Talk:Gehenna

Merge with Blood Rift
I'm not an expert on the subject so I don't know if the article is correct but the text claims that Gehenna and the Blood Rift are one and the same. If that's the case, why have two separate articles on the subject? Why not just merge them. Niirfa-sa 04:01, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

This is one of those sticky Edition things. Gehenna, the 1E and 2E plane is not exactly the 3e and 4E Blood Rift. The only people looking up Gehenna, will want to see an article about the plane, not just a tiny foot note at the bottom of a 4E page. Gehenna is a plane itself, not a 'part' of the Abyss plane(or whatever happened to the Blood Rift) in 4e. If you put everything in 4E terms,as you want a pure 4E Wiki(though, again I wonder why you just don't make a new Wiki) you will just confuse people. If someone reads about Gehenna in a book, and comes to the Wiki to look it up, they will get no useful information by being directed to a 4E page all about the Blood Rift. But go ahead and merge them, won't be so much worse then all the other 4E stuff you have changed on the wiki to make it useless to any but the 4E people. Now, it might be a good idea to combine all the information on all the pages into edition neutral articles with quadruple the number of categories, one set for each edition. I'm not sure you'd go for that, as it would not put 4E at the top and have this look like a 4E only Wiki. (Bloodtide 03:14, 20 February 2009 (UTC))


 * I'm not talking about 4e at all. The Blood Rift is barely mentioned in 4e, only in passing in Worlds and Monsters, which I do not own. This is a 2e/3e difference and one that seems purely linguistic in nature. The article straight out says that Gehenna is "better known as the Blood Rift." If this is the case - then why have two different articles?
 * I don't see why you think this has anything to do with 4e. It doesn't. As I said, the Blood Rift isn't even mentioned in 4e sourcebooks. Stop constructing a straw man here. If you have an objection other than "you're trying to make everything 4e" (which I'm not since, as I just said, this isn't even related to 4e) I don't see a reason not to merge them. Niirfa-sa 04:35, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

This particular article is somewhat misleading, since there's no canonical source (as far as I'm aware) that says outright that the Blood Rift is the same as Gehenna. While Paul Kemp's novels have indeed placed some Gehennan locations in the Blood Rift (for example, the volcano Khalas), the Blood Rift is actually more of a combination of Gehenna and Hades, and even Carceri to some extent; it fills the function that all three of those planes do in the Great Wheel cosmology in providing a place for battles between Baator and the Abyss and the home of the yugoloth race and the River Styx/River of Blood. Yugoloth-related locations that were placed in Hades and Carceri in the Great Wheel cosmology, like Khin-Oin and the Tower of Incarnate Pain, would have to be placed in the Blood Rift along with Gehennan locations like the Tower Arcane and the Crawling City. The Blood Rift is probably more like Gehenna than it is the other two planes, but it differs from Gehenna in many respects as well. Gehenna is described as four massive volcanoes floating in an infinite void, while the Blood Rift is a series of canyons and badlands that seems to lack the consistent 45 degree angle or ubiquitous vulcanism characteristic of Gehennan terrain. What's more, the realms of Gehennan deities like Velsharoon and Iyachtu Xvim exist elsewhere in the Great Tree cosmology.

This article on Gehenna has a number of problems. It shouldn't state baldly that Gehenna and the Blood Rift are identical, and it shouldn't use quite so opinionated language in discussing the cosmological changes. Does this wiki need articles on the old Great Wheel planes at all? I would argue yes, since it was part of the Realms for so long (for example, Drizzt and his friends visited a plane that is distinctively Carceri in The Halfling's Gem (though described differently from Planescape's Carceri), not Fury's Heart or the Supreme Throne, and the characters of Tymora's Luck visit the Abyss, Arborea, and Gehenna in their travels), but they ought to be better organized, kept Realms-centered, and not create spurious associations with the planes of the Great Tree or World Axis. You see that in a few other articles, like when someone claimed Fury's Heart was the same as Carceri. While two of Fury's Heart's deities were formerly noted as having realms in Carceri, the rest weren't.

In any case, I plan on starting an article on the Great Wheel to go along with the Great Tree and World Axis articles. I think it can use neutral language to say that this is the way things were for a while but now they're different, and spend most of its space identifying the locations of Faerunian deities' realms. Most links to Great Wheel planes could probably redirect there. -- Rowan Earthwood 21:48, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
 * This isn't a bad idea but I'd need to look at hard sources. For instance, the Blood Rift may be composed of two demiplanes, Gehenna and Hades. I really don't know that much about the topic. But I can say with certainty that, between 2e and 3e there was no plane-shaking event that changed the cosmology so any differences between 2e and 3e cosmology are strictly retcons/metagame information, rather than actual, canonical changes like the 3e to 4e transition (where we have the Spellplague) or the 1e to 2e changes (where we have the Time of Troubles).
 * Saying the "Great Wheel" was the way things once were obviously doesn't cut it because it doesn't seem to be the canonical way the developers view the Realms cosmology. As far as I can tell, the Great Wheel is an outdated and refuted cosmological model - nothing more, nothing less. If anyone can provide evidence to suggest otherwise, than feel free to do so.
 * I'm not opposed to listing Great Wheel planes that exist separately. For instance, if Gehenna is indeed a section of the Blood Rift, rather than the Blood Rift itself, it probably can merit a different article (just as the Blood Rift itself has a different article than the Abyss or Nessus could merit a separate article from the Nine Hells). But if it is, for all intents and purposes, the 2e version of the Blood Rift, I see no reason to have a separate aritcle.
 * There are examples of such planes that stand on their own. The Nine Hells and the Abyss are two of them. So is Celestia. These planes exist separately and distinctively within the FR cosmology. However, the Great Wheel is not canon as the FR cosmology - the World Tree is. Whatever references are made to the Great Wheel are mistakes on the part of characters or outdated models.Niirfa-sa 22:45, 22 February 2009 (UTC)


 * The Great Wheel is "the way things were" in the metagame history of the Forgotten Realms setting, and is worth mentioning for that reason, as long as the distinction between metagame and in-game history is made clear. Surely the development of the setting is of interest to this wiki? Because Gehenna is never described anywhere as a "section" of the Blood Rift, I'd be reluctant to make that particular inference. It is no more the 2e version of the Blood Rift than Hades is. I'd be okay with merging articles on Great Wheel planes like this one with a single article on the Great Wheel in general, however. I'll finish writing the Great Wheel article and you can tell me what you think. -- Rowan Earthwood 23:38, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not against a Great Wheel article. It existed as a concept in FR if nothing more. I'm simply uncomfortable with giving it the same level of detail and consideration as canonical versions of the cosmology. As for merging Gehenna with the Blood Rift, you've convince me it's not a simple matter and that the article is misleading. However, I'm not certain why Gehenna and Hades couldn't be considered portions of the Blood Rift, since they function as the home plane of yugoloths/daemons in the Great Wheel cosmology. Similarly, Gehenna certainly exists in some manner within the Realms, since it's the home plane of Bhaal so I wouldn't be comfortable with merging it into a Great Wheel article either.Niirfa-sa 00:52, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd personally be fine with giving the earlier versions of the cosmology significantly less detail. I'm trying to keep the Great Wheel article I'm writing concentrated on mentioning the realms of Forgotten Realms deities only. I think Gehenna and Hades could be considered to be portions of the Blood Rift, except the Blood Rift has no deities in it, and the realms of those deities once said to dwell there have mostly been shunted to the Barrens of Doom and Despair or elsewhere. In many respects, the Barrens of Doom and Despair are the 3e version of the Gray Waste, except the yugoloths are now elsewhere and the realms of Talona (formerly in Carceri), Hoar (formerly of Mechanus), and Loviatar (formerly in Gehenna) are there too, and the region of the Gray Waste once called the Fugue Plain is now the Fugue Plane, its own separate plane of existence. So it's difficult to map out an exact correspondence between outer planes in the two cosmologies, except in a few obvious examples like Baator, Celestia, and the Abyss. -- Rowan Earthwood 01:24, 23 February 2009 (UTC)