather verbose way, what this topic tries to tell us is that Asmodeus was made a god in order to emphasize his threat level and to make it more obvious for WotC and individual DMs to use him as a potential campaign-long opponent.
Archdevils in 4th Edition: The Saga of Levistus:
This topic... I'm not sure how to really describe. Much of it is a summary of the history of Levistus within the World Axis cosmology, and a guide to how he attempts to exploit mortals as part of his ongoing plan to seek revenge on Asmodeus. After all, he may be too weak to face his enemies in Hell, but amongst the creatures who dwell beyond Baator, he's on a much more equal footing. This lets him focus on building up an external power-base whilst his rivals focus almost entirely on the interal political power-jockeying within Baator.
From here, it moves onto these two paragraphs, which I'll quote because I feel that they summarize the whole point of this subchapter far better than I could! This has been a rather quote-heavy review, hasn't it?
Levistus’s scheme makes him the first archdevil whose plans adventurers must defeat. The dungeon outside town might seem as though it holds only a few warlike goblins, but in truth Levistus and his imp agents are behind the goblin tribe’s latest round of attacks. If the adventurers defeat and question the imps, they uncover more schemes driven by Levistus’s followers. What started as a simple mission to halt a raid turns into an epic quest to uncover a grand, diabolic scheme. As the characters gain levels, they slowly work their way deeper and deeper into Levistus’s machinations. Perhaps, in the end, they must face the archdevil himself.
Levistus is a great example of everything that makes devils intriguing and challenging enemies. He rests within an elaborate power structure, but seeks to twist, destroy, and control it at every turn. He dares not stand openly against his rivals, but he continually spawns subtle plots to undermine them. Fighting devils is like peeling open a mysterious box, only to find another, smaller box inside. Perhaps in the end, Levistus is another pawn of Asmodeus, or his plans strike in a completely unexpected direction. Only the Dungeon Master knows for sure!
Devils and Hell:
The last subchapter within this chapter discusses the topic of Hell's role within the World Axis and its in-universe history.
World Axis Devils are not merely "evil angels", as I've seen them sometimes dismissed. Rather, they are Fallen Angels - former angels subjected to a divine curse after they betrayed and murdered the god they had sworn to serve. Whilst Asmodeus was too powerful for the gods to openly battle him without rising destruction on a planar scale, the other gods united to transform Baator into a planar prison, binding them and leaving them to rot.
Over centuries, though, the gods began to forget about the direness of what Asmodeus had done. And the God of Sin had not been idle. Creating a sprawling, jumbled but ultimately comprehensive system of laws, pacts and codes, Asmodeus had unified his diabolic underlings and turned Baator from a prison into a fortress, from which he was ready to launch a campaign of subversion. Exploiting loopholes in the bindings on Baator, he sent emissaries to evil gods, turning the strict authoritarian nature of his rule to his advantage - the devils proved themselves as useful, even reliable allies to those who paid close attention to the terms of the pacts and pledges that they offered. In time, they used the openings that this gave them to access the mortal world, bringing their diabolic contracts to ambitious, greedy, foolish and desperate mortals.
Soul-harvesting is the end-goal of the diabolic interest in the mortal world. It's obvious that the power they harvest from souls subverted by their dark pacts is being channeled to slowly erode and ultimately destroy the bindings that restrain devilish movement beyond their dominion. As to what Asmodeus plans once he's free? Well, only the God of Sin knows that...
Closing Thoughts:
The Astral Plane was the backstage of the Outer Planes, in the Great Wheel. It was an empty void, a vacuum; convoluted rules (even by Planescape standards) and with very little to recommend exploring there. It was part of the background, or a traveling method of last resort, with no real reason to travel there. The Upper Planes were... well, in bluntness; they were pretty bland, in my experience.
The Astral Sea is a huge step up, for me. Although ironically I would argue that we don't actually get that much discussion done here on the plane itself! There's tantalizing hints, and a very lovely bit of setting art showing crystal-bedecked islands and fantastical halls linked by winding earth bridges in a silver sea, but most of this chapter is actually devoted to gods and devils. It's not bad, but it does mean we're going to need to wait for later books to really understand what the Astral Sea is and where we can go when we get there!