The Outer Planes are the outermost planes of existence in the standard cosmology of the Dungeons and Dragonsrole-playing game. They are physical manifestations of moral and ethical alignment, of belief, and of the will of the gods. The native inhabitants of each plane have the same alignment as their plane. There are a total of seventeen different outer planes.
Most of the Outer Planes are subdivided into layers, which are essentially sub-planes that represent one particular facet or theme of the plane. (For example, Baator's geography is reminiscent of Hell as depicted in Dante's The Divine Comedy.)
The Outer Planes are typically represented in a ring, with the Upper Planes (the planes of Good alignment) at the top, the Lower Planes, or Underworld (the Evil planes) at the bottom, the Lawful planes at the left, and the Chaotic planes at the right.
At the center of the ring is The Outlands. At the center of the Outlands is a Spire of infinite height. In the Planescapecampaign setting, the city of Sigil floats above the Spire's pinnacle.
Theories of organisation of the Outer Planes vary according to culture. Nordic lands see the plane of Ysgard as dominant over all others, in accordance with the importance they ascribe the powers there. Some Oriental lands see the planes not as separate regions, but as a single mass throughout which are scattered different agencies of the Celestial Bureaucracy, with the Celestial Emperor residing on one plane, and his Minister of State on another.
See also Alternative interpretations of the planes.
The Stoics say that when the planets return to the same celestial sign, in length and breath, where each was originally when the world was first formed, at set periods of time they cause conflagration and destruction of existing things.
His complex hierarchy of beings, including celestialgods, visible gods, angels and daimons, justifies a practice of theurgy in which each of these beings is sacrificed and prayed to appropriately, in a manner pleasing to and in sympathy with their individual natures.
Celestial beings are independent, self-subsistent, divine, and have their own will and power.
of constructing a celestial globe; it also treats of the configuration of the stars, first with regard to the sun, moon and planets, and then with regard to the horizon, and likewise of the different aspects of the stars and of their rising, See also:
Ptolemy now takes up this question for the planets; he says that " this perfection is of the essence of celestial things, which admit of neither disorder nor inequality," that this planetary theory is one of extreme difficulty, and that no one had yet completely succeeded in it.
He was content, Ptolemy continues, to arrange the observations which had been made on them in a methodic order and to show thence that the phenomena did not agree with the hypotheses of mathematicians at that time.
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