Quote Originally Posted by Millstone85 View Post
This was a very interesting read.

However, I feel that you forgot an important plot point of the World Axis. As the war between the gods and the primordials went on, the primal spirits came into existence, incorporating both astral and elemental essences. They are the ones who won the Mortal World, mainly by virtue of *being* the Mortal World, and they sent both the gods and the primordials back to their corners. So I wouldn't say that "Law and Chaos fought until Neutrality was eliminated", far from it.

Of course, this is Nentir Vale lore, a setting where none remembered any other cosmology than the World Axis. Forgotten Realms was a whole nother matter, with an attempt to include a shift in cosmology into the history of Toril.
Firstly, yeah, as far as I'm aware (and granted I haven't delved too deep into 4e lore, because bleh ), the existence and nature of primal spirits differs by Prime world; the ones on Nentir Vale's Prime are active and distinct from the gods, but the ones on Athas are either dead or largely insane while the "primal spirits" on Toril are in fact nature deities that that sphere's druids label differently.

Secondly, it's not that powerful beings that are allied with neither Law nor Chaos were eliminated in that timeline, but that Neutrality as a cosmic force is gone. There are no Outlands or Planes of Conflict, no exemplar races of Neutrality, no spheres aligned with Neutrality over Law or Chaos, no organizations dedicated to upholding the balance between Law and Chaos, and no magic of Neutrality, and the "Neutral" alignment itself is gone, NG/LN and NE/CN having been collapsed into LG and CE respectively and True Neutral (the more "active" neutrality, which in theory would make more sense for this world if its alignment framework supported it) is gone, leaving only a lack of alignment in its place. The primal spirits of Valespace may have kicked the gods and primordials out of that particular realm, but they did so as a "get off my lawn" sort of thing rather than as a philosophical statement on balance between the gods and primordials.

Now, rather than ignore the Spellplague, I would imagine that it actually shifted Realmspace from one of your timelines to another. Among various unpleasantries, it caused a superposition with the native Realmspace of the World Axis, including an alternate Abeir-Toril commonly shortened to Abeir instead of Toril. Then, in 5e, the Second Sundering brought Realmspace back to the Great Wheel. Or did it? This Great Wheel is different. It has both four well-separated Elemental Planes and an Elemental Chaos. The Energy Planes are not among the Inner Planes, instead being outer-er than the Outer Planes. The Feywild and the Shadowfell border the Material Plane. Could it be yet another timeline?
I don't ignore the Spellplague, I just don't try to reconcile it with Great Wheel FR as if it makes any logical sense. In this headcanon, the Spellplague does indeed happen on the World Axis timeline, but the Great Wheel timeline is unaffected; different Realms-Shaking Events most likely continue to happen, but as short-duration localized events along the lines of the Avatar Crisis or very subtle ones along the lines of the Lady's alterations at the end of Die Vecna Die (which didn't actually have a Realms-specific manifestation), because anything as blatant, illogical, overwhelming, and destructive as the Spellplague is clearly impossible in a Law-dominated cosmology like the Wheel.

The 5e cosmology, meanwhile, I view as being one Prime's interpretation of the actual Great Wheel cosmology. It's entirely possible for sealed spheres like Darkspace (Athas) and Shardspace (Eberron) to have different links to the overarching Wheel cosmology due to local conditions or for normally-linked spheres like Krynn to have infrequent enough interactions with the planes that they have different names or diagrams for the normal planes, after all. The 5e map of the planes looks like what a sage would create if he comes from a Prime with slightly abnormal planar relations: this Prime world probably has a coexistent Plane of Faerie-like demiplane that cuts off Ethereal links in the same way Athas has the Grey, has few enough links to the Energy Planes that the locals think they're "farther" than the Outer Planes, and has enough common enough interactions with both Ravenloft and the Plane of Shadow that it conflates them into a single plane.

That setup would also, incidentally, explain the utterly stupid "every world uses the Weave" 5e retcon. If the core 5e world has a Weave, and a spellcaster from the main 5e Prime travels to Toril and sees that it has a Weave too, he might extrapolate that everywhere has one, because what are the chances that he just happens to run into the one other Prime with a Weave? (Quite high, actually, as Toril is definitely the Prime world most reachable by and welcoming to travelers from other Primes, but he has no way of knowing that.)

Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
On a similar note, Lord Ao from Realmspace may be in a similar situation regarding being the spirit of a location
Another headcanon of mine is that "overgods" aren't a distinct category of being at all, they're just normal deities pulling a fast one on the rest of the gods.

So, gods gain power based on the prominence of their portfolio, amount and strength of prayer, number of lay worshipers and clergy, and similar factors, modulo a given Prime's mechanics of godhood, right? Well, if you can have Lathander as the god of the sun, Bane as the god of tyranny, and so forth, there's no reason you couldn't have Ao the god of divinity. And just like Bane can see and hear around subjects of tyranny and acts of tyranny, know the future of tyrannical acts and organizations, use tyranny-related magic and grant or deny power to those who draw on the concept of Tyranny, manipulate the bodies and minds of mortals within his sphere of influence, and so forth, Ao would be able to see and hear around the gods, know what the gods are up to, grant or deny deific powers, control the gods' bodies and minds, and so forth, and just as Lathander could control the sun itself and alter its properties, Ao could grant or strip divinity to and from the gods and change the way worship and goodhood work. This would make him appear to be effectively omnipotent and omniscient to the gods in the same way that Mystra appears effectively omniscient and omnipotent to a mortal wizard.

Evidence for this:

1) New gods can come into existence (and existing gods can be changed) when mortal belief in a given concept is strong enough. No one knew about Ao until the Time of Troubles (and the gods didn't appear to know about him for much longer before that), and crediting him as the creator of Realmspace contradicts what sages know of the Selūne/Shar creation myth, so sure, he might have been a hands-off overgod for years until he felt forced to step in in a way he never did before or since...or perhaps growing mortal dissatisfaction with the gods caused Ao to coalesce around the portfolio of regulating divinity (with "worship, godhood, gods, and divine magic" as his portfolio and Cynosure as his divine realm), use his power over the gods to make them believe he'd always been around, use his power over godhood and worship to cause himself to draw power from gods instead of mortals, use his suddenly-massive reserves of divine power to retroactively block the greater gods' future sight of his ascension and actions, and use the Time of Troubles to show off and solidify his control over his portfolio in the same way a new god might appear to his worshipers and do some miracle-working and/or smiting to show them he's in charge.

2) During the Avatar Crisis, Cyric appeared to gain enough power to be able to challenge Ao when no other god was, and Ao appeared to be concerned or even afraid of this. Completely unreasonable if Ao is actually an overgod who's all-powerful within Toril...but much more reasonable if he's just a god trying to pull one over on the gods exactly like Cyric was doing with his Cyric-is-the-one-true-god maneuver with the Cyrinishad, and Ao's portfolio of "the gods" ran head-first into Cyric's new portfolio of "monotheism" and he couldn't exert nearly as much power over Cyric for that reason.

The scene where Cyric challenges Ao in Cynosure, Ao is surprised, and he has to actually try to shut Cyric down certainly reads to me like Ao trying and failing to overpower Cyric's divine powers, then realizing that, hey, Cynosure is his divine realm, he has home ground advantage, and cheats to squeak out a win that way, and then as soon as Cyric really believes that Ao actually does have power over him, well, belief begets reality and Ao is in control again.

3) The High God of Krynn pulls basically the same stunt Ao does. The gods are squabbling and ignoring the mortals, the High God steps in and lays down the law in a way that implies that he can't just wave his hand and change things while claiming to be "as high above the gods as the gods are above mortals," and then once he's made his big debut he steps back and pretends to run things from behind the scenes.