Planes

The world is vaster than anyone could explore in a lifetime with mysterious corners that promise wonder and peril, yet there are other dimensions far stranger and deadlier, called planes. Many claim to have read the truths of those other realms in books or learned them from religious dogma, or even boast that they’ve visited in person. Their accounts may not be trustworthy, but they all tell of places that pose unique challenges and offer rewards unlike anything one could find at home. 

A Planar Primer

Everyday people know legends about strange pathways in remote forests that lead into the dream-like land of the fey. Their tales warn of bleak ruins where one can step across the threshold to a place where all joy, sound, and light have been leached away. In the dark of night they gaze at the stars and share stories of ancient heroes and gods who gave the Heavens their shape. In times of crisis they curse their enemies to Hell, and pray to gods they’ve never seen.

Adventurers eventually come to understand more about the nature of existence. Clerics and scholars study the true names of demons and devils and the differences between the two. Learned wizards and theurgists research the metaphysics that provide the arcane energies of their spells. Druids and worshipers of nature perform incantations to ward against interplanar incursions. Warlocks form pacts with horrors born of the spaces between worlds, the lower planes, or even the fey.

Common folk are superstitious, seeing danger in mundane shadow, but perhaps adventurers and their ilk don’t understand the nature of reality as well as they think—the fell entities that warlocks pledge themselves to might even just be clever monsters from the next county over having a good laugh. While people aren’t entirely sure of the truth of the multiverse, it is undeniable that these planes exist, and that the nature of reality elsewhere isn’t quite the same as here. Fools who stumble upon another world unprepared are unlikely to survive. Interplanar monsters are often more powerful and magical than average wild beasts, and the native intelligent beings have strange ways of thinking. They are seldom swayed by the same threats or persuasion that work on normal humanoids.

Types of Planes

The so-called ‘real’ world where most humanoids and nations exist is known as the Waking, or the Material Plane. Closely linked worlds referred to as Mirror Planes have the same general shape as the realms material—the same landforms, same structures, perhaps even the same people—but differ in character or the nature of magic.

Two other types of planes are easily codified. Elemental Planes (sometimes called Inner Planes) are defined by some overriding physical trait, while Moral Planes (sometimes called Outer Planes) each reflect a central ideology or philosophy of being.

Magic to travel between worlds makes use of the Transitive Planes, which connect multiple planes but have few noteworthy landmarks or residents. Amidst these are innumerable Demiplanes that range from lifeless pocket dimensions for bags of holding, to drifting shards that support the vestiges of dead worlds, to realms as large as continents created as prisons, crucibles, or palaces. Beyond them all exists the Far Realm, a place so alien to the minds of mortals that few can understand it or glimpse it without risking insanity.

The same plane may have different names in different cultures. Explorers might erroneously think two locations on the same plane are separate dimensions entirely, or model them as different nested ‘layers’ that have the same essence but take different forms. Some planes even actively resist efforts to map them, morphing to vex codification and categorization.

Travel Between Planes

Monsters from other dimensions can be summoned to the Material Plane but sometimes adventurers must face strange outsiders in the realms where they originated.

Spells. A handful of metal with the appropriate resonance and several hours of smithing with arcane treatments can produce the rod necessary for a plane shift spell, though discovering the proper formula might require an adventure itself. The esoteric astral projection spell lets people explore in a spiritual form, protecting their bodies at the risk of their very souls. The mighty gate spell permits immediate and precise travel, but the rare magic users capable of such powerful magic are seen as threats by many extraplanar powers.

More obscure magic can also breach the veil between worlds, often through great rituals and terrible costs.

Transits. Planar transits take three main forms: portals, pathways, and tides. Portals have a clear threshold between worlds, like a carved stone dragon maw that leads to the Prison Plane of the Great Pyromancer. Pathways offer a gradual transition that must be completed in full to reach the destination plane, such as the shadow labyrinth that leads to the demiplane of Phorros Irrendra, last bastion of the Taranesti elves. Tides cause a given area to shift between worlds, taking those within with it, like the shores along Bosum Strand where on the Night of the Mirror Moon those who dive into the waters holding a mirror emerge in the fey realm known as the Dreaming. By dawn however the magic fades, stranding any who haven’t found their way home.

Many planar transits are ephemeral and cannot be relied on to still be there for a return trip. Some appear and vanish without discovery, brought forth by little understood conjunctions of place and planar energy—and those that are discovered often provoke fear rather than exploratory fervor.
The rare permanent portal is highly valued and closely guarded. It is said the hierarchs who built the Gates of Dawn and Dusk hoped to unite their world with Heaven and Hell, but angels and devils united to punish their hubris. The hierarchs’ continent was carved out into a prison plane known as Daemonforge where the souls of the dead can never reach the afterlife.

Overlays. While a planar tide carries creatures in an area between worlds, sometimes the elemental or moral energy of a plane bleeds into the Material Plane, such as the haunted peak of Cauldron Hill where the veil to the Bleak Gate is thin. Overlays—also called coterminances or manifestations—can vary greatly. One might be temporary, linked to some celestial convergence, or permanent, perhaps the result of a great magical cataclysm, and its borders might simply mark a return to normalcy or could serve as a way to travel to another plane.

Mirror Planes

Like a reflection or echo of the realms material, Mirror Planes take the familiar and imbue it with a sense of fascination or repulsion. 

The land called the Dreaming is a verdant, shifting landscape where time and distance conspire for the sake of dramatic events, ensuring travelers reach their destination at the moment that will yield the greatest conflict or catharsis. The fey population’s strange behaviors make a whimsical sort of half-sense, even if their goals are cruel. Promises made in the Dreaming are dangerous to break, and accepting gifts can oblige their recipient to the giver. 

The most famous figures of the Dreaming are the lords of the Unseen Court—served by the implacable riders of the Great Hunt—who threaten war but can be appeased with offerings of songs and riddles. But the fey vary based on the cultures and myths of the lands they reflect. Around temperate farmlands pixies cavort with leaves in their hair and hags lure children into the woods with tempting sweets, while in vaunted cities of high art the pixies might take the shape of figures from famous paintings and hags call gullible schoolchildren down into sewer drains.

In opposition to the vibrant life of the Dreaming is the somber emptiness of the Bleak Gate. Here buildings sit hollow and abandoned, and even the brightest magic cannot illuminate much farther than a stone’s throw. The air lies still and windless. The only sounds are the scattered whispers and lonely moans of the recently dead, whose souls linger for a time before passing on to some final reward. Without sun or stars time here becomes almost meaningless, unconsidered by the beings of shadow and decay that reside within. Uneasy spirits haunt their old houses, cursed mortals and condemned penitents roam in caravans seeking absolution or simply a way home, and exiled fey of the Bleak Court trade in souls, their servants often seen at the sites of great tragedies to enslave the recently slain.

Other Mirror Planes are possible. Some conceptions of Hell depict it as the Material Plane in the aftermath of some fiery cataclysm. Temporal magic that flows around a crux of fate might create two splinter realities branching from different outcomes of a pivotal event—perhaps in that world, an adventurer’s double longs for everything that their counterpart has, and would kill to get it.

Transitive Planes

If you were to write down details of each plane, the Ethereal Plane is like the page the words are written on, and the Astral Plane is the book itself. Both dimensions have little in the way of interesting landmarks or natives, and even most planar travelers pay them no mind. But certain magic relies on them.

Thought reigns in the Astral Plane—disembodied souls navigate by will and distance means nothing, the world fading to silvery gray in every direction. Most of the dimension is empty, though errant ideas can sometimes manifest crude matter. The personal mindscapes of dreamers may form links to the Astral Plane, and those trapped in perpetual sleep may create permanent dream bodies that eventually degenerate into monsters. Ur-ideas can take the form of leviathans that swim the astral like a psychic sea, and it is rumored an entire empire of psychic beings has learned to control these creatures. Magic like dream and astral projection can untether the soul from the body, using the astral to reach other minds and other worlds. Travelers can move to other planes through convergences, which mortal minds often perceive as swirling pools of color or other sensations that evoke the feeling of the destination. 

The Ethereal Plane is what allows incorporeal creatures to move through solid objects, and nearly every plane has its own ethereal. Beings in the ethereal usually are invisible to those in the plane they originated from, but can perceive a small swath of the dimension they left. Matter and energy from that world cannot affect them, nor even gravity, but other ethereal beings can interact with or harm them, and spells like wall of force extend into the Ethereal Plane. Usually the only thing for a traveler to do in the ethereal is to watch their plane of origination, explore, and emerge at some other spot in that same world, though sometimes two dimensions abut the same Ethereal Plane, and a creature can slip between them like poking a hole in a sheet of paper. It is also possible for ethereal travelers to metaphysically wander away from their origination plane—they find themselves swept up in mists, and might become lost forever or emerge in a random dimension.

Elemental Planes

Most magical traditions define four cardinal elements—air, earth, fire, and water. These are often depicted as vast wedge-like realms floating together in a roiling Elemental Chaos. 

The cores of the Elemental Planes are simple expanses of pure elemental energy. Some regions are almost like the Material Plane just with an exaggerated presence of one element—huge flocks of birds might nest on islands that float through storms in Caeloon, the Plane of Air, gems might rain as hailstones upon endless mountain ranges of Urim, the Plane of Earth, city-sized forges might gather ore from molten seas on Jiese, the Plane of Fire, and luminescent kelp might support civilizations of fish folk in deep benthic gorges in Ostea, the Plane of Water. 

The cardinal elements are sometimes categorized alongside four esoteric elements—death, life, space, and time. Amrou, the Plane of Death has dark grottos, vacuous expanses of drifting asteroids, and rivers of negative energies that awaken undead. Av, the Plane of Life thrums with positive energy, nurturing light, endless tangles of jungle, and rains that cause animals to sprout from rich soil. Mavisha, the Plane of Space is known for geometric palaces and platforms of pure force that orbit, interlink, and fold upon themselves in mind-bending tesseracts and optical illusions brought to life. Sphinxes watch over Ascetia, the Plane of Time, a place where mirages of the past and flickering glimpses of possible futures cause travelers to forget when they are, and the only signs of civilization are enigmatic monoliths and bones upon bones of fallen empires.

Moral Planes

The Moral Planes are the homes of gods, or at least things that claim that title. As with the Elemental Chaos, the great majority of these planes are hard for mortals to conceive and exist more as ideas than as places. Even so certain regions can be explored and visited, and are home to creatures that are motivated by strong ideologies or overpowering impulses. Deities may claim domain to some regions where they can shape the world and set the rules.

Goodness elevates the heavens and other Upper Planes while evil seethes in Hell and similar Lower Planes, but from those generalities each dimension’s texture is nuanced with diverse philosophical manifestations of that core morality. On a single plane that is suffused with lawful essence, one divine domain might be a gallery garden that shifts to fulfill a visitor’s every hedonistic pleasure, another a stolid yet vaunted bureaucracy working to ensure a stable price for diamonds and pearls across the cosmos, and a third a holy bastion under constant siege by demons. 

Mortal souls are thought by most to find their way to Moral Planes after death where they may be transmogrified into servants or receive rewards for their service. Others wait in purgatory, endure punishment for sins, or are simply absorbed into the plane’s spiritual core where perhaps the choices they made with their free will in life will help shift the scales of the moral multiverse.

Otherworldly Oddities

Most dimensions are not so neatly codified as the Elemental, Moral, Mirror, and Transitive Planes.

Planets

The Material Plane has other planets orbiting other stars, and some are suffused with a different mix of elemental and moral energies. 

In the ZEITGEIST setting travel to most planes is nearly impossible, but plane shift and planar transits allow some journeys between worlds around the same star. Each has a supernatural influence on the primary world, Amsywr—the planet Jiese, the Fire of Industry has spurred technological innovation, the influence of Mavisha, the Mysterious Deep means divinations do not work well on islands or at sea, and Caeloon, the Paper Wind lifts spirits in the face of tragedy and produces magic to help with graceful flight.

Mindscapes

Psychic magic can draw energy from the Astral Plane to create small ephemeral dimensions where one’s thoughts can shape subjective reality almost like a god. Here the limits of flesh and physical laws bend to a strong will, and weak minds can be overwhelmed and forget that what they see isn’t real. 

These planes are almost always temporary, but in the BURNING SKIES setting a perpetual and massive mindscape exists deep underground, guarded by dragons. The dreamborn beings within (called trillith) reflect various desires and fears of some great sleeping entity called the Mother of Dreams that is trapped in the depths of the mindscape. Within this world one must have the right mindset to reach their destination, and those who find common purpose with a trillith might bond with it and receive occult powers.

Pocket Dimensions

Mortal magic can attempt to emulate the divine power necessary to create planes, but few can create more than mere pocket dimensions a few score feet across. Without a true divine spark, most of these artificial planes cannot support life. Inanimate objects made of wood or fabric can endure for weeks or years, but still degrade rapidly. Food is sapped of its nourishing essence and becomes tasteless within hours if not faster. Creatures placed within might die within minutes. Water, even in sealed vessels, becomes infused with energies that makes it undrinkable.

The Gyre and The Far Realm

In some distant reach of the multiverse floats The Gyre, a graveyard of planes where the last vestiges of dead worlds are drawn into a churning cloud and ultimately obliterated. Perhaps their energies are then used for the creation of new worlds, or maybe the whole of the multiverse will be consumed one day, but those pieces of worlds that survive long enough to reach the Gyre are homes of the most dreadful and powerful beings–often those who brought about their own apocalypses.

How many of those worlds have been destroyed by corruption from the Far Realm? Few even begin to understand the alien concepts of that place, and those with the insight can become threats themselves. To most the aberrations birthed by contact with the Far Realm are terrifying, yet some come to see that very unnaturality as something be desired and shared with others. Adventurers should be careful when staring into that maddening abyss—lest they become like the monsters they fight.

The Nature of Reality

One theory sees other planes as wellsprings of elemental essences and morality that underpin reality. The elemental energies mingle to create the diverse physical form of the realms material, and the balance of moral energies ensure that free will is innate to the mortals native to the Material Plane. No shortage of theories disagree. Some think other planes are simply places like any other, and that they exert no sway on reality. Others claim the planes are actually created by mortals and their beliefs, and that there was no Hell before there were people to consider the nature of evil, no Plane of Earth until there were mortal minds to think of rocks as being distinct from water. This may seem a distinction without a difference, but it has ramifications for the meaning of life and the purpose of existence. Perhaps mortals are fairly inconsequential relative to the vast scale of the planes, their actions drowned out by forces far greater than them—yet if the planes are shaped by belief, then a person with the right idea can remake the multiverse.