The Planes

Contents

While endless adventure awaits out in the game—there are other worlds beyond these—other continents, other planets, other galaxies. Yet even beyond this existence of countless planets exist more worlds—entirely different dimensions of reality known as the planes of existence. Except for rare linking points that allow travel between them, each plane is effectively its own universe with its own natural laws. Collectively, the entirety of these other dimensions and planes is known as the Great Beyond.

Although the number of planes is limited only by imagination, they can all be categorized into five general types: the Material Plane, the transitive planes, the Inner Planes, the Outer Planes, and the countless demiplanes.

The Great Beyond

The planes are collectively known as the Great Beyond, and form a vast, nesting sphere. At the heart of the sphere lie the Material Plane and its twisted reflection, the Shadow Plane, bridged by the mists of the Ethereal Plane. The elemental planes of the Inner Sphere surround this heart. Farther out, beyond the void of the Astral Plane, sits the unimaginably vast Outer Sphere, which is itself surrounded and contained by the innumerable layers of the Abyss.

What is a Plane?

The planes of existence are different realities with interwoven connections. Except for rare linking points, each plane is effectively its own universe, with its own natural laws. The planes break down into a number of general types: the Material Plane, the transitive planes, the Inner Planes, the Outer Planes, and the demiplanes.

Although the number of planes is limited only by imagination, they can all be categorized into five general types: the Material Plane, the transitive planes, the Inner Planes, the Outer Planes, and the countless demiplanes.

Material Plane

The Material Plane is the most Earth-like of all the planes, and operates under the same set of natural laws that our own world does. This is the default plane for most adventures.

The Material Plane tends to be the most Earth-like of all planes and operates under the same set of natural laws that our own real world does. The “size” of the Material Plane depends upon the campaign—it might conform only to the single world on which your game is set, or it might encompass an entire universe of planets, moons, stars, and galaxies. As it includes the official campaign setting world, it is the assumed starting realm and the default plane for most adventures.

Transitive Planes

These three planes have one important common characteristic: each is used to get from one place to another. The Astral Plane (although technically an Outer Planes) is a conduit to all other planes, while the Ethereal Plane and the Shadow Plane both serve as means of transportation within the Material Plane, which they’re connected to. These planes have the strongest regular interaction with the Material Plane and can be accessed using various spells. They have native inhabitants as well.

Transitive planes have one important common characteristic: they “overlap” with other planes, and as such can be used to travel between these overlapping realities. These planes have the strongest regular interaction with the Material Plane and are often accessed by using various spells. They have native inhabitants as well. Example transitive planes include the following.

Astral Plane

A silvery void that connects the Material and Inner Planes to the Outer Planes, the astral plane is the medium through which the souls of the departed travel to the afterlife. A traveler in the Astral Plane sees the plane as a vast empty void periodically dotted with tiny motes of physical reality calved off of the countless planes it overlaps. Powerful spellcasters utilize the Astral Plane for a tiny fraction of a second when they teleport, or they can use it to travel between planes with spells like astral projection.

Ethereal Plane

The Ethereal Plane is a ghostly realm that exists as a buffer between the Material Plane and the Shadow Plane, overlapping each. A traveler in the Ethereal plane experiences the real world as if the world were an insubstantial ghost, and can move through solid objects without being seen in the real world. Strange creatures dwell in the Ethereal Plane, as well as ghosts and dreams, many of which can sometimes extend their influence into the real world in mysterious and terrifying ways. Powerful spellcasters utilize the Ethereal Plane with spells like blink, etherealness, and ethereal jaunt.

Shadow Plane

The eerie and deadly Shadow Plane is a grim, colorless “duplicate” of the Material Plane. It overlaps with the Material Plane but is smaller in size, and is in many ways a warped and mocking “reflection” of the Material Plane, one infused with negative energy (see Inner Planes) and serving as home for strange monsters like undead shadows and worse. Powerful spellcasters utilize the Shadow Plane to swiftly travel immense distances on the Material Plane with shadow walk, or draw upon the mutable essence of the Shadow Plane to create quasi-real effects and creatures with spells like shadow evocation or shades.

Inner Planes

These six planes are manifestations of the basic building blocks of the universe. Each is made up of a single type of energy or element that overwhelms all others. The natives of a particular Inner Planes are made of the same energy or element as the plane itself. The Negative Energy Plane, the Positive Energy Plane, the Plane of Air, the Plane of Earth, the Plane of Fire, and the Plane of Water are all Inner Planes.

The Inner Planes contain the building blocks of reality—it’s easiest to envision these planes as “containing” the Material Plane, but they do not overlap with the Material Plane as do the transitive planes. Each Inner Planes is made up of a single type of energy or element that overwhelms all others. The natives of a particular Inner Planes are made of the same energy or element as the plane itself. Example Inner Planes include the following.

Elemental Planes

The four classic Inner Planes are the Plane of Air, the Plane of Earth, the Plane of Fire, and the Plane of Water—it is from these planes that the creatures known as elementals hail, yet they house many other strange denizens as well, such as the genie races, strange metal-eating xorns, unseen invisible stalkers, and mischievous mephits.

Energy Planes

Two energy planes exist—the Positive Energy Plane (from which the animating spark of life hails) and the Negative Energy Plane (from which the sinister taint of undeath hails). Energy from both planes infuses reality, the ebb and flow of this energy running through all creatures to bear them along the journey from birth to death. Clerics utilize power from these planes when they channel energy.

Outer Planes

Beyond the realm of the mortal world, beyond the building blocks of reality, lie the Outer Planes. Vast beyond imagining, it is to these realms that the souls of the dead travel, and it is upon these realms in which the gods themselves hold court. Each of the Outer Planes has an alignment, representing a particular moral or ethical outlook, and the natives of each plane tend to behave in agreement with that plane’s alignment. The Outer Planes are also the final resting place of souls from the Material Plane, whether that final rest takes the form of calm introspection or eternal damnation. The denizens of the Outer Planes form the mythologies of civilization, comprising angels and demons, titans and devils, and countless other incarnations of possibility. Each campaign world should have different Outer Planes to match its themes and needs, but classic Outer Planes include lawful good Heaven, the chaos and evil of the Abyss, the regimented lawful evil of Hell, and the capricious freedom and joys of chaotic good Elysium. Powerful spellcasters can contact the Outer Planes for advice or guidance with spells like commune and contact outer plane, or can conjure allies with spells like planar ally or summon monster.

The deities live on the Outer Planes, as do creatures such as celestials, fiends, and other outsiders. Each of the Outer Planes has an alignment representing a particular moral or ethical outlook, and the natives of each plane tend to behave in agreement with that plane’s alignment. The Outer Planes are also the final resting place of souls from the Material Plane, whether that final rest takes the form of calm introspection or eternal damnation. Abaddon, the Abyss, Elysium, Heaven, Hell, Limbo, Nirvana, Purgatory, and Utopia are all Outer Planes.

Esoteric Planes

Source PRG:OA

The planes of the Great Beyond encompass all of existence, from the simple and sublime wonders of the material world to the impossibilities of heavens, hells, and everything in between. Arcane tradition conceptualizes this multiverse of planes as a series of nesting spheres, with each layer and the spaces between representing different vistas of reality. At the center of it all, suspended within the silvery seas of the Astral Plane, lies the Inner Sphere of the Elemental and Material Planes. The Elemental Planes are the raw building blocks of the multiverse, while the planes aligned with positive and negative energy govern the forces of life and death, creation and destruction. The invisible mists and eddies of the Ethereal Plane connect and interpenetrate the worlds of the Inner Sphere, just as the Astral Plane connects these worlds in turn to the infinite realms of the Outer Sphere, the domains of gods and the final destination for the souls of the multiverse.

The esoteric tradition, sometimes referred to as the “ancient wisdom,” acknowledges the many planes, demiplanes, and corners of the Inner and Outer Spheres, but tends to focus more on the Inner Sphere than the realms of the deities. Scholars of occultism believe that their investigations reveal a hidden truth behind the multiverse, and that mastering the implications of this secret can give an adept power over not just her mortal life, but also her life after death. She can then enter a cycle of reincarnation that allows, over successive cycles of existence and reflection, the complete mastery of body, mind, and soul, opening up new vistas of consciousness and immortality.

Consequently, the adept does not concern herself with the courts of petitioners enjoying their final reward or laboring eternally under fiendish masters, nor with the raw building blocks of the material world such as air, earth, fire, and water. Her final personal journey into a more evolved existence is loftier than the base elements, and more self-determined than the proscribed fate of the pious petitioner.

The orthodox view of the planes sees two opposing forces underlying existence in the multiverse: positive and negative energy. Each of these primal forces commands a vast plane of its own at the core of the Inner Sphere.

The Positive Energy Plane is the source of life, and the Negative Energy Plane is the source of death; each exists as antithesis to the other. The great secret of occultism holds that rather than positive and negative energy being conflicting forces, they are in fact two halves of a single whole. Their polarity is not a sign of opposition, but rather two integral aspects of a single dualistic cycle.

The positive aspect of this duality is the Cosmic Fire, the breath of life that grants vital force to living creatures.

The Negative Energy Plane is the intake of that same breath, a return to dust, the recycling of component parts to pave the way for that which comes next.

Delving deeper into the ancient wisdom reveals even more enticing secrets regarding the nature of existence.

Among the oldest creatures in the Great Beyond are the enigmatic outsiders known as aeons, who are said to be the caretakers of reality and the original architects and crafters of the multiverse itself. Befitting the esoteric view of the planes, these primordial beings always manifest a powerful dichotomy sustained in equilibrium: Birth and death. Fate and freedom. Creation and destruction.

The aeons believe they are bound in a supreme oneness with the multiverse known as the “monad,” or the “condition of all,” the transcendental undersoul of all living creatures. They equate this oneness with both the life-giving Cosmic Fire of the Positive Energy Plane and the destructive void of the Negative Energy Plane.

Furthermore, they do not limit this cosmic oneness to themselves, but rather include all of the multiverse’s creatures within their concept of the monad. A human and a pleroma aeon are both emanations of the cosmic flame—the aeon is simply much closer to the source and believes itself to be in communication with it, whereas the monadic soul of a human is esoterically distant from the Fire, being focused primarily on the mortal affairs of the base Material Plane.

Imagine a blazing sphere of brilliant energy blocked by a thick screen. This sphere represents the Cosmic Fire.

Now imagine multitudes of tiny holes in the screen, each allowing some of the light to shine through. From the exoteric viewpoint of the uninitiated, each pinpoint of light appears distinct and unique. The esoteric perspective looks behind the screen and understands that all of the individual lights are but rays from a single source. A creature’s soul is like one glimmering light in that screen‘s field of stars, and when mortal scholars speak of “a monad,” they’re usually referring to this individual-seeming expression of the universal undersoul, at once a unique entity and part of the common soul of the multiverse. The greater an adept understands her place in this scheme, the more power she holds over her eternal destiny.

The short summaries below offer an occult viewpoint on the realms generally referred to as the Esoteric Planes.

Many prominent planes in the orthodox scheme, such as the Shadow Plane and Elemental Planes, do not feature prominently in the cosmology of the adept concerned with multiversal truths and the journey of the mortal soul.

Occultism freely acknowledges the existence of these planes, but does not dwell on them, an approach likewise observed here.

Demiplanes

This catchall category covers all extradimensional spaces that function like planes but have measurable size and limited access. Other kinds of planes are theoretically infinite in size, but a demiplane might be only a few hundred feet across. There are countless demiplanes adrift in reality, and while most are connected to the Astral Plane and Ethereal Plane, some are cut off entirely from the transitive planes and can only be accessed by well-hidden portals or obscure magic spells.

The planes of the Inner Sphere and the Outer Sphere form the overarching structure of the multiverse. With their unimaginably ancient histories and vast scales, they contain most of reality within their borders. Yet the dimensions of reality are not static, particularly in the Astral and Ethereal Planes, which serve to connect the other planes. Under the right conditions, any plane can warp so profoundly that portions coalesce into entirely new planes. These selfcontained pockets of reality are known as demiplanes.

A typical demiplane is a relatively small, finite plane governed by its own set of laws determined upon its creation.

Some of these pocket dimensions owe their existence to the collision of natural forces within other planes. The Positive and Negative Energy Planes exert powerful tidal forces upon the Ethereal Plane, generating ethereal mists. However, these forces are not perfectly synchronized, and when the strain from opposing forces grows too great, the Ethereal Plane sometimes releases energy by coalescing ethereal mists into a demiplane. Occasionally, instead of forming a new demiplane, these mists graft themselves onto an existing demiplane, which expands to accommodate the new material.

Meanwhile, in the Astral Plane, the ever-shifting currents of the River of Souls combine with energy from Limbo and the Plane of Fire to produce massive, hurricane-shaped astral storms. Like hurricanes on Golarion, these storms have stable eyes at their centers. When conditions are right, the Astral Plane can release some of a storm’s energy by creating a demiplane in its eye. These demiplanes can grow over time as they absorb storm-tossed fragments of the Astral Plane into their mutable structures. Astral and ethereal demiplanes are similar in structure, though the differences in their creation leave lingering effects. Because of the role of currents on the River of Souls in their creation, astral demiplanes bear fragments of the nature and memories of passing souls.

Meanwhile, ethereal demiplanes can absorb echoes of dreams, most commonly from the pull of the Dimension of Dreams, and particularly from dreams tied to strong emotions. In the absence of outside interference, these lingering fragments determine the demiplane’s properties and characteristics.

While some demiplanes arise from planar forces, others are born when individuals deliberately fracture pieces of the Astral or Ethereal Planes and reshape them into pocket dimensions to suit their needs. Even mortals can weave demiplanes into existence with complex rituals or powerful magic. The most common reason behind the creation of demiplanes is a desire to isolate their contents. Demiplanes serve as ideal, protected havens for experiments, as well as for manipulations of time and space that would prove difficult or impossible to produce in other places.

The true definition of a demiplane is a matter of debate. In its most restrictive definition, only self-contained pockets of reality formed from the Astral or Ethereal Planes and accessible via typical methods of planar travel—such as plane shift—qualify. This definition excludes secluded places that the gods have formed by reshaping portions of other planes, such as Desna’s realm of Cynosure, and places that are difficult or impossible to access via standard methods, such as the mythical Akashic Record and Rovagug’s prison, the DeadLands.

Some demiplanes include the word “Dimension” in their title, as is the case for the Dimension of Dreams and the Dimension of Time. A dimension is a type of demiplane that breaks two of the common rules most demiplanes share. First, a dimension is always a Transitive Planes that overlays all other planes, including other dimensions. Second, a dimension is an infinite space that encompasses all of reality; it is never a small, finite plane. However, some scholars believe that dimensions are not demiplanes at all, and insist that other Transitive Planes like the Astral Plane, the Ethereal Plane, and the Shadow Plane are, in fact, dimensions.

Layered Planes

Infinities may be broken into smaller infinities, and planes into smaller, related planes. These layers are effectively separate planes of existence, and each layer can have its own features and qualities. Layers are connected to each other through a variety of planar gates, natural vortices, paths, and shifting borders.

Access to a layered plane from elsewhere usually happens on the first layer of the plane, which can be either the top or bottom layer, depending on the specific plane. Most fixed access points (such as portals and natural vortices) reach this layer, which makes it the gateway for other layers of the plane. The plane shift spell generally deposits the spellcaster on the first layer of the plane.

How Planes Interact

Two planes that are separate do not overlap or directly connect to each other. They are like planets in different orbits. The only way to get from one separate plane to the other is to go through a third plane, such as a Transitive Planes.

Coterminous Planes

Planes that touch at specific points are coterminous. Where they touch, a connection exists, and travelers can leave one reality behind and enter the other.

Coexistent Planes

If a link between two planes can be created at any point, the two planes are coexistent. These planes overlap each other completely. A coexistent plane can be reached from anywhere on the plane it overlaps. When moving on a coexistent plane, it is often possible to see into or interact with the plane with which it coexists.

Beyond the mundane world of humans, elves, gnomes, and dwarves lie vast realms known as the planes of existence. Almost limitless in size and potential, the various planes embody the fundamental aspects of reality: alignments, elements, energies, and so on. Each plane is a universe unto itself; it follows its own natural laws and has its own unique inhabitants—the outsiders that occasionally visit or are summoned to the mortal world, be they gods, angels, demons, devils, or even stranger creatures. Literally anything is possible on the planes, making them a perfect location for exotic, terrifying, wondrous, and deadly adventures.

Planar Traits

Each plane of existence has its own properties—the natural laws of its universe. Planar traits are broken down into a number of general areas. All planes have the following kinds of traits.

Physical Planar Traits

The two most important natural laws set by physical traits are how gravity works and how time passes. Other physical traits pertain to the size and shape of a plane and how easily a plane’s nature can be altered.

Gravity

The direction of gravity’s pull may be unusual, and it might even change directions within the plane itself.

Normal Gravity

Most planes have gravity similar to that of the Material Plane. The usual rules for ability scores, carrying capacity, and encumbrance apply. Unless otherwise noted in a plane’s description, assume that it has the normal gravity trait.

Heavy Gravity

The gravity on a plane with this trait is much more intense than on the Material Plane. As a result, Acrobatics, Climb, Ride, and Swim checks incur a –2 circumstance penalty, as do all attack rolls. All item weights are effectively doubled, which might affect a character’s speed. Weapon ranges are halved. A character’s Strength and Dexterity scores are not affected. Characters that fall on a heavy gravity plane take 1d10 points of damage for each 10 feet fallen, to a maximum of 20d10 points of damage.

Light Gravity

The gravity on a plane with this trait is less intense than on the Material Plane. As a result, creatures find that they can lift more. Characters on a plane with the light gravity trait take a +2 circumstance bonus on attack rolls and on Acrobatics and Ride checks. All items weigh half as much, and weapon ranges double. Strength and Dexterity don’t change as a result of light gravity, but what you can do with such scores does change. These advantages apply to travelers from other planes as well as natives. Falling characters on a light gravity plane take 1d4 points of damage for each 10 feet fallen (maximum 20d4).

No Gravity

Individuals on a plane with this trait merely float in space, unless other resources are available to provide a direction for gravity’s pull.

Objective Directional Gravity

The strength of gravity on a plane with this trait is the same as on the Material Plane, but the direction is not the traditional “down” toward the ground. It may be down toward any solid object, at an angle to the surface of the plane itself, or even upward. In addition, the direction of “down” may vary from place to place within the plane.

Subjective Directional Gravity

The strength of gravity on a plane with this trait is the same as on the Material Plane, but each individual chooses the direction of gravity’s pull. Such a plane has no gravity for unattended objects and nonsentient creatures. This sort of environment can be very disorienting to the newcomer, but it is common on “weightless” planes.

Characters on a plane with subjective directional gravity can move normally along a solid surface by imagining “down” near their feet. If suspended in midair, a character “flies” by merely choosing a “down” direction and “falling” that way. Under such a procedure, an individual “falls” 150 feet in the first round and 300 feet in each succeeding round. Movement is straight-line only. In order to stop, one has to slow one’s movement by changing the designated “down” direction (again, moving 150 feet in the new direction in the first round and 300 feet per round thereafter).

It takes a DC 16 Wisdom check to set a new direction of gravity as a free action; this check can be made once per round. Any character who fails this Wisdom check in successive rounds receives a +6 bonus on subsequent checks until he or she succeeds.

Time

The rate at which time passes can vary on different planes, though it remains constant within any particular plane. Time is always subjective for the viewer. The same subjectivity applies to various planes. Travelers may discover that they gain or lose time while moving between planes, but from their point of view, time always passes naturally.

Normal Time

Describes how time passes on the Material Plane. One hour on a plane with normal time equals 1 hour on the Material Plane. Unless otherwise noted in a plane’s description, assume it has the normal time trait.

Erratic Time

Some planes have time that slows down and speeds up, so an individual may lose or gain time as he moves between such planes and any others. To the denizens of such a plane, time flows naturally and the shift is unnoticed. The following is provided as an example.

d% Time on Material Plane Time on Erratic Time Plane
01–10 1 day 1 round
11–40 1 day 1 hour
41–60 1 day 1 day
61–90 1 hour 1 day
91–100 1 round 1 day
Flowing Time

On some planes, the flow of time is consistently faster or slower. One may travel to another plane, spend a year there, and then return to the Material Plane to find that only 6 seconds have elapsed. Everything on the plane returned to is only a few seconds older. But for that traveler and the items, spells, and effects working on him, that year away was entirely real. When designating how time works on planes with flowing time, put the Material Plane‘s flow of time first, followed by the flow in the other plane.

Timeless

On planes with this trait, time still passes, but the effects of time are diminished. How the timeless trait affects certain activities or conditions such as hunger, thirst, aging, the effects of poison, and healing varies from plane to plane. The danger of a timeless plane is that once an individual leaves such a plane for one where time flows normally, conditions such as hunger and aging occur retroactively. If a plane is timeless with respect to magic, any spell cast with a noninstantaneous duration is permanent until dispelled.

Shape and Size

Planes come in a variety of sizes and shapes. Most planes are infinite, or at least so large that they may as well be infinite.

Finite

A plane with this trait has defined edges or borders. These borders may adjoin other planes or may be hard, finite borders such as the edge of the world or a great wall.

Demiplanes are often finite.

Immeasurable

Planes with this trait might seem to go on forever, and indeed many are so vast that, for all practical purposes, their size is infinite. The Material Plane consists of the entire universe—an expanse so truly vast in scope that it is close enough to being immeasurable to qualify for this trait.

Similarly, while the Outer Sphere has a static size, it is so unimaginably vast that it cannot be measured or traversed without powerful magic.

Self-Contained

On planes with this trait, the borders wrap in on themselves, depositing the traveler on the other side of the map. Some spherical planes are examples of self-contained, finite planes, but they can also be cubes, tori, or flat expanses with magical edges that teleport the traveler to the opposite edge when she crosses them. Some demiplanes are self-contained.

Unbounded

On planes with this trait, the borders wrap in on themselves, depositing a traveler who voyages too far onto the other side of the map. Unbounded planes can be spheres, cubes, tori, or flat expanses with magical edges that teleport the traveler to the opposite edge when she crosses them.

Structural Traits

The underlying rules of reality that govern how the denizens and landscape of a plane function are described by a plane’s structural traits. Regardless of the nature of a plane’s structural traits, all planes can be altered on a whim by a deity’s will to a certain extent; this ability to change reality is greatest within the boundaries of a deity’s planar realm. Demigods have a lesser ability to effect such change and are limited to changing only their own planar realms.

Lasting Structure

On a plane with this trait, objects remain where they are (and what they are) unless affected by physical force or magic. Anyone can change the immediate environment as a result of tangible effort.

Morphic

This trait measures how easily the basic nature of a plane can be changed. Some planes are responsive to sentient thought, while some respond to physical or magical efforts. Others can only be manipulated by extremely powerful creatures.

Alterable Morphic

On a plane with this trait, objects remain where they are (and what they are) unless affected by physical force or magic. You can change the immediate environment as a result of tangible effort. Unless otherwise noted in a plane’s description, assume it has the alterable morphic trait.

Divinely Morphic

Specific unique beings (deities or similar great powers) have the ability to alter objects, creatures, and the landscape on planes with this trait. They may cause these areas to change instantly and dramatically, creating great kingdoms for themselves. Ordinary characters find these planes similar to alterable planes in that they may be affected by spells and physical effort.

Highly Morphic

On a plane with this trait, features of the plane change so frequently that it’s difficult to keep a particular area stable. Some such planes may react dramatically to specific spells, sentient thought, or the force of will. Others change for no reason.

Magically Morphic

Specific spells can alter the basic material of a plane with this trait.

Sentient

These planes respond to a single entity’s thoughts—those of the plane itself. Travelers might find the plane’s landscape changing as a result of what the plane thinks of the travelers, becoming either more or less hospitable depending on its reaction.

Static

These planes are unchanging. Visitors cannot affect living residents of the plane or objects that the denizens possess. Any spells that would affect those on the plane have no effect unless the plane’s static trait is somehow removed or suppressed. Spells cast before entering a plane with the static trait remain in effect, however. Even moving an unattended object within a static plane requires a DC 16 Strength check. Particularly heavy objects may be impossible to move.

Essence Traits

Four basic elements (air, earth, fire, and water) and two types of energy (positive and negative) combine in various ways to make up reality. Note that some planes have no elemental or energy traits; such traits are noted in a plane’s description only when they are present.

Mixed Essence

The Material Plane is the classic example of a mixed essence plane—here, reality is composed of a mixture of all forms of essence. In certain places, one form of essence might be more dominant than others, but overall they appear in this plane in relatively equal measures.

On the Outer Planes, a different form of mixed essence composes reality: quintessence. This material forms the basis for all matter and life on the Outer Planes, and it is tied to the nature of the soul itself. See the River of Souls for more information about quintessence. Note that when quintessence duplicates another essence (such as earth or fire), effects that interact with that essence function as expected.

Air-Dominant

Consisting mostly of open space, planes with this trait have just a few bits of floating stone or other solid matter. They usually have a breathable atmosphere, though such a plane may include regions of acidic or toxic gas.

Earth-Dominant

Planes with this trait are mostly solid. Visitors who need to breathe run the risk of suffocation if they don’t reach a cavern or other pocket of breathable air within the earth.

Worse yet, individuals without the ability to burrow are entombed in the earth and must dig their way out (at a rate of 5 feet per full-round action spent digging).

Fire-Dominant

Planes with this trait are composed of flames that continually burn without consuming their fuel source.

Fire-dominant planes are extremely hostile to Material Plane creatures, and those without resistance or immunity to fire are soon immolated.

Unprotected flammable materials catch fire almost immediately, and individuals wearing unprotected flammable clothing catch on fire. In addition, all individuals take 3d10 points of fire damage each round while on a fire-dominant plane. Creatures of the water subtype are extremely uncomfortable on fire-dominant planes, while those that are made of water take 6d10 points of fire damage from the plane each round, rather than 3d10.

Water-Dominant

Planes with this trait are mostly liquid. Visitors who can’t breathe in water or reach a pocket of air likely drown.

Creatures of the fire subtype are extremely uncomfortable on water-dominant planes, and those made of fire take 1d10 points of damage each round while on a waterdominant plane.

Negative-Dominant

Planes with this trait drain the life out of travelers who tread upon them. They tend to be lonely, haunted planes, drained of color, devoid of plant and animal life, and filled with winds bearing the soft moans of those who died within them. Death ward provides protection from a negative-dominant plane as long as the effect lasts, regardless of the strength of that plane’s negative dominant trait.

On minor negative-dominant planes, living creatures take 1d6 points of negative energy damage per round. When this damage reduces a creature to 0 hit points or below, the creature crumbles into ash. Undead on a minor negative-dominant plane instead gain fast healing 2 (this does not stack with existing fast healing an undead already has).

Major negative-dominant planes are even more dangerous to the living. Each round, a living creature on such a plane must succeed at a DC 25 Fortitude save or incur a negative level. A creature whose negative levels equal its current levels or Hit Dice is slain and becomes a wraith. Undead on a negative-dominant plane gain fast healing 5 (this does not stack with any existing fast healing an undead already has).

Positive-Dominant

Planes with this trait are characterized by an abundance of life. Like for negative-dominant planes, the strength of the positive-dominant trait can be either minor or major.

A minor positive-dominant plane is a riotous explosion of life in all its forms. Colors are brighter, fires are hotter, noises are louder, and sensations are more intense as a result of the positive energy infusing the plane. All living individuals in a positive-dominant plane gain fast healing 2.

Undead instead take 1d6 points of positive energy damage per round, and at 0 hit points they crumble to ash.

A creature on a major positive-dominant plane must succeed at a DC 15 Fortitude save or be blinded for 10 rounds by the brilliance of the surroundings. Simply being on the plane grants living creatures fast healing 5. In addition, living creatures at full hit points gain 5 additional temporary hit points per round that last until 1d20 rounds after the creature leaves the major positive-dominant plane.

However, a creature that gains temporary hit points in this way must attempt a DC 20 Fortitude save each round that its temporary hit points exceed its normal maximum hit point total. Failure results in the creature exploding in a riot of energy, which kills it. Undead on a major positive-dominant plane take 3d6 points of positive energy damage per round and are staggered during each round they take this damage.

Alignment Traits

Just as characters may be lawful neutral or chaotic good, many planes are tied to a particular morality or ethos.

Some planes have a predisposition to a certain alignment. Most of the inhabitants of these planes also have the plane’s particular alignment, even powerful creatures such as deities. The alignment trait of a plane affects social interactions there. Characters who follow other alignments than most of the inhabitants do may have a tougher time dealing with the plane’s natives and situations.

Alignment traits have multiple components. First are the moral (good or evil) and ethical (lawful or chaotic) components; a plane can have a moral component, an ethical component, or one of each. Second, the specific alignment trait indicates whether each moral or ethical component is mildly or strongly evident. Many planes have no alignment traits; these traits are noted in a plane’s description only when they are present.

First are the moral (good or evil) and ethical (lawful or chaotic) components; a plane with alignment traits can have a moral component, an ethical component, or one of each.

Second, the specific alignment trait indicates whether each moral or ethical component is mildly or strongly evident.

Many planes have no alignment traits; these traits are noted in a plane’s description only when they are present.

No plane can be both good-aligned and evil-aligned, nor can any plane be both law-aligned and chaos-aligned.

Aligned (Good/Evil)

These planes have chosen a side in the battle of good versus evil. No plane can be both good-aligned and evil-aligned.

Aligned (Chaos/Law)

Law versus chaos is the key struggle for these planes and their residents. No plane can be both law-aligned and chaos-aligned.

Aligned (Neutral)

These planes stand outside the conflicts between good and evil and law and chaos.

Mildly Aligned

Creatures who have an alignment opposite that of a mildly aligned plane take a –2 penalty on all Charisma-based checks. A mildly neutral-aligned plane applies no penalties.

Strongly Aligned

On strongly aligned planes, a –2 penalty applies on the Intelligence-, Wisdom-, and Charisma-based checks of all creatures not of the plane’s alignment. The penalties for the moral and ethical components of the alignment trait stack.

A strongly neutral-aligned plane stands in opposition to or in careful balance between all moral and ethical principles: good, evil, law, and chaos. Such a plane may be more concerned with the balance of the alignments than with accommodating and accepting alternate points of view.

In the same fashion as for other strongly aligned planes, strongly neutral-aligned planes impose a –2 penalty on the Intelligence-, Wisdom-, and Charisma-based checks of any creature that isn’t neutral. The penalty is applied separately for neutrality with respect to law and chaos and for neutrality with respect to good and evil; therefore chaotic neutral, lawful neutral, neutral evil, and neutral good creatures take a –2 penalty, and chaotic evil, chaotic good, lawful evil, and lawful good creatures take a –4 penalty.

Magic Traits

Magic works differently from plane to plane; magic traits set the boundaries for what magic can and can’t do on each plane.

A plane’s magic trait describes how magic works on that plane compared to how it works on the Material Plane. Particular locations on a plane (such as those under the direct control of deities) may be pockets where a different magic trait applies.

Normal Magic

This magic trait means that all spells and supernatural abilities function as written. Unless otherwise noted in a plane’s description, assume that it has the normal magic trait.

Dead Magic

These planes have no magic at all. A plane with the dead magic trait functions in all respects like an antimagic field spell. Divination spells cannot detect subjects within a dead magic plane, nor can a spellcaster use teleport or another spell to move in or out. The only exception to the “no magic” rule is permanent planar portals, which still function normally.

Enhanced Magic

Particular spells and spell-like abilities are easier to use or more powerful in effect on planes with this trait than they are on the Material Plane. Natives of a plane with the enhanced magic trait are aware of which spells and spell-like abilities are enhanced, but planar travelers may have to discover this on their own. If a spell is enhanced, it functions as if its caster level was 2 higher than normal.

Impeded Magic

Particular spells and spell-like abilities are more difficult to cast on planes with this trait, often because the nature of the plane interferes with the spell. To cast an impeded spell, the caster must make a concentration check (DC 20 + the level of the spell). If the check fails, the spell does not function but is still lost as a prepared spell or spell slot. If the check succeeds, the spell functions normally.

Limited Magic

Planes with this trait permit only the use of spells and spell-like abilities that meet particular qualifications. Magic can be limited to effects from certain schools or subschools, effects with certain descriptors, or effects of a certain level (or any combination of these qualities). Spells and spell-like abilities that don’t meet the qualifications simply don’t work.

Wild Magic

On a plane with the wild magic trait, spells and spell-like abilities function in radically different and sometimes dangerous ways. Any spell or spell-like ability used on a wild magic plane has a chance to go awry. The caster must make a caster level check (DC 15 + the level of the spell or spell-like ability) for the magic to function normally. Failure means that something strange happens; roll d% and consult Table: Wild Magic Effects.

Table: Wild Magic Effects
d% Effect
01–19 The spell rebounds on its caster with normal effect. If the spell cannot affect the caster, it simply fails.
20–23 A circular pit 15 feet wide opens under the caster’s feet; it is 10 feet deep per level of the caster.
24–27 The spell fails, but the target or targets of the spell are pelted with a rain of small objects (anything from flowers to rotten fruit), which disappear upon striking. The barrage continues for 1 round. During this time the targets are blinded and must make concentration checks (DC 15 + spell level) to cast spells.
28–31 The spell affects a random target or area. Randomly choose a different target from among those in range of the spell or center the spell at a random place within range of the spell. To generate direction randomly, roll 1d8 and count clockwise around the compass, starting with south. To generate range randomly, roll 3d6. Multiply the result by 5 feet for close-range spells, 20 feet for medium-range spells, or 80 feet for long-range spells.
32–35 The spell functions normally, but any material components are not consumed. The spell is not expended from the caster’s mind (the spell slot or prepared spell can be used again). Similarly, an item does not lose charges, and the effect does not count against an item’s or spell-like ability‘s use limit.
36–39 The spell does not function. Instead, everyone (friend or foe) within 30 feet of the caster receives the effect of a heal spell.
40–43 The spell does not function. Instead, a deeper darkness effect and a silence effect cover a 30-foot radius around the caster for 2d4 rounds.
44–47 The spell does not function. Instead, a reverse gravity effect covers a 30-foot radius around the caster for 1 round.
48–51 The spell functions, but shimmering colors swirl around the caster for 1d4 rounds. Treat this as a glitterdust effect with a save DC of 10 + the level of the spell that generated this result.
52–59 Nothing happens. The spell does not function. Any material components are used up. The spell or spell slot is used up, an item loses charges, and the effect counts against an item’s or spell-like ability‘s use limit.
60–71 Nothing happens. The spell does not function. Any material components are not consumed. The spell is not expended from the caster’s mind (a spell slot or prepared spell can be used again). An item does not lose charges, and the effect does not count against an item’s or spell-like ability‘s use limit.
72–98 The spell functions normally.
99–100 The spell functions strongly. Saving throws against the spell incur a –2 penalty. The spell has the maximum possible effect, as if it were cast with the Maximize Spell feat. If the spell is already maximized with the feat, there is no further effect.

Reading A Plane Stat Block

Each of the planes explored in this chapter begins with a short stat block of key information, organized as follows.

New rules elements and player options introduced elsewhere in this book are marked with an asterisk (*).

Name and Description: The plane’s name comes first, followed by some of the other names by which the plane is known. This is followed by a short description of the plane.

Category: This indicates whether the plane is an Inner Planes or an Outer Planes. Parentheses are used to indicate Transitive Planes and the alignment of Outer Planes.

Traits: This section lists all of the plane’s traits.

Denizens: The Denizens section of the stat block lists information about that plane’s occupants.

Divinities includes pantheons that can be found on the plane.

Outsiders lists significant types of outsiders (such as air elementals, angels, or demons) that dwell on a specific plane.

Petitioners provides the name of the specific type of petitioner native to the plane in question, followed by the unique qualities that petitioner gains.

Infusions: This final section provides details on the benefits a character gains when she gets one of the three infusion feats: Planar Infusion, Improved Planar Infusion, and Greater Planar Infusion.

List of Planes and Their Traits

Abaddon (Neutral Evil)

Abaddon is a bleak realm—the source of the legendary River Styx and the realm of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Abaddon embodies the concept of oblivion of the mortal soul. Here the Four Horseman and their courts of harbingers rule over a population of daemons epitomizing every iteration of mortal death. The bleak and forbidding wastes are laced through by the glittering, toxic ribbon of black water known as the River Styx, while overhead the sky hangs in perpetual eclipse, a single shrouded star looking down like the lidded eye of a slumbering, malevolent god.

Abaddon is a vexing and frightening place to become lost, but in many ways, the desolation of the plane’s deadly wilderness regions is a comfort compared to the horrors that await in its landmark locations.

Category Outer Planes (neutral evil)

TRAITS

Abaddon has the following planar traits:

DENIZENS

Abaddon is a realm of the hunted. Little dwells here that isn’t in turn stalked by something more terrifying. In many areas, undead stalk the landscape in constant search of lives to quench. The grim reapers are the most dangerous and infamous of these predators. The landscape is infested with deadly predators like soul eaters, vargouilles, and yeth hounds, to say nothing of hunters and feeders from other planes who stalk the twilit reaches of the Eternal Eclipse.

  • Daemons Although they often deny this, every daemon began as a living evil mortal. Condemned to Abaddon, their forms shifted to reflect their nature in life and their cause of death. Daemons have a ravenous, overwhelming desire to sate themselves on mortal souls, like addicts seeking to feed their own selfish needs. They’re also religious zealots devoted to the obliteration of every mortal soul: pitiable, wretched things, rudderless and adrift in an uncaring cosmos and forever defined by the very thing they detest— life itself.
  • Divs Corrupted genies exiled to Abaddon, divs are consumed by an utter hatred of mortals and seek to bring ruin to those creatures’ creations. Serving the demigod Ahriman, they dwell in the unclaimed wastes at Abaddon’s periphery, where they war with exiled daemon harbingers and endlessly plot to rain catastrophe upon the Material Plane.
  • The Hunted Abaddon’s petitioners appear much as they did in life, though greatly emaciated, populating the horrific landscape as the lowest tier of the metaphysical food chain. Many perish within hours of arrival, and those who survive longer never know a moment of peace from being hunted. Their often brief and horrific afterlives usually end with ritual consumption or industrialized oblivion, with the surviving few preying upon each other, fueling ironic transformations into daemons who then go on to perpetuate the cycle.
  • Night Hags The night hags’ interplanar trade in stolen souls makes them ubiquitous sights in Abaddon’s soul markets. Beneficiaries of some cosmic bargain between their goddess and the Four Horsemen, night hags receive virtual immunity to predation in any form while within Abaddon and are afforded free movement between the domains of harbingers and Horsemen. Even non-daemons that might attack them hesitate due to the swift and brutal responses such actions inevitably draw.

DIVINITIES

  • Daemon Harbingers Filling the power void between the daemons and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a diverse, terrifying pantheon of daemonic demigods known as the harbingers. On Abaddon, the harbingers rule smaller swaths of reality and serve as favored advisors, consorts, or generals to the Horsemen, while on Material Plane worlds their cults spread to ensure Abaddon shall never have a shortage of souls to hunt.
  • Horsemen of the Apocalypse Among the most feared of all demigods are those four known as the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the greatest of all daemons and the rulers of much of Abaddon itself. Only four Horsemen can exist at any one time, but three of these positions (the Horseman of Famine, the Horseman of Pestilence, and the Horseman of War) have been held by numerous entities over the eons. Only the Horseman of Death has never been supplanted or replaced—Charon has existed as long as the Horsemen have.
  • The Oinodaemon Some legends say the Four once bowed to a singular ruler. This first daemon, the so-called Oinodaemon, was the one being that could have guided the Horsemen through the agonizing meaninglessness of their hunger, but befitting their nature, the Four rebelled, bound their father, and gorged themselves on his flesh. Where the Oinodaemon dwells today, if he survived his deposition, and indeed if he ever existed at all, are some of the enduring mysteries of the Great Beyond. Perhaps the most disturbing theory holds that the eternally eclipsed sun that looks out forever over Abaddon is in fact the Oinodaemon’s only remaining eye, and that he and Abaddon itself have become one.

Outsiders apocalypse horses, daemons, divs, dorvaes, night hags, nightmares, soul eaters, vargouilles, yeth hounds

Petitioners hunted (emaciated versions of mortal selves)

Qualities fast healing 1, DR 5/—

INFUSIONS

Basic Your link to Abaddon enhances your skill in hunting prey while avoiding being hunted yourself. You gain a +1 bonus on Reflex saves, you can move at full speed while hiding your tracks, and you a gain a +2 bonus on Survival checks to follow tracks.

Improved Mirroring Abaddon’s hunger for and mastery over souls, you gain a +4 bonus on all saving throws against possession effects and effects that tamper with your soul, such as soul trap or an astradaemon’s devour soul ability. Furthermore, you can consume a soul gem created by a cacodaemon as a standard action. Immediately thereafter, for a number of rounds equal to your Hit Dice, you are treated as an evil outsider and gain fast healing 2.

Greater The waters of the River Styx infuse you. You are immune to effects that cause amnesia or otherwise alter your memory, including the effect of the Styx itself. Your touch can affect the memories of others as well. Three times per day, you can use mindwipe as a spell-like ability.

Exploration

The grim skies above Abaddon are as often as not filled with smoke and dark, roiling clouds, but when the cover parts, what is revealed above is worse—an endless gray expanse with no visible stars. A continuously eclipsed sun burns high above, appearing as an empty hole in the firmament ringed by a ghostly glow. This sole illumination provides Abaddon with an eerie half-light that never wanes or waxes, keeping the realm in a perpetual state of twilight with no discernible day-night cycle.

As with the other Outer Planes, there is no true concept of “north” on Abaddon. Devices like astralabes are often difficult to utilize in this realm, for here, even the strongest pull can change and fluctuate. On a local scale, such devices tend to focus on the heart of power of the closest divinity, whether a throne or altar or other center of faith, but when traveling great distances across Abaddon, only the River Styx can be trusted to remain constant.

Traveling the Styx

The Styx’s waters erase memories. A splash is enough to cause a fugue state, while full immersion causes total amnesia.In both cases, a player must attempt a DC 25 Will save to resist the effects of the waters. This is a mind-affecting effect. Creatures native to the River Styx are immune to its memory-wiping effects.

Charon’s thanadaemons ply the Styx, and accept payment from any traveler willing to pay the price. In typical situations, the fee consists of 50 platinum pieces or two gems worth 300 gold pieces apiece for a living passenger, and a mere 2 copper pieces for each dead or undead passenger. Refusal or inability to pay the thanadaemon’s price causes the fiend to abruptly overturn its vessel, hurling passengers into the Styx, as does any attempt to bring violence to any passengers aboard the craft.

Fortunately for those who pay for passage, Abaddon’s denizens understand these rules and do not attack those who partake of the thanadaemons’ services. A thanadaemon can pilot its passengers to any location touched by the Styx in the Outer Planes in a matter of 2d6 hours, regardless of the actual distance traveled.

Travel upon the Styx without a thanadaemon’s aid is possible. The waters of the Styx are unnaturally calm—cataracts and rapids exist, but they are rare. A character who wishes to use the Styx to reach a specific location in Abaddon, the Abyss, or Hell must succeed at a DC 30 Knowledge (planes) check to plot the course. On a successful check, the PC plots a viable course to the desired destination, and the journey takes 2d6 days to complete. If the check was a failure, at the end of the 2d6 days, the traveler ends up elsewhere in Abaddon, the Abyss, or Hell, subject to the GM’s discretion. At this point a character can attempt a new DC 30 Knowledge (planes) check to plot a new course, even to the previously attempted location. Each journey always takes 2d6 days to complete, regardless of how many attempts have been made to reach a destination.

Table: Abaddon Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–4 1 doru 2
5–6 1 aghash 4
7–10 1 nightmare 5
11–16 2d6 hunted petitioners 6
17–18 1 ceustodaemon 6
19–20 1d6 lacridaemons 6
21–22 1d10 cacodaemons 7
23–24 1 soul eater 7
25–26 1 pairaka 7
27–30 2d6 vargouilles 8
31–34 1d6 venedaemons 8
35–36 2d6 yeth hounds 9
37–40 1 night hag 9
41–44 1d12 vulnudaemons 9
45 1d8 bushyastas 10
46–47 1 ghawwas 10
48–49 1 cauchemar 11
50–51 1d8 sepsidaemons 11
52–55 1d6 hydrodaemons 11
56 1 dorvae 11
57–58 1d8 suspiridaemons 11
59–60 1 night hag coven 12
61 1 shira 12
62–65 1d6 piscodaemons 13
66–69 1d10 leukodaemons 14
70–71 1d6 meladaemons 14
72 1 sepid 14
73–76 1d6 erodaemons 14
77–78 1d10 sangudaemons 14
79–82 1d6 derghodaemons 15
83 1 astradaemon 16
84 1d3 temerdaemons 16
85–88 1d8 thanadaemons 17
89–90 1d6 crucidaemons 18
91–92 1d4 lesser deaths 18
93–94 1d4 phasmadaemons 19
95 1 akvan 20
96 1d6 purrodaemons 21
97 1d4 olethrodaemons 22
98 1 grim reaper 22
99 1d6 obcisidaemons 22
100 1 apocalypse horse 25

The Abyss (Chaotic Evil)

Surrounding the Outer Sphere like the impossibly deep skin of an onion, the layered plane of the Abyss begins as gargantuan canyons and yawning chasms in the fabric of the other Outer Planes, bordered by the foul waters of the River Styx. Coterminous with all of the Outer Planes, the infinite layers of the Abyss connect to one another in constantly shifting pathways. There are no rules in the Abyss, nor laws, order, or hope. The Abyss is a perversion of freedom, a nightmare realm of unmitigated horror where desire and suffering are given demonic form, for the Abyss is the spawning ground of the innumerable races of demons, among the oldest beings in all the Great Beyond.

TRAITS

The Abyss has the following planar traits:

Note: See the Abyss page for more information.

Abyss

The Abyss is the realm of demons—a place infused with chaos and evil whose fissures have swallowed entire worlds.

The Abyss is one of the largest of the Outer Planes, but it consists of numerous distinct ecosystems rather than a single roiling expanse. Each portion of the Abyss exists as a plane in its own right. The Abyssal reaches ruled by divinities are known collectively as Abyssal realms.

Category Outer Planes (chaotic evil)

TRAITS

Gravity normal

Time normal

Realm immeasurable

Structural sentient

Essence mixed

Alignment strongly chaos-aligned and strongly evil-aligned

Magic enhanced (spells and spell-like abilities with the chaotic or evil descriptor) and impeded (spells and spell-like abilities with the lawful good descriptor)

DENIZENS

While the most populous of the Abyss’s denizens are its demons, much more than demonic life dwells in this plane’s depths. Ravenous swarms such as flesh-eating vescavors, spidery demon-hunting bebiliths, immense slithering riftcreepers, and gluttonous wormlike grimslakes are but a small sample of the horrors the Abyss has to offer.

  • Demodands Although the titans who sought to become gods were defeated and cast into the Abyss, they still managed something godlike: the creation of life in the form of demodands. These minions are loyal to their creators but have little interest in the divine. Unlike many other outsider races, all varieties of demodands are powerful, for each carries a tiny spark of divinity that ensures even the weakest of their kind is truly dangerous.
  • Demons Although demons are perhaps the youngest of the established races of outsider, they are also perhaps the most numerous. The first demons were created eons ago by a now-forgotten Horseman of the Apocalypse who was intrigued by the nature of mortal souls that had become larvae in the afterlife. At the height of this Horseman’s experiments in conjoining sinful mortal petitioners with qlippoth, he triggered a most unholy transformation— the creation of the first demon. In doing so, the foolish Horseman unwittingly showed the Abyss how to transform mortal sin into demonic life. A chain reaction spread from that incident, giving rise to demons throughout the Abyss and singlehandedly shifting power over the plane from the qlippoth to the demons. After this initial population explosion, the demonic population of the Abyss leveled out, but it remains unimaginably large.
  • Larvae Mortal souls consigned to the Abyss transform into hideous maggot-like petitioners known as larvae. These writhing abominations can manifest anywhere in the Abyss, but they are most common in its uppermost reaches.
  • Qlippoth Once the rulers of the Abyss, the qlippoth are now an endangered species. Driven back to the very depths of the plane by the explosive growth of demonic life, the qlippoth hope to one day reclaim the plane from the demons.
  • Qlippoth Lords Once the rulers of the Abyss, the qlippoth lords have degraded to a fraction of their power, no longer even at the full strength of demigods.
  • Rift Dragons The rift dragons who dwell on the Abyss generally fall into one of two categories: young who haven’t yet migrated to a Material Plane world, or elderly monsters who have completed their goals on such worlds and have returned to rule realms of their own, akin in many ways to demon lords. Rift dragons adore the concept of being worshiped, often relying upon their cruelty and power to force veneration.
  • Titans The titans of the Abyss are universally bitter, cruel, and jealous of the gods. Once hoping to be counted among the divine, they were summarily defeated by true gods and cast into the Abyss as punishment.

Divinities The most numerous of the Abyssal divinities are its demon lords. Notes on the two most powerful of their kind are presented below, along with information about other deities and demigods who make their home in the Abyss. demon lords, goblin hero-gods, nascent demon lords, qlippoth lords Outsiders demodands, demons, qlippoth

Petitioners larvae (writhing maggots with humanoid faces)

Qualities resistance 10 to cold, electricity, and fire, bite attack replaces slam attack

INFUSIONS

Basic The horrific fecundity of the Abyss and its entropic drive to expand and consume have bolstered your body and enhanced your capacities for cruelty. You gain a +1 bonus on Fortitude saves, a +2 bonus on Intimidate checks to demoralize a foe, and a +2 bonus on attack rolls to confirm critical hits.

Improved You can call upon the Abyss to infect and transform the surrounding terrain, afflicting it with horrors and nightmares. You can use curse terrain as a spell-like ability once per day.

Greater You can flood a creature’s mind with horrific truths and the overwhelming chaos and evil from the Abyss. You can use insanity as a spell-like ability once per day.

Locations

Abyssal realms exist in a mind-boggling number, and only a small fraction of them are detailed below.

Exploration

As if the inhabitants of the Abyss weren’t enough, the plane itself is an enemy of those who travel there. Each realm has its own rules of reality, making navigation from realm to realm impossible without magic like plane shift. Day-night cycles and whatever might (or might not) substitute as “north” can vary widely from realm to realm.

The deep chasms for which the Abyss was given its epithet gouge through the walls of the Outer Sphere, opening to ever more horrific regions. Those unfortunate enough to fall into one of these endless rifts can plunge forever unless they happen to strike a ledge, bridge, immense behemoth, or some other solid surface—no true bottom exists in such rifts (or if one does, nothing alive today has lived long enough to plumb the immense distance). A creature that can propel itself close to the rift’s walls might find that gravity draws it to a new “down,” pulling it into an Abyssal realm that adjoins the rift, though the creature would certainly take falling damage in the process.

Alternatively, a creature might fall far enough that gravity diminishes entirely, stranding the unfortunate entity for eternity. Some rifts eventually connect to other planes; the Abyss is known for its many passages and portals, but a rift could take a creature nearly anywhere in the multiverse, with no guarantee of safety upon arrival and rarely an opportunity for a return trip. Other rifts are truly infinite, leaving a creature to fall endlessly until it succumbs to starvation, suffocation, thirst, or the sheer madness of an unending plummet.

Table: Abyss Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–2 1d6 ostovites 4
3–4 1d4 howlers 5
5–9 2d6 larvae petitioners 6
10 1 greater barghest 7
11 2d6 cythnigots 7
12 1d8 hydraggons 7
13 1 utukku 8
14 1d8 deinochoses 9
15–18 1d8 vescavor swarms 9
19 1 vescavor queen 9
20–22 2d6 lamhigyns 9
23–26 1d4 bodaks 10
27 1 retriever 11
28 1d8 shoggtis 11
29 1 dorvae 11
30 1d8 warmonger wasps 11
31–34 1d10 grimslakes 11
35 2d6 apocalypse locusts 12
36 1d6 gorgoroses 12
37 1 young rift dragon 12
38–40 1d6 bebiliths 13
41 1 augnagar 14
42 1d8 nyogoths 14
43–44 1d4 baregaras 14
45 1d6 chernobues 15
46 1 xacarba 15
47–48 1 riftcreeper 15
49–50 1d6 dwiergeths 16
51 1d6 behimirons 16
52 1d10 gongorinans 16
53 1 adult rift dragon 16
54–56 1d8 tarry demodands 17
57 1 gristly demodand 17
58 1 shaggy demodand 18
59–60 1d2 slimy demodands 18
61 1d4 catabolignes 18
62–63 1d8 stringy demodands 19
64 1d4 thulgants 20
65 1 hundun 21
66 1 ancient rift dragon 21
67 1 devastator 22
68 1d4 squamous demodands 22
69 1d4 thanatotic titans 24
70 1 hekatonkheires 24
71–100 Roll on Demon Table 3–22 Varies
Table: Demon Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–5 2d6 dretches 7
6–10 2d6 quasits 7
11–15 2d6 cambions 7
16–18 1d8 schirs 8
19–21 2d6 abrikandilus 8
22–26 1d6 brimoraks 8
27–29 1d10 vermleks 8
30–32 1d6 yaenits 9
33–37 1d8 babaus 10
38–40 1d8 incubi 10
41–43 1d8 shadow demons 11
44–48 1d8 succubi 11
49 1d4 mythic vrocks 13
50–54 1 glabrezu 13
55–59 1d4 hezrous 13
60–64 1 nalfeshnee 14
65–69 1d10 vrocks 14
70–72 1d6 kalavakuses 14
73–75 1d6 omoxes 15
76–78 1 seraptis 15
79–81 1 shemhazian 16
82–84 1d8 coloxuses 16
85–86 1d6 oolioddroos 16
87–88 1d3 ghalzarokhs 17
89 1 mythic nalfeshnee 17
90–92 1 marilith 17
93–94 1 vrolikai 19
95–96 1d4 lilitus 19
97 1 balor 20
98–99 1d2 vavakias 20
100 1 mythic marilith 21

Plane of Agony

Source 3pp:ToHC

Somewhere within the great configuration lies a desolate and windswept plane of stone and steel; a plane of darkness and the macabre. An everlasting cyclone of despair and hopelessness; a place most would soon forget ever existed. It has been referred to as “Hell for outsiders”. Its name among sages is the Plane of Agony. To its inhabitants, the n’gathau, it is home.

This plane appears as a windswept and desolate place. The ground is formed of cracked brown rock that pumps and spews blood in certain areas. The sky is a swirling morass of grays, blues, and reds with no clear or discernible features. A constant wind blows across the plane carrying the screams of those kindred souls that have arrived here. There are purportedly thirteen known structures on this plane. Each is a fortress constructed of stone and earth and each belongs to one of the Twelve; the last one, known as the Great Vault, belongs to the Quorum. Each fortress has but one road leading from it and that road leads toward the center of the plane where the Great Vault stands. With the Great Vault resides the supreme and god-like ruler of the n’gathau—the Quorum. Think of a great wheel; the Great Vault is the hub and each road leading away is a spoke. Planar features of the Plane of Agony include razor storms, needleshard cyclones, dying winds (supposedly the screams of tortured souls before their final death), blood torrents, and rivers of pain.

TRAITS

The Plane of Agony has the following planar traits:

Akashic Record (Demiplane)

Deep within the Astral Plane lies a demiplane called the Akashic Record that forms a critical part of the ancient wisdom at the heart of occult philosophy. The Akashic Record is a visual library of perfect psychic records of every moment in the history of the multiverse. Those who find their way here can observe scenes from any moment from the recent to distant past, going all the way back to the beginning of the multiverse. When a dead creature’s untethered astral body sees its life flash before its eyes as it awaits judgment in Purgatory, its consciousness ventures to the Akashic Record. When a psychometrist divines a touched object’s past, he really gains impressions from scenes stored in the Akashic Record.

Unlike the history books of mundane existence, the Akashic Record is a perfect recording of events as they actually happened. Two creatures observing the same event in real time might come away with very different subjective understandings of what just occurred, but such confusion is impossible in the Akashic Record, Which occultists speak of as the memory of nature. It is also known as the Book of the Lipika by the mysterious cloaked aeons who act as the Lords of Karma and who record every event in a mortal’s life to measure its rightful place in the afterlife.

A visitor consulting the Akashic Record simply turns her attention to the moment she wishes to observe, and it appears before her, not as a two-dimensional image like an illustration on page, but rather all around her, as if she were actually present witnessing the desired moment in history. The actors before her are unconscious of her presence, as they are but reflections. The observer can’t change or affect their actions in any way.

The observer can set the pace of events. He understands perfectly all communications within the record, even if he would not otherwise understand languages read or spoken, or the importance of cultural norms and signals otherwise foreign to him. If the event in question is from the observer’s own life, he may choose to view it as an outsider, or may inhabit his form and live out the event again, re-experiencing the emotions associated with the event the first time around.

Traveling to the Akashic Record, which abuts the mysterious Dimension of Time, is incredibly difficult.

Spells that allow for planar travel, such as plane shift, cannot take a seeker to the Akashic Record. While occult lore suggests several methods to “enter” the Akashic Record and influence the visions seen there (for example, to rescue a character from some past scene and escape with her to the Astral Plane), those doing so risk becoming lost in the currents of the Dimension of Time, marooned in the real past of the observed event, very likely never to return. Such meddling with the affairs of time risks drawing the ire of the Lords of Karma, unleashing retributive time elementals or inevitables, or attracting the bloodthirsty otherworldly predators known as the hounds of Tindalos.

TRAITS

The Akashic Record has the following planar traits:

  • Alignment mildly neutral-aligned
  • Essence mixed
  • Gravity normal
  • Magic normal
  • Realm finite
  • Time flowing (1 day = 1 hour)
  • Shape: Finite Shape
  • Structural static (1 hour)

DENIZENS

Outsiders aeons, danava titans

Petitioners none

INFUSIONS

Basic Your memories have been infused with energies from the Akashic Record, but it’s difficult to keep them all at the forefront of your thoughts. Once per day (typically when you wake from sleep), select one Knowledge skill. You gain a +2 bonus on checks using that skill for the remainder of the day. If you have at least 10 ranks in that skill, you instead gain a +4 bonus on checks using that skill.

Improved You can use divination once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use retrocognition once per day as a spell-like ability.

The Akashic Record is one of the multiverse’s greatest mysteries. According to occult lore, the true Akashic Record is a demiplane deep within the Astral Plane that contains all information in the multiverse in a single, vast visual library of psychic experiences collected and guarded by powerful aeons. Supposedly, these psychic records provide perfect and unambiguous understanding of all knowledge, and they present this knowledge on command. The existence of such a location flies in the face of nearly every other philosophy and tradition, including the death of prophecy in the Age of Lost Omens, and it would seem to negate all the mysteries of the multiverse.

The truth of the Akashic Record is shrouded in its own mysteries and uncertainty. No known spell or ritual allows direct travel to the Akashic Record, and divinations about the demiplane often grant contradictory results.

Some occult sources tell tales of those who reached the demiplane by piggybacking off the Dimension of Time. The most reputable of those sources indicate that the planar travelers gained access to a sort of “reading room” of the Akashic Record’s library with limited access to the record’s knowledge, under the watchful eyes of lipika aeons. The most extreme tales indicate that the travelers discovered how to alter the record and thus change the past, but supposedly those travelers were lost in the alternate realities their actions created or erased from the timestream.

According to occult scholars, the crux that holds the Akashic Record together is a danava titan known as the Akashic Guru, a being made nearly invincible by her ability to automatically recall previous versions of herself from the Akashic Record, thereby undoing any injuries she might have sustained—up to and including her own destruction.

As might be expected given the reverence with which occult scholars speak of the Akashic Record, its putative existence serves as a linchpin they use to account for countless phenomena. These range from humble psychometry all the way up to powerful magic that allows the mightiest psychics to emulate imperfectly Akashic Guru’s signature power and restore themselves to a version from the past. Even arcane and divine scholars begrudgingly accept the effectiveness of such spells, but they maintain that the mysterious magic that could be explained by accessing the Akashic Record is not necessarily proof of the record’s existence.

Astral Plane (Outer Plane (Transitive)

Source PRG:OA

The Astral Plane is the space between the Inner and Outer Planes, and coterminous with all of the planes. When a character moves through a portal or projects her spirit to a different plane of existence, she travels through the Astral Plane. Even spells that allow instantaneous movement across a plane briefly touch the Astral Plane. The Astral Plane is a great, endless expanse of clear silvery sky, both above and below. Occasional bits of solid matter can be found here, but most of the Astral Plane is an endless, open domain.

The Astral Plane is the great silvery sky that connects all planes to one another, the realm of pure thought and expanded consciousness. Occasional islands of solid matter float in astral space, but most of the plane is an enormous, seemingly eternal void of silver radiance.

As a gateway between the Inner and Outer Spheres, the Astral Plane teems with travelers, from entities venturing between planes to explorers searching for one of the numerous demiplanes secreted here or looking for the one of the countless marooned spirits that dwell within the expanse. Its nature as a crossroads makes the Astral Plane very dangerous. Although it’s possible to visit the plane bodily via plane shift or by using an item such as a robe of stars, most travelers prefer to play it safe by manifesting their souls in an astral body created by spells such as astral projection.

A creature’s astral body looks like a translucent version of its physical form, usually limned with a soft nimbus of blue or violet light. A slim tether of resilient incorporeal energy known as a silver cord connects a creature’s astral body to its unconscious physical body. If the astral body dies, the silver cord retracts into the physical body, returning the soul to its familiar seat (albeit at the cost of two permanent negative levels due to the resultant trauma). A silver cord resists most attempts to damage it, but if it somehow manages to break, the creature immediately dies, and the astral form housing its soul is cast adrift on the astral currents, pulled inexorably toward the enormous spire of Purgatory, which extends up into the Astral Plane from the surface of the Outer Sphere. As a realm of thought, the Astral Plane is home to entities that represent concepts, myths, and legends spawned from mortal thoughtforms. Mediums open their consciousness to these denizens of the Astral Plane, inviting them to reside in a physical form and spread their influence on the Material Plane.

Travel through the Astral Plane is a strange affair, as the plane’s subjective directional gravity means that each traveler chooses the direction of gravity’s pull. Creatures can move normally in any direction by imagining “down” near their feet and “falling” in that direction. In this way a creature “falls” 150 feet the first round and 300 feet on each successive round. Movement is straight-line only. A character can attempt a DC 16 Wisdom check to set a new direction of gravity or stop as a free action; this check can be attempted once per round. Any character who fails this Wisdom check on successive rounds receives a +6 bonus on subsequent checks until he succeeds. When moving in this manner, the traveler does not have the sensation of physical movement. Rather, the landscape of the Astral Plane (such as it is) seems to come toward, through, and past him. Scintillations of light are thrown off by the astral body as it moves along at great speed.

The untethered astral bodies of the dead flow toward Purgatory along the River of Souls. During this process, the dross of mortality is shed, leaving behind only the soul’s core self, its memories, and the refined character of its prior life. The gods of the Outer Sphere consider the River of Souls inviolate, often sending celestial and infernal outsiders to help steward wayward souls toward judgment and eventual delivery to their afterlife of reward or punishment. Soul-collecting or soul-devouring predators such as night hags and astradaemons prey on the dead of the Astral Plane, usually limiting themselves to picking off isolated incorporeal undead but all too often raiding parties of disembodied souls as they make their way toward eternity. The goddess of the dead, hates this perversion of the natural order of the multiverse, and the entities known as psychopomps often act as guides to deliver souls safely to their final destinations.

Other inhabitants of the Astral Plane include enormous astral leviathans that float through the silvery seas, sometimes with passengers or even semi-permanent settlements upon their backs; strange caulborn who harvest knowledge and psychic energy from astral travelers; formless nirmanakaya manasaputras who seek to guide Material Plane adepts through telepathy; and the lean humanoid outsiders known as the shulsaga, multiplanar hunters who ride magical disks and view intruders to their astral realm with xenophobic disdain.

TRAITS

The Astral Plane has the following planar traits:

DENIZENS

For most, the Astral Plane is merely a Transitive Planes—a means of reaching more desirable destinations, be it via teleportation or traveling through the Silver Sea. However, those who call this realm home live and die here, all the while contesting with the plane’s timeless quality; while these species never hunger or age, neither do they heal naturally or truly grow in ways familiar to those from other realms.

  • Aeons The multiverse may sustain itself through the cycle of souls, yet there are so many moving parts that could fall out of alignment that the system as a whole requires constant maintenance. The inscrutable aeons serve this role; the Astral Plane is not only their highway for reaching the far corners of the cosmos, but also where they originate. Just as astral material can aggregate to form demiplanes, so too do stray thoughts broadcast from other planes sometimes coalesce on this plane. As diametrically opposite ideas grind against one another, they form energized drifts that flash with momentary bursts of emotional auras and crackle in metaphysical debates. Referred to as aeonic nebulae, these colorful fields eventually reach a critical mass, whereupon the clashing concepts’ eddies take permanent form as new aeons, each often embodying the same dichotomy as the nebula from which it was born. From there, most aeons disperse to wherever they’re needed in the multiverse; the Astral Plane’s relatively high concentration of aeons is due almost exclusively to their creation here and to their use of the realm for transportation. The only aeons who are otherwise regularly found on the plane are bythos, guardians of time and planar travel. These cloud-like beings vigilantly patrol the Astral Plane, watching for those who would exploit the plane’s timeless quality and connectivity to distort the flow of time elsewhere or to unite two realms best kept separate—at least according to their silent judgment.
  • Astral Dragons Much as mortal legends can imprint themselves on the Astral Plane as legendary spirits, so too did dragonkind brand itself upon this timeless sea. Astral dragons are descendants of several especially powerful draconic echoes that awoke within the Astral Plane and began acting autonomously. The astral dragons of today strive for excellence, much as their progenitors did, continuing to clash with one another to carry on conflicts both new and impossibly old. Astral dragons exist in a timeless realm and do not age in the same way true dragons do. Astral dragons’ contests, experiences, and inspirations refine each individual’s psychic potential, granting it a greater presence on the Astral Plane and allowing it to grow gradually in size and power. Those astral dragons that travel to other planes can age several categories spontaneously as both the passage of time and accrued self-confidence trigger an explosive growth spurt in a matter of seconds—which is particularly troubling if a dragon suddenly becomes too large to fit back through the portal from which it came.
  • Astral Leviathans The Astral Plane’s greatest wanderers are astral leviathans, massive whalelike beings with asymmetrical eyes, a multitude of overlapping jaws, and warped, skinless muscles. Astral leviathans require little sustenance—even without the plane’s timeless trait—but prioritize variety in their diet. This drives them to open rifts, where food particles or even hapless creatures might fall into the Silver Sea. Like elephants seeking water, astral leviathans have an unerring sense of where they’ve been before and what they can find there—a quality that the nomadic shulsagas value when they befriend and recruit leviathans as traveling companions. The immense beasts in turn appreciate shulsagas’ companionship and ability to sense nearby planar breaches where the leviathans might sample some new cuisine or culture. Other species tend to be more forceful in their dealings with astral leviathans, trapping or enchanting them and rigging them with cargo harnesses to carry freight across the plane.
  • Danavas Like most titans, danavas trace their origins to the earliest days of creation when they served as peacekeepers of reality. The same titan wars that saw their evil kin banished to the Outer Planes also resulted in danavas’ imprisonment, for their methods of policing the cosmos were deemed too severe. Although they are sealed across a variety of planes, most reside in perpetual captivity in a handful of cities that float through the Astral Plane. From there, they scry upon distant worlds, agonize over the ways in which mortals unbalance existence, and convene to discuss how best to restore cosmic order.
  • Devourers Those fiends and evil spellcasters who find a break in the Astral Plane and escape beyond the Outer Sphere sometimes return, twisted and transformed into devourers. Many of these undead linger on the Astral Plane, where they compete with night hags and astradaemons in plucking victims from the River of Souls. But other outsiders vigilantly guard the river, so devourers often wander to other realms or traverse the Astral Plane in search of easier prey.
  • Elohim The powerful elohim are virtually silent about their own origins, yet they are the source of life on countless worlds. The prevailing hypothesis is that the gods crafted elohim as impartial servitors who would then create mortal forms to help populate reality’s initial draft in the Fey World, only to cast elohim aside when the gods moved on with the Material Plane’s creation. No matter their original purpose, elohim today predominantly inhabit the Astral Plane. There they build new demiplanes seeded with never-before-seen species and possibilities before departing to begin the process again elsewhere. For all their powers of creation, elohim seem incapable of reproducing, and most shulsagas believe that elohim created them as a form of proxy children. While many shulsagas have since spurned their creators, others believe that by attaining a truly enlightened state, a shulsaga can transcend its simple form and metamorphose into a new elohim. Enduring shulsaga tales of their paragons support this idea; however, elohim’s dwindling numbers suggest otherwise—that elohim are on the path to extinction.
  • Ouroboroses The cycles of divine creation and destruction that created the multiverse echo eternally through the Astral Plane, slowed by neither time nor matter. This never-ending process has coagulated into serpentine beasts known as ouroboroses, forever left to consume themselves and be reborn in an unending loop.
  • Psychementals Just as souls can cross planar boundaries, so too can powerful thoughts echo outward like ripples in the astral sea. Particularly exuberant, passionate, or traumatic thoughts can gather quintessence as they travel, gradually developing sentience as they collide with other ideas and memories. From these clashes develop psychementals, intellects formed from hundreds of consciences that lack the context they knew in life. These fragmented personalities can war with one another for centuries before coming to an uneasy consensus, and although the collective can behave as a unified whole, surprises can shock the entire system into a fury of unpredictable internal squabbling and even violence.
  • Shining Children The accretion of metaphysical material not only begets demiplanes, but also emits intense pulses of light and energy. Quintessence adheres to the brightest of these sparks, creating life in a painful process that forever imprints itself on the anthropomorphic creature that results: a shining child. Born out of cosmic trauma, these beings seethe with spite, and their telepathic communications echo with the furious roar of their birth. Every demiplane leaves a different imprint on its “offspring,” who seem capable of identifying others of their own cohort by some sixth sense. Not every demiplane spawns shining children, but the greatest demiplanes can create cohorts that are scores strong. Forever trapped in apparently adolescent bodies, these children dedicate themselves to scholarship in a futile effort to understand their role in the multiverse and the burning injustice of their births.
  • Shulsagas Although the spindly shulsagas are among the more anthropomorphically relatable species native to the Astral Plane, they rarely welcome visitors. Their isolationist preferences aren’t just for their own peace, but more importantly for the sake of their charges: the nascent demiplanes that they guard. Just as formative demiplanes can absorb the influences of nearby Outer Planes, so too can stray moral influences, power-hungry manipulators, and other forms of meddling (accidental or otherwise) contaminate a new world. Casual travelers often describe shulsagas as hunters, though as outsiders on a timeless plane, these creatures have virtually no need for conventional sustenance. Instead, their tracking, territorial behavior, and ability to sense planar rifts ensure that their adopted nurseries remain sacrosanct. Shulsaga tribes act as planar shepherds, departing each demiplane in their care once they’re certain it has coalesced completely and isn’t at immediate risk from stray philosophies. Shulsagas take it upon themselves to practice moral moderation so that they do not corrupt their charges themselves. Those who demonstrate discernible alignment extremes are often cast out to fend for themselves, ideally using their travels to rediscover a neutral outlook and return to the tribe. Rarely, shulsagas decide to cultivate a particular planar trait or ethical foundation for a demiplane, and when they do, their envoys travel far across the Astral Plane in search of strong-willed individuals (often adventurers) who become honored guests of the tribe and serve as mental templates to shape a new realm. Likewise, shulsagas sometimes reach out to strangers to help them fend off a confirmed threat, whether that means destroying shining children spawned by a demiplane or discouraging an errant elohim’s unsolicited attempt to populate a demiplane. The only creatures that shulsagas implicitly trust are aeons, whom they view as divine messengers. When an aeon expresses its desire to impose change on something in the shulsagas’ territory, shulsagas typically stand aside or even shift their priorities to aid the aeon—even if that seems to reverse the tribe’s previously held beliefs. It is this mutability that can cause a previously friendly tribe of suddenly seem xenophobic or hostile.

DIVINITIES

Although the Astral Plane is often traveled by divinities (particularly demigods in astral form) or used as a neutral meeting ground.

Petitioners untethered (astrally projected versions of past lives sans silver cord)

Qualities incorporeal subtype, fly speed 20 ft. (perfect)

INFUSIONS

Basic You gain a +2 bonus on saves against curses, diseases, and poisons. You also gain a +4 bonus on Wisdom checks to maneuver in subjective directional gravity.

Improved You always succeed at Wisdom checks to maneuver in subjective directional gravity. Increase your maximum lifespan and the number of years you must age to reach each age category by 10%. You can act under the effects of haste as a free action for 1 round; you can activate this ability a number of times per day equal to your Hit Dice divided by 4 (minimum of 1 round per day). These rounds need not be consecutive.

Greater Select one of the following afflictions: curses, diseases, or poisons. You become immune to the effects of that affliction. Increase your maximum lifespan and the number of years you must age to reach each age category by an additional 10% (20% total when combined with the improved infusion above), and you do not retroactively age or hunger when departing a plane with the timeless planar trait. You gain a fly speed of 60 feet (perfect) on the Astral Plane.

The Outer Sphere revolves around the Inner Sphere, gliding upon a matrix of metaphysical material known as the Astral Plane, much as tectonic plates coast upon a planet’s liquid mantle. This plane may seem to be an empty expanse of faint, shimmering, silvery clouds, yet astral space is a diffuse realm of colliding philosophies, eternally echoing thoughts, quintessential detritus, and undreamt ideas. Dispersed, these particles are barely perceptible. However, the Plane of Fire at the Astral Plane’s heart churns this silvery sea with its physical and metaphysical heat, sending roiling currents coiling outward to eventually brush against the Outer Planes in a form of cosmic convection. As these currents collide, so too do concepts, legends, and raw quintessence, drawing in more and more material to form new islands of solidity or even entire demiplanes. Those new locales birthed near an Outer Planes often absorb that realm’s ideals, whereas those spawned far from other planes can manifest the unspoken principles of nearby creatures.

Cosmic convection by the Plane of Fire is not the only force to stir the Astral Plane. The River of Souls courses through this sea in a spiraling whorl imperceptible to most, yet the movement of souls is as powerful as any oceanic current for those with the tools to harness it. Likewise, the Antipodal Flow cascades back to the Inner Sphere in an opposing spiral, carrying the pulverized quintessence of the Outer Planes back to the Positive Energy Plane to fuel the cycle of souls. Both metaphysical waterways attract the attention of opportunists, be they daemons and night hags hoping to snatch stray souls or enterprising wizards and cosmic filter feeders harvesting the Antipode’s limitless potential—ultimately consuming mere drops from a deluge.

Table: Astral Plane Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–8 1 othaos 5
9–18 2d6 untethered petitioners 6
19–23 2d6 paracletus 7
24–43 2d4 shulsagas 8
44–45 1 juvenile astral dragon 9
46–49 1d4 theletos 9
50–53 Silver squall 10
54–60 1d6 psychementals 11
61–62 1 devourer 11
63–65 1d4 moon dogs 11
66–67 1d4 yithians 11
68–72 1d3 night hags on nightmares 12
73 1 adult astral dragon 13
74–75 1 astral deva 14
76–78 1d6 akhanas 15
79 1 ancient astral dragon 18
80–81 1d4 bythos 18
82–86 1d6 whyrlishes 18
87–90 1d4 astradaemons 18
91–92 1 astral leviathan 18
93–94 1 pleroma 20
95 1 ouroboros 21
96 1 elohim 23
97 1 danava 24
98–100 Roll on Boneyard Encounters table Varies
Exploration

The Astral Plane is a disorienting realm with directional subjective gravity, allowing each creature to “fall” at great speed in the direction of its choice.

No day-night cycle exists on the Astral Plane. The light of the Plane of Fire surrounding the Inner Sphere, along with the flow of souls from life to death (or the flow of recycled quintessence back to the Positive Energy Plane) can aid in navigation if these energies can be detected, but no truly workable analog to north exists on the Astral Plane.

Magic on the Astral Plane

All spells and spell-like abilities used within the Astral Plane can be employed as if they were improved by the Quicken Spell or Quicken Spell-Like Ability feats, though this has no effect on spells and abilities that have already been quickened or on spells from magic items. Spells thus quickened are prepared and cast at their unmodified level. As with the Quicken Spell feat, only one quickened spell or ability can be cast per round.

Silver Squalls (CR 10) Weather is virtually nonexistent on the Astral Plane, but drifts of aggregating thoughts can turn violent when sparked by competing ideas. These trigger chain reactions known as silver squalls, which erupt into clouds of obfuscating chatter punctuated by arcing bolts of psychic energy. A silver squall’s effects target all creatures in the area and vary by the debate the squall represents, dealing 2d6 points of ability damage to Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma (depending on the nature of the debate), causing the confused condition for 1d10 rounds, or striking victims permanently blind, deaf, or mute. A silver squall generally fills a 300-foot-diameter sphere and lasts for 2d6 rounds. Each round a creature is exposed to a silver squall, it must succeed at a DC 20 Will save to resist the squall’s effect; once a creature has been affected by a particular squall, it cannot be affected by that same squall again. Sentient beings caught within a squall can calm the storm as a full-round action by discerning its constituent ideas (typically with a successful DC 30 Knowledge [planes] check) to dismantle the controversy. Larger squalls exist that can last for days; quelling these storms can require complex arguments better represented by the verbal duels system. Silver squalls are mind-affecting effects.

Utopia (Outer Plane (lawful neutral))

Utopia serves as a border between Heaven and Hell.

Utopia is a bastion of immutable law set against the evercrashing tide of pure chaos that is Limbo. From the outside, Utopia appears as a pristine city surrounded by a wall of gold amid a demolished wasteland littered with ancient, skeletal corpses of titans left over from a war. Utopia is actually millions of separate cities folded and layered atop, within, and around one another in an elegantly arrayed masterpiece of architecture and city planning. Many of the city-districts within Utopia are either a deity’s domain or the remnants of a domain of a deceased deity. Magical portals at major crossroads connect the countless cities, aiding in navigation and travel.

Before the rise of mortal life, the realm of Utopia was a blank slate—an empty wasteland. As cities and laws were introduced by mortal acts, portions of Limbo crystallized and broke away from that churning sea of infinite possibilities.

These crystalline shards fell into the rough-hewn wasteland allowing order and rigidity to manifest physically. It is from this seed that the first axiomites emerged, and from them, in time, came their aphorite mortal proxies.

TRAITS

DIVINITIES

Utopia is the home of many divinities, some of whom control significant reaches of the plane.

Halfling Pantheon Just as they tend to adopt the cultural motifs and traditions of other races they live among, halflings vary widely in their patterns of worship. Many pay homage to divinities associated with civilization and trade, the values of home and family, and other creature comforts.

Primal Inevitables The most powerful of the inevitables are the caste of primal inevitables, those who were first to be crafted eons ago.

Outsiders aeons, apkallus, axiomites, inevitables, mercanes

Petitioners remade (unblemished bodies covered in metallic writing)

Qualities immunity to hostile transmutation effects, +2 Intelligence

INFUSIONS

Basic The rigidity and order of Utopia bolsters you physically, enhances your ability to notice tiny imperfections, and inspires your ability to create. You gain a +1 bonus on Fortitude saves, a +2 bonus on one Craft skill of your choice, and a +2 bonus on Perception checks to find secret doors or hidden traps.

Improved You are never far from the comforts and safety of urban life. You can use secure shelter once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can transform yourself into a whirling cloud of glowing glyphs and symbols as a standard action. While in this form, you gain a fly speed of 60 feet with perfect maneuverability and can move through small cracks as per gaseous form (but you are not prohibited from entering water). You gain DR 10/chaos and regeneration 5/chaos and are immune to precision damage and critical hits while in glyph form. You can remain in this form for up to 1 minute per level each day, but these minutes need not be used consecutively.

DENIZENS

Countless creatures from across the planes have come to settle in Utopia, bringing with them a sampling of their distinct cultural and societal ideals, yet each bound by the constant of law and order. Despite being a plane of indisputable law, there is a wealth of diversity apparent in Utopia.

Aeons While aeons have traditionally attended their unfathomable duties and pursued their mysterious goals within the silver reaches of the Astral Plane, they have increasingly become a notable presence in Utopia. In many cases, their duties clash with those of the inevitables. Only recently has this slow but inexorable shift in aeon behavior been noted by planar scholars, who describe a trend of aeons favoring order over entropy. Many of those scholars have begun to wonder whether the aeons have designs on Utopia itself. The aeons, true to form, provide no real clues.

Aphorites and Axiomites The axiomites are Utopia’s architects and caretakers, and they are the most populous of the realm’s inhabitants, whereas aphorites are mortal incarnations of the same ideal. Unlike their immortal kin, most aphorites travel to other planes and worlds, either intentionally or accidentally. The rare aphorites who are encountered in Utopia tend to be entirely forgettable or utterly legendary, having chosen to remain in the city out of complacency, or having returned there after incredible exploits.

Apkallus The axiomites are not the most powerful. As the scope and size of Utopia and its laws grew, so too did the need for a dedicated race of guardians and caretakers of those laws. The mythic apkallus were the result, and while they remain rare sights in the city, their influence is felt every day when historians, judges, or scholars research or record lore about Utopia. In times of great need, the apkallus rise up to defend the city, stepping beyond their role as mere archivists. Few who have faced even a single apkallu in combat would think to cross one again.

Inevitables The inevitables are a created race, yet they live and think.

They share many features with constructs, but each is a specific individual. Originally created by the axiomites long ago in response to a protean assault on Utopia, the inevitables today serve as Utopia’s guardians, patrolling its streets and defending its portals and walls, or acting as agents of law across the planes.

Mercanes Although Utopia hosts a mind-numbing array of merchants of an equally mind-numbing collection of races, the mercanes are the most ubiquitous of the city’s traders. It seems likely that the first mercanes arrived at Utopia to establish trade routes from elsewhere, but where that “elsewhere” may have been is unknown. One popular theory, particularly among the mercanes themselves, speaks of a lost demiplane within the Astral Plane that they were forced to abandon. No matter where they came from, today the mercanes are every bit the natives of Utopia, and embody the notion of mercantilism and economy with every fiber of their being.

Divinities
Table: Utopia Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–10 2d6 aphorites 4
11–15 1 othaos 5
16–25 2d6 remade petitioners 6
26–33 2d6 arbiters 7
34–43 1d4 mercanes 7
44–48 2d6 paracletuses 7
49–51 1 zelekhut 9
52–56 1d10 novenaruts 10
57–58 2d6 theletoses 13
59–68 2d6 axiomites 14
69–73 1d6 kolyaruts 15
74–76 1d6 akhanas 15
77–81 1d8 valharuts 15
82–84 1d6 maruts 18
85 1 lipika 18
86 1d3 bythos 18
87–88 1 lhaksharut 20
89 1 pleroma 20
90 1 apkallu 23
91–95 Roll on Heaven table Varies
96–100 Roll on Hell table Varies

Dimension of Dreams (Dimension (transitive)/demiplane†)

Source PRG:OA

As a mortal sleeps, its monadic soul withdraws from the physical body to manifest in the Dimension of Dreams.

This dream avatar is known as the lucid body, and can take a variety of forms based on the dreamer’s subconsciousness.

The minds of the countless dreamers of the Material Plane brush up against the Ethereal Plane, bubbling forth ephemeral demiplanes in which the dreamers’ lucid bodies experience fantastic adventures inspired by their own unconscious minds. A dreamer can alter her surroundings, and one with the Lucid Dreamer feat gains a greater measure of control. Spells cast and items used in a dream are not depleted in the real world.

Wounds and conditions don’t have any effect on the creature’s waking body and mind. Fantastic adventures don’t yield real treasure or experience to the waking being, though knowledge gained in the Dimension of Dreams occasionally aids in solving real challenges faced in the waking world. Even the worst nightmares hold little true danger for the dreamer. Should the lucid body die, the dreamer simply awakens, perhaps a bit shaken but otherwise little worse for the experience. A creature with the Lucid Dreamer feat awakens from such an experience fatigued, as her mind is more invested in perceptions of the dreamscape.

Experience in a dreamscape is usually a private affair.

Rare spells (such as dream council), magic items, and other abilities allow creatures to enter and share another creature’s dream demiplane for a short amount of time.

While these secondary dreamers can interact with the highly morphic qualities of the plane, with the primary dreamer, and with each other, the existence of the demiplane is still contingent on a single primary dreamer.

When the primary dreamer awakens, the demiplane pops out of existence, causing any other dreamers to continue dreaming—shunted into a dreamscape of their own creation—or to wake up.

A lucid body is not the only way to enter a dream, however, and considerable danger faces the explorer who enters the Dimension of Dreams in his physical body.

Regular methods of planar travel like plane shift do not offer transit to the dream world—only specialized means such as the dream travel spell do the trick. When a physical creature enters a dreamscape, he doesn’t have to make the check to determine his initial state, but also can’t attempt impossible feats (see below). Spells cast, magic items used, and other limited abilities expended are lost just as if the creature were adventuring on some other plane. Creatures in their material forms can use items generated within a dreamscape, but these items wink out of existence when the primary dreamer awakens, or when a creature in material form leaves the dreamscape.

Wounds and experiences are real, and remain after the creature leaves the dreamscape. A creature in its physical form that dies within a dream demiplane actually dies.

Material creatures still within a dreamscape when the primary dreamer awakens are pushed into an abutting dreamscape or regions of the Ethereal Plane that border the Dimension of Dreams.

Although each dreamer’s slumbering soul conjures a personal demiplane dreamscape that manifests on the Ethereal Plane, all dreams collectively belong to the greater network of the Dimension of Dreams. When numerous dreamscapes cluster in the ethereal fog, transit between dreams is easier, and moods, emotions, and even creatures from one dream spill more easily into another. Where the individual dreamscapes brush up against the little-understood Dimension of Time, dreams often take on prophetic elements.

Figments from the dream world sometimes manage to escape the Dimension of Dreams, usually at the moment when a particularly imaginative sleeper awakens, and the reality of the dream is at its weakest as the demiplane fades away. These weird, shifting creatures stalk the Ethereal Plane as animate dreams, feeding off the minds of mortals, searching for other dreams in which to take refuge and torment a new sleeper.

A class of vile so-called “nightmare creatures” infests the Dimension of Dreams, venturing from dreamscape to dreamscape hunting victims to torment and destroy. A hierarchy of horror known as the Nightmare Lords rules over lesser nightmare creatures in puppet courts staffed by the soul-shriveled husks of insane enslaved dreamers.

Somehow, these creatures have even found a way to manifest on the Material Plane, not content to limit their terrors to the realm of sleep.

Night hags are among the most harrowing threats of the Dimension of Dreams. They walk freely between dreams, searching for chaotic or evil dreamers, on whose backs they ride until morning. Creatures they encounter between dreams or dwelling within the dreamscapes of their prey are simply cut down, regardless of alignment.

Night hags collect the souls of their slain enemies in gemstones they sell to clientèle throughout the planes.

Although most dreamscapes are ephemeral, fading when the sleeper awakens, particularly potent dreamscapes, bolstered by recurrence or by the shared subconscious of numerous dreamers, sometimes last forever. Among the most formidable and permanent regions of the Dimension of Dreams is the bizarre realm of Leng, where near-human denizens sail ethereal seas in black-hulled ships packed with slaves bound for the dark markets of the multiverse.

TRAITS

The Dimension of Dreams has the following planar traits:

  • Gravity varies by dreamscape/normal†
  • Flowing Time: Both lucid bodies and creatures visiting the Dimension of Dream with their physical bodies are subject to the flowing time trait of a given dreamscape (typically 1 hour = 1 day)
  • Realm immeasurable/finite†
  • Highly Morphic: When a creature enters a dreamscape with a lucid body, it must make a Charisma check (DC 15) to prevent arriving in the Dimension of Dreams at a disadvantage, such as without important equipment or on the side of an arctic mountain during an avalanche. A successful save means the dreamer manifests in perfect health, with all of its regular equipment (spells and magic items used in a dream are not actually expended in the real world). Even in the worst of circumstances, however, the lucid body is capable of fantastic—even impossible—feats. As a standard action, a number of times during the dream equal to the creature’s Charisma bonus (minimum 1). The dreamer can attempt one impossible action, such as casting a spell, gaining an effect of a spell as if it were cast, or conjuring a magic item. This requires a successful Charisma check (DC 10 + the level of the spell being cast or spell effect replicated or half of the caster level of the item conjured; non-magical items are caster level 0). Other fantastic feats are also possible with GM approval and a Charisma check with a DC determined by the GM. If the check fails, the dreamer cannot perform the feat. Creatures that enter the dream with their physical bodies do not need to make the initial check and do not gain the ability to create items and spell effects or perform other fantastic feats, but must otherwise deal with the strange realities of the dreamscape.
  • Essence mixed
  • Alignment mildly neutral-aligned/mildly chaotic-aligned†
  • Wild Magic: Both lucid bodies and creatures visiting the Dimension of Dream with their physical bodies are subject to the wild magic of dreamscapes.

DIVINITIES

Elder Mythos pantheon

Outsiders animate dreams, night hags

Petitioners dreamers (idealized versions of mortal bodies)

Qualities +2 bonus on all saving throws, +2 Charisma

INFUSIONS

Basic You gain a +4 bonus on Charisma checks to arrive in the Dimension of Dreams at an advantage, and you can attempt one additional impossible action beyond the normal limit during a visit to a Dreamscape.

Improved You can use dream as a spell-like ability once per day.

Greater You can use dream council as a spell-like ability once per day.

Traits listed before the slash apply to the Dimension of Dream; those listed after apply to the Dreamlands.

The Dimension of Dreams is a dimension adrift in the Ethereal Plane. Sleeping creatures enter the dimension naturally via dream avatars known as lucid bodies, appearing in dreamscapes that other creatures can’t access via ordinary means such as plane shift; rather, this requires specialized spells like dream travel. When a creature dreams, it interacts with the Dimension of Dreams as if that dimension overlaid all planes, regardless of the dreamer’s location.

When a creature enters a dreamscape by way of a lucid body, it must succeed at a DC 15 Charisma check or arrive in the Dimension of Dreams at a disadvantage, such as without important equipment or on the side of an arctic mountain during an avalanche. On a success, the dreamer manifests in perfect health with all of its regular equipment (spells and magic items used in a dream are not actually expended in the real world). Even in the worst of circumstances, however, the lucid body is capable of fantastic—even impossible—feats.

As a standard action a number of times during the dream equal to the creature’s Charisma bonus (minimum 1), the dreamer can attempt one impossible action, such as casting a spell you can’t normally cast, gaining an effect of a spell as if it had been cast, or conjuring a magic item. This requires a successful Charisma check (DC = 10 + the level of the spell being cast, level of the spell effect replicated, or half the caster level of the item conjured; non-magical items are caster level 0). Other fantastic feats are also possible with GM approval.

Hidden within the sea of dreamscapes lies a stable realm created by the dreaming minds of powerfully imaginative mortals and ancient entities who may well have been the first to dream. The Dreamlands exists as a demiplane within the Dimension of Dreams but remains separate from it. Travel to and from this demiplane is easier than traveling to individual dreamscapes but more difficult than traveling to planes such as Heaven or Hell. Certain occult rituals can allow a person to enter the Dreamlands. Typically, the first time a dreaming mortal enters the Dreamlands, she does so by descending a spiral staircase that emerges from the side of a great tree into the majestic Enchanted Forest. Entire nations exist within the Dreamlands—some ruled by people and others by nightmare creatures of the Elder Mythos, such as the Great Old One Bokrug.

Dimension of Time (Dimension (Transitive)

The dimension of time lies behind and before all realities. It is the beginning and the end—a place impossible to reach but traveled by all.

The Dimension of Time is difficult to access, even by those who know that it exists. This dimension touches upon all known planes, save for timeless ones such as the Astral Plane and The Apocalypse Archive. It cannot be reached by conventional means of planar travel. In theory, plane shift could allow one to travel to the Dimension of Time, but none have the unique tuning fork required for such a journey.

Those wishing to make their way to the Dimension of Time might chase persistent rumors of strange, ancient rituals recorded in fabulously rare tomes such as the Book of Serpents, Ash, and Acorns: Shadows of What Was and Will Be or the notorious Necronomicon. The journeys through these rituals and the portals they create vary wildly, but those who perform them successfully find themselves surrounded on all sides by a whirlwind of sensations and visions from random times and places. A solitary, transient door at the bubble’s center provides a visiting creature with access to any moment in its own life, provided it can focus on the memory of that moment long enough to stabilize the doorway, an effort requiring a successful DC 30 Perception check. On a failed check, the traveler is cast back out of the Dimension of Time to its starting point and, depending on the nature of the ritual used, may suffer excruciating or devastating side effects. At the very least, a traveler thus rejected often find herself targeted by creatures such as the hounds of Tindalos. On a success, the traveler can pass through the doorway, whereupon she becomes an invisible and insubstantial presence in her own past, linked to her present body via a shimmering cord similar to the silver cords of astral travelers. True seeing allows those in the past to observe the time traveler as a shimmering ghostly figure.

Those who visit fragments of their own pasts can observe and listen safely, but someone who attempt to alter his own history never returns, erased from the timeline or trapped forever in an unending temporal loop.

These journeys do not allow a traveler to truly enter the Dimension of Time, nor do they allow for the exploration of eras before one’s own birth or in the future. For such a legendary feat, especially powerful rituals must be utilized.

Most of what is known about the dimension has been gleaned from natives of the plane who have traveled beyond the realm, be they the lean and athirst hunters known as the hounds of Tindalos, powerful entities such as time dragons and danava titans, or the strange outsiders known as the iriis. Hints gathered from such creatures speak of a truly alien realm and of denizens composed of living temporal power who can aid others in traveling to and from the dimension. The Outer God Yog-Sothoth is said to be able to access the Dimension of Time, and he may even be a sentient manifestation of the dimension made terrible and aware. Certainly his avatar Tawil at’Umr knows the methods by which a mortal may travel to the Dimension of Time, yet the price such a traveler must pay is rumored to be terrible indeed.

The true mystery of the Dimension of Time, though, is what actually exists therein. All indications are that the portion of the dimension that can actually support physical life is relatively small. What few hints of this reality have been gathered mention green meadows, sinister forests, an immense ocean that spills over a bottomless cataract, and a mysterious place known only as Stethelos.

TRAITS

  • Gravity normal
  • Time erratic
  • Realm immeasurable
  • Structural lasting
  • Essence mixed
  • Alignment mildly neutral-aligned
  • Magic normal

DENIZENS

Outsiders danava titans, hounds of Tindalos, iriis*

Petitioners unbound (as mortal form, but apparent age varies: based on the petitioner’s mental state)

Qualities +4 bonus on initiative checks, base speed increases by +10

INFUSIONS

Basic Once per day, you can roll twice for initiative and take the higher roll as your actual result. When you gain the improved infusion, you can use this basic infusion twice per day. When you gain the greater infusion, you can use this ability three times per day.

Improved Once per day, you can touch an object that was once alive, such as wood, paper, or a dead body. That object is protected from time, as if you had used a dose of unguent of timelessness on the object. You can maintain this effect on a number of objects equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum of 1) at any one time. If you exceed this limit, the oldest existing effect immediately ceases.

Greater You are immune to temporal stasis. In addition, once per day, when a creature within 30 feet of you casts time stop, you are treated as if you were under the effects of time stop as well and are free to act for as long as the spell effect allows. This ability activates automatically, whether you notice the casting of the spell or not.

Elemental Plane of Air (Inner Plane)

The Plane of Air is an empty plane, consisting of sky above and sky below. It is the most comfortable and survivable of the Inner Planes and is the home of all manner of airborne creatures. Indeed, flying creatures find themselves at a great advantage on this plane. While travelers without flight can survive easily here, they are at a disadvantage.

The Plane of Air exists at the edge of the universe—a “skin” of wind and clouds where down seems to be in every direction at once. Here, the sky is everything there is, and only those who can fly can ever truly call this reality home.

Just beyond the Material Plane floats the immense, seemingly peaceful blue firmament of the Plane of Air. Known to many as the Endless Sky, this plane is shot through with enormous clouds, floating cities of fantastic design, meandering sheets of ice and crystal, strange spheres of brass and iron, and even more astounding features. Towering cloud walls mark the borders it shares with the edge of the Material Plane’s universe, and gigantic water bubbles—oceanic ecosystems in their own right—pepper the areas abutting the Plane of Water. Although its population is scant in comparison to those of the other Elemental Planes, the Plane of Air is home to a grand djinni society, dozens of mephit kingdoms, and a plentitude of diverse creatures.

Breathable air is the plane’s most dominant substance, making the Plane of Air the most hospitable of all the Elemental Planes for visitors from the Material Plane.

Flying creatures have great advantages here, though nonnatives of all sorts might find themselves constrained by the lack of solid ground. Such material does exist, in the form of great chunks of drifting ice originating from the adjacent Plane of Water and magically suspended hunks of earth and crystal—but such places are few and far between.

TRAITS

The Plane of Air has the following planar traits:

DIVINITIES

Elemental lords of air

Outsiders air elementals (including aerial servants, air wysps, anemoi, belkers, comozant wyrds, invisible stalkers, and mihstus), air veelas, djinn, and mephits (air, cold, and dust)

Petitioners air pneuma (semitransparent, misty-looking forms)

Qualities immunity to air and electricity effects, fly speed 60 ft. (perfect)

INFUSIONS

Basic You gain a +2 bonus on Fly checks and a +2 bonus on saving throws against air or electricity effects.

Improved You can use air walk once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use wind walk once per day as a spell-like ability.

DENIZENS

Although it is the least populated of the Elemental Planes due to its lack of solid ground, the Plane of Air still teems with life. Unlike on the outer planes, the petitioners of the Plane of Air (vaporous entities known as air pneumas) are not common, as the time it takes for an air pneuma to transition into an air elemental or similar creature is typically quite short. Listed below are several prominent or noteworthy residents whom planar travelers might encounter.

Djinn The Plane of Air’s native genies are the true lords of the Endless Sky. Powerful beings in their own right, they focus on art, culture, trade, and especially the acquisition of knowledge, which brings them great wealth and even greater influence. Calmer and more peaceful than the genies native to other planes, djinn are nonetheless quick to remind all listeners that they have been the plane’s undisputed masters since before the mortal races appeared. This sense of superiority, combined with their paternalism toward nongenies, has earned the djinn a widespread reputation of insufferable self-importance. Despite the djinn’s stuffy proclamations, some believe that their superiority has not always been uncontested. Mysterious metal spheres scattered throughout the plane fuel rumors of a long-vanquished foe. A recent theory involves an ancient war between the djinn and a contingent of extraplanar outsiders, or perhaps gods. Some claim that these spheres actually imprison the genies’ rivals. The djinn’s failure to acknowledge these rumors, plus their refusal to build upon or even touch these spheres, has done nothing to quell such speculation.

Air Elementals Though just as disorganized as other elementals, air elementals have their own culture and are known for being more gregarious than others of their kind. They are intelligent, but their mind-sets and emotions can change as quickly as the winds from which they are born. The elementals’ command obedience from all but the most rebellious air elementals. Air elementals are not the realm’s only elementals. In the places where the azure sky turns dark with violent storms, lightning elementals dash about like children playing in the sea, unleashing great bolts of electricity. Ice elementals also venture to this plane, despite being native to the Plane of Water.

Cloud Dragons Cloud dragons are natives of the Plane of Air and are known for flitting unhindered through the expanse of the Endless Sky, indulging their fickle whims. They have an innate curiosity and may begin a quest for lore or a lost bauble only to allow a distraction to sidetrack them for years. Cloud dragons’ whimsical journeys sometimes take them away from their home plane; most cloud dragons on the Material Plane traveled there for a specific but now long-forgotten purpose and, finding the mountain peaks of Material Plane worlds quite hospitable, decided to stay.

Mephits Three types of mephits dwell on the Plane of Air: air, dust, and ice mephits. These miniscule scamps sometimes serve the powerful entities that dwell on the Plane of Air and are often seen flitting about the plane’s great cities, delivering messages or running errands. Many mephits, however, choose to remain independent. These mephits create small nations on the plane’s scattered islands, and each nation’s strictures and social mores depend on the type and personality of its self-proclaimed mephit ruler. Mephit nations often have confusing and contradictory laws and customs, making it easy for visitors to unknowingly break them. Moreover, familiarity with the customs of one nation never provides much help in understanding the rules of another.

Sylphs Although uncommon on their progenitors’ home plane, highly capable sylphs have left the Material Plane in fair numbers to reside on the Plane of Air. They work often as commanders of airship fleets or as extraplanar diplomats for the djinn—or, more rarely, the elemental population. Still others are high-priced guides for the plane’s most esteemed or influential visitors. Some conspirators posit that such sylphs act as spies for extraplanar forces that wish to eventually challenge the djinn for dominance of the plane, but practically no one—the air genies included— gives the theory any credence.

Table 3–8: Plane of Air Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–5 2d6 sylphs 4
6–11 1d8 Small air elementals 5
12–14 1d8 Small lightning elementals 5
15–19 2d6 air pneuma petitioners 6
20–24 1d8 Medium air elementals 7
25–29 1 invisible stalker 7
30–32 1d8 Medium lightning elementals 7
33–35 1d6 comozant wyrds 7
36–38 2d6 air mephits 8
39–41 2d6 dust mephits 8
42–44 2d6 ice mephits 8
45–47 1d4 belkers 8
48–50 1 mihstu 8
51–55 2d6 air wysps 8
56–60 1d8 Large air elementals 9
61–63 1d8 djinn 9
64 1 young cloud dragon 9
65–67 1d8 Large lightning elementals 9
68 1 djinni vizier and 1d6 djinn 10
69–73 1d6 air veelas 10
74–78 1d8 Huge air elementals 11
79–81 1d8 Huge lightning elementals 11
82–84 1 aerial servant 11
85–89 1d8 greater air elementals 13
90 1 adult cloud dragon 13
91–93 1d8 greater lightning elementals 13
94–95 1d8 elder air elementals 15
96 1d6 monadic devas 15
97 1d8 elder lightning elementals 15
98 1 ancient cloud dragon 18
99 1 anemos 18
100 1d8 mythic elder air elementals 18

Elemental Plane of Earth (Inner Plane)

The Plane of Earth is a solid place made of soil and stone. An unwary traveler might find himself entombed within this vast solidity of material and crushed into nothingness, with his powdered remains left as a warning to any foolish enough to follow. Despite its solid, unyielding nature, the Plane of Earth is varied in its consistency, ranging from soft soil to veins of heavier and more valuable metal.

The Plane of Earth is a vast shell of stone and minerals shot through with tunnels and caverns that range from narrow squeezes to vast vaults capable of hosting entire worlds.

The most fixed and stable of the Elemental Planes, the Plane of Earth is an effectively limitless domain of dirt, stone, and metals, its lightless depths crisscrossed by a network of interconnected tunnels and caverns. In primordial times, this plane was a single solid shell that barred all but the most acclimated or cunning species from entering. Since the Material Plane came into being, though, the essences of the other Elemental Planes—especially the adjacent shells of fire and water—have subtly influenced the Plane of Earth.

The combination of planar convergences and the arrival of new inhabitants turned the Plane of Earth into the vast expanse of interlocking cave systems, bottomless crevasses, and bizarre, unique ecologies that it is today.

Along the immeasurable border between the Planes of Earth and Fire, stoic shaitan genies maintain bustling outposts geared toward trade, exploration, and general maintenance of the Peerless Empire’s borders. These stations’ official orders from the empire’s capital, the Opaline Vault, are to monitor for incursions of efreeti forces from the Plane of Fire, and most maintain at least a nominal defensive military force. In practice, the warring between the shaitans and the efreet is limited to a specific conflict between the Opaline Vault and the City of Brass, and in general, shaitans harbor no enmity for their fiery counterparts, and the two types of genies sometimes even work together when their interests align.

TRAITS

The Plane of Earth has the following planar traits:

DIVINITIES

Elemental lords of earth

Outsiders earth elementals (including crysmals, earth wysps, mudlords, sandmen, and thoqquas), earth veelas, shaitans, mephits (earth and salt), and xorns

Petitioners earth pneuma (stony or crystalline forms)

Qualities immunity to earth and acid effects, burrow speed 20 ft., earth glide ability (as an earth elemental)

INFUSIONS

Basic You gain a +2 bonus on Climb checks and a +2 bonus on saving throws against earth and acid effects.

Improved You can use acid pit once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use statue once per day as a spell-like ability.

DENIZENS

The Plane of Earth is more populous than most natives and visitors alike realize, as entire societies can thrive within nooks and crannies that even the most experienced guides don’t know exist.

Crystal Dragons These draconic entities infused with elemental energy claim dominion over several small, personal empires in the Eternal Delve. The flighty nature of crystal dragons doesn’t particularly predispose them to the rigors of ruling a nation, but their trade savvy—especially when it comes to precious gems and metals—combined with their altruistic natures often land them in such roles. Predispositions aside, once in a position of authority, these dragons fiercely protect those in their domains, providing comfortable living conditions free from the slavery that is ubiquitous in shaitan society.

Earth Elementals Earth elementals are some of the oldest inhabitants of the Eternal Delve, and they are so attuned to their home plane that some spend entire decades or centuries fused with their surroundings, never revealing their existence until their whims move them to action. Other earth elementals traverse the plane’s interior like swarms of insects, moving in dizzying and often unintelligible patterns. Many earth elementals—and mud elementals, to a lesser extent— are reclusive and territorial, clinging ferociously to their ever-changing homes. They have few, if any, reasons to communicate with other inhabitants of the plane, and most others view them as a natural hazard inherent to existence here. On occasion, though, a great threat to the plane has mustered the elementals’ strengths, and the shaitans of the Opaline Vault are constantly scheming to enlist them in their war against the efreet of the City of Brass.

Mephits Mephits are considered pests by their domineering shaitan neighbors. The Peerless Empire subjugates earth and salt mephits without a second thought, but due to their sheer number, for every mephit captured another five go free. More often than not, when mephits are apprehended, the shaitans entrap them in extended contracts of servitude or use the empire’s draconic laws to sentence them to extended work for the slightest violation. Ironically, many such mephits come to appreciate their newfound existence under shaitan rule, for it allows them to live among the trappings of power and opulence. The longest-serving of these mephits sometimes move on to become seneschals or minor power brokers within the rigid slave castes of the Peerless Empire.

Oreads With its abundance of open-air tunnels and caverns, the Eternal Delve has historically appealed to several races more commonly found on the Material Plane, including dwarves, humans, and even elves. However, the most populous of these races are oreads, whose ancestors hailed from the Plane of Earth. Although relatively common, they typically live in smaller, more isolated populations or scattered among great cities full of other creatures. Oreads mix easily with most of the native creatures here, but many never feel truly at home. Most leverage their resiliency and adaptability to serve as envoys between shaitans and xorns or even xiomorns. However, these roles are inherently risky, and more than a few oreads have found themselves on the wrong side of shaitans’ laws or accidentally delivering a fatal insult to a proud xiomorn.

Shaitans These large genies maintain the expansive Peerless Empire, a nation that spans the borders of the Plane of Earth and operates with ruthless efficiency. The earth genies are consummate contractors and use their talents to bind a wide array of creatures into serving them in everything from their business interests to maintaining their immaculate homes. They prefer willing servants over slaves, but those who oppose shaitans are ruthlessly forced into servitude, often spending their remaining existence toiling in the distant reaches of the Peerless Empire’s mining operations. Shaitans have some manner of diplomatic relationship with nearly every race that exists on the Plane of Earth, even extending to some tentative deals with the efreet, although the shaitans of the Opaline Vault remain at war with the fire genies and refuse to participate in any dealings with them.

Xiomorns The xiomorns are a race of primordial builders and experimenters whose genius is tempered by a tendency to seize upon endeavors that they lose interest in relatively quickly. While xiomorns have spent recent centuries chiefly consumed with building enormous Vaults on the Material Plane, the center is full of immense, abandoned cavern-cities created by the xiomorns before they abandoned their incredible settlements on what appears to be little more than a whim. Their activities might seem capricious, but the xiomorns assert that all their actions are driven by exacting goals whose details they refuse to disclose. Xiomorns are divided into two distinct types: the Vault Builders and the Vault Keepers. The Vault Builders are mythic beings who rule over their lesser Vault Keeper counterparts. Most of the xiomorns who dwell on the Plane of Earth dedicate themselves either to crafting new vaults or venerating their elemental lord patron.

Xorns Driven into solitude by hunger, xorns are commonly found in the wilderness regions of the Plane of Earth, far removed from territories controlled by other races. They live alone or in small communities known as clusters, distant from the open tunnels that break up the plane.

Table 3–9: Plane of Earth Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–10 1d8 Small earth elementals 5
11–13 1d8 Small mud elementals 5
14–16 1d6 crysmals 6
17 1 young crystal dragon 6
18–22 2d6 earth pneuma petitioners 6 See page 130,
23–27 1d8 Medium earth elementals 7
28–30 1d8 Medium mud elementals 7
31–35 2d6 earth mephits 8
36–40 2d6 salt mephits 8
41–43 1d10 sandmen 8
44–48 2d6 earth wysps 8
49–53 1d8 Large earth elementals 9
54–56 1d6 xorns 9
57–59 1d8 Large mud elementals 9
60–62 1d8 mudlords 9
63 1 adult crystal dragon 10
64–68 1d6 earth veelas 10
69–73 1d8 Huge earth elementals 11
74–76 1d8 shaitans 11
77–79 1d8 Huge mud elementals 11
80–84 1d8 greater earth elementals 13
85 1 shaitan pasha and 1d6 shaitans 13
86–88 1d8 greater mud elementals 13
89–92 1d8 elder earth elementals 15
93 1d6 monadic devas 15
94 1 ancient crystal dragon 15
95 1d8 elder mud elementals 15
96–97 1d8 carnivorous crystals 15
98 1d6 xiomorns (Vault Keepers) 17
99 1d8 mythic elder earth elementals 18
100 1 mythic xiomorn (Vault Builder) 20

Elemental Plane of Fire

Everything is alight on the Plane of Fire. The ground is nothing more than great, ever-shifting plates of compressed flame. The air ripples with the heat of continual firestorms and the most common liquid is magma. The oceans are made of liquid flame, and the mountains ooze with molten lava. Fire survives here without needing fuel or air, but flammables brought onto the plane are consumed readily.

TRAITS

The Plane of Fire has the following planar traits:

Plane of Fire (Inner Plane)

A realm of perpetual conflagration, the Plane of Fire is a brilliant vortex of light and flames.

Like the brilliant, fiery colors that dance within an all-consuming blaze, the Plane of Fire is both astonishingly beautiful and eminently hostile to most forms of life.

Visitors able to safely traverse the Inferno are few and far between, as the plane quickly engulfs those without proper protection. Those who can endure its smoldering terrain— and the domains of its mercurial and often terribly cruel inhabitants—earn serious bragging rights back on their home planes, not to mention the wealth of treasure and adventure they might find here. For some elite explorers, the Plane of Fire’s scintillating beauty is reward enough for visiting, though the dangers here are as unrivaled as they are alluring.

Immense swaths of the Plane of Fire consist of rolling seas of fire, rivers of lava, volcanic mountains, and burning plains, and with skies filled with flame, smoke, and rains of cinders, the landscapes here are strange indeed. In some areas, searing, sulfurous fumes supplant all breathable air, but even those places with a breathable atmosphere are often so hot that organic materials instantly sear to a crisp. In other cases, massive columns of fire engulf whole regions and contain their own unique ecosystems. Much of the plane’s solid and semisolid surfaces are seas of liquid fire, molten metal, flowing lava, or other hazardous materials. Rains of melted metal, incendiary mists, and volcanic eruptions occur throughout the plane, often randomly and without warning.

Ages ago, as efreeti cities grew to astonishing proportions, their inhabitants began abutting azer strongholds as they pleased. The efreet simply executed the headstrong azer leaders of fortresses that resisted, afterward taking the unmoored clans into their cities to form an openly oppressed—and sometimes outright enslaved—bottom-ranking class. One by one, the mighty azer fortresses fell, their insular inhabitants unaware of the injustices that had happened to their neighbors.

Very few free azer strongholds remain, and empty and ruined fortresses stand across the landscape like iron husks.

However, rumors tell of a mighty azer empire that exists far below the plane’s surface, embedded in the side of a massive basalt cliff behind a raging waterfall of lava. This empire has supposedly never had contact with any other intelligent races on the plane and has access to ancestral construct magic the likes of which the rest of the multiverse has never seen. Many intrepid explorers have set out to find this empire, but none have been successful. Those few who have returned live out the rest of their short days in a strange, horrified haze, repeating the words, “Anything to sate the All-Father.”

TRAITS

DIVINITIES

Elemental lords of fire

Outsiders azers, efreet, fire elementals (including fire wysps and magmins), fire veelas, mephits (fire, magma, and steam), rasts, and salamanders

Petitioners fire pneuma (smoky and burning forms)

Qualities immunity to fire effects, slam attack deals an additional 1d4 points of fire damage

INFUSIONS

Basic You gain a +2 bonus on Acrobatics checks and a +2 bonus on saving throws against fire effects.

Improved You can use wall of fire once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use delayed blast fireball once per day as a spell-like ability.

DENIZENS

Although it is inherently hostile to many forms of life, the Plane of Fire is home to a surprising breadth of fire-loving species. Below are details on some of the most common or significant creatures abiding on the plane.

Azers Among the Eternal Furnace’s most populous creatures, azers have a long, complex, and in many ways tragic history on the plane. These sturdy, dwarf-like people are hardworking and self-sufficient folk, and they once lived in carefully ordered societies secluded in fortresses of iron and brass scattered across the plane. However, while these societies had internal hierarchies that ensured they functioned as efficiently as clockwork, the ancestral azer realms never paid much attention to each other or to their homelands’ defenses, and this left the race ripe for exploitation.

Efreet The most widely recognized denizens of the Plane of Fire are the efreet, and for good reason: fire genies operate the most powerful empire in the Inferno—the Dominion of Flame. The dominion’s cosmopolitan cities sprawl across the realm, bringing the genies’ overbearing elitism, deviousness, and cruelty to nearly every corner of the plane. Their capital, the City of Brass, is among the Great Beyond’s most amazing achievements. The efreet’s enemies are legion; efreet universally despise djinn, most consider themselves several orders of magnitude superior to the plane’s mephit monarchy, and the efreet of the City of Brass remain in a state of open warfare with the shaitans of the Opaline Vault. Efreet think nothing of enslaving any creatures they can overpower, no matter on how large of a scale. However, despite their cruelty and volatility, they maintain a remarkable sense of terrible logic. The Dominion of Flame maintains a tense, though not openly violent, relationship with the shaitans of the Plane of Earth as a whole, and the two nations sometimes work together when the conditions are right.

Fire Elementals The most abundant beings in the Eternal Furnace are its fire and magma elementals. Were they to form any large-scale, cohesive society, they could undoubtedly vie for control of the entire plane, but elementals simply don’t think in those terms. Fiercely independent and open to negotiating with any nonhostile beings, fire elementals see themselves more as natural forces than as parts of any larger whole.

Magmins Small but quite numerous pockets of the fiery, humanoid-shaped creatures known as magmins exist throughout the Eternal Furnace. Perhaps because magmins’ settlements tend to offer little plunder of value, or simply because the suspicious folk quickly annihilate visitors they believe to be threats, no major conquerors have arrived at their doorsteps. It’s said to be nearly impossible for an extraplanar visitor to gain a magmin enclave’s trust, but those who make the attempt often look to the creatures’ sacred magma pools for inspiration. Because magmins use the pools for everything from sustenance to bathing to recreation, offering precious minerals to add to the magma or protecting it from imminent threats can ingratiate such helpers with a community of magmins.

Mephits The Inferno’s fire mephits are notable for their highly developed society. The theocratic mephits have expanded much in power over recent centuries, and as their realms have grown, their customs, taboos, and rituals have increased in complexity to a degree just short of those of the efreet. However, though they are not kind creatures, they are not nearly as haughty or self-obsessed as their more powerful genie counterparts.

Table: Plane of Fire Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–8 1d8 Small fire elementals 5
9–11 1d8 Small magma elementals 5
12–16 2d6 fire pneuma petitioners 6
17–19 1d8 thoqquas 6
20–24 1d8 Medium fire elementals 7
25–27 2d6 azers 7
28–30 1d8 Medium magma elementals 7
31–33 1d8 magmins 7
34–38 2d6 fire mephits 8
39–43 2d6 magma mephits 8
44–48 2d6 steam mephits 8
49 1 young magma dragon 8
50–52 1d6 rasts 8
53–55 2d6 fire wysps 8
56–60 1d8 Large fire elementals 9
61–63 1d6 salamanders 9
64–66 1d8 Large magma elementals 9
67–71 1d6 fire veelas 10
72–76 1d8 Huge fire elementals 11
77–79 1d8 Huge magma elementals 11
80–82 1d8 efreet 12
83 1 adult magma dragon 12
84–88 1d8 greater fire elementals 13
89 1 efreeti malik and 1d6 efreet 13
90–92 1d8 greater magma elementals 13
93–95 1d8 elder fire elementals 15
96 1d6 monadic devas 15
97 1d8 elder magma elementals 15
98 1 ancient magma dragon 17
99 1d8 mythic elder fire elementals 18
100 1d8 fire whales 20

Elemental Plane of Water (Inner Plane)

The Plane of Water is a sea without a floor or a surface, an entirely fluid environment lit by a diffuse glow. It is one of the more hospitable of the Inner Planes once a traveler gets past the problem of breathing the local medium.

The eternal oceans of this plane vary between ice cold and boiling hot, and between saline and fresh. They are perpetually in motion, wracked by currents and tides. The plane’s permanent settlements form around bits of flotsam suspended within this endless liquid, drifting on the tides.

The Plane of Water is a seemingly endless ocean with neither surface nor floor, a sunken realm that lies between the Planes of Air and Earth.

With the Plane of Air serving as a vast sky and the Plane of Earth forming its floor, the Plane of Water is a breathtaking, endless ocean of salt and fresh water alike. Generally growing more saline with increased proximity to the Plane of Earth, the Boundless Sea nonetheless contains within its primeval tides vast pockets of pristine fresh water, salt-choked dead seas, freshwater rivers flowing in tandem with ocean currents, and even enormous bubbles of floating air, all of which contain their own unique and vibrant ecosystems.

Sprinkled throughout the plane are even stranger features, such as enchanted springs that bubble into underwater pools, warping whatever wildlife lives within them, and pockets of acid and poison that form roiling lagoons and refuse to dilute into the surrounding ocean. Enormous, whirling torrents of blood and chum, too large to have formed through organic means, sustain environments incomprehensibly alien to all but the most savvy natives of this plane. Although the Boundless Sea’s temperature is largely tepid, strong currents of ice-cold and boiling-hot water thread throughout it, imperiling those unfamiliar with the terrain.

Most of the plane is liquid, but foreign elements can be found here as well, having fallen into the plane over the eons. For instance, hunks of rock from the Plane of Earth form vast floating reefs alongside fragments of lost cities and forgotten worlds. Enormous chunks of ice have also meandered into the Boundless Sea from the Plane of Air; on many such solid escarpments natives have constructed bustling cities, often alongside small populations of ice elementals. Jagged spires of solidified magma reach straight into the Endless Sky, while a handful of sunken spheres from the Plane of Fire light some portions of the seas, burning like underwater stars. The Boundless Sea’s other light sources include gently filtered light from the Plane of Air and, near where it meets the Plane of Earth, massive, roving schools of luminescent fish.

TRAITS

The Plane of Water has the following planar traits:

  • Subjective Directional Gravity: The gravity here works similarly to that of the Plane of Air, but sinking or rising on the Plane of Water is slower (and less dangerous) than on the Plane of Air.
  • Water-Dominant This plain is mostly liquid. Visitors who can’t breathe water or reach a pocket of air likely drown. Creatures of the fire subtype are extremely uncomfortable on water-dominant planes. Those made of fire take 1d10 points of damage each round.
  • Time normal
  • Realm immeasurable
  • Structural lasting
  • Essence water-dominant
  • Alignment mildly neutral-aligned
  • Magic enhanced (spells and spell-like abilities with the water descriptor or that use, manipulate, or create water [such as those of the Water domain and the elemental water bloodline]) or impeded (spells and spell-like abilities with the fire descriptor or that use or create fire [such as those of the Fire domain and the elemental fire bloodline])

DIVINITIES

Elemental lords of water

Outsiders marids, mephits (ooze and water), tojanidas, water elementals (including water wysps), and water veelas

Petitioners water pneuma (watery-bodied forms)

Qualities aquatic subtype, immunity to water and cold effects, swim speed 40 ft.

INFUSIONS

Basic You gain a +2 bonus on Swim checks and a +2 bonus on saving throws against water and cold effects.

Improved You can use control water once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use vortex once per day as a spell-like ability.

Water pressure remains even throughout the plane, allowing disparate life forms to travel throughout without much difficulty, and kingdoms and creatures alike can and often do grow to unfathomable sizes. Near the border with the Plane of Air, enormous storms occasionally descend into the turbulent waves, forming mountain-sized whirlpools and waterspouts. At the border with the Plane of Earth, the waters are clogged with iron and silt, and thermal vents shoot out jets of nutrients and superheated blasts of brine.

DENIZENS

Though civilization exists only in pockets of the Boundless Sea, water-breathing life-forms of all types thrive on this elemental plane. Merfolk, sahuagin, and numerous other humanoids dwell in the endless depths, gathering in villages, cities, or even nations, while deadly monsters like krakens and scyllas are less common but much feared. Unlike their kin on the Plane of Air, elementals and mephits native to the Plane of Water do not gather in groups. Water elementals act much like brutal beasts of the wild, while mephits prefer to lurk in the nooks and crannies of other societies. The petitioners known as water pneumas, like other pneumas, are short-lived and swift to make the transition into elementals once they arrive on the Plane of Water. The most significant denizens of the plane are explored below.

Brine Dragons Past the Boundless Sea’s salinity interchange, the Plane of Water teems with brine dragons. Although most scholars assume that the dragons bask aimlessly in the plane’s saltier depths, in reality most live there at the behest of their elemental lord.

Marids The Boundless Sea’s water genies claim to be the absolute and rightful rulers of the Plane of Water in its entirety, but in truth, the disparate marid nations have been divided for nearly 10,000 years. Visitors to the Boundless Sea tend to find that the marids are some of its more accessible natives. Marid society follows very strong rules of hospitality, meant to help facilitate peace between members of their notoriously capricious race. Marids also enjoy foreign visitors and performers for their own sake, and the genies go out of their way to invite and support such guests. Many marid cities have a foreign quarter that provides food and breathable air, and nobles eagerly welcome opportunities to do business with surface dwellers. The lack of safe, reliable, and organized transport routes between the marid settlements, however, means such trade is infrequent at best.

Merfolk Merfolk immigrants to the Plane of Water prefer to dwell in dimly lit waters, while their deep merfolk kin keep to the lightless seas near the border with the Plane of Earth. Merfolk are a secretive people, going to great lengths to avoid other races and keep intruders out of their domains. An explorer is more likely to merely feel the presence of merfolk than to actually see one, as merfolk weave complex webs of illusion, build decoy cities, and construct misleading trails to lead curious outsiders miles away from their true homes. They have also been known to relocate or even destroy sites of significance to keep adventurers from finding them. This causes no end of frustration for other denizens of the plane, from knowledgeseekers to travelers who simply need stable landmarks.

Sahuagin Often dismissed as simple savages, the sahuagin of the Plane of Water are entrenched planar immigrants whose strength should not be underestimated. The Boundless Sea’s sahuagin originated from the Material Plane and, they say, alighted here several thousand years ago to fulfill a prophecy. While well known for quick and vicious invasions of neighboring kingdoms, these sahuagin are even more infamous for fighting among themselves. Most major nobles in their cities claim lineage back to the first sahuagin emperor. Sahuagin warlords are some of the most adaptable residents of the Plane of Water, grasping for any advantages they can find to bring them to greater heights of conquest and power.

Table: Plane of Water Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–7 2d6 merfolk 3
8–15 2d6 undines 4
16–23 1d8 Small water elementals 5
24–25 1d8 Small ice elementals 5
26–30 2d6 water pneuma petitioners 6
31–35 1d8 Medium water elementals 7
36 1 young brine dragon 7
37–38 1d8 Medium ice elementals 7
39–43 2d6 sahuagin 7
44–47 2d6 ooze mephits 8
48–51 2d6 water mephits 8
52–55 1d6 tojanidas 8
56–59 2d6 water wysps 8
60–64 1d8 Large water elementals 9
65–66 1d8 Large ice elementals 9
67–68 1d8 mudlords 9
69–72 1d6 water veelas 10
73–77 1d8 Huge water elementals 11
78 1 adult brine dragon 11
79–80 1d8 Huge ice elementals 11
81–84 1d8 greater water elementals 13
85–87 1d8 marids 13
88–89 1d8 greater ice elementals 13
90 1 marid shahzada and 1d6 marids 14
91–94 1d8 elder water elementals 15
95 1d6 monadic devas 15
96 1d8 elder ice elementals 15
97 1 ancient brine dragon 16
98 1 scylla 16
99 1 kraken 18
100 1d8 mythic elder water elementals 18

Elysium (Chaotic Good)

A vast land of untamed wilderness and wild passions, Elysium is the plane of benevolent chaos. Freedom and self-sufficiency abound here, personified in the azatas native to the plane. In Elysium, selfless cooperation and fierce competition clash with the violence of a raging thunderstorm, but such conflicts never overshadow the lofty concepts of bravery, creativity, and good unhindered by rules or laws.

TRAITS

Elysium has the following planar traits:

Elysium (Outer Plane (chaotic good))

Elysium is a place of bold deeds and fiery passions, where heroes clash and revel, and freedom is prized above all.

Elysium is a vast and ancient realm, and the following locations only scratch the proverbial surface.

Despite its good alignment, Elysium is far from universally safe, and regions of true wilderness grow increasingly perilous farther from the heartlands of the Promised Land, where monsters and worse are known to dwell.

Elysium’s day-night cycle varies, potentially changing with each dawn and dusk. When a new day dawns, roll 1d12 to determine the number of daylight hours for that day, and roll 1d12 with each dusk to determine the number of hours that night will last. In certain areas, the passage of day and night may be stable, or it may pass faster or slower, but to most of Elysium’s denizens, the unpredictability of the days’ lengths is a welcome bit of whimsy and randomness.

Celestial bodies exist, with the brightest star in the night sky being a manifestation that gives Elysium a fixed “north” that can be used to navigate. The number and color of Elysium’s moons vary by region, but there remains only one sun during each day.

Elysium is beautiful beyond any landscape of the Material Plane, teeming with rich and vibrant life. By day, a golden sun shines brightly down upon the emerald fields and azure seas, while by night, the sky is a sea of glittering stars escorting a silver moon on its journey. Nothing in Elysium knows much of restraint; its mountains stretch taller and its oceans yawn deeper than on any world on the Material Plane, accounting for some of the greatest extremes in elevation in all the Great Beyond. Yet these extremes are not limited by Material Plane realities: the tops of Elysium’s tallest mountains have plenty of breathable air and its deepest oceans receive ample sunlight.

TRAITS

  • Gravity normal
  • Time normal
  • Realm immeasurable
  • Structural lasting
  • Essence mixed
  • Alignment strongly chaos-aligned, strongly good-aligned
  • Magic enhanced (spells and spell-like abilities with the chaotic good descriptor), impeded (spells and spell-like abilities with the lawful or evil descriptor)

DIVINITIES

One of the curious realities about the divinities who dwell in Elysium, be they true deities or merely demigods, is the fact that not all of them are particularly strong thematic fits for a realm of equal parts chaos and goodness. This points to one of Elysium’s greatest strengths, though: its diversity in chaos. Unlike more rigidly constrained planes such as Utopia, Heaven, and Hell and unlike planes such as the Abyss that are brutally inimical in nature, the Promised Land is welcoming to a wide range of ethos and ideals. While this makes Elysium the most welcoming of the Outer Planes for the average mortal to visit, it also makes it the most dangerous of the good-aligned Outer Planes for the same visitors—those who travel to Elysium cannot rely upon everything they meet there being equally friendly.

Empyreal Lords The majority of the empyreal lords who dwell in Elysium are powerful azatas, but a handful are instead unique and powerful angels. With separate areas of interest and diverse worshipers, they all maintain sizable realms of their own scattered throughout the Promised Land.

Giant Pantheon The giant races worship a large pantheon of divinities (most of whom are demigods), but unlike the oversized stature of their kind, the giant pantheon does not hold a particularly oversized role in Elysium. Content for the most part to remain within their floating continent-sized fortress and wilderness that drifts on clouds above, the giant divinities are quick to exile those among their ranks who either risk the sanctity of the realm or raise arms against their sisters and brothers.

Outsiders angels, azatas, cynosomas, Elysian titans, empusas*

Petitioners chosen (idealized versions of souls’ mortal bodies)

Qualities resistance 10 to cold and fire, +2 Charisma

INFUSIONS

Basic Elysium has inspired your artistic sense and quickened your agility. You gain a +1 bonus on Reflex saves, a +2 bonus on Acrobatics checks to avoid provoking attacks of opportunity, and a +2 bonus on a single type of Perform check of your choice.

Improved You can use confusion once per day as a spell-like ability. Lawful or evil targets take a –1 penalty on saves against this effect, while lawful evil targets take a –2 penalty on saves.

Greater Elysium’s blessing bolsters your bravery and sense of self. Whenever you are under the effects of an ongoing fear effect, a possession effect, or an effect that grants mental control over you (such as dominate person), at the beginning of each of your turns, you can attempt a new saving throw against that effect as though you were initially exposed to it. On a success, the effect immediately ends. You can attempt a number of additional saves this way each day equal to 3 + your Charisma modifier (minimum 4/day).

DENIZENS

In Elysium, a plane of bountiful life, celestial versions of most Material Plane creatures are common and often far more intelligent than their counterparts. Beyond these, numerous other sorts of creatures roam Elysium and live out their lives there: capricious havoc dragons, cynosomas and peris visiting from their respective home planes, empusas on missions of vengeance or espionage for the elven deities, and whimsical shape-changing sapphire oozes, can all be encountered throughout Elysium.

But the most populous creatures of all in the Promised Land are the eager and passionate azatas.

Angels As in Heaven and Nirvana, angels can be encountered in number in Elysium, be they chaotic good natives of the realm or messengers traveling from elsewhere on divine missions. of the three good-aligned Outer Planes, though, Elysium hosts the smallest number of angelic natives. This is not to say that Elysium is any less benevolent than the other planes—simply that in Elysium, the desire and need for divine representation is less than on those other planes, for Elysium’s divinities prefer to handle their own affairs rather than rely upon intermediaries.

Azatas Of the true outsider races, none embody Elysium’s nature better than the azatas. Azata culture is passionate and competitive, with honor gained through great accomplishments such as heroic deeds and impressive works of creativity. Despite their fierce independence, azatas place great stock in community among their own kind. Many azatas pledge themselves to factions known as courts, such as the Court of the Muse or the Court of the Burning Gale. Befitting the azatas’ fickle nature, however, allegiance to a court lasts only until the ruler’s whims shift. Non-azatas are almost never invited to join these courts, though as with all things Elysian, the dedicated can achieve nearly anything.

The Chosen The petitioners of Elysium are known as the chosen and manifest as idealized versions of their mortal bodies; as a result, Elysian societies often strongly resemble the Material Plane realms from which their member petitioners hail. For example, in the realm of the elven pantheon, most petitioners appear as elves and live their afterlives in much the same way that elves live on the Material Plane. of course, the chosen retain their mortal memories no more often than any other petitioner, so while in appearance some chosen may closely resemble their mortal incarnations (assuming the mortals were comfortable in their own skin), in personality they have fully embraced their outsider roles. Traditionally, the chosen are the category of petitioners who most quickly ascend into a higher form of outsider after arrival in the afterlife, in large part due to their affinity to the identity of their “idealized selves.” When such a petitioner ascends, in most cases he does so into a half-celestial version of the race he was when alive. Such half-celestials may then at a later date ascend once more into actual angels, azatas, or other outsiders, but many live out the rest of their afterlives in their new but familiar forms. In realms where a chosen’s idealized form does not fit the constraints of a Medium petitioner (as is the case often in the realm of the giant pantheon), the transformation to a half-celestial happens swiftly after arrival in Elysium, often after only a few days or even mere hours spent in an uncomfortably sized form.

Elysian Titans Among the mightiest of the Promised Land’s outsider races, the Elysian titans retired to the plane after the ancient war that turned them against their now-imprisoned thanatotic kin in the Abyss. The Elysian titans are great lovers of the arts and often depart their opulent mountaintop villas and floating palaces for the lands below in search of new wonders to enjoy.

Table: Elysium Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–8 1 gancanagh 4
9–11 1d6 cassisians 5
12–26 2d6 chosen petitioners 6
27–31 2d6 lyrakiens 8
32–33 1 balisse 8
34–37 2d6 sapphire oozes 8
38–47 1d6 bralanis 9
48–58 1d6 lillends 10
59–60 1d8 chorals 10
61–65 1d10 yamahs 10
66 1 young havoc dragon 12
67–68 1d6 movanic devas 13
69–71 1d6 raelises 13
72 1d6 monadic devas 15
73–75 1d6 cynosomas 15
76 1 planetar 16
77–81 1d6 ghaeles 16
82–84 1d4 peris 16
85 1 adult havoc dragon 16
86–90 1d6 empusas 16
91 1d6 astral devas 17
92–93 1d4 brijidines 19
94–95 1d8 uinujas 19
96 1 empyrean 20
97 1 ancient havoc dragon 21
98 1 solar angel 23
99 1d6 veranallias 23
100 1d6 Elysian titans 24

Ethereal Plane (Inner Planes (Transitive))

Source PRG:OA

The Ethereal Plane is coexistent with the Material Plane and often other planes as well. The Material Plane itself is visible from the Ethereal Plane, but it appears muted and indistinct; colors blur into each other and edges are fuzzy.

While it is possible to see into the Material Plane from the Ethereal Plane, the latter is usually invisible to those on the Material Plane. Normally, creatures on the Ethereal Plane cannot attack creatures on the Material Plane, and vice versa. A traveler on the Ethereal Plane is invisible, insubstantial, and utterly silent to someone on the Material Plane.

The Ethereal Plane is the seat of emotional forces, the mist-shrouded home of haunts and horrors, and the ever-present doorway between the worlds of the Inner Sphere. The Ethereal Plane coexists with these planes, interpenetrating them and generally mimicking their contours and vistas, albeit with greatly reduced visibility thanks to drifting fog and the slow rise and fall of fading sheets of light like the somber interior of a thunderstorm.

From within the Ethereal Plane, these neighboring worlds appear hazy and indistinct, as if viewed through frosted glass. Inhabitants of neighboring planes can’t perceive the Ethereal Plane at all, though certain mortals blessed or cursed with psychic sensitivity sometimes catch glimpses of its vistas. Since the Ethereal Plane is generally invisible from the other planes of the Inner Sphere, creatures under the effects of spells like ethereal jaunt and etherealness cannot be seen by creatures who are not themselves ethereal. Normally, creatures on the Ethereal Plane cannot attack creatures on the Material Plane, and vice versa.

Within the mists of the Ethereal Plane, warped, indistinct versions of locations overlap their Inner Sphere counterparts. This, coupled with the inherent weightlessness of creatures in the plane, makes it tempting to use the Ethereal Plane as a vantage to scout out unknown locales by passing through incorporeal walls and floating over traps with ease. The natural denizens of the plane make this a frightful prospect, however, and ensure that most forays into the Ethereal Plane are brief endeavors. Among the deadliest of local hazards are the blood-red xill—warlike, plane-shifting outsiders who incubate their eggs in living mortals.

Worse still, hideous, cackling night hags use the Ethereal Plane as a byway to the Dimension of Dreams, where they slip into nightmares to abduct mortal souls.

The twisted remnants of mortal souls comprise the vast majority of the Ethereal Plane’s inhabitants. Some souls, freed from their physical bodies by death, remain tethered to the Ethereal Plane by profound emotional distress and cannot proceed along multiversal currents to join the River of Souls flowing inexorably toward Purgatory until they sever the powerful emotional ties that bind them. Indeed, the longer these souls remain stalled on their afterlife journey, the closer they slide toward the Negative Energy Plane, and the more of their memories and personalities become subsumed by raw emotional distress and psychic damage. These souls eventually manifest as incorporeal undead, frequently in the form of wraiths and spectres.

Spiritualists call out to the spirits of the Ethereal Plane and open their physical minds as refuges for them to inhabit. With practice and the help of a trained spiritualist, a spirit can even take its own physical form on the neighboring planes by cloaking itself in a sheath of ectoplasm, the ghostly substance that acts as a veil between worlds. These spirit guides are known as phantoms, and while they are loyal to the spiritualist to whom they are bound, the emotional connection to the Ethereal Plane remains strong, manifesting in jealousy and fiery outbursts from even the kindest of souls. The ectoplasmic nature of the Ethereal Plane is extraordinarily susceptible to the thoughts and emotions of the plane’s inhabitants. The ethereal version of a physical location is informed not just by its actual dimensions and appearance, but also by the memories and impressions of the spirits that haunt it. For example, on the Ethereal Plane, an old mansion might look as it did in the era of its ghostly inhabitants. If those spirits find final rest, their memories cannot sustain the structure, and it falls into an ethereal ruin. Some incorporeal spirits become so entwined with the emotional nature of the plane that they can manifest these ectoplasmic vistas in an overlapping location on a neighboring plane, temporarily cloaking it in a disturbing reflection of some past incarnation.

In a similar way that locations in the outside world possess overlapping etheric reflections, mortal creatures also have ethereal doppelgangers in the form of etheric doubles that exactly overlie their physical forms. The etheric double is a vessel for the cosmic breath of life that gives a creature animate force, most commonly known as ki. This energy collects in seven blazing vortices of colorful energy known as chakras, which bind the etheric double and the physical body together and distribute vital life energy to both. This energy extends 2 to 3 feet beyond the outlines of the creature’s physical form to create its aura, a nimbus of colorful occult energies that reveals much about a creature’s disposition and emotional state.

A creature’s etheric double, aura, and chakras are not visible except to those with the knowledge or magic to see them. From the Material Plane, this involves esoteric use of the Perception skill by a creature with the Psychic Sensitivity feat or any of a number of spells.

From within the Ethereal Plane, all it takes to observe the interplay of these forces is simple concentration— if you know what to look for, it becomes plainly visible.

Interpreting this information, of course, is another matter. An etheric double is outlined in violet-gray or blue-gray luminescence. Unlike an astral body generated by astral projection or a lucid body of the Dimension of Dreams, an etheric double is not normally capable of acting as a separate vehicle of consciousness.

Finally, the sweeping expanse of the Ethereal Plane is home to countless pocket realities known as demiplanes.

Many of these unique realms are the private domains of powerful arcane spellcasters, the playgrounds of minor gods, the experiments of the inscrutable elohim, or the prisons of creatures that pose such danger to the cosmos that they must never be released.

TRAITS

The Ethereal Plane has the following planar traits:

  • Gravity none
  • Time normal
  • Realm immeasurable
  • Structural lasting (although there is little on this plane to alter)
  • Essence mixed (see text)
  • Alignment mildly neutral-aligned
  • Magic normal (see Magic on the Ethereal Plane)

DENIZENS

Despite its barren emptiness, the Ethereal Plane is far from uninhabited. The most notorious of its denizens are the xills, blood-red planar marauders with the power to step into the Material Plane and abduct creatures to serve as living hosts for their eggs. These alien outsiders have a tyrannical military culture and see all other creatures as fodder for their expansion—particularly phase spiders, a race that the xills have warred against for eons. Vile sahkils move through the Ethereal Plane as well, seeping out from the nightmare realm to torment the mortal world, and while they are most at home in that demiplane, they are disturbingly common foes across the Ethereal Plane as well.

These are far from the only creatures lurking in the mists, however. Aether elementals twist and dance in places where the Elemental Planes brush close to the Ethereal Plane, mighty etheric dragons lurk in secluded holdings, and phase spiders spin their twisted web settlements when not battling against their xill enemies.

Unfettered phantoms wander the mists, desperately seeking escape from the ravenous entropy of the Negative Energy Plane, while the enigmatic caulborn sift memories and secrets from mortal emotions. Animate dreams that have escaped from the countless dreamscapes floating through the Ethereal Plane, along with more dangerous nightmare creatures, wander the mists serving their own strange intentions. And though they are more commonly associated with the evil-aligned planes, night hags stalk the Ethereal Plane (often riding atop their nightmare steeds) in search of dreaming mortals to prey upon.

Xevnorvex The eerie creatures known as caulborn have long wandered the planes searching for psychic energies and new lore to add to their collective minds. As the Ethereal Plane is rich in both, it is no surprise that the caulborn first emerged into reality. Today, the caulborn primarily dwell on the Material Plane, but their Ethereal fortress, Xevnorvex, is every bit as strange and off-putting as its creators—a vast, grublike life-form that bears obvious kinship to the caulborn, wriggling its way through the misty void. Its insides are a mix of raw brain tissue used for memory accumulation and organic chambers suitable for caulborn habitation.

Outsiders aether elementals, caulborn, sahkils, xills

Petitioners terrorized (sickly or haunted-looking figures)

Qualities immunity to death effects, disease, and poison

DIVINITIES

Few deities are known to make their homes in the mists of the Ethereal Plane, for there is little of substance to claim, and the lack of large quantities of quintessence limits options for expanding divine realms. Sahkil tormentors dwell in one of the largest demiplanes drifting within the Ethereal Plane. The only real exception is a patron of night hags who has long dwelled on the Ethereal Plane to be closer to the dreams of mortals and gods alike. Many night hags believe that her continued presence is one of the things that gives them power over dreaming mortals.

INFUSIONS

Basic Your senses are sharp and attuned. You gain a +3 bonus on Perception checks on the Ethereal Plane, against creatures native to the Ethereal Plane, or against creatures on the Material Plane that are ethereal. When on the Ethereal Plane, you can see twice as far (clearly to 600 feet, and indistinctly to 1,800 feet).

Improved Your sense of sight on the Ethereal Plane improves greatly, and you can see clearly while there. You can gain nourishment and water from ectoplasm as if it were a tasteless food, and once per day you can use ectoplasmic snare as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can step from reality into the In-Between to travel and explore. Once per day you can use ethereal jaunt as a spell-like ability.

Table 3–1: Ethereal Plane Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–3 1d6 ectoplasmic humans 2
4–6 1d3 thought eaters 4
7–8 1d8 Small aether elementals 5
9 1d8 aether wysps 6
10–12 2d6 terrorized petitioners 6
13 1 young nightmare dragon 6
14–16 1d8 Medium aether elementals 7
17 1 young etheric dragon 7
18–22 1d6 unfettered phantoms 7
23–27 1d12 esipils 7
28–32 1d6 phase spiders 8
33–35 1 etheroot 8
36–38 1 night hag and 1 nightmare 9
39–43 1d6 xills 9
44–46 1d8 Large aether elementals 9
47–48 1d8 hypnalises 9
49–51 1d12 nucols 9
52 1 young dream dragon 10
53 1 adult nightmare dragon 10
54–56 1d8 Huge aether elementals 11
57 1 adult etheric dragon 11
58–59 1d4 moon dogs 11
60–62 1d12 wihsaaks 11
63–65 1d12 caulborn 12
66–68 1d12 ichkohs 12
69 1d6 ether drakes 13
70–72 1d8 greater aether elementals 13
73–76 1d10 horlas 13
77 1d8 pakalchis 13
78 1 adult dream dragon 14
79 1d8 elder aether elementals 15
80 1d6 monadic devas 15
81 1d12 zohanils 15
82 1 ancient nightmare dragon 15
83 1 ancient etheric dragon 16
84 1d6 qoloks 19
85 1 ancient dream dragon 19
86 1 kimenhuls 20
87 1d6 ximtals 20
88 Roll on Fey World table 21
89–90 Roll on Shadow Plane table 22
91 Roll on Positive Energy Plane table 24
92 Roll on Negative Energy Plane table 24
93–94 Roll on Plane of Air table 25
95–96 Roll on Plane of Water table 26
97–98 Roll on Plane of Earth table 27
99–100 Roll on Plane of Fire table 28

Ectoplasm

While the mist that makes up the vast majority of the Ethereal Plane is normally insubstantial, when it interacts with a soul traveling from a death into the River of Souls, this material can partially solidify into a semiliquescent ooze known as ectoplasm. Magic (particularly necromancy), powerful emotional upheavals, certain rare undead creatures, and nightmares escaped from the Dimension of Dreams can also manifest ectoplasm.

Certain creatures and classes can manipulate and shape ectoplasm to serve their needs, but when ectoplasm forms on its own in the Ethereal Plane, it creates stretches of tangled, pale-green, weblike sheets that twist and undulate in unfelt winds. Free-floating ectoplasm is odorless and tasteless, and cold and clammy to the touch. Ectoplasm of this type hinders movement as if it were difficult terrain, and it provides concealment as if it were dense fog.

Magic on the Ethereal Plane

Spells function normally on the Ethereal Plane, though their effects do not cross onto the Material Plane. The reverse is also true, save for spells and spell-like abilities that have the force descriptor and abjuration spells that affect ethereal beings; these can cross from the Material Plane to the Ethereal Plane. Spellcasters on the Material Plane must have some way to detect foes on the Ethereal Plane to target them with force-based spells. While it’s possible to hit ethereal enemies with a force spell cast on the Material Plane, the reverse isn’t possible; no magical attacks cross from the Ethereal Plane to the Material Plane, including force attacks.

Movement on the Ethereal Plane

The Ethereal Plane’s lack of gravity and near-total absence of solid matter would normally make movement close to impossible; however, as a result of its psychic resonance, creatures can move themselves through the plane via a sustained force of will. This requires the same action as regular movement, but the creature only moves at half its normal base speed (or one-quarter its normal speed if it lacks an Intelligence score). A creature with a swim or burrow speed can use that speed to determine its halved movement rate instead. Creatures capable of flight or whose movement is based on non-terrestrial means such as ectoplasmic gliding can move at their full speed. Movement in this fashion is a purely mental action, and a creature that is paralyzed can still move normally in this manner. Any effect that prevents thought components from functioning also prevents movement in this way on the Ethereal Plane.

Vision in the Ethereal Plane

The ever-present mist and fog on the Ethereal Plane give the realm an eerie, gray-green glow such that true darkness is rare, but the mist also distorts and obscures line of sight beyond 300 feet. From this distance to a distance of 900 feet, creatures and objects are visible as blurry, indistinct shapes in the mist and gain concealment. Beyond 900 feet, vision is obscured completely, although certain immense objects may be visible as lighter or darker shapes in the mist at great distance.

Abilities that allow for sight through mist or fog grant the ability to see normally, yet this does nothing to change the fact that there is rarely anything of import to see in this mostly empty realm.

Fey World (Inner Plane)

Source: PZO1140

Located before, between, and beyond the Material Plane, the Fey World is a dimension of extremes and unpredictability. While the Shadow Plane straddles the metaphysical gulf between the Material Plane and the Negative Energy Plane, the Fey World lies between the Material Plane and the Positive Energy Plane. The Fey World has been said to be a sort of “first draft” of reality—under a sky of whirling stars and moons that change shape and texture as they track their way through the vibrant heavens, inconsistent natural laws and wellsprings of primal magic and natural splendor create vistas unfathomable to mortal minds. Here stand ancient forests as tall as mountains, living lakes and rivers, traveling faerie courts alternately benevolent or sadistic, and landscapes of all manner that constantly shift and reinvent themselves. And ruling over all in this realm are those powerful entities known as the Eldest. It is from this realm that dread linnorms, fey creatures, the original gnomes, and far stranger beings hail.

This rough draft of the Material Plane was abandoned by the gods and set aside from the ebb and flow of the Cycle of Souls. Today, it is a place where fey rule and the laws of nature itself constantly change—a realm of nature run amok and ruled by the fey and the demigods known as the Eldest.

The Material Plane was not the first of its kind. In the earliest days of existence, before the creation of mortals and their realm, divinities created a rough draft—a prototype where they could test out different laws of physics and magic.

Working through powerful proxies known as the elohim, the gods and goddesses populated this infinitely mutable landscape with countless forms of life. Every creature that could come to be was shaped and refined, every natural process examined. In the end, the goddesses and gods hit upon a configuration they enjoyed—yet they didn’t simply declare their rough draft finished. Instead, they started over from scratch, abandoning their old ideas and painting the final version of the Material Plane over the top of their rough sketches. Thus, the Fey World was abandoned by its makers and the elohim proxies were freed to continue their own designs in the Astral Plane.

Today, the Fey World occupies a unique position in the Great Beyond. Set somewhat aside from deific interests and the Cycle of Souls in what residents dub the “Great Abandonment,” the Fey World is a closed system, its soul energy constantly recycling. Bolstered by its proximity to the Positive Energy Plane and the souls of the few mortal worshipers of the Fey World’s demigods, the Eldest, the realm has become unnaturally verdant, bursting with growth.

However, the Fey World is not simply a pastoral wonderland.

It is a realm of infinite possibility and unbridled evolution, with natural laws changing from place to place to reflect the variety of half-finished versions tested out by their makers— the landscape constantly reinventing itself to suit the whims of powerful individuals or its own inscrutable desires. Its residents are equally mysterious, at once familiar and alien, with most living in harmony with a landscape of savage, primeval beauty. Thus, the Fey World is the realm of fairy tales, where anything is possible—if you can pay the price.

TRAITS

The Fey World has the following planar traits.

  • Gravity normal
  • Erratic Time: Time progresses faster in some areas and slower in others, often according to the whim of the Eldest or other powerful individuals. For most visitors from other planes, their own timestream clings to them like a protective shell, but it’s not uncommon for a creature who spends a day in the Fey World to find upon their return home that a year or more has passed.
  • Realm immeasurable
  • Highly Morphic: The Fey World can be altered by strong-willed individuals, such as the Eldest.
  • Minor Positive Dominant: The Fey World grants fast healing to creatures only in certain areas where life is particularly potent and concentrated.
  • Mildly Neutral-Aligned: The Fey World does not impart alignment-based Charisma check penalties to anyone.
  • Magic enhanced and impeded magic or wild magic (see Magic in the Fey World)

DIVINITIES

Fey World residents have a unique relationship with deities due to their ancient abandonment by the gods who created them. Some resent those deities, others ignore them entirely, a few still pine for their love, and most have no opinion one way or the other, having lived so long in a world where the deities themselves have moved on. The end result is the same: none of the core deities make a home on the Fey World. Instead, Fey Worlders who seek spiritual guidance turn their veneration to a pantheon of demigods known as the Eldest.

When the gods and goddesses abandoned the Fey World, a collection of the strongest fey individuals—seeing both a need and an opportunity—stepped into their place, using their vast powers to grant spells and becoming the defacto pantheon of the Fey World. As with everything on the plane, the faces and portfolios of this pantheon have changed drastically over the untold millennia. Culturally, the Eldest differ from most deities in their general disregard for worship or organized religion, acting more like ordinary rulers than true demigods and maintaining more direct and personal relationships with their followers. Even so, no one can question their vast power, and the fabric of the Fey World itself bends to their every whim.

Outsiders none

Petitioners special (see Fey Incarnation)

INFUSIONS

Basic Traveling in the constantly changing Fey World has taught you to be ever ready for situations to shift in unpredictable ways. You gain a +2 bonus on Perception checks, initiative checks, and Charisma checks to shape the Fey World.

Improved Once per day, you can summon a fey creature from the Fey World to serve you, as if using summon nature’s ally IV as a spell-like ability. When you use this ability, you can choose to summon 1 boggart, 1 calpina, 1 huldra (a summoned huldra’s manipulate luck ability’s duration lasts only as long as the summoned huldra persists), 1 satyr, 1d3 liminal sprites, 1d3 pookas, 1d4+1 atomies, 1d4+1 brownies, 1d4+1 fauns, 1d4+1 grigs, or 1d4+1 mockingfeys.

Greater You can use fey form III as a spell-like ability once per day.

DENIZENS

The Fey World is the ancestral home of all fey, as well as gnomes. Members of these races native to the Fey World, however, are often quite different than those found on the Material Plane. Most significantly, its native residents do not die in the conventional sense—native Fey World creatures slain on that plane do not find their souls bound for judgment. Instead, such creatures are reformed from the planar fabric after a variable amount of time, often with their memories and personalities intact. While true destruction is possible, if an enemy is powerful and dedicated enough, death is more of an inconvenience than an ending for Fey Worlders.

In addition to fey such as satyrs, nymphs, and dryads, the Fey World is also home to lesser-known species like the dreaded lurkers in light, the piscine grodairs that carry their own streams with them, the shadowy ankous, and innumerable animals with the fey creature template. The Fey World is also home to the Tane, creatures created by the Eldest as weapons and grown so powerful that not even their inventors can control them. of these, the dreaded jabberwock is most famous, but others like the jubjub bird, bandersnatch, and sard are still more than capable of laying waste to nations.

Of the Tane, the most powerful is the legendary Leviathan, an entity even the Eldest are said to fear.

Features and Inhabitants

While the majority of the Material Plane’s universe is empty space populated by a diverse and seemingly endless number of different star systems and worlds, the Fey World is simply that: a single world that seems to stretch forever in every direction. Everything in the Material Plane has analogues in the Fey World, but the Fey World versions are often exaggerated in some way. Mountains are taller, oceans are deeper, and forests grow at unusual angles. Colors are more vibrant, flavors more potent; everything is amplified to oversaturated extremes, the cause of which is the Fey World’s proximity to the Positive Energy Plane. Much as the Shadow Plane is a realm of muted colors and near darkness due to its proximity to the Negative Energy Plane, so too is the Fey World skewed in the opposite direction.

The flora and fauna of the Fey World both resembles that of the Material Plane and exceeds it. What entities resided on the Fey World in its fledgling moments remains unknown, but ancient dragons and other primal forces of nature are likely candidates. Since then, all manner of wildly alien and unimaginable creatures have come to call the Fey World home, themselves exaggerated in much the same way as the plane’s geography. Creatures are more vivacious, more energetic, and more fecund. The most widespread of the Fey World’s denizens are creatures of the fey type, making up more than half of the Fey World’s populace, but they are neither the first denizens of the plane nor the most powerful. Any creature found on the Material Plane could conceivably be found in the Fey World, different from their mortal cousins in subtle or dramatic ways. The easiest way to represent the differences between a Material Plane creature and its Fey World counterpart is to apply the fey creature template. But even something as simple as changing a creature’s appearance or abilities can transform a mundane specimen into a denizen of the Fey World.

Between the suffusion of positive energy throughout the Fey World and the unique qualities drafted into its planar tapestry, the cycle of life and death is not linear as it is on the Material Plane. Creatures native to the Fey World that die either are outright reborn anywhere from a day to a year after their death or are otherwise recycled into the plane and reconstituted as another member of their kind. Some creatures even lead asynchronous lives, having memories of versions of themselves that have not come to pass (or may never) rather than just memories of their pasts. As such, natives of the Fey World do not always understand the concept of death; this can lead to deadly misunderstandings with travelers from the Material Plane or natives of the Fey World stranded on the Material Plane. In the latter case, the death of a Fey World native on the Material Plane is the absolute end of its life, and the soul is instead subject to the rules of the Material Plane—often without realizing it until it is too late.

Notable inhabitants of the Fey World include creatures of the animal, fey, plant, and vermin types. of the fey, the most legendary of the Fey World denizens are the members of the wild hunt, but all fey have ties back to this realm. Beyond animals, fey, and plants, the following creatures are among those most often encountered in this dimension: almirajes, animal lords, bandersnatches, blink dogs, catoblepases, cerynitis, delgeths, drakainias, drakes (all), elementals (all), elohims, ettercaps, fachens, faerie dragons, fey creatures, giant eagles, grodairs, grootslangs, jabberwocks, jubjub birds, leucrottas, linnorms, manitous, pegasi, sards, shining children, thrasfyrs, thunderbirds, unicorns, vishaps, wendigos, will-o’-wisps, worgs, winter wolves, and yeth hounds. Undead are incredibly rare in the Fey World, but those that do exist there tend to be powerful and unique.

The Eldest

Large swaths of the Fey World are carved up into fiefdoms and other such dominions by native inhabitants of great power. The demigods who call the Fey World home are some of the oldest beings in creation, and many have resided on this plane since before the Material Plane was woven into existence. Known collectively as the Eldest, they are as reclusive and secretive as they are ancient. The Eldest have relatively little interaction with the gods who dwell elsewhere in the Great Beyond, but like those divinities, they maintain cults and sects on countless Material Plane worlds. The religions of the Eldest are most commonly found in regions where the boundaries between the Material Plane and the Fey World grow thin. Fey often worship members of the Eldest, and many gnomes look back to their ancient roots in the Fey World and venerate the Eldest as well. Though the Eldest have nothing against cities or civilization, their worship tends to be less popular in heavily populated areas. Barbarians, druids, hunters, and others who live in the wild often venerate a member of the Eldest or the pantheon as a whole.

Table 4–3: The Eldest lists the most widely worshiped members of the Eldest, along with their areas of concern, domains, subdomains, and favored weapon for cleric and warpriest followers.

Getting to the Fey World

The Fey World is a coterminous plane and therefore overlaps the Material Plane, but unlike the Shadow Plane, the Fey World does not mimic the Material Plane’s geography. Ley lines, supernatural conduits that connect the planes and channel experiences, magic, memories, and the souls of the dead and the unborn through them, crisscross the Fey World just as they do the Material Plane. Unlike those on the Material Plane, ley lines found in the Fey World do not stay in one place for long and typically wander vast distances, writhing through the world like disquieted snakes. Where these ley lines penetrate the barrier between the Fey World and the Material Plane, thin spots known as breaches form, allowing passage between the Fey World and the Material Plane without the aid of magic. These breaches typically manifest as circles of mushrooms, puddles of water with a rainbow-hued surface, trees in a peculiar arch, or other seemingly innocuous patterns. Simply stepping through one of these portals is often enough to travel from one plane to the other, but breaches are not always two-sided. Some doorways to the Material Plane are one-way, stranding extraplanar travelers in a seemingly dull and lifeless world, while Material visitors to the Fey World could be stranded for decades or more as they try to find a way back home. Other means of traveling to and from the Fey World include powerful spells such as fey gate, gate, and plane shift.

Echoes of the Fey World

The Fey World shares its place in existence with the Material Plane, and in some places, the boundary between the planes wears thin. The Material Plane’s influence on the Fey World manifests as regions of stubborn stability called “breach scars,” which the Fey World’s denizens regard with disgust. On the Material Plane, the fey realm’s influence erodes the laws of time and space and transforms reality in its wake. Sometimes, this influence manifests as an echo of the Fey World.

An echo of the Fey World functions (and is designed) as a haunt, but unlike haunts, they are damaged by negative energy and healed by positive energy. These echoes can be any alignment, but they are almost always chaotic neutral. Three sample echoes are detailed, but countless others certainly exist.

Overcharge: Positive energy and healing effects heal echoes of the Fey World. If such healing would cause an echo of the Fey World to exceed its normal maximum hit points, it gains half the excess as temporary hit points until those hit points are spent or 1 minute has passed since it last gained temporary hit points in this manner. As long as an echo of the Fey World has at least 1 temporary hit point gained in this way, it also gains its overcharge ability, which is listed in each of the following stat blocks.

Magic in the Fey World

Magic on the Fey World is mutable, confusing, and selfcontradictory. Throughout most of the plane, the effects of spellcasting are unstable and can result in unexpectedly powerful or weak effects, but in certain regions of the realm wild magic holds sway—treat these regions as if the plane had the wild magic trait.

For the rest of the Fey World, when a non-native spellcaster casts a spell, she must succeed at a caster level check (DC = 20 + the spell’s level; druids, hunters, rangers, and worshipers of the Eldest gain a +5 bonus on this check) for her spell to function normally. Failure means that the spellcaster rolls on Table 3–3: Fey World Magic to determine how the Fey World’s energies enhance or decrease the effects of the spell as it is cast. Any spellcaster can voluntarily fail this caster level check to automatically roll on the table to determine the spell’s effect. If the randomly generated enhancement or impediment cannot be applied to the spell being cast (for example, a result of increased damage when casting haste, or a result of an adjusted duration for an instantaneous or permanent spell), then the spell is cast normally.

Table 3–3: Fey World Magic
d% Effect
1–7 Damage increases by 50%
8–14 Damage decreases by 50%
15–21 Area of effect increases by 50%
22–28 Area of effect decreases by 50%
29–35 Duration increases by 50%
36–42 Duration decreases by 50%
43–49 Spell affects caster instead of target
50–56 Spell affects caster and target
57–63 Spell affects one additional eligible target (chosen randomly)
64–70 Spell is affected by all of the following metamagic feats that could apply, with no increase to the spell’s effective level: Enlarge Spell, Extend Spell, Maximize Spell, Widen Spell
71–77 Summon an uncontrolled creature as per a summon nature’s ally of same spell level
78–100 Spell effect resolves normally

Shaping

The ability to bend the fabric of the Fey World to one’s whim is an outgrowth of the plane’s fundamental mutability and inconsistency, and thus the practice is difficult to codify into a single system of rules. Even on the Fey World, shaping is an ability learned through trial and error rather than taught—an expression of personality and sheer will— and no two entities go about the process in exactly the same way. The following notes give some general guidelines on how to incorporate shaping into your game.

Shaping is not a simple matter, and an attempt to alter the morphic nature of the Fey World requires 1 minute of concentration by a character who is not fatigued or exhausted. This action provokes attacks of opportunity.

At the end of this minute, the character must succeed at a Charisma check (DC = 20 + 4 per previous shaping attempt made in the last 24 hours). On a failed check, the character’s ability to shape the Fey World is exhausted for 24 hours. If the character fails the check by 10 or more, she also becomes fatigued. Druids, hunters, rangers, fey, worshipers of one of the Eldest, and natives of the Fey World all gain a +4 bonus on Charisma checks to shape.

On a successful Charisma check, the character can alter the Fey World by using a spell-like ability determined by the shaper’s Hit Dice, as shown on Table 3–4. The shaper must begin using the spell-like ability on the round immediately after spending the minute of concentration required to shape in the first place, or the opportunity to shape is wasted. The spell-like ability resolves at a caster level equal to the character’s Hit Dice or character level, whichever is higher. At the GM’s option, similar spells of equal spell level can be allowed.

Table 3–4: Sample Shaping Effects
Shaper’s HD Spell-Like Effect Generated
1–2 Prestidigitation
3–4 Soften earth and stone or wood shape
5–6 Spike growth or wind wall
7–8 Spike stones, wall of fire, or wall of ice
9–10 Fabricate, wall of stone, or wall of thorns
11–12 Control water, move earth, or wall of iron
13–14 Lesser create demiplane, † or reverse gravity
15–16 Create demiplane†, or polymorph any object
17–18 Greater create demiplane
19 or more Wish

Demiplanes created via shaping are treated as extradimensional spaces contained wholly within the Fey World.

Table 3–2: Fey World Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–5 1 fey creature 3
6–8 1 dryad 3
9–11 2d6 tooth fairies 3
12–14 1 grodair 5
15–17 1d6 liminal sprites 5
18–20 1d6 quicklings 6
21–25 2d6 brownies 6
26–28 2d6 grigs 6
29–31 1d8 leprechauns 6
32–34 2d6 atomies 6
35–39 2d6 fauns 6
40 1d8 pookas 6
41–45 1d6 satyrs 7
46–48 1 nymph 7
49–51 1d6 huldras 7
52–54 1d6 korreds 7
55–57 1d8 twigjacks 7
58 1d8 lurkers in light 9
59–60 2d4 pixies 9
61–62 1 leanan sidhe 9
63–64 1d10 redcaps 11
65–66 1d6 boggles 11
67–69 1 ankou 14
70–71 1 crag linnorm 14
72 1 jubjub bird 15
73–77 1 hamadryad 15
78–80 1d6 banelights 15
81 1 zomok 16
82 1 bandersnatch 17
83 1 thrasfyr 17
84–86 1 tunche 17
87 1 erlking 18
88–89 1d4 vilderavns 18
90 1 sard 19
91 1 seilenos 19
92 1 vishap 19
93 1 tarn linnorm 20
94 1d3 norns 20
95 1 whisperer 20
96 1 julunggali 21
97 1 glaistig 21
98 Wild hunt 21
99 1 elohim 23
100 1 jabberwock 23

Heaven (Outer Plane (lawful good)

The soaring mountain of Heaven towers high above the Outer Sphere. This ordered realm of honor and compassion is divided into seven layers. Heaven‘s slopes are filled with planned, orderly cities and tidy, cultivated gardens and orchards. Though they began their existences as mortals, Heaven‘s native archons see law and good as indivisible halves of the same exalted concept, and array themselves against the cosmic perversions of chaos and evil.

Heaven is a realm of pure righteousness, where the forces of good gather to aid those on less virtuous planes and help worthy souls find rest.

Though inconceivably large, most viewers perceive the plane as a mountain with a mysteriously floating peak.

Heaven is as much a realm of law as it is one of goodness, and visitors unversed in its regulations may find themselves detained by its guardians. The archons who protect it are compassionate, but they also view any who have not earned their place within Heaven’s borders as lacking sufficient moral grounding to be trusted to wander freely. A visitor invited by a specific deity or other heavenly power might be welcomed and escorted to the proper realm, but told not to venture outside it. Other guests are often confined to Heaven’s Shore—sometimes called “Heathen Shore” by its residents—a city built to allow celestial beings to trade and consult with creatures from other planes without endangering all of Heaven.

Heaven’s residents see law and goodness as largely the same force. Order is the greatest good, and goodness is the greatest order. They recognize the good intentions of the azatas of Elysium, but view them as misguided children.

Similarly, they oppose the lawful evil forces of Hell, but credit them with intelligence and believe that they can at least be reasoned into truces and stalemates—and, perhaps, even redeemed—while chaotic and neutral evil forces must simply be eliminated or neutralized.

Heaven appears to most mortals and recently settled petitioners to be a great mountain. While mortal minds may conceptualize Heaven as a geographic region with familiar hallmarks like trees and buildings, it does not obey the same physical laws as the Material Plane (see the Planar Traits sidebar). Mortals from vastly different worlds may even perceive the same location differently based on the environment in which they lived on the Material Plane.

Distances between areas are based as much on their philosophical affinity as they are on actual locations, and two locations may, paradoxically, be both extremely close and far away from one another at the same time.

The mountain slopes slant downward, yet also host flat plains that seem to go on forever. One glance might reveal a stately city on the other side of a shining lake, while the next shows a lush forest.

From its base, Heaven rises in seven tiers. While each tier technically exists above or below another, higher tiers do not represent greater authority within Heaven’s hierarchy.

Rather, each tier houses souls that fit its particular theme and carries out prescribed functions to ensure Heaven’s continued operations. A number of locations exist within the mountain or are otherwise not considered part of any layer. Six of the levels are governed by one or more powerful entities called stewards—leaders who do not rule in the traditional sense, but rather help organize and serve as the official authority for matters concerning their respective levels. Over time, different beings cycle in and out of terms of service as their tiers’ stewards—while an archon acting as steward might be weaker than some of Heaven’s other residents, even the gods recognize the role of government in lawful society, and thus grant the office proper deference. Though the governors are collectively called stewards, each has a unique honorific related to her tier’s focus (such as High Preceptor or Chief Moderator).

TRAITS

Heaven has the following planar traits:

  • Essence mixed
  • Gravity normal
  • Realm immeasurable
  • Structural lasting
  • Time normal
  • Divinely Morphic: Deities with divine realms in Heaven can alter the plane at will.
  • Alignment Strongly Good– and Law-Aligned: Heaven is home to forces of good, and a –2 circumstance penalty applies to all Intelligence-, Wisdom-, and Charisma-based checks made by creatures that are not good-aligned while such creatures are in Heaven. These penalties stack with those inflicted by the plane’s strong lawful alignment. Heaven is a place of law, and a –2 circumstance penalty applies to all Intelligence-, Wisdom-, and Charisma-based checks made by creatures that are not lawful while such creatures are in Heaven. These penalties stack with those inflicted by the plane’s strong good alignment.
  • Enhanced Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities with the lawful good descriptor are enhanced, because they are in sync with Heaven’s nature. These spells function as if the caster level was 2 higher than normal.
  • Impeded Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities with the chaotic or evil descriptor are more difficult to cast because Heaven’s nature interferes with such spells. To cast a spell with the chaotic or evil descriptor, the caster must make a concentration check (DC = 20 + the level of the spell). If the check fails, the spell does not function but is still lost as a prepared spell or spell slot. If the check succeeds, the spell functions normally.

DIVINITIES

Unlike Hell or Purgatory, Heaven is not ruled by a single deific monarch. Instead, a variety of powerful divinities collectively govern Heaven through careful cooperation and service to the greater good. While the deities are sovereign within their own realms and may take actions on other planes as they see fit, within Heaven all are expected to comply with the realm’s holy, meritocratic government, allowing even the lowliest lantern archon to call a deity to account. of course, not all of Heaven’s divinities play significant roles today.

Gods, empyreal lords, lawful angels, and other powerful good-aligned outsiders often maintain homes or even entire realms on Heaven’s slopes or inside the mountain. Each deity’s realm is sovereign, and may bear no resemblance to or continuity with the areas around it.

Empyreal Lords Operating just beneath the primary deities are the lawful good empyreal lords—agathions, angels, archons, or azatas who have achieved the spark of divinity necessary to become demigods. Encompassing dozens of individuals, this pantheon is responsible for much of the day-to-day leadership of Heaven, with each lord having a particular area of concern.

Dwarven pantheon, empyreal lords

DENIZENS

Heaven is home to a wide variety of good-aligned outsiders.

As with all the planes, Heaven’s residents may come from any number of worlds and realms of existence, though most fall into three distinct categories.

Heaven’s most numerous native creatures are the archons, lawful good outsiders who serve as soldiers and administrators for the plane. Some archons are ascended petitioners, while others are generated spontaneously by the plane in the Garden. Numerous angels also reach their angelic status here, or are formed by the raw energy of the plane, and lawfully aligned celestial creatures roam Heaven’s landscapes.

Agathions, azatas, and other emissaries from Heaven’s sister realms of Elysium and Nirvana are generally welcome to study, trade, or aid in Heaven’s war efforts, provided they acknowledge Heaven’s authority and follow its rules.

Couatls, peris, zuishin kami, and other native outsiders can often be found here as well, accepting divine missions to carry out on the Material Plane, but celestial blood alone is not enough to get someone through Heaven’s gates. All mortals (including aasimars) are generally prohibited except on official business.

Huge tracts of picturesque wilderness on Heaven’s slopes hold a tremendous variety of celestial animals, all living in peace without the need to hunt one another.

Angels Less common than archons but still a vital part of Heaven’s society are the angels, celestials with a more flexible attitude toward law and order than their archon kin. Often serving alongside archons but generally operating independently, angels help raise important questions and prevent the ossification that can accompany too much deference to authority. Together with the archons, they ensure that Heaven’s society continually grows and changes, adapting to be the best possible version of itself.

Archons Heaven’s guardians and primary decision makers are the archons, beings of perfect lawful goodness. Archons understand that organization is key to preventing the forces of evil and chaos from taking over and that individual desires are less important than serving the greater good when the state of the entire multiverse is at stake. They are crusaders first and foremost, fighting in or supporting Heaven’s armies as they defend the innocent and punish the wicked. While their detractors sometimes paint them as authoritarian zealots, archons in truth are generally compassionate toward those of good intent and tolerate even those less righteous creatures who obey the law, saving their fiery blades for fiends and other irredeemable entities that recognize neither law nor righteousness. Within Heaven, their focus is often on teaching and training petitioners, yet their commitment to serving their cause doesn’t stop them from laughing often and taking joy in their friends and work.

Outsiders archons, angels

Petitioners elect (similar to mortal forms, with glowing halos and feathered wings). Souls assigned to Heaven after their sojourn in Purgatory arrive at the mountain’s base, where they wait in orderly lines for admission and registration. Once admitted into Heaven, petitioners may travel freely throughout the plane, usually settling on the heavenly tier that most fits their nature.

Qualities fly speed equal to base speed (average)

INFUSIONS

Basic Your acceptance of Heaven has fortified your physical endurance and bolsters your presence. You gain a +1 bonus on Fortitude saves, a +2 bonus on Diplomacy checks against good creatures, and a +2 bonus on Intimidate checks against evil creatures.

Improved You can call down Heaven’s divine fury as a standard action, channeling it through your own body and expelling it all around you. Once per day, you can release this divine energy in a 30-foot-radius burst centered on you. Each evil creature within the area takes 1d8 points of damage per character level you have (maximum 10d8) and is blinded for a number of rounds equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1 round). On a successful Will save, an affected creature takes only half damage and negates the blindness.

Greater You can keep Heaven’s champions from being called home before their work is complete. Twice per day, you can use breath of life as a spell-like ability. If the target is lawful good, you can use this ability as a move action. If the target is evil, it becomes staggered for 10 minutes unless it vows to repent for its evil ways.

Heaven is a realm of perfect goodness and exquisite order, and its residents see the two as inextricably linked— righteousness requires structure, but structure is pointless without a just and noble goal. It is a realm of crusaders striving to help others, by word or by sword, as well as those of pure heart who simply seek to follow the rules and foster harmony through love and service.

Most creatures perceive Heaven as an enormous mountain with an inaccessibly distant peak, yet this description is deceptively simple, as the mountain’s slopes can simultaneously contain seemingly endless plains, vast lakes, yawning canyons, or whatever else it might need to accommodate petitioners from millions of different environments. Distances shift depending on the needs of the traveler, and even the same specific locations can be perceived differently according to the conceptual frameworks of the viewer.

Regardless of its appearance, Heaven always consists of seven tiers, each immeasurably vast in its own right and organized by metaphysical purpose and philosophy rather than by any sort of relative value. All but the topmost tier are overseen by powerful entities called stewards, each with a title specific to the role they fill. While these entities are never the most powerful on their tier, such is Heaven’s regard for proper governance that even deities acknowledge the rights and responsibilities of these officials. A list of Heaven’s seven tiers appears in the Heaven’s Tiers sidebar.

Table: Heaven Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–10 1d6 lantern archons 5
11–13 1d6 cassisians 5
14–23 2d6 elect petitioners 6
24–28 1d6 hound archons 7
29–38 2d6 harbinger archons 8
39–41 1 balisse 8
42–44 1d8 chorals 10
45–46 1d6 argent wardens 11
47–49 1d4 couatls 12
50–60 2d6 legion archons 12
61 1 young paradise dragon 12
62–63 1d6 movanic devas 13
64–65 1d6 zuishin 12
66–70 1d6 shield archons 13
71–72 1 peri 14
73–74 1d6 monadic devas 15
75–78 1d6 exscinders 15
79–80 1 planetar 16
81 1 adult paradise dragon 16
82–89 1d6 trumpet archons 17
90–92 1d6 astral devas 17
93–94 1 gate archon 17
95–96 1 star archon 19
97 1 bastion archon 20
98 1 empyrean 20
99 1 ancient paradise dragon 21
100 1 solar 23
Exploration

Heaven has a standard day-night cycle of 12 hours each, with the sun, moon, and stars manifesting overhead in ways that are comforting and familiar to the viewer. Travelers from different worlds see different celestial bodies above, but in speaking with each other, they are able to interact in ways that both parties find meaningful. Likewise, navigation on Heaven functions in a familiar way to travelers from a Material Plane, “north” is toward Heaven’s unattainable peak. As a result, of all the Outer Planes, Heaven is the least jarring to visit in these regards, as would make sense for a place known as Paradise.

Hell (Lawful Evil)

The nine layers of Hell form a structured labyrinth of calculated evil where torment goes hand in hand with purification. A plane of iron cities, burning wastelands, frozen glaciers, and endless volcanic peaks, Hell is divided into nine nesting layers, each under the malevolent rule of an archdevil. Torture, anguish, and agony are inevitable in Hell, but they are methodical, not spiteful or capricious, and serve a deliberate master plan under the watchful eyes of the disciplined ranks of Hells’ lesser devils. The nine layers of Hell, from first to last, are Avernus, Dis, Erebus, Phlegethon, Stygia, Malebolge, Cocytus, Caina, and Nessus.

TRAITS

Hell has the following planar traits:

Hell (Outer Plane (lawful evil))

Hell is formed of nine layers, each tailored to the whim of its ruling archdevil, where the souls of evil mortals and victims of the devils’ machinations endure unending torments.

Hell is famed throughout the Great Beyond for its innumerable dangers and torments. The skies above range from gloomy and depressing on the best of days to burning red with ash and fire, or, in realms like Erebus, entirely absent. The exact nature of the clouds and illumination varies from each layer of Hell to the next, but there is never anything comforting or soothing in the view.

Long depicted in art as an immense pit, Hell consists of nine distinct layers connected by a network of portals and gateways. Progression from one layer to the next must typically be accomplished sequentially, with the deeper layers growing ever more remote from goodness and hope.

TRAITS

Gravity normal

Time normal

Realm immeasurable

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment strongly law-aligned, strongly evil-aligned

Magic enhanced (spells and spell-like abilities with the lawful or evil descriptor) or impeded (spells and spell-like abilities with the chaotic good descriptor)

DENIZENS

The denizens of Hell are many, ranging from the legions of the damned to the plane’s powerful and deific rulers.

Asuras The outsiders known as asuras are the result of divine accidents—hateful reminders that even divinities are fallible. Unlike most other outsider races, asuras exist in a cycle of reincarnation, wherein a slain asura returns in a lesser form rather than simply ceasing to exist. On rare occasion, when a slain asura had excelled in its role, it instead comes back in a more powerful form.

Devils The most numerous of Hell’s inhabitants are devils— beings of absolute order and obedience who know nothing of compassion, free will, or morality. Functioning in a rigid caste system and always striving to excel in their roles for a chance at promotion to a more valued position in Hell’s infernal bureaucracy, devils seek to influence mortals into consigning their souls to eternal damnation in the afterlife, for it is upon the backs of the damned that Hell runs.

Kytons Relatively few kytons remain in Hell today, although at one point long ago, they dwelled in this realm in tremendous numbers. Today, the majority of their kind reside on the Shadow Plane, and most of those who remain in Hell are evangelist kytons (the most common type).

DIVINITIES

Asura ranas, archdevils, infernal dukes, malebranche, queens of the night. Asmodeus and his eight archdevils are far and above the most iconic of Hell’s divinities, yet other powers reside in the Pit as well. Inarguably the most powerful is Hell’s ruler, Asmodeus. He allows other divinities their own realms in Hell and does not interfere in their actions. Likewise, these other deities and demigods respect Asmodeus’s place as the ruler of Hell, for the Pit is nothing if not a place of law.

Asmodeus The Prince of Darkness maintains a powerful presence on countless Material Plane worlds, yet he never seems to lose track of his machinations there or in Hell itself. A master of manipulation, Asmodeus has ruled Hell for untold eons, yet the Pit was not always his domain. The exact details of what led to his arrival and what he was before he became what he is today vary wildly and exist only in the realm of myth and legend, but if there’s one thing these stories agree upon, it is that he is among the oldest deities in existence.

Asura Ranas As certain asuras complete enough cycles of reincarnation and build upon their atrocities over multiple lives of devotion to cruelty, they are in time incarnated into the most powerful of their kind: demigods known as ranas. The asura ranas keep mostly to themselves and do not interfere or assist in the schemes of any layer’s archdevil.

Archdevils Only eight archdevils exist at any one time, each of whom has been granted sovereignty over one of the first eight layers of Hell by Asmodeus himself. While most archdevils are ancient beings who have ruled nearly as long as Asmodeus has been the Prince of Darkness, others are relative newcomers to the Pit. The sidebar lists the layers of Hell and the archdevil that rules each of them.

Infernal Demigods Below the archdevils who rule much of Hell lie three additional ranks of infernal demigods. The first are the queens of the night consist of four powerful demigods who have achieved the near impossible—establishing their own realms and power in a plane dominated by misogyny. Secondly, the infernal dukes are an elite caste of devilkind from whom the next archdevil may someday rise; one of the most prominent of the dukes is a scheming duke who may well be the best (and most notorious) of Hell’s record keepers. The least of these three ranks are the malebranche, quasi-deities who have each been charged with conquering a specific Material Plane world in Hell’s name.

Outsiders achaierais, asuras, cerberi, devils, hellcats, hell hounds, kytons, wisagatcaks

Petitioners the damned (tormented figures with countless scars). Petitioners themselves are only rarely able to make a transition into an asura form at all. This has limited the growth of asuras in Hell, and while their numbers are still vast, they are minuscule compared to those of devilkind. The petitioners of Hell are known as the damned, and they are legion. The damned manifest in Hell in forms that evoke those they held in life, yet in a starved, colorless state. It is rare to encounter the damned outside of some form of eternal torment, but now and then devils have been known to take them in, almost like pets. Whether or not the torments these “pets” receive at their masters’ hands are less than what they would have otherwise endured is open to debate. Whatever their position, the damned all bear the scars of their abuses as they are torturously molded for all eternity into the building blocks of Hell itself.

Qualities immunity to fire (but not to the pain of burning)

INFUSIONS

Basic Hell’s influence grants you a silvered tongue and bolsters your arrogance. You gain a +1 bonus on Will saves, a +2 bonus on Bluff checks to lie to or fool someone, and a +2 bonus on Diplomacy checks to adjust a creature’s attitude.

Improved Whenever you deal fire damage, you can instead deal hellfire damage (see below). Secondary fires lit by your initial fire attack deal normal fire damage (including burn damage, if such damage occurs).

Greater You can inflict the agonizing pain of eternal damnation on the masses for a brief instant. You can use mass inflict pain once per day as a spell-like ability.

Hell is not the oldest plane of the Great Beyond, yet it may well be the most notorious, for here Asmodeus and his legions of devils have worked since the dawn of mortality to tempt, corrupt, and lure those who have the gift (or curse) of free will into eternal damnation.

Table: Hell Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–10 2d6 damned petitioners 6
11–20 3d6 lemures 7
21–23 1d12 accuser devils 8
24–25 2d6 tripurasuras 8
26–30 2d6 imps 8
31–35 1d12 hell hounds 8
36–37 1d8 achaierais 9
38–40 1d6 host devils 9
41–43 1d6 kytons 9
44–48 1d10 bearded devils 10
49–51 1d3 erinyes 10
52–53 1d8 hellcats 11
54 1 dorvae 11
55–56 1d6 hellwasp swarms 11
57–58 1d10 cerberi 11
59 1 mythic bone devil 11
60 1 young infernal dragon 12
61–62 1d12 adhukaits 12
63–64 1d6 upasundas 12
65–66 1d6 Nessian hell hounds 12
67–68 1d10 drowning devils 13
69–72 2d6 warmonger devils 13
73 1d6 contract devils 13
74–75 1d6 barbed devils 14
76–77 1d10 bone devils 14
78–79 1d8 executioner devils 15
80 1d8 aghasuras 15
81 1 belier devil 16
82–83 1d4 handmaiden devils 16
84 1d8 heresy devils 16
85 1 mythic ice devil 16
86 1 adult infernal dragon 16
87 1d6 nikaramsas 17
88 1 apostate devil 17
89–90 1d8 ice devils 17
91 1d4 nemesis devils 20
92–94 1d8 horned devils 20
95 1 ancient infernal dragon 21
96–97 1d6 immolation devils 22
98 1d2 asurendras 22
99–100 1d6 pit fiends 23

Infernus

Source 3pp:ToHC

Cast out of Hell, Lucifer sought revenge against his persecutors. But revenge required power, and he was tired, injured, and weakened from the time spent battling in Hell. He needed a place to rest, a place to grow in power, and a place to plan. Thus he created Infernus, a plane of eternal and everlasting fire and suffering: one plane, one ruler; created by his own hands, his own blood, and a portion of his very essence. Lucifer is said to be one with the plane. As the gods of law are to the planes of good, so is Lucifer to Infernus. Nothing goes unnoticed by him on Infernus. All movements are seen, all whispers are heard. A plan is not hatched or contrived in this place without Lucifer’s knowledge. When people speak of Infernus, they speak of Lucifer and vice versa. No creature, it is thought, stands a chance against Lucifer on Infernus, not even the archdevils that stood against him a millennia ago.

Infernus is a plane wrought of blood and fire. The entire plane is hot (though not as hot as the Elemental Planes of Fire) and the horizon, landscape, and glow with an orange light. Outposts dot the landscape, though no permanent settlements are likely to be found. These outposts are maintained by the devils that still serve Lucifer. There is one permanent settlement known to exist on this plane, the palace of Lucifer. This large, black, basalt palace stretches for miles (or so it appears). At various points large towers rise and disappear into the orange-glowed sky.

TRAITS

Infernus has the following planar traits:

Limbo (Outer Plane (chaotic neutral))

When viewed from the edge of another plane, the Maelstrom’s (also known as Limbo) features appear much like that of its adjacent neighbor. The differences grow more profound farther away from the stabilizing anchor of the borderlands, eventually falling back into the mutable freedom of perpetual change in a vast churning sea of possibility called the Cerulean Void. The Maelstrom defies the efforts of mapmakers, as its very character shifts and f lows like the tide of an unseen ocean, to which the borderlands are but shores and calm shallows. Crystalline forests melt like candle wax into shallow brine seas with jewel-like icebergs, and then sublimate to vast parched deserts, all within the stretch of days. Still, islands of stability do exist within the depths of the Maelstrom. Petty gods, exiled fiends, and fallen celestials rule such islands, and even the rare stronghold of a mortal wizard or priest-king can be found here, holding itself against the metaphysical lapping tide. Creatures wandering in from the structured planes, long since grown native, populate the Maelstrom’s borderlands, often possessing characteristics and behaviors at odds with their origins. Deeper still, the mysterious serpentine proteans thrive within an environment of plastic potentiality. Claiming to be the first children of the Outer Planes, the proteans worship alien, godlike beings they refer to as the Speakers of the Depths, whom scholars speculate to be something akin to a pair of conjoined gods or a single dualistic entity.

Limbo is a realm of boundless chaos, a churning void of land, sea, and everything else that can or could exist between, bordering all of the Outer Planes even as it seeks to devour them.

Limbo is almost impossible to map, and no reliable directional constant like “north” exists on this plane. Even relatively stable terrain moves and changes, and so the DCs of Survival checks to track a creature increase by 5 in the Borderlands and 10 in the Cerulean Void, on addition to any modifiers present due to current conditions.

The day-night cycle in Limbo is random, shifting without apparent reason and following a nonsensical clock that none can predict.

Gravity in Limbo

On the countless islands adrift on the sea or air currents of Limbo, gravity functions normally, with “down” being toward the center of mass. Likewise, on and below the surface of Limbo’s churning liquid Cerulean Void, gravity functions normally, with “down” being further from the surface into the sea of quintessence. The gravitational pull of the Cerulean Void generally extends to a distance of 200 feet above the surface (as such, it is rare for floating islands of solid matter to exist within 200 feet of the void), while the gravitational pull of a floating island extends to a range equal to its radius or 200 feet, whichever is a smaller distance.

TRAITS

Limbo has the following planar traits:

  • Gravity subjective directional or normal (see “Gravity in Limbo”)
  • Time erratic
  • Realm immeasurable
  • Structural morphic
  • Essence mixed
  • Alignment strongly chaos-aligned
  • Magic wild (with pockets of normal magic on the most stable of Limbo’s islands)

DIVINITIES

Few deities argue the point that Limbo was already old when they first came into being, and those who argue otherwise do so only out of pique. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—Limbo is home today to perhaps the most diverse collection of divinities in the Outer Planes.

Orc Pantheon Largely consumed with their own infighting and politics, the gods of the orcs dwell within an immense, battlescarred realm. Far more orc demigods clash and bicker here, yet those demigods are certainly among the strongest of the pantheon.

Protean Lords The protean lords act as intermediaries between the mysterious Speakers of the Depths (see below) and the protean choruses. Most prominent among the protean lords, who takes the form of a massive albino keketar.

Speakers of the Depths The most prominent and mysterious of Limbo’s gods, the proteans’ dualistic divinity have no discrete domain, with the entirety of the plane itself being under their sway. Some planar scholars consider the Speakers to be a manifestation of Limbo as a living entity, albeit a profoundly alien one, both more and less than other gods.

Outsiders chaos beasts, einherjar, hunduns, proteans, valkyries

Petitioners shapeless (shifting incarnations of mortal forms)

Qualities incorporeal, gains incorporeal touch attack

INFUSIONS

Basic Limbo grants you the ability to react to unpredictable situations, while also helping you to be more unpredictable. You gain a +1 bonus on initiative checks, a +1 bonus on Reflex saves, and a +2 bonus on Bluff checks to feint in combat.

Improved The whimsical entropy of Limbo runs through your veins. Once per day, you can use confusion as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can invoke the pure chaos of Limbo with a word. Once per day, you can use word of chaos as a spell-like ability.

The Outer Planes are surrounded by Limbo, a vast, volatile, roiling thing that churns at the heart of reality.

Conventional wisdom holds that Limbo is the source of all reality, that portions of its liquid quintessence coalesced into the Outer Planes, and that it now erodes reality and recycles this quintessence back into the Positive Energy Plane. Doomsayers and pessimists suggest that this process isn’t entirely efficient, and that each time a bit of potentiality is lost so that, in time, the ravenous grinding will consume all of reality.

While some believe that Limbo was the original (and only) plane of existence, enough evidence exists to suggest that the shell of the Outer Sphere, riddled with the fractures known as the Abyss, existed even before the primal chaos of possibility. Although some of the best clues to this mystery are found written in the protean language, the fact that the protean language muddles the definition between creation and destruction means that the truth of which came first may never be known.

DENIZENS

Limbo serves as a planar crossroads, for its shores eventually touch all other Outer Planes. The plane itself has numerous native occupants, including living manifestations of entropy like chaos beasts, risen champions of battle like the einherjar and valkyries, and the most infamous of its denizens, the primeval and serpentine proteans. Yet visitors are just as likely to encounter something foreign to the plane, for Limbo is rife with wandering monsters and travelers from other realms, self-exiled fallen celestials and risen fiends, things lost and abandoned, demons spilling forth from great Abyssal rifts, and the armies of gods marching to war.

Einherjar and Valkyries Einherjar congregate in Limbo as much for its chaos as they do for the opportunity for conflict that it provides. Manifestations of fallen champions who perished in righteous religious wars, they either fight on their own or serve various gods and pantheons throughout Limbo’s worlds. Each einherji is selected for its role in the afterlife by valkyries, who are themselves formed from petitioners risen from the souls of the greatest of soldiers. Both types of outsider are often found in the Cerulean Void, aboard ships or island realms, wherever the call of battle and conflict rages.

Proteans The serpentine proteans are living extensions of Limbo that act both subtly and overtly against incursions of other alignments. Proteans organize loosely into groups known as choruses, each with a philosophical obsession set by its keketar priest-kings, though chorus allegiance is wildly transient and their goals are often fluid. The choruses routinely assault the other planes’ borders en masse, acting almost like the manifestation of an immune system against an infection of unwanted ethics and philosophies. When at rest, proteans prefer to dwell in the deepest reaches of the Cerulean Void itself.

The Shapeless Limbo’s petitioners appear as they did in life, but incorporeal and constantly shifting in shape and color, like the sheen of oil on water reflecting an image. Most of them wander, indulging their whimsy in Limbo’s wilds, often aided by protean choruses. Unlike many petitioners who go unclaimed by a deity, the shapeless are never conscripted or transformed unless they specifically petition one of the choruses. The proteans themselves predate the emergence of mortal souls, and while they can and do accept willing souls to join their ranks, the process is less common than on other planes. As a result, it is relatively rare for one of the shapeless to ascend into a protean; most who are not chosen by valkyries for ascension into einherjar are destined to become chaos beasts.

Table: Limbo Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–10 2d6 shapeless petitioners 6
11–15 2d6 voidworms 7
16–20 1d6 ourdivars 7
21–25 1d6 azuretzis 8
26–33 1d6 chaos beasts 10
34–38 1d6 pelagastrs 11
39–43 2d6 naunets 13
44–48 1d10 imenteshes 15
49–68 2d6 einherjar 15
69–78 1d8 valkyries 16
79–83 1d8 oshageroses 17
84–86 1d6 hegessiks 18
87–88 1d4 keketars 19
89 1 izfiitar 20
90 1 hundun 21
91–95 Roll on Abyss table Varies
96–100 Roll on Elysium table Varies

Material Plane

Source PRG:OA

The Material Plane is the center of most cosmologies and defines what is considered normal. It is the plane most campaign worlds occupy.

The Material Plane is the realm of physical sensation and incarnate existence. Souls manifest here in the shell of a physical body, a union so complete that most living creatures do not spend much time contemplating the difference between the gross physical form and the higher monadic soul that guides its movements and destiny. The final destination of a soul is not yet determined during its mortal life, making the Material Plane a magnet for the attentions of gods and outsiders eager to rally mortals to their banners in the afterlife, either willingly or by force. A planar crossroads, the Material Plane is coexistent with the Ethereal and Shadow Planes and coterminous with all of the realms of the Inner Sphere.

Just as little-known forces bind a physical body to its astral and ethereal counterparts, the whole of the universe is bound together by a series of ley lines— spiritual conduits that interpenetrate the many planes of the multiverse. Ley lines are prevalent on the Material Plane, and wise adepts of the occult arts, canny students of the arcane, and even village witches learn to recognize and manipulate these forces to their own ends.

TRAITS

The Material Plane has the following planar traits:

  • Normal Gravity
  • Normal Time
  • Alterable Morphic
  • No Elemental or Energy Traits: Specific locations may have these traits, however.
  • Mildly Neutral-Aligned: Though it may contain high concentrations of evil or good, law or chaos in places.
  • Normal Magic
  • Realm immeasurable
  • Structural lasting
  • Essence mixed
  • Alignment none
  • Magic normal

DENIZENS

Divinities Great Old Ones, kami lords, oni daimyo, rakshasa immortals, Outer Gods, Ydersius

Outsiders aasimars, kami, ganzi, oni, rakshasas, tieflings

Petitioners prey (oni daimyo or rakshasa immortal petitioners) or remnant (all others)

Qualities SR equal to 11 + HD, ferocity universal monster rule

INFUSIONS

Basic none

Improved none

Greater none

Negative Energy Plane

Source Some additional information from PRG:OA

The Negative Energy Plane is one of the most hostile planes in the Great Beyond, and exploration beyond its fringes, where islands and precipices from reality form somewhat stable and sheltered regions, should be attempted only by the most well-prepared adventuring groups. There are no astronomical bodies to speak of in the “skies” of this plane, nor is there a workable analog to north.

To an observer, there’s little to see on the Negative Energy Plane. It is a dark, empty place, an eternal pit where a traveler can fall until the plane itself steals away all light and life. The Negative Energy Plane is the most hostile of the Inner Planes, the most uncaring and intolerant of life. Only creatures immune to its life-draining energies can survive there.

The orthodox view of the Inner Sphere casts the Negative Energy Plane as the jealous rival of its positive-energy twin, an empty infinite void of entropic darkness antithetical to creation, fit only to consume and destroy.

Negative energy is itself a dark opposite of life-giving positive energy, yet while it is most often a source or tool of destruction, it is also the animating force of the undead. The ancient wisdom of occultism seizes on this seemingly paradoxical association with creation and posits that entropy clears the slate for what’s next as the multiverse inexorably marches along an unimaginably vast evolutionary cycle of its own. Perfection is not a fixed state. It is always growing and changing. To say that there is one “natural” state—for instance, utter oblivion—that constitutes perfection is as impossible as imposing a limit on the infinite. Occultists believe that this destruction allows for and drives change.

Nonetheless, negative energy sustains the undead, who throng to the sterile and desolate gulfs of nothingness that compose the overwhelming expanse of this dark and terrifying realm. The plane offers few solid surfaces, so the undead present here tend to be incorporeal and capable of taking flight on the soul-chilling currents that seem inexorably to guide visitors toward the absolute darkness at the plane’s heart. This inner blackness connects via portals to the black holes scattered about the cosmos of the Material Plane. Records of astral voyages to the Material Plane side of these portals relate tales of the accretion disks of black holes swarming with incorporeal undead trapped within the event horizon.

Within the plane, where the concentration of negative energy reaches an absolute, it begins to manifest a crystalline material that grows into beautiful and deadly structures of absolute entropy. When these crystals form strange angles, the plane gives birth to a sceaduinar.

These vile creatures hate life and unlife alike, and exist only to sow entropy and destruction. Somehow, their manifestation seems to drain a measure of the plane’s entropic energies, ironically making the regions around these haunting snowflake structures the most stable and survivable regions in the otherwise hostile plane.

While negative energy is less of a concern, the sceaduinar themselves represent a significant threat to visitors.

The ancient wisdom suggests that the jyoti hate the sceaduinar for their knowledge of the role destruction plays in the creation of souls, and the jyoti fear the exposure of that information. The Negative Energy Plane’s most terrible and hateful residents, the undead abominations known as nightshades, care little for this squabbling between the planes. Theirs is a quest to eradicate all life in the cosmos, to cloak the stars of the Material Plane in darkness, and to quench the Cosmic Fire, no matter the consequences.

The Negative Energy Plane is the realm of constant entropy and never-ending destruction, a lightless void of nothingness that destroys the raw force of life and gives rise to the animating force of undeath.

Vacuous and barren, devoid of any natural path for souls after judgment, the Negative Energy Plane has no divinity who calls it home. The goddesses and gods have little interest in the plane as a whole, barring occasional attention from servitors and priests of various gods of undeath and entropy.

TERRAIN

The vast majority of the negative energy plane is empty nothingness—hence its name. But here and there, pockets of terrain stand out against the blackness, some of which have been hastily cataloged by explorers. Below are some of the features PCs may encounter, listed roughly in order from the plane’s borders to its center.

The Escarpment: If travelers are fortunate, they arrive at the otherwise unbounded plane’s metaphorical edge—a shelf of cliffs that somehow hang over the negative energy plane’s blackness, where chunks of Material Plane worlds and other planes abut the Nothing. The rocky promontories make suitable camps (some sheltering ridges even protect against the plane’s negative energies), but they are also haunted by the shades of previous explorers.

In theory, one could travel along the Escarpment to reach other worlds, but cataracts of liquid entropy cutting through the cliffs make this a fraught endeavor. Travelers would also be wise to avoid the highest peaks, as powerful outsiders lay claim to them.

Elemental Pockets: Where the Elemental Planes brush against the negative energy plane, pockets of fundamental substances break off and float away. Though they’re less negatively charged than the surrounding environs (treat as minor negative-dominant), these elemental clouds pose their own dangers.

Ash Pocket: Travelers experience the effects of a sandstorm and risk smoke inhalation.

Dust Pocket: Travelers experience the effects of a greater dust storm and risk drowning in dust.

Salt Pocket: Travelers immediately begin to dehydrate and must attempt Constitution checks every 10 minutes.

Vacuum Pocket: Travelers cannot breathe and begin to suffocate. Spellcasting must be voiceless and effects resolve as if underwater, though fire effects manifest instantaneously before dissipating. The few surviving elemental creatures trapped in these pockets tend towards murderous depravity.

Chasm to Shadow: The border to the Plane of Shadow manifests as an impossibly deep canyon of shadowstuff set against the already black backdrop of the negative energy plane. While both planes are mildly neutral-aligned, the admixture of shadow and entropy in the heart of the rift takes on a malice bordering on sentience (treat as mildly evil -aligned). Fiends visiting the negative energy plane find the Chasm has a mysterious pull on them; those unwary enough to enter return transformed into nightshades.

Floating Islands: The negative energy plane’s constant erosion of the Escarpment causes chunks of terrain to calve off and float away. Most crumble to dust in short order, but a few persist for centuries, protected by magic, unique minerals, or infusions of positive energy. Many islands are claimed by sceaduinars or potent undead, but some are home to lonely monasteries, forgotten oubliettes, evil dragons, and at least one enclave of fey horribly twisted by their severance from the First World.

TRAITS

The Negative Energy Plane has the following planar traits:

  • Gravity subjective directional
  • Major Negative-Dominant: Some areas within the plane have only the minor negative-dominant trait, and these islands tend to be inhabited.
  • Enhanced Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities that use negative energy are enhanced. Class abilities that use negative energy, such as channel negative energy, gain a +4 bonus to the save DC to resist the ability.
  • Impeded Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities that use positive energy (including cure spells) are impeded. Characters on this plane take a –10 penalty on saving throws made to remove negative levels bestowed by an energy drain attack.
  • Time normal
  • Realm unbounded
  • Structural lasting (although there is little on this plane to alter)
  • Essence major negative-dominant (with isolated and rare pockets of minor negative-dominant)
  • Alignment mildly neutral-aligned

DENIZENS

The Negative Energy Plane destroys life and most forms of matter, yet still, there are denizens of the realm. By far the most common are undead—particularly those without physical bodies. Wraiths are the most commonly encountered, for when a mortal creature dies on the Negative Energy Plane, a wraith often spawns during the process of death. In this case, the mortal’s actual soul is not completely corrupted—what forms the wraith is scraped from the dying soul in a process that is metaphysically and emotionally excruciating. The resulting wraiths are almost mindless and have little other desire than to destroy any other form of life they come across in their aimless drifting through the Void. Other undead exist here as well, although most tend to manifest in isolated areas—only those present in significant numbers are mentioned on the encounter table.

Few creatures call the negative energy plane home. Even fewer have travelers’ best interests at heart.

Liches, vampires, and other corporeal undead who come to bask in the negative energy plane’s deadly energies soon grow horrified by the constant gnawing of entropy on their decaying bodies and worldly possessions. Of necessity, most gather in small floating-island city-states under authoritarian monarchs, pooling their resources to stave off the Nothing while engaging in research, trade, and what sybaritic pleasures their lord allows. Petty rivalries and resentments abound, but all differences are cast aside to fend off sceaduinar incursions or the impressment efforts of ambitious nightshades. Ironically, the safeguards that preserve these settlements also make them some of the safest places for living creatures in the negative energy plane as well. Adventurers who prove they’re not cattle can earn outlandish fees as bodyguards, couriers, and sceaduinar hunters.

Nightshades lord over the negative energy plane’s dead worlds and swim its rivers of entropy. Drawn to their power, spectral dead congregate around them like pilot fish around sharks. Nightshades rarely cooperate; instead, individual nightshades scheme against the realms of the living, ever looking for vulnerable worlds to colonize and raze.

The one true society of the negative energy plane belongs to the sceaduinars. Born divorced from existence—and out of geometrical errors at that—sceaduinars have an instinctive loathing for all creatures born with a spark of positive energy. This is reinforced by a xenophobic culture that calls them to repel any stain on the negative energy plane’s purity: in particular, the parasitic abomination of undeath. Slaying undead is the closest thing sceaduinars have to a holy obligation, and they pursue it with fervor.

Sceaduinar society is also marked by ancestral hatred for the Positive Energy Plane’s birdlike jyoti. According to their lore, sceaduinars and jyoti used to be equal shepherds of creation, tending the ebb and flow of positive and negative energy throughout the multiverse. Then the jyoti betrayed the sceaduinars, slamming shut the doors to the Cosmic Fire and hoarding the secrets of creation for themselves. Now the sceaduinars are locked in darkness while the multiverse marches inexorably from positive to negative, life to death, till the end of time. Yet they dream of a multiverse flowering with crystal negative life—and some sceaduinars plot to see this vision come to pass.

Corporeal Undead: Intelligent undead of all kinds make pilgrimages to the negative energy plane, particularly liches and graveknights.

Daemons: Driven by their all-consuming hatred for life, many daemons visit the Negative Energy Plane to study and conduct experiments. They rarely settle for long, however—there is scant mortal suffering to feed upon, and sceaduinars resent their presence. Of the daemons that persevere, most find their fates in becoming nightshades.

Danavas: At least one of these ancient titans is known to inhabit the negative energy plane, ruminating over strange artifacts and the deepest concentrations of captured crystalline energy. Moreover, this nameless titan is one of that race’s great pillars—powerful beings who have evolved to become anchors of reality itself. Any action by this pillar would have multiverse-shaking implications, and his destruction might well hasten the end of existence. Danavas of lesser power may hide deeper in the negative energy plane as well.

Devourers: Transformed by fell energies at the edge of reality, devourers are held in suspicion by the negative energy plane’s corporeal undead, yet they have no place among the spectral dead or the courts of the nightshades. Despite— or perhaps because of—their perennial outsider status, they often serve as emissaries and diplomats. They may also be heralds of darker forces deeper in the negative energy plane, including lesser deaths, grim reapers, and worse.

Hunduns: Extradimensional beings from an unreality beyond the multiverse, these hooded monks come to the negative energy plane to study entropy and the destruction of existence. Often found on the highest perches along the Escarpment, their silent ruminations can last for eons. Hunduns are obsessive students of their hated foes, the danavas, and reward news of their enemies’ movements with occult secrets—revelations that, while true, set travelers on a path to ruin.

Incorporeal Undead: Wraiths are the plane’s most common threat—spirit shreds sheared off mortals slain by the negative energy plane. Fortunately, these wraiths are merely imprints born of agony, while the original soul goes on to its ordained rest. But other victims of the plane are not so lucky. Souls stained by significant evil sometimes form dread wraiths, while those who perish in great anger rise as spectres, and victims consumed by madness or who commit suicide rise as allips. The plane’s occasional consumption of whole realms can spawn other spirits—including banshees, callers in darkness, festering spirits, poltergeists, shadows, and wyrmwraiths. Most of these remain bound near the sites of their death until their eventual absorption into the Nothing.

Movanic Devas: Detached from celestial infantries, these angelic volunteers see themselves as the multiverse’s first line of defense against the negative energy plane’s spectral hordes.

Nightshades: Fiends of all stripes seek the power concentrated in the gulf between the Shadow and Negative Energy Planes. They rarely survive to regret their hubris. The Chasm breaks them down utterly, stripping them apart and refashioning them out of shadowstuff as new undead creatures. Collectively known as nightshades, these monstrosities seem to be manifestations of the negative energy plane itself, empowered by fiendish malice and sense of purpose. Able to cast plane shift daily, only their hatred for sunlight keeps them from obliterating world after world. Nightshades travel freely throughout the negative energy plane, gravitating toward environs that favor their umbral forms. Nightwalkers and nightprowlers lead shadow armies across dead worlds, as nightcrawlers bore beneath the surface, accelerating their eventual destruction. Nightskitters weave necromantic webs to ensnare prey along the Escarpment, while nightwings flock like bats above the plane’s few landmarks. Practically demigods, the deadly nightwaves swim in rivers of entropy in the Chasm’s depths. If there is a supreme intelligence that guides the nightshade race, as some sages postulate, it is likely found there.

Oblivions: Oblivions are the purest expression of the negative energy plane: roiling thunderclouds of negative energy that work to unmake creation. Each is independent, commands a crude intelligence, and seeks to lay waste to entire globes. Reality’s saving grace is that oblivions cannot travel the planes on their own; when one does, it is often an extinction-level event. Oblivions manipulate spheres of annihilation with consummate skill. Indeed, far from being magical artifacts, these spheres may in fact be the eggs of the oblivion race—if such a term even applies to the oozes’ indecipherable life cycle.

Sceaduinars: Resembling spindly gargoyles made of dark purple crystal, these outsiders dwell upon the negative energy plane’s crystalline knots. Sceaduinars’ origins are unique, for unlike other creatures, they are born without positive energy. Instead they spontaneously generate from flaws in the crystal structure of their homes, shearing into being at odd angles and intersections that would otherwise mar the knot’s integrity. Their skittering, wolfish mounts, sceazirs, originate in a similar manner. Sceaduinars create shard cities of glass along the arms of their snowflake homes, decorating them with smoky mirrors and filling them with the empty sound of chimes. They tend strange treelike outgrowths of negative energy crystal, coaxing spheres of annihilation to bud from jagged branches. They then use these orbs to defend against wraith attacks or set them drifting into the negative energy plane like deadly balloons—some of which make their way to other planes of existence.

Sceaduinars also send out death squads, parties of up to a dozen hunters and several sceazir mounts, using their supernatural invisibility to undead to pounce upon any such creatures they find. These raiding parties serve another function too: industrial espionage. Sceaduinars’ divorce from the Positive Energy Plane robs them of the ability to create. They can guide natural processes—hence their careful husbandry of nascent spheres—and they can copy or mimic, but they never truly invent.

It is a cruel irony that, over time, sceaduinar cities tend to resemble the nearest dead world or undead redoubt. In spite of the sceaduinars’ best efforts to forge a destiny unique to themselves, their works inevitably mirror those of living beings they despise.

Umbral Dragons: Infused with negative energy while still in the egg, umbral dragons are one of the few living species that can tolerate the bleak essence of the negative energy plane. Most dwell along the Escarpment or on floating islands picked clean of undead and sceaduinars.

Void-Ravaged Creatures: Living creatures who survive in the negative energy plane eventually become acclimated, but not unchanged. They live on as the void-ravaged (Planar Adventures 117), creatures suspended between life and undeath. Most are lone individuals, but a few colonies of void-ravaged harpies and yrthaks squabble along the Escarpment. Elsewhere in the negative energy plane, an outpost of void-ravaged elves clings to the thicket that was their nation-tree, guarded by banshee ancestors.

INFUSIONS

Basic You have been infused with unlife and are affected by positive and negative energy as if you were undead. Undead creatures who gain this ability instead gain a +2 bonus to their channel resistance.

Improved You can use enervation once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater Negative energy suffuses your being and can be unleashed in a devastating burst once per day as an immediate action when are reduced to 0 or fewer hit points.

This creates an explosion of negative energy in a 20-foot burst, centered on you, that deals 1d6 points of negative energy damage per Hit Die you have (maximum 20d6) to all creatures in the area of effect. Each affected creature can attempt a Reflex save (DC = 10 + half your Hit Dice + your Charisma modifier) to take half damage. This negative energy damage does not heal undead. When this effect is triggered, you regain a number of hit points equal to your total Hit Dice; this healing applies immediately, and if it brings your hit point total above a negative number equal to your Constitution (or above 0 if you are undead), then the healing prevents your death.

The Negative Energy Plane is cold and inimical to life.

Also known as the Void, it embodies entropy and decay.

Yet while its energies empower the concept of undeath, the plane itself is without conscious malice; it destroys life as a natural consequence, like water extinguishing fire. Without negative energy there would be no natural progression of youth to aged, no progression of life to death, and no draw to pull soul energy from the Positive Energy Plane in the first place. Without the Negative Energy Plane, life could not exist, for its existence defines life.

Matter exposed to the lightless vacuum of the Negative Energy Plane is inexorably reduced to nothing. Any living creature thus exposed is sucked dry of life and doomed to the cursed half-life of undeath. Despite this brutally hostile environment, the Void is not entirely empty, as over the eons the plane has accepted terrible things hurled into its depths, abandoned or forgotten. Undead spawned from doomed mortal travelers pollute the plane and perpetually war with the original natives, the sceaduinars. These strange beings of beauty and horror rage against the influence of positive energy and hint at a great conflict between the two planes and their respective energies that raged long before the Material Plane was crafted.

Magic on the Negative Energy Plane

Spells and spell-like abilities that use negative energy are enhanced. Class abilities that use negative energy, such as channel negative energy, gain a +4 bonus to the save DC to resist the ability.

Spells and spell-like abilities that use positive energy (including cure spells) are impeded.

Characters on this plane take a –10 penalty on saving throws made to remove negative levels imposed by an energy drain attack.

Preparation is the watchword when venturing into the planes—and the Negative Energy Plane is more unforgiving than most.

  • Adventurers’ first priority should be sheer survival. Death ward’s protection against negative energy and energy drain is essential for exploring the negative energy plane, preferably via deathless armor, lifesurge weapons, or other wondrous items.
  • The negative energy plane is cold, dark, and lifeless. Light sources soon gutter and go out, and magical light shines like a beacon to nearby denizens. Effects or abilities that confer sight in darkness are the wiser choice. Adventurers planning to remain longer than a day should obtain cold-weather gear or endure elements to ward off hypothermia.
  • Movement through the negative energy plane’s subjective directional gravity is a matter of will. Magic that boosts Wisdom or aids flight can help.
  • The negative energy plane’s undead tend to travel in packs, making hide from undead invaluable. Be aware that intelligent undead may still perceive something is amiss and that sceaduinars and their sceazir mounts won’t be fooled in the least.
  • Incorporeal undead are the negative energy plane’s most common threat, making ghost touch weapons practically mandatory (though incorporeal opponents can also handle these items). Holy, undead bane or slaying, disruption, grayflame, and similar weapons are also prized—though, again, the use of too much holy or positively charged magic may attract as many undead as it repels. Holy weapons are also useful against sceaduinars and their mounts, as are outsider bane or slaying weapons and effects that target evil outsiders.
  • The most important part of any visit to the negative energy plane is the return trip. Parties should keep spells such as plane shift, homeward bound (Planar Adventures 41), or even anywhere but here (Planar Adventures 38) on hand for when—not if—the negative energy plane becomes too deadly.

Ecology

The negative energy plane has little ecology in the traditional sense. The naturalist’s model of a food web fueled by a kindly sun seems quaint in a realm where black holes go to die. Instead, the plane’s ecology resembles that of the ocean depths—a grimly efficient chain of predation and carrion scavenging that consumes every scrap unfortunate enough to fall into the inky blackness.

Accordingly, the apex predator of the Negative Energy Plane is the plane itself. In a sense, the negative energy plane is the multiverse’s digestive system. The constant wash of negative energy breaks down living and unliving matter alike. Food spoils almost immediately, leather and cloth begin to rot away, metal rusts in only a few days, and even stones soon crumble to dust. The entropic energies released in this process then dissipate into the blackness of the negative energy plane, where strange physics at the plane’s heart reshape these wisps of nothingness into crystalline forms.

The effect on living beings is more dramatic. Unless magically protected or attuned to the plane, mortal creatures have the life leached out of them in mere minutes—or even seconds (Planar Adventures 61). The process is so agonizing that most travelers become mindless wraiths on the spot, while their bodies crumble to ash.

Those visitors who withstand the negative energy plane’s entropic atmosphere must then contend with its hunters. The positive energy radiating from living travelers acts as a lure to the plane’s undead. Most of these are the aforementioned wraiths, drawn to mortal life like moths to a flame. But more cunning spirits lurk in the dark as well, seeking out victims to consume, torture, or transform for their own ends.

Yet this system is predicated upon the destruction and disposal of positive energy. There is another ecology deeper in the negative energy plane, one not well understood, fueled entirely by negative energy. Here the plane’s original inhabitants, the sceaduinars, are birthed from strange faults of crystalline geometry. Elsewhere the smoky oozes called oblivions precipitate like thunderclouds out of coalesced entropy. It is an alternate model of existence that stands in opposition to and defiance of the rest of the multiverse—a cosmology the sceaduinars fight to the death to protect.

Faith

The gods and the denizens of the negative energy plane have little use for each other. While gods are not barred from the Negative Energy Plane as they are from the Positive, it is too devoid of worshipers or souls to be of interest. Moreover, the plane’s promise of an end to all things is disturbing on an ontological level even to deities.

Instead, deities leave the plane to their servants. Celestial powers send regular patrols of movanic devas to guard against undead incursions into other worlds, a hardship post that brings honor to the angels who survive. Cultists of undeath and entropy also send small delegations.

Sceaduinars have no deities, rejecting them out of hand as jailors in league with the jyoti. Some practice a rough worship of the negative energy plane itself that yields paltry clerical powers, but by and large they are scornful atheists. Sceaduinars resist daemonic overtures of alliance, but they occasionally treat with asuras out of a shared sense of divine abandonment. At least one sceaduinar city, has made contact with entities that would cause alarm throughout the celestial planes were it widely known.

Three divine mysteries remain to planar sages. One is what dark power, if any, spurs the creation of nightshades. The second is what role danavas play in the negative energy plane; should the nameless titans be roused to act, or should the slowly gathering hunduns finally strike, reality itself would reel from the blow. The third is the mystery at the heart of the negative energy plane: the ancient jyoti crime that barred the way to the Positive Energy Plane—or so the sceaduinars allege. Occultists dispute this claim, arguing that the Positive and Negative Energy Planes are still connected and that any appearance of duality is a veil obscuring the oneness beneath. Whatever the truth, adventurers of a philosophical bent have the opportunity to uncover secrets of existence hitherto unknown. They may even find tools to save the multiverse, or to break and remake it entirely.

Blight Quartz

Deposits of solidified negative energy, formed by the precipitation of the plane’s substance in regions oversaturated by raw entropy, can be found throughout the Negative Energy Plane. Known as blight quartz (although the crystals are not a form of traditional elemental material), these crystals appear as black or smoky gray gemstones that periodically shimmer or crackle with eerie, dark purple energy.

The majority of blight quartz deposits are no larger than the size of a human fist. The process of crystallization diffuses the negative energy inherent in the material somewhat, but in large quantities the stuff can be debilitating. As long as a creature carries a pound or more of blight quartz or is within 5 feet of a deposit of blight quartz of a minimum of 10 pounds, that creature incurs 1 negative level. This negative level remains as long as the proximity to blight quartz continues, and disappears when these conditions end. This negative level never results in actual level loss, but cannot be overcome in any way (including via restoration) while proximity to the quartz continues. This is a negative energy effect.

While blight quartz cannot be worked into armor, the material can be used to augment melee weapons, as well as arrowheads, spear tips, and similar ammunition. Doing so costs an additional 200 gp per piece of ammunition or an additional 2,500 gp for a weapon. A creature hit with a blight quartz weapon must succeed at a DC 15 Fortitude save or take 1 negative level. A negative level imparted by a blight quartz weapon or ammunition lasts for 1 minute before fading and never results in permanent level loss. Negative levels imparted by multiple hits reset the duration but do not otherwise stack, nor do they stack with any other negative levels the weapon may otherwise impart, or with any negative levels the creature struck may already have. This is a negative energy effect.

Blight quartz has 10 hit points per inch of thickness and hardness 10, but the material decays rapidly when taken from the Negative Material Plane, taking 2d6 points of damage that bypasses its hardness each round until it crumbles away into nothingness.

Table 3–6: Negative Energy Plane Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–8 1d6 shadows 6
9–13 1d6 allips 6
14–43 2d6 wraiths 11
44–53 1d8 sceaduinars 11
54–63 1d6 greater shadows 11
64–68 1d4 devourers 13
69 1d6 movanic devas 13
70–74 1d6 nightwings 17
75–78 1d4 nightwalkers 18
79–81 1d4 lesser deaths 18
82–84 1d3 nightcrawlers 20
85–86 1 nightwave 20
87 1 oblivion 20
88 1 hundun 21
89 1 grim reaper 22
90 1 danava 24
91–100 Roll on Shadow Plane table Varies

Nirvana (Outer Plane (neutral good))

Nirvana is an unbiased paradise existing between the two extremes of Elysium and Heaven. Its stunning mountains, rolling hills, and deep forests all match a visitor’s expectations of a pastoral paradise, but Nirvana also contains mysteries that lead to enlightenment. Nirvana is a sanctuary and a place of respite for all who seek redemption or illumination. Nirvana‘s native agathions have willingly postponed their own transcendence to guard Nirvana‘s enigmas, while celestial beings fight the forces of evil across the planes.

Nirvana is a realm of rolling fields, lush forests, deep blue seas, tall mountains, and hidden valleys. Its pastoral wilds are home to intelligent animal petitioners, animalistic agathions, shining angels, and other creatures of pure good. Nirvana holds mysterious secrets to higher states of existence, and pilgrims and inhabitants alike seek to explore and unearth those mysteries through their interactions on the plane.

TRAITS

Nirvana has the following planar traits:

DIVINITIES

Numerous benevolent deities from various pantheons as well as a large contingent of empyreal lords dwell in Nirvana.

Empyreal Lords Empyreal lords are embodiments of transcendent multidimensional virtues that mortals attempt to encapsulate with words and philosophies familiar to them. Each empyreal lord is a paragon of a particular celestial race—in Nirvana, native empyreal lords are either agathions or angels, but their interests and areas of concern vary greatly.

Outsiders agathions, angels, foo creatures, moon dogs, peris

Petitioners cleansed (animals that symbolize the originating souls’ personalities)

Qualities resistance 10 to cold and sonic, +2 Wisdom

INFUSIONS

Basic Nirvana’s influence has enlightened your mind. You gain a +1 bonus on Will saves, a +1 bonus on Perception checks, and a +2 bonus on Sense Motive checks to avoid being bluffed.

Improved You can focus on Nirvana’s serenity, allowing you to restore a creature’s sense of self with a touch. This functions as restoration, but it cannot cure ability damage or drain to Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution, nor can it eliminate fatigue or exhaustion. You can use this ability once per day. As a spell-like ability, it does not require a diamond dust component unless the target is nongood, in which case you must supply the 100 gp or 1,000 gp of diamond dust as if you had cast the spell normally.

Greater You gain truespeech and can speak with any creature that has a language, as though you were using the tongues spell. You gain a +4 bonus on all saving throws against language-dependent effects, and any language-dependent effect you create that allows a saving throw has its save DC increased by 1.

DENIZENS

Nirvana is home to multitudes of creatures, some of them unique entities formed through transcendent selfactualization.

The realm is heavily populated by what appear to be wild animals, when in truth these “animals” are the plane’s petitioners: mortal souls allowed to live out the afterlife in the peaceful reaches of the Great Wilderness.

Agathions Agathions are a race of outsiders that incorporate animal features into their forms; the vast majority appear as anthropomorphized natural beasts. Unlike angels (who often travel the planes as messengers), archons (who are often called upon to wage war against fiends far afield from Heaven), or azatas (who revel in the bliss of exploration), agathions rarely leave their home plane save for when they are conjured elsewhere. This planar introversion is quick to vanish if an agathion realizes that stepping off-plane will allow it to aid a mortal soul, but opportunities for such events on a plane as idyllic as Nirvana are few and far between. Agathions come across as mysterious and wise, full of strange aphorisms and animal-themed metaphors. They generally default to the serenity of an enlightened community of mutual respect but quickly transition to animal ferocity, speed, and strength when necessary to protect themselves and others from the forces of evil. Their primary demeanor of peaceful wisdom and patience allows them to serve as mediators in disputes among other celestials, with both free-spirited azatas and order-minded archons often agreeing to accept agathion arbitration as a fair and reasonable means to resolve conflicts between law and chaos.

Angels While angels make their homes on all three of the good-aligned Outer Planes, Nirvana is home to more angels than any other plane, in large part because Nirvana’s impartiality to law or chaos makes it the most pleasant realm for many angels to reside within. Angels often carry messages for their divine patrons, traveling numerous planes to deliver the missives; when they remain at home in Nirvana, angels prefer to spend their time in contemplation, meditation, and pleasant conversation with other natives of the realm. Although the vast majority of angels are formed from mortal souls, the most powerful angels predate the existence of mortals entirely. Today, most of these angels are empyreal lords or deities.

The Cleansed Although all souls shed the memories of their mortal lives upon becoming petitioners, those who become the cleansed embrace this aspect most and view their transformation into animals—the “purest” of forms—as a manifestation of their lives starting anew. Yet they maintain their sapience, and in their pursuit of deeper spiritual understanding and communion with Nirvana, grow ever more thoughtful and wise.

Foo Creatures While foo dogs and foo lions are the foo creatures most commonly summoned to the Material Plane to serve as guardians, foo creatures that correspond to every animal in existence dwell in the wilds of Nirvana and are the most common ascended form of a typical cleansed petitioner. In Nirvana, foo creatures are far less serious than they are on the Material Plane, and they frolic and play with any who would join them, even those whose ordinary animal would naturally be their predators. Foo creatures are eager to help any agathion who asks for assistance and typically extend this spirit of cooperation to other visitors, provided those visitors treat them with kindness and respect. The most powerful foo creatures are known as the imperials; as a general rule, each species of animal is represented by one imperial foo creature in Nirvana at a time. When such a creature dies, or if it makes an extended visit to another plane, a new foo creature ascends to the role to fill the vacancy.

Moon Dogs Moon dogs are nomadic guardians, roaming in packs that protect Nirvana from interlopers. While they foster no ill will toward Nirvana’s other inhabitants, they prefer the company of their own kind and do not mix with other outsiders.

Peris Today, many peris dwell in Nirvana and play a role akin to that of the city guard, but in this capacity they always seek diplomatic and nonviolent resolutions to conflicts. A peri guardian forced to attack or imprison a troublemaker counts the act as a failure in her role, and she strives to avoid such ends except in the most extreme of circumstances. Peris encountered in Nirvana are natives of the realm, not outsiders native to the Material Plane, but they retain the native subtype when visiting the Material Plane.

Roselings Not all of Nirvana’s denizens have characteristics that resemble those found in the animal kingdom. The enlightened plants known as roselings spread peace and friendship throughout the plane. They share a particular kinship with azatas and other visitors from Elysium and often host such outsiders in their homes, serving as guides for them during their stay. Roselings are detailed further.

Table: Nirvana Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–5 2 foo dogs 4
6–9 1d6 cassisians 5
10–14 2 foo lions 6
15–19 2d6 cleansed petitioners 6
20–24 1d10 silvanshees 7
25–27 1 balisse 8
28–35 1d10 reptials 9
36–43 1d8 vulpinals 10
44–46 1d8 chorals 10
47–54 1d8 roselings 11
55–62 1d6 avorals 12
63–66 1d6 movanic devas 13
67–68 1d6 monadic devas 15
69–76 1d12 moon dogs 15
77 1 planetar 16
78–82 1d8 leonals 16
83–85 1d6 astral devas 17
86–93 1d6 peris 17
94–95 1d6 cetaceals 18
96 1 draconal 20
97 1d6 cervinals 20
98 1 empyrean 20
99 1d4 sirrushes 23
100 1 solar angel 23

Plane of Gravity

Source 3pp:ToHC

The Plane of Gravity is an empty plane, resembling the vastness of space itself with points of light like distant stars, swirling gasses, and dark matter. The Plane of Gravity touches on all other planes, for gravity is a factor in all parts of the multiverse.

The Plane of Gravity is the least survivable of the Inner Planes, as it consists of the vacuum of space itself. It contains large, dark almost planet-like bodies that exert strong forces on other nearby bodies. Planar travelers to the Plane of Gravity that require air to breathe must somehow bring their own supply or be subject to suffocation.

The Plane of Gravity is the home of all manner of strange creatures that need no air, light, or food on which to survive. The only places where there is a noticeable pull of gravity here are near the planetary bodies or near natives to the plane itself. Using the principles of action/reaction, non-native travelers must somehow push off from a solid surface in order to move (attaining a speed equal to 10 feet + 5 feet per point of Strength bonus) or use magical means of locomotion.

TRAITS

The Plane of Gravity has the following planar traits:

  • Gravity: Subjective directional gravity. Inhabitants of the plane determine their own “down” direction. Objects not under the motive force of others do not move.
  • Time: Normal time. Time passes here the same as it does on the Material Plane. One hour on the Plane of Gravity equals one hour on the Material Plane.
  • Size: Infinite size.
  • Morphic Traits: Alterable morphic. Objects remain where they are (and what they are) unless affected by physical force or magic. You can change the immediate environment as a result of tangible effort.
  • Elemental Traits: No dominant elemental traits. No single element dominates on the Plane of Gravity.
  • Alignment Traits: No dominant alignment traits. No single alignment is stronger than the other on the Plane of Gravity.
  • Enhanced Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities that use, manipulate, or create gravity are both empowered and enlarged (as if the Empower Spell and Enlarge Spell metamagic feats had been used on them, but the spells don’t require higher-level slots).

Plane of Molten Skies

Source 3pp:ToHC

A nexus connecting three planes formed of elemental air, earth, and fire, the Plane of Molten Skies is a legendary waypoint for planar races who wish to do business with one another without the confines and consequences of visiting a hostile elemental plane. It is also the “road” to the fabled City of Brass.

The skies are ablaze on this plane; the entire upper atmosphere consumed in a gigantic ball of flame and liquid fire. The air is stuffy and warm, breathable, but uncomfortable to those not used to it. The ground is formed of cracked obsidian and basalt, warm to the touch, but comfortable enough to walk upon without inflicting harm on those not resistant to heat or fire. Mountains and hills formed of basalt and small pools of lava dot the landscape. Volcanoes scattered throughout the planar landscape belch forth blasts of molten elemental fire and rock at random intervals. Rivers and streams of liquid flame wind through the landscape, emptying into a raging sea of liquid elemental fire.

Planar features of the Plane of Molten Skies include rivers of fire and flame, magma storms, heat storms, geysers of flame, and lava pools.

TRAITS

The Plane of Molten Skies has the following planar traits:

Plane of Time

Source 3pp:ToHC

The Plane of Time is blanketed in eternal fog and vapor. Creatures traveling this plane can see a few feet in front of their position and that’s about it. Even darkvision and magical forms of seeing have difficulty here. The ground is formed of dust and sand and appears as a vast, windswept desert. For the most part, the plane is relatively flat, though dust and sand dunes dot the landscape.

The Plane of Time is hospitable to plane jumpers for the most part. The air is breathable and the temperate is always comfortable. Dangers presented by this plane include areas where a person can age rapidly, withering away into nothing, or regress in age to the point of becoming an infant again. Thankfully such areas are rare.

Planar features of the Plane of Time are paradox cyclones, infinity regions, time storms, vapor pockets, and sand or dust storms.

TRAITS

The Plane of Time has the following planar traits:

  • Gravity: Normal Gravity. The Plane of Time has gravity similar to that of the Material Plane. The usual rules for ability scores, carrying capacity, and encumbrance apply.
  • Time: Erratic time. The Plane of Time has several areas where time flows faster, some areas where time flows slower, and still some areas where time doesn’t flow at all.
  • Size: Infinite size.
  • Morphic Traits: Magically morphic. Certain spells modify the base material of the Plane of Time. The utility and power of these spells within the Plane of Time make them particularly useful for explorers and natives alike.
  • Enhanced Magic: Spells that affect time or deal with time, such as foresight or time stop, and so on function as if prepared with both the Extend Spell and Enlarge Spell feats.

Positive Energy Plane (Inner Plane)

Source PRG:OA

The Positive Energy Plane has no surface and is akin to the Plane of Air with its wide-open nature. However, every bit of this plane glows brightly with innate power. This power is dangerous to mortal forms, which are not made to handle it. Despite the beneficial effects of the plane, it is one of the most hostile of the Inner Planes. An unprotected character on this plane swells with power as positive energy is forced upon her. Then, because her mortal frame is unable to contain that power, she is immolated, like a mote of dust caught at the edge of a supernova. Visits to the Positive Energy Plane are brief, and even then travelers must be heavily protected.

The Positive Energy Plane is the source of all life, the Cosmic Fire at the heart of the multiverse that gives birth to mortal souls. The plane has no surface and exists as an emanation of life-giving energy radiating from an incandescent interior that resembles the molten heart of an active star. Ironically for a plane associated with life, the Positive Energy Plane can be extremely deadly to mortal visitors, as its ambient energies are so powerful that a mortal shell cannot absorb them without bursting. At certain vertices, the refraction of the Cosmic Fire’s rays create islands of solidity where the plane’s energies are not so extreme, and some manner of life as mortals understand it becomes possible. Here, upon vast shimmering fields, phoenix-feathered creatures known as the jyoti tend to orchards of glowing, anemone-like trees as tall as mountains, sprouting immature souls like glossy, liquid fruit. The xenophobic jyoti dwell in complex cities of crystal specially designed to reflect the weird luminescence of the Cosmic Fire. Jyoti seldom venture from these structures, focusing all of their energies on their sacred charge of tending and defending the nascent souls of the multiverse. At the center of each jyoti city is an imposing gate to a star in the cosmos of the Material Plane. New souls pass through these gates and ride waves of light to find incarnation in mortal vessels.

If the jyoti dedicate themselves to the protection of incubating immature souls, the other primary inhabitants of the Positive Energy Plane, the manasaputras, dedicate their existence to assisting the spiritual development of mortals. These “sons of mind” are the powerful psychic incarnations of mortals who have endured scores of mortal reincarnations, with each step becoming more attuned to the universal undersoul. The greatest and most powerful of the manasaputras—the glory-clad solar— dwell within the heart of the Cosmic Fire, and claim to be in communication with it. Lesser manasaputras like agnishvattas, barhisads, and manus spread through the Inner Sphere to initiate mortal adepts in the occult nature of the multiverse, so that they too might step once again into the light that birthed them.

For reasons unknown even to the eldest natives, divine beings cannot enter the Positive Energy Plane. Refugees from the vengeance of the gods or those hoping to hide important relics from certain divinities sometimes venture to the Positive Energy Plane to negotiate with the jyoti, who over the centuries have amassed an astounding trove of world-shattering artifacts, illegitimate halfmortal bastards, heretics, and other dangers.

The Positive Energy Plane is a luminous, burning void and the origin of pre-incarnate souls—the source of all life.

The Positive Energy Plane is the source of pre-incarnate mortal souls and the wellspring of life’s animating force, but despite this, it may well be the single most hostile plane of existence. Blinding, brilliant, and burning, Creation’s Forge resembles the heart of a blazing star. There is precious little solid ground except for outcroppings of iridescent crystal composed of solid positive energy, and despite the popular but incorrect association of positive energy with goodness, the force of unrestrained life is relentlessly destructive to mortal flesh.

The bright twin of the Negative Energy Plane’s entropic force, the Positive Energy Plane receives raw quintessence devoured by Limbo, forming one pole of the cosmic cycle of souls. It is here that souls originate and begin their journey, in this place paradoxically inimical to most life, often comparatively barren and sterile, but nevertheless having an overwhelming alien beauty.

TRAITS

The Positive Energy Plane has the following planar traits:

  • Gravity subjective directional
  • Time normal
  • Realm unbounded
  • Structural lasting (although there is little on this plane to alter)
  • Major Positive-Dominant: Some regions of the plane have the minor positive-dominant trait instead, and those islands tend to be inhabited.
  • Alignment mildly neutral-aligned
  • Magic enhanced and impeded (see Magic on the Positive Energy Plane)

DIVINITIES

Among the planes, the Positive Energy Plane is unusual not merely due to the lack of deities who make their domain there but because deities are entirely barred from entry and taking direct action in the realm. Whether this is a self-imposed limitation or something of a fundamental truth of reality is unclear. Among demigods, only kumaras—incredibly powerful manasaputras—maintain realms here, and they are quick to explain, when asked, that they are visitors to Creation’s Forge; that such visits might last for thousands upon thousands of years is somewhat irrelevant to an ageless entity. Other demigods avoid the plane entirely. Servants of the divine face no such restriction, of course.

The deep antipathy and suspicion jyoti harbor toward the divine certainly suggests that their race’s existence has some unknown link to whatever bars deities from entering the Positive Energy Plane. Some scholars have inferred their own reasons, suggesting that the presence of shackled danavas within the plane speaks to an early attempt by a deity (or maybe even an entire pantheon) to interfere with or regulate the flow of pre-incarnate mortal souls, a concept jyoti find abhorrent. Additional sources (primarily those associated with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse—although curiously enough, not in the infamous pages of the Book of the Damned) refer to the Positive Energy Plane as “the feast that eludes,” suggesting early attempts by the Horsemen to investigate the source of mortal souls and potentially short-circuit the system in order to accomplish their goal of ending all mortal life.

Outsiders danavas, jyoti, manasaputras, turuls

Petitioners enlightened (diaphanous, radiant versions of their mortal forms)

Qualities electricity resistance 10, immunity to negative energy effects

INFUSIONS

Basic You’ve been infused with raw life force, and whenever you’re healed by a positive energy effect (including all cure spells), you regain an additional number of hit points equal to your total Hit Dice. You gain a +4 bonus on Constitution checks to stabilize while dying.

Improved Thanks to your deeper understanding of positive energy, you can call upon it to restore yourself or others. Once per day you can touch a creature to create one of the following effects as a spell-like ability: cure serious wounds, lesser restoration, remove blindness/deafness, remove disease, or remove paralysis. If you use the ability on yourself, this ability requires only a move action to activate.

Greater Once per day as a spell-like ability, you can use raise dead as a spell-like ability. If you use this ability on a creature that has been dead no longer than 1 minute per Hit Die you have, the creature restored to life does not incur any negative levels and does not lose its prepared spells or spell slots, nor does this ability require an expensive material component. If you use this ability on a creature that has been dead longer than 1 minute per Hit Die you have, you must supply the material component as usual, and the target is subject to the normal side effects for raise dead.

DENIZENS

The greatest danger of the Positive Energy Plane is the nature of the plane itself, but those who manage to protect themselves from being overwhelmed by raw life force and the blinding vistas can find much to wonder and marvel at within Creation’s Forge. There are no astronomical bodies to speak of in the “skies” of this plane, nor is there a workable analog to north.

That fewer beings dwell upon the Positive Energy Plane than the Negative Energy Plane is one of the oldest ironies of the Great Beyond. At least on the Negative Energy Plane, undead can dwell and prosper—but on the Positive Energy Plane, the opposite does not hold true. Living creatures are bolstered and energized by brief exposure to the Positive Energy Plane, but those who stay too long are quickly overloaded by raw life force and perish as their souls are absorbed and recycled. Despite this inhospitable feature, a few forms of life have managed to adapt and even flourish in this overwhelming plane.

Danavas The first danavas came to the Positive Energy Plane near the dawn of creation itself, but though they are among reality’s oldest denizens, today they are met with abhorrence and hatred by other natives of the plane. Jyoti view them as a grotesque meddling by the gods in a task that was removed from deific purview and instead granted to jyoti by the nameless presence of their own convoluted religion, which remains opaque to those outside their race. The presence of those few danavas in Creation’s Forge, and in the Void as well, may in fact be what sparked jyoti’s antipathy towards the divine.

Jyoti Often erroneously called phoenix-kin, jyoti are the most populous natives of the Positive Energy Plane. They appear as radiant humanoid birds with glowing auras, but unlike phoenixes, which are benevolent magical beasts, jyoti are cold, secretive, exceptionally xenophobic, and have a severe antipathy and distrust of the divine. Dwelling in towering cities grown of luminous, living crystal, jyoti are guardians and stewards of their plane, and they see themselves as protectors and even cultivators of the Furnace’s preincarnate souls. Who or what appointed them is unknown— the “appointment” may indeed simply be a perpetuation of their own perceptions of their kind’s importance in the Great Beyond. Jyoti are not born, nor do they age. They form spontaneously from their plane’s raw and burning essence, and their subsequent activities help to keep the cosmic cycle of souls flowing. More than anything, jyoti abhor negative energy and those who use it, whether directly or indirectly (as in the case of undead). Yet rather than being an antipathy borne of rival energies, jyoti’s relationship to sceaduinars on the Negative Energy Plane is strangely complicated; scholars suspect a deep and opaque history exists between the races. Jyoti view sceaduinars not as enemies, but as objects of profound pity, and they embrace the act of destroying them as a mercy.

Manasaputras Manasaputras manifest when the reincarnated soul of a mortal who sought perfection and spiritual transcendence in life merges with the raw energy of life itself. Shedding the bonds of mortality, these souls continue on in their new forms, seeking to guide other mortals through the same difficult trek towards enlightenment. Manasaputras share a mutual respect with jyoti, who temper their instinctive xenophobia when they meet (though neither do jyoti actively seek out manasaputras to interact with). Manasaputras welcome visitors, and their acceptance and hospitality typically is accompanied by lessons geared toward the visitor’s spiritual maturation and enlightenment. The greatest manasaputras seek out the wisdom of a mysterious presence they call the Logos—a presence some equate with the same ill-defined object of the aeons’ worship and perhaps also that which the jyoti claim tasked them with guardianship of souls. of the three, only the manasaputras ever discuss the subject with others, but their teachings come in the form of personal quests geared toward guiding scholars to come to their own conclusions, rather than simply imparting answers.

Turuls The relationship these gargantuan and powerful avian outsiders have with jyoti is a curious one indeed—a relationship that certainly goes beyond mere physical similarity. Some believe the two races to be different incarnations of the same genesis, with others going a step further to suggest turuls represent a higher form of reincarnation than jyoti. Neither turuls nor jyoti speak of the matter. Often, a turul can be found dwelling among jyoti, living alongside them atop great spires of crystal and acting as protectors and advisors even though jyoti tend to ignore their presence. More often, however, turuls prefer isolation. They often watch over places where the boundaries between the Material Plane and the Positive Energy Plane wear thin, roosting amid great crystalline trees or vast mountains of force. While moody and haughty, turuls often select mortal communities and pose as divine figures or beings of prophecy, working to manipulate and shepherd Material Plane societies toward mysterious goals.

Magic on the Positive Energy Plane

Spells and spell-like abilities that use positive energy (including cure spells) are enhanced. Class abilities that use positive energy, such as channel energy, gain a +4 bonus to the save DC to resist the ability.

Spells and spell-like abilities that use negative energy are impeded.

Darkness and Light

The process by which pre-incarnate souls migrate from the Positive Energy Plane into the Material Plane is not well understood; likewise, the point at which a soul infuses a life is unknown and subject to great debate across all worlds.

One particularly compelling theory holds that at the heart of every star in the universe lies a pinpoint portal to the Positive Energy Plane. Whether these portals are what ignites new stars, or whether they form as a side effect of the cosmic violence of a new star’s explosive birth is unclear, and the evidence gives little weight to one side over the other. If stars are the points of access for new souls into the Material Plane, however, this may explain why the Material Plane is the only plane in the entire Great Beyond that is not inhabited primarily by outsiders.

Some scholars have taken this theory a step further and have proposed that black holes are similar pinpoint portals, connecting instead to the Negative Energy Plane. How the proximity of a black hole to a world might affect the paths taken by souls into the River of Souls is unknown, since such regions of space typically leave nothing behind to learn from—black holes consume everything, after all!

Pre-Incarnate Souls

Pre-incarnate souls have no sentience and are more akin to a form of energy than to distinct creatures, as it is the process of life itself that shapes a pre-incarnate soul into an actual soul. At most, a pre-incarnate souls act like natural forces with a minor tendency to mirror the actions of living creatures, moving and flowing with a semblance of life and organization, though this is little more than an illusion.

New pre-incarnate souls are constantly manifesting, and are almost impossible to destroy. Powerful blasts of negative energy could wipe out a pre-incarnate soul, as could magic like wish or miracle, but not effects that directly target and damage souls, since a pre-incarnate soul lacks the qualities that allow, for example, an astradaemon’s devour soul ability or trap the soul to function. Despite these facts, jyoti are ferociously protective of pre-incarnate souls and act like shepherds where they gather, nurturing and singing to them as they slowly mature during their migration toward life on the Material Plane.

A pre-incarnate soul is a quivering, floating mass of quintessence, spiritual potential, and positive energy, and contact with one can have unusual results. A character who comes into contact with a pre-incarnate soul increases the effects of positive-dominant essence traits currently affecting the character by one step (or doubles the effects of major positive-dominant effects) for as long as the contact persists (minimum of 1 round). In addition, each round of contact with a pre-incarnate soul removes 1 negative level from a creature per round.

Table 3–7: Positive Energy Plane Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–20 2d6 enlightened petitioners 6
21–25 1d6 movanic devas 13
26–70 1d8 jyoti 13
71–75 1d8 manus 16
76–80 1 maharishi manu 16
81–88 1d8 rishi manus 18
89–92 1 twilight pitri 18
93–95 1 turul 19
96–97 1 solar pitri 22
98 1 danava 24
99–100 Roll on Fey World Varies

Purgatory (Neutral)

A massive spire stretches deep into the sliver expanse of the Astral Plane from the surface of the Outer Sphere, beckoning unfettered monads on the River of Souls toward their final destinations in the afterlife. At the pinnacle of this spire is Purgatory, a necropolis of graveyards, mausoleums, and solemn courts dedicated to the goddess of death. This gloomy realm, also known as Purgatory, is home to countless souls awaiting final judgment. Clad in the sheaths of their astral forms, these somber sojourners bask in deep reverie, reliving scenes from their mortal lives during a solitary, inward journey of remembrance and catharsis.

This process allows the soul to revisit key scenes from its mortal life and evaluate the lessons of its previous incarnation on the Material Plane. Only when it has worked through the psychological troubles of its past can it proceed further along the River of Souls. As a soul reflects upon and settles its past affairs, it lets go of its ties to these events and begins to forget them, cleansing its soul for the glorious (or terrible) transformations to come. This is why petitioners in the Outer Sphere seldom remember much of their mortal existence, and why most mortals cannot remember anything of their past incarnations on the Material Plane.

The ancient wisdom sometimes analogizes the soul’s final moments as gazing into the Lake of Mortal Reflections, and seeing the whole of one’s existence flash before one’s eyes. The lessons of the manasaputras who guide the occult development of mortals suggest that the greatest esoteric fate is not to simply glance at the lake, but to step fully into its waters and allow them to subsume you. A soul immersed fully in the waters of the Lake of Mortal Reflections sheds the karma and experiences of its past life and, once again, the cleansed monadic soul descends into a new physical body in a cycle of reincarnation. With each subsequent reincarnation, the monad gains a greater appreciation for the experiences of a multitude of different incarnations, underlying the concept of the universal undersoul represented by the Cosmic Fire. With this understanding comes greater control over the soul’s final incarnation as an outsider. According to esoteric lore, the most learned adepts are able to choose their own fates, becoming powerful outsiders, peerless mortal “ascended masters,” or even living gods.

The majority of souls do not reincarnate. When they finish the kama-loka process, their astral forms stand ready for final judgment. For some souls, the kama-loka progresses rapidly, while for others it can take years, decades, or even longer. In the unlikely event of deathbed conversions, renouncements of faith, or disputed soulbinding pacts, advocates for the souls’ potential fates argue with one another.

TRAITS

Purgatory has the following planar traits:

  • Timeless: Age, hunger, thirst, afflictions (such as diseases, curses, and poisons), and natural healing don’t function in Purgatory, though they resume functioning when the traveler leaves Purgatory.
  • Divinely Morphic: Deities with domains in Purgatory can alter the plane at will.
  • Strongly Neutral-Aligned
  • Enhanced Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities with the death descriptor, or from the Death or Repose domains, are enhanced.

Purgatory (Outer Plane (neutral))

Purgatory is a sprawling graveyard where all mortal souls, no matter who or what they were in life, come to stand and be judged. Purgatory contains swathes of unexplored territory and many unexplained mysteries, but most non-natives remain within the confines of the divine domain.

TRAITS

Gravity normal

Time timeless

Realm immeasurable

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment strongly neutral-aligned

Magic enhanced (spells and spell-like abilities with the death descriptor or from the Death or Repose domains are enhanced)

DIVINITIES

Arguably the most powerful and ancient of all the gods (such as the Outer Gods Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Yog-Sothoth).

Psychopomp Ushers The mysterious pantheon of demigods who rule over the psychopomps are known collectively as the ushers.

Outsiders psychopomps, shinigami

Petitioners dead (animated skeletons that are not undead)

Qualities DR 10/bludgeoning, immunity to cold

INFUSIONS

Basic The knowledge that Purgatory awaits us all bolsters your ability to resist the pull of death and to aid others in doing the same. You gain a +1 bonus on Will saves, a +2 bonus on Heal checks to stabilize a dying creature, and a +4 bonus on Constitution checks to stabilize yourself when your hit points are reduced below 0.

Improved You can use death ward once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater Once per day, you can attempt to revoke the unnatural energies that empower an undead creature’s animation. This spell-like ability functions as destruction, save that it is not a death effect and can target only undead creatures. As a spell-like ability, it does not require an expensive focus to function.

Purgatory sits atop an impossibly tall and constantly growing spire of quintessence that extends from the edge of Utopia and stretches up into the depths of the Astral Plane. Purgatory serves as a beacon and destination for the River of Souls, from which the souls of the recently deceased arrive at the plane’s edge and join enormous lines that wind through the realm, awaiting their final judgment to determine their place within the Great Beyond. For all its size and prominence, The majority of the plane consists of vast territories reminiscent of environments on the Material Plane. Determined travelers who overcome Purgatory’s systems for preventing accidental egress can also traverse the length of the Spire itself, a massive rock face riddled with yawning archways that lead into spiraling tunnels and staircases. Explorers have found truly bizarre relics in these shattered passageways, leading some to believe the Spire is what remains of a previous reality that has since ended.

DENIZENS

Purgatory is the land of the dead, and the most populous inhabitants of this plane are the souls of the recently deceased as they stand in line, patiently awaiting their judgments. Most of those who are judged fit to remain within Purgatory become dead petitioners. In their roles as groundskeepers and caretakers for the plane, they are rarely significant or active participants in the plane’s politics. Purgatory, placed as it is in the metaphysical and philosophical center of the Outer Planes, sees far more traffic from other planes than any other Outer Planes, with visitors from the Abyss, Heaven, and everywhere in between traveling to Purgatory on missions as diverse as the visitors themselves.

Aeons Aeons can be encountered in Purgatory, but they are not natives of this realm. They often use Purgatory as a staging point for their own missions through the planes, and in many cases have understandings found throughout Purgatory to facilitate such travels.

Crypt Dragons Purgatory is the home plane of crypt dragons. These creatures emerge from nests of tombstones and skulls within the Graveyard of Souls and often seek out lairs on the Material Plane. There, crypt dragons claim the dead as both their hoard and their subjects: a creature’s earthly remains are treated as precious treasure, and a creature’s soul is considered to be under the dragon’s protection. Crypt dragons even go so far as to escort favored souls through the Astral Plane and represent them. Anyone who perpetuate crimes against a corpse or a soul that a crypt dragon has declared sovereignty over must face the dragon’s wrath.

Psychopomps The most common outsiders within Purgatory are psychopomps, stoic stewards and guides for departed souls. Psychopomps do not cause mortal death (that role among the outsiders of Purgatory being filled by shinigamis) but seek instead to ensure that a deceased soul’s judgment and journey to its ultimate afterlife proceed smoothly. This is far from a simple task, as psychopomps often have to battle marauding predators that feed upon hapless souls, locate confused or rebellious spirits who attempt to flee their fate, or deal with those who would subvert the natural order with soul-binding magics or necromancy. They also serve as respected neutral parties, as they work with denizens of many planes equally and disperse judged petitioners out into the Great Beyond.

Table: Purgatory Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–2 1 othaos 5
3–12 2d6 dead petitioners 6
13–17 1d10 esoboks 8
18–25 2d6 nosois 8
26–30 1 shoki 9
31–35 1d12 viduuses 9
36–38 3 moon hags (coven) 10
39–43 1d10 catrinas 10
44–45 1d8 theletoses 11
46 1 young crypt dragon 12
47–51 2d6 vanths 12
52–54 1d6 algeas 14
55–57 1d6 akhanas 15
58 1 adult crypt dragon 16
59–63 1d8 morrignas 17
64 1 shinigami 17
65 1d3 bythoses 18
66–67 1d6 memitims 18
68 1 lipika 18
69–70 1d3 olethroses 19
71 1 pleroma 20
72 1 yamaraj 20
73 1 ancient crypt dragon 21
74–76 Roll on Abaddon table Varies
77–79 Roll on Abyss table Varies
80–82 Roll on Astral Plane table Varies
83–85 Roll on Utopia table Varies
86–88 Roll on Elysium table Varies
89–91 Roll on Heaven table Varies
92–94 Roll on Hell table Varies
95–97 Roll on Limbo table Varies
98–100 Roll on Nirvana table Varies

Quasi-Elemental Plane of Acid

Source 3pp:ToHC

The Quasi-Plane of Acid is a roiling, bubbling sea of deadly acid—an entirely fluid plane, similar to the Elemental Planes of Water, but composed of acid. It is one of the deadliest, if not the deadliest, of all elemental-based planes. For while a traveler can drown on this plane just like it can on the Plane of Water, it usually dissolves in the corrosive acid long before that happens.

The acids making up this plane maintain a constant and comfortable temperature (forgetting about the acidic nature of the plane for a moment). The plane itself is constantly in motion. There are a few islands floating throughout the acid, constructed of an alien material that seems to be impervious to the corrosiveness of this plane. Still elsewhere, they are thought to be air pockets where air-breathers can survive, though locating such a pocket isn’t easy.

Planar features of the Quasi-Plane of Acid are whirlpools, tidal waves, fume clouds (only in air pockets), and dilution zones.

TRAITS

The Quasi-Plane of Acid has the following planar traits:

Quasi-Elemental Plane of Lightning

Source 3pp:ToHC

Bits of air, smoke, and ice swirl throughout an eternal lightning storm. Grayish clouds (thunderclouds it appears) litter the area and lightning streaks away from them and into the void of this plane. A thick smell of sulfur and ammonia permeates the air here. There is no solid surface, but there is an atmosphere and air-breathers function fine on this plane.

Flying creatures find themselves at a great advantage on this plane. While travelers without flight can survive easily here, they are at a disadvantage. Creatures carrying metal objects or weapons, or creatures wearing metal armor are at an even bigger disadvantage.

Planar features of the Quasi-Plane of Lightning are lightning storms, lightning bursts, electromagnetic eruptions, and thunderstorms.

TRAITS

The Quasi-Plane of Lightning has the following planar traits:

  • Gravity: Subjective directional gravity. Inhabitants of the plane determine their own “down” direction. Objects not under the motive force of others do not move.
  • Time: Normal time. Time passes here the same as it does on the Material Plane. One hour on the Quasi-Plane of Lightning equals one hour on the Material Plane.
  • Size: Finite size.
  • Morphic Traits: Alterable morphic. Objects remain where they are (and what they are) unless affected by physical force or magic. You can change the immediate environment as a result of tangible effort.
  • Elemental Traits: Air-dominant.
  • Enhanced Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities that use, manipulate, or create air or electricity (including related or relevant domain spells) are both empowered and enlarged (as if the Empower Spell and Enlarge Spell metamagic feats had been used on them, but the spells don’t require higher-level slots).
  • Impeded Magic: Spells and spell-like abilities that use or create earth (including spells of the Earth domain and spells that summon earth elementals or outsiders with the earth subtype) are impeded.

Quasi-Elemental Plane of Obsidian

Source 3pp:ToHC

The Quasi-Plane of Obsidian exists where elemental earth and fire conjoin. It is a plane of barren wastes and blackened rock, of razor-sharp obelisks and fields of sharpened glass.

The Quasi-Plane of Obsidian is survivable and comfortable with varying temperatures and the occasional rainstorm or breeze. There are pockets on this plane considered earth-dominant where a traveler could become entombed in the plane and crushed into nothingness. Such areas are rare, but dangerous nonetheless.

Planar features of the Quasi-Plane of Obsidian are shard storms, earthquakes, and glass storms.

TRAITS

The Quasi-Plane of Obsidian has the following planar traits:

Shadow Plane (Inner Plane (Transitive))

The Shadow Plane is a dimly lit dimension that is both coterminous to and coexistent with the Material Plane. It overlaps the Material Plane much as the Ethereal Plane does, so a planar traveler can use the Shadow Plane to cover great distances quickly. The Shadow Plane is also coterminous to other planes. With the right spell, a character can use the Shadow Plane to visit other realities. The Shadow Plane is a world of black and white; color itself has been bleached from the environment. It otherwise appears similar to the Material Plane. Despite the lack of light sources, various plants, animals, and humanoids call the Shadow Plane home.

The Shadow Plane is a dimly lit, murky mirror of the Material Plane, warped by proximity to the Negative Energy Plane and inhabited by sinister beings and undead.

The warped relationship between the Shadow and Material Planes offers a particular utility in that the distance between locations is frequently skewed, as if those spaces that receive little attention in the Material Plane simply fade away. While both planes are immeasurable, the Shadow Plane is smaller than the Material Plane, and as such, it can be used to vastly decrease the amount of time it takes to travel between two points on the Material Plane. Shadow walk is the most common method of using the Shadow Plane to travel swiftly from one point to another on the Material Plane in this manner. However, the same warped dimensions that make transit swifter also make judging distances accurately virtually impossible, and travelers can return to the Material Plane at only an approximation of their intended location— if they return at all.

TRAITS

The Shadow Plane has the following planar traits:

DENIZENS

D’ziriaks: Despite the perpetually dim nature of the Shadow Plane, it supports a surprising variety of life. Several types of plants have developed within the shadows, all of them eerie, twisted, and colorless reflections of species found on the Material Plane. Likewise, animals suited to the darkness prowl the plane, from shadows and shadow mastiffs to gloomwings, umbral dragons, tenebrous worms, and various nightshades. Sentient species also make their home on the Shadow Plane, but few are welcoming to visitors from other realities. The unusual nature of d’ziriak society combines with their appearances—something between humanoid and termite, with elaborate luminescent patterns across their bodies— to unsettle most outsiders. These colorful exoskeletons are strangely unaffected by the Shadow Plane’s penumbral gloom. D’ziriaks maintain a complex social structure, most of it hidden within their extensive, partially underground cities lit through a combination of alchemical and illusory lighting and the creatures’ own natural bioluminescence.

Fetchlings Descendants of humans that were long ago trapped on the Shadow Plane, fetchlings are perhaps the most familiar Shadow Plane denizens to those on the Material Plane. They are a distinctive species, exceptionally slender and bleached of most natural coloring beyond pale yellow eyes, but many fetchlings value extraplanar pigments to dye their hair in striking colors when visiting other worlds (such colors remain muted in their home plane). They are among the most populous of the plane’s residents, establishing humanoid settlements far and wide—often overlapping with Material Plane counterparts.

Kyton Demagogues Many kytons have their own divine leaders. The nine kyton demagogues maintain their own realms on the Shadow Plane, known as sanctuaries, ranging from meeting spaces to mind-shattering mazes to an exhibition of the culmination of kyton artistry.

Owbs The mysterious owbs, floating humanoid torsos draped in shadows darker than those of the plane around them, are the least understood of the Shadow Plane’s denizens. Rarely encountered, their only relations with other races are their ties to the caligni and dark folk of the Material Plane, to whom they appear as divine guides. The most disturbing legends speak to the possibility that the owbs may be all that remains of a long-forgotten pantheon of demigods—a pantheon that may be gathering power once again.

Shadow Giants Shadow giants roam the reaches of their vast territories, eschewing permanent settlements in favor of a nomadic lifestyle. They typically gather into familial units, traveling and hunting in these tight-knit groups, but different families are known to join together into larger tribes in times of war. With a reputation as fierce warmongers, shadow giants are rightfully feared and respected by many of the plane’s other denizens, but more than one traveler has found that the right combination of deference and battle prowess can win their respect and fair treatment in return. Most, however, prefer simply to keep to their own settlements and stay out of the nomads’ paths.

Shaes Shaes encountered on the Material Plane wear masks and garments that give a discrete form to their shadowy bodies. Among their own kind, however, they dispense with such accommodations, defaulting to their unfixed forms of pure shadowstuff. They maintain one city on the Shadow Plane as their homeland, and in many ways they exhibit typical humanoid social structures. An overwhelming sense of racial pride, however, limits their interactions with outsiders, and few non-shaes are allowed within their elegant citadel.

Svartalfars A race of fey remarkable in that they are native to the Shadow Plane, svartalfars were long ago exiled here from the Fey World. In the countless ages since, they have formed into powerful clans of assassins, hiring their services to anyone who can pay the esoteric fees they demand—typically arcane secrets, occult lore, and obscure information about the Fey World. No one has ever catalogued the number of vast underground libraries the svartalfars maintain hidden away throughout the Shadow Plane, though certain groups, fearing that the creatures are planning a terrible revenge upon those who forced them out, would pay dearly to learn more.

Velstracs (Kytons) Perhaps the most widely-known (and certainly the most notorious) denizens of the Shadow Plane, the vicious kytons (or velstracs, as they call themselves) have made the Shadow Plane their home since they were exiled eons ago from the reaches of Hell. Their demigod leaders—demagogues— maintain their realms here, while others of their kind take up residence nearby or in isolated communes where they strive to perfect themselves and their chosen torments. Countless velstracs practice their arts on the souls of those damned to the Midnight Lord.

Wayangs Only a few elusive wayangs remain on the Shadow Plane, as the majority of their kind ventured through a series of breaches to the Material Plane only to become trapped there forever. A handful have since managed to find their way back to the Shadow Plane in the ages since, finding themselves as isolated and alone here as they had been on the Material Plane.

DIVINITIES

Kyton demagogues

Outsiders d’ziriaks, fetchlings, kytons, owbs, shaes

Petitioners mutilated (covered in bleeding wounds)

Qualities regeneration 2 (good spells and weapons), immunity to fear

INFUSIONS

Basic You can see clearly in shadowy conditions to a short range. In every square in your space, and in all squares adjacent to your space, you treat conditions of dim light as normal light.

Improved You have the ability to use shadow conjuration once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater The essence of shadow so infuses your being that you sometimes exist only partially when subjected to damage. As an immediate action when you would take damage from an attack, spell, or other effect, you can reflexively dissolve the portion of your body that would be injured into quasireal shadowstuff to gain a 50% chance to ignore all the damage from the effect. You can successfully ignore damage in this way up to three times per day—if you activate this ability and it fails to prevent damage, it does not count against your limited daily uses of the ability. A disorienting expanse cloaked in never-ending night, the Shadow Plane is a dark, twisted mirror of the Material Plane. It exists as an insulating layer between the Material Plane and the Negative Energy Plane, and it overlaps the Material Plane much as the Ethereal Plane does, though its actual reaches are warped and distorted. Darkness covers the plane, yet shadows cannot exist without light. There is no day-night cycle in this world—the ambient light remains constantly at dim illumination, indoors or out, but the source of this illumination is never apparent. Shadows shift and move on their own as if the source of this mysterious light were constantly and randomly changing. While the perpetual gloom mutes most traces of color from the plane, it doesn’t draw away heat, and thus the Shadow Plane remains relatively comfortable to most creatures. As a distorted reflection of the Material Plane, the Shadow Plane features many locations similar to those found elsewhere, but these counterparts are altered, sinister, and strange by comparison. Overhead is an endless expanse of perpetual night, devoid of any moon, stars, or even clouds; a sooty gloominess so endless it becomes claustrophobic.

Table 3–5: Shadow Plane Encounters
d% Encounter Avg. CR
1–4 Small voidboil 2
5–7 1d8 fetchlings 3
8–9 2d6 wayangs 4
10–13 1 gloomwing 4
14–15 1d6 shadow drakes 5
16–18 Voidboil 5
19–20 1d8 augurs 6
21–25 2d6 mutilated petitioners 6
26–32 1d8 shadows 7
33 1d4 owbs 8
34–38 2d6 d’ziriaks 8
39–43 1 greater shadow 8
44–48 1d8 ostiariuses 9
49–55 1d8 shadow mastiffs 9
56–58 1 vampire sorcerer 9
59–60 1 young umbral dragon 10
61–70 1d8 kytons 10
71–73 2d6 shaes 10
74–76 1d6 tenebrous worms 11
77–79 1d12 svartalfars 12
80–81 1d4 sacristans 12
82 1 apostle kyton slayer 12
83 Potent voidboil 12
84 1 shadow roper (or other shadow creature) 13
85 1d4 oitoses 13
86 1 adult umbral dragon 14
87–88 1d6 interlocutors 15
89–93 1d6 shadow giants 16
94–95 1d6 nightwings 17
96 1d4 nightwalkers 18
97 1 ancient umbral dragon 19
98 1d3 nightcrawlers 20
99 1 nightwave 20
100 1 eremite 20
Exploration

Though the Shadow Plane is less immediately harmful than the adjacent Negative Energy Plane and may at first glance seem safer than the perilous stretches of Hell or the Abyss, it carries many of its own dangers.

North on the Shadow Plane functions in the same way as on the Material Plane region with which the realm overlaps.

Magic on the Shadow Plane

Spells with the shadow descriptor are enhanced on the Shadow Plane. Shadow conjuration and shadow evocation spells are 30% as powerful as the conjurations and evocations they mimic (instead of 20%). Greater shadow conjuration and greater shadow evocation are 70% as powerful (instead of 60%), and shades conjures at 90% of the power of the original (instead of 80%). Despite the gloomy nature of the Shadow Plane, spells that produce, use, or manipulate darkness are unaffected.

Spells with the light descriptor or that use or generate light or fire are impeded on the Shadow Plane. Spells that produce light are less effective in general, because all light sources have their ranges halved on the Shadow Plane (see Vision on the Shadow Plane, below).

Shifting Shadows

Parts of the Shadow Plane continually flow into other planes. As a result, creating a precise map of the plane is next to impossible, despite the presence of landmarks. In addition, certain spells, such as shadow conjuration and shadow evocation, modify the base material of the Shadow Plane. The utility and power of these spells here become enhanced (see above) as they are able to tap into the morphic nature of the realm.

Vision on the Shadow Plane

The ambient lighting on the Shadow Plane is dim illumination, regardless of whether one is outside or indoors. The source of this dim light is never apparent and seems to shift and change. Light sources from mundane and magical sources alike can brighten this illumination but their ranges are halved. Magical darkness effects reduce illumination levels normally.

Voidboils (CR 2, 5, or 12)

Due to the plane’s proximity to the Negative Energy Plane, portions of the Shadow Plane occasionally erupt with gouts of what appears to be black lightning and fire that tear through the planar fabric itself. Sometimes, a voidboil can be predicted by tumorlike growths that rapidly buckle the land around them and vent small sprays of negative energy (a creature that succeeds at a DC 20 Knowledge [planes] check has 1d4 rounds to prepare for the eruption), but just as often they are sudden outbursts with no warning. A typical voidboil sprays negative energy in a 30-foot-radius burst from its point of origin. A creature can avoid the spray of energy with a successful DC 16 Reflex save; those caught within the burst take 6d6 points of negative energy damage (CR 5). Smaller voidboils (CR 2) deal only 2d6 points of damage in a 20-foot-radius burst (Reflex DC 12 negates), while particularly large or potent voidboils (CR 8) can deal up to 10d6 points of damage in a 60-foot-radius burst (Reflex DC 22 half ) and persist for 1d6 rounds.

Utopia (Lawful Neutral)

Utopia is a bastion of order against the chaos of Limbo and the countless demonic hordes of the Abyss. A great city of eternal perfection, Utopia‘s streets and buildings are paragons of architecture and aesthetics; everything is ordered and nothing happens by chance. While no one race rules Utopia, axiomites and inevitables make their homes here, forever striving to expand their perfect city.

TRAITS

Utopia has the following planar traits:

Demiplanes

Akashic Record (Demiplane)

Source PPC:PHH

A demiplane lying deep within the Astral Plane, the Akashic Record is an infinite library said to contain all knowledge in existence. This information is preserved in psychic form, curated and protected by the unwavering dedication of the outsiders known as aeons. Though this demiplane exists in the Astral Plane, it seems impossible to gain access from that realm. Instead, legends tell of explorers entering the Akashic Record through the elusive Dimension of Time.

Those who find their way to the Akashic Record are said to enter a sort of reading room, where they can access a small portion of the plane’s catalog under the aeons’ strict supervision. In spite of these tales, there is currently no known method to access the Akashic Record.

Apocalypse Archive (Demiplane)

When worlds die, a fragment is claimed and preserved in the mysterious Apocalypse Archive.

TRAITS

Gravity normal

Time timeless

Realm finite

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment strongly law-aligned

Magic limited (spells that target or attempt to affect any of the structures in The Apocalypse Archive fail unless the caster succeeds at a DC 30 caster level check; whenever such spells are successful, a watcher arrives shortly thereafter to investigate)

DENIZENS

Outsiders watchers*

Petitioners collected (animated statue-like exemplars of their previous races) The Apocalypse Archive’s petitioners, called the collected, do not serve a deity. They typically number one per destroyed world, each taken from among the last casualties in that world’s apocalypse. While they still forget their own personality like most petitioners, the collected each retain factual information about their lost home worlds and can attempt any Knowledge checks relevant to their worlds’ geography, history, and other vital statistics untrained with a +8 racial bonus. Most collected have never known visitors to The Apocalypse Archive, but if adventurers were to cross the demiplane’s threshold, despite being the first such travelers in eons, they would find that most collected are more than willing to share information about their lost worlds, at least as long as the inquiry comes in one of their worlds’ longforgotten languages. Collected cling to their own personal world fragments, and their afterlives are lonely existences, each an isolated oddity bound in a metaphysical cage while the watchers do little but watch, providing little in the way of company. Only the Oliphaunt’s occasional rumbling presence punctuates their monotony, bringing with it a moment of nearly recalled panick and final desperation dangling like a stray thread of the petitioner’s lost memories.

Qualities DR 5/bludgeoning, immunity to bleed effects

INFUSIONS

Basic The power of the Watcher infuses your being, granting you resistance against entropy. You gain a +4 bonus on saving throws against effects that reduce your body to dust (such as destruction or disintegrate) and on saving throws against confusion effects and spells with the chaos descriptor.

Improved You can use order’s wrath once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use dictum once per day as a spell-like ability.

DeadLands (Demiplane)

The DeadLands is a demiplane crafted for but one purpose: to imprison a god.

TRAITS

Gravity heavy, objective directional (see below)

Time normal

Realm finite

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment strongly chaotic-aligned, strongly evil-aligned

Magic normal

DENIZENS

Outsiders qlippoth

Petitioners caged (chained incarnations of their mortal bodies with faces that unfold into horrific insectile maws)

Qualities regeneration 2 (lawful), replace slam attack with a bite attack

INFUSIONS

Basic The DeadLands’s inexorable strengths suffuse you, making you difficult to move against your will and enhancing your ability to detain others. You gain a +4 bonus to CMD against combat maneuvers that attempt to force you to change position (such as bull rush or reposition), and a +4 bonus on grapple checks to maintain an existing grapple.

Improved You can use dimensional anchor as a spell-like ability once per day.

Greater You can use forcecage as a spell-like ability once per day, but only to create a windowless cell.

Harrowed Lands (Demiplane)

A demiplane crafted in the images found upon the deck of Harrow cards, the Harrowed Lands are ruled today by its treacherous prisoners.

TRAITS

Gravity normal

Time special (time passes normally in the Harrowed Realm; creatures in the demiplane must still eat, drink, and sleep normally, but they do not age)

Realm unbounded

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment mildly neutral-aligned

Magic limited (spells that transport a creature to another plane function only if the caster succeeds at a DC 30 caster level check; spells of the conjuration [summoning] subschool function only if the caster succeeds at a DC 20 caster level check)

DENIZENS

Outsiders varies:

Petitioners none

INFUSIONS

Basic Once per day, you can draw a card from a Harrow deck to randomly choose one of the six ability scores. (Players who don’t have an actual Harrow deck can instead roll 1d6 to randomly determine an ability score.) At any point during the next 24 hours, you can gain a +2 bonus on a single d20 roll modified by that ability score. You can add this bonus after the die is rolled, but must do so before you learn the outcome of the roll.

Improved The bonus granted by your basic infusion is now +4, and you can apply the bonus on two different d20 rolls during the day.

Greater The bonus granted by your basic infusion is now +6, and you can apply the bonus on three different d20 rolls during the day. Alternatively, you can expend all three uses for the day to apply the bonus on a d20 roll after you’ve learned the outcome of the roll.

Leng (Demiplane)

The dreaded Plateau of Leng lurks at the edge of all nightmares, a realm inhabited by eldritch horrors and ruled by their ancient gods.

TRAITS

Gravity normal

Time normal

Realm finite

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment strongly chaotic-aligned, mildly evil-aligned

Magic normal

DIVINITIES

Entities of the Elder Mythos

Outsiders denizens of Leng, scarlet walkers, wendigos

Petitioners lost (haunted, sleep-deprived versions of their previous lives)

Qualities immunity to cold and adverse effects of high altitude, but not to mind-affecting effects; no breath

INFUSIONS

Basic You can infuse the menace of Leng into everything you do. You gain a +2 bonus on Intimidate checks to demoralize foes, and you increase the save DC of supernatural fear effects you create by 1.

Improved You can use confusion once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use contact entity IV once per day as a spell-like ability but must still supply the required material component.

Those who travel too far in their exploration of the Dreamlands may find themselves caught up in a vast sea where the tides carry them away, only to wash them up on the shores of the Plateau of Leng.

Leng is a realm of nightmares, a cold and desolate world populated by inscrutable alien entities. Although the Plateau of Leng is finite in size, the scope of its truths and horrors is incomprehensible to mortal minds. The demiplane consists of a vast wasteland plateau nestled between two mountain ranges that converge at the most distant point from the Dreaming Shore in a region known as the Cold Waste. Nightgaunts and Leng hounds fly across the desolate landscape, searching for prey to bring to their dark masters. In scattered villages, degenerate, vaguely humanoid beings and the scaly, birdlike shantaks perform depraved rituals to appease their frightening gods. For those who come close enough to witness such gruesome acts, a quick death is a rare mercy, as these creatures’ concentrated malice is enough to shatter the mind and scar the soul. Only the strongest-willed witnesses manage to avoid being inexorably drawn into the ritual themselves. Occasionally, the creatures bring their sacrifices directly to the Prehistoric Monastery, where a hideous high priest not to be described rules.

Travelers who seek to escape Leng may think to flee across the ocean from the Dreaming Shore in hopes that they eventually return to the Dreamlands. The Dreaming Shore is far from lifeless, however. Humanoid-shaped creatures with fanged maws and voluminous robes, known only as denizens of Leng, ply its waters, bringing in slaves captured from both the Dreamlands and the waking world.

Many of these ships are bound for Nameless Rock, an island where the denizens’ moon-beast masters maintain temples to their unspeakable gods.

They eagerly capture and torment anyone foolish enough to wander near their lairs. Another race of spiderlike outsiders, scarlet walkers, feed on the blood and tissue of living creatures.

The true horrors of Leng’s mountains increase as travelers draw closer to their highest, central peak. A row of sentient and malevolent statues marks the border of the Cold Waste, beyond which eternal night reigns. At the top of Leng’s tallest mountain stands the fortified castle city of unknown Kadath, its towers reaching several miles above the mountain’s peak and casting its dread shadow across the entire realm. Though it is nearly impossible to find sources who can credibly claim to have survived the journey to Kadath, it is said that strange and unknown gods from many worlds dwell within its chambers, with the Outer God Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, ruling the city above all others.

Land of Dread (Demiplane)

Drifting in the depths of the Ethereal Plane is the fearful domain of the sahkils.

TRAITS

Gravity normal

Time normal

Realm finite

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment strongly evil-aligned

Magic enhanced (spells with the fear descriptor increase their save DCs by 2 and have a +2 bonus on caster level checks to penetrate SR)

DIVINITIES

Sahkil tormentors

Outsiders sahkils

Petitioners terrorized (sickly humanoids with oddly disproportionate joints)

Qualities immunity to death effects, disease, and poison

INFUSIONS

Basic The dread horrors of The Land of Dread infuse your being, and there is little that can further unnerve you. Increase the save DC of fear effects you create by 1, and you gain a +2 bonus on all saving throws against fear effects.

Improved You can use phantasmal killer as a spell-like ability once per day.

Greater You can use insanity as a spell-like ability once per day.

The Land of Dread is a haunted realm designed to torture souls by manifesting and augmenting their deepest fears. Distilled terror forms the foundation and substance of the Land of Dread, coalescing into the form of a ruined city on a hill surrounded by blighted landscapes. The Land of Dread is not bound by the laws of the Material Plane. The expansive caverns below the hill taunt mortal perceptions, twisting space and even seemingly slowing time to produce an endless and inescapable array of panick-inducing chambers. The House of the Bat is only one such chamber, one of the three realms of a bat god. When travelers reach The Land of Dread, the plane watches and lurks, suffocating them in its raw malice. It plagues its targets with piercing wails of suffering and whispered threats, followed by stretches of oppressive silence to allow its victims’ minds to dwell upon their situation. Over time, the plane slowly migrates these pitiable souls to the places best suited to enact their worst nightmares.

The Land of Dread’s masters are the sahkils, a race of outsiders driven by the desire to rule over hordes of souls broken through the relentless exploitation of each soul’s darkest imaginings. Foremost among the sahkils are the demigod sahkil tormentors, who reign from the Black Pyramid at the city’s center and concoct ruinous plots in the pyramid’s halls and the nigh-infinite caverns of anguish below.

The Land of Dread’s nature defies narrow classification. From the outside, it appears to be a seamless part of the Ethereal Plane, and unsuspecting ethereal travelers can wander right into it.

The Land of Dread’s borders reach out unpredictably into the ethereal mists, answering to both their own hunger and the sahkils’ will. As an alternative to simply walking in from the Ethereal Plane, however, brave and foolhardy souls who wish to journey to The Land of Dread of their own volition can reach it directly using planar travel magic. Most such magic functions with cruel accuracy, depositing crusaders in front of the broken souls they wished to rescue or desperate lovers in front of the shattered remnants of their partners.

Star Realm (Demiplane)

TRAITS

Gravity light

Time normal

Realm finite

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment strongly chaos-aligned, strongly good-aligned

Magic enhanced (spells and spell-like abilities with the chaotic good descriptor, beneficial dream-related spells), impeded (spells and spell-like abilities with the lawful or evil descriptor, harmful dream-related spells)

DENIZENS

Outsiders azatas, cynosomas*

Petitioners chosen dreamers (idealized and softly glowing versions of souls’ mortal bodies)

Qualities resistance 10 to cold and fire 10, +2 Charisma

INFUSIONS

Basic You remain alert as you sleep and have more control over effects that force you to slumber. Perception check DCs are not modified for you when you are asleep, and you gain a +4 bonus on all saving throws against sleep effects.

Improved You can use air walk once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use dream travel once per day as a spell-like ability. When you do so, you roll twice to determine how accurate your arrival is at the end of the journey and take the better of the two results as your actual result.

The azatas are often more serene and less wild than their Elysian kin, but they share the same love of beauty and freedom. Rarer are the cynosomas, the so-called “moth angels”. Shy and retiring, these delicate outsiders prefer the more secluded corners of the plane.

The most common threats come from without—evil invaders crossing over from the Dimension of Dreams or the Plateau of Leng, or malevolent spacefarers such as mi-go or neh-thalggus entering through the star paths. While the natives are long accustomed to repelling such incursions, any visitor who stands beside them in the demiplane’s defense may be rewarded. These rewards rarely come in the form of material wealth: Dwellers instead offer blessed dreams and wanderers’ lore, solace, and secrets.

Woven Museum (Demiplane)

As much a museum as anything else, this world within a magical tapestry was created to serve as a menagerie and repository of sites and cultures from the Material Plane.

TRAITS

Gravity normal

Time normal

Realm finite

Structural lasting

Essence mixed

Alignment mildly neutral-aligned

Magic normal

DENIZENS

Outsiders varies

Petitioners none

INFUSIONS

Basic You become sensitive to the reality-warping presence of extradimensional spaces and magical portals. You can use Perception or Knowledge (planes) in place of Spellcraft to identify magic items, spells, and magical effects associated with such effects as if using detect magic.

Improved You can use dimension door once per day as a spell-like ability.

Greater You can use mage’s magnificent mansion once per day as a spell-like ability.

Section 15: Copyright Notice

Pathfinder RPG GameMastery Guide. © 2010, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Authors: Cam Banks, Wolfgang Baur, Jason Bulmahn, Jim Butler, Eric Cagle, Graeme Davis, Adam Daigle, Joshua J. Frost, James Jacobs, Kenneth Hite, Steven Kenson, Robin Laws, Tito Leati, Rob McCreary, Hal Maclean, Colin McComb, Jason Nelson, David Noonan, Richard Pett, Rich Redman, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Amber Scott, Doug Seacat, Mike Selinker, Lisa Stevens, James L. Sutter, Russ Taylor, Penny Williams, Skip Williams, Teeuwynn Woodruff.

Pathfinder Campaign Setting: The Inner Sea World Guide. © 2011, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Authors: Keith Baker, Wolfgang Baur, Clinton J. Boomer, Jason Bulmahn, Joshua J. Frost, Ed Greenwood, Stephen S. Greer, Jeff Grubb, James Jacobs, Michael Kortes, Tito Leati, Mike McArtor, Rob McCreary, Erik Mona, Jason Eric Nelson, Jeff Quick, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Leandra Christine Schneider, David Schwartz, Amber E. Scott, Stan!, Owen K.C. Stephens, Todd Stewart, James L. Sutter, Greg A. Vaughan, Jeremy Walker, and JD Wiker.

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Occult Adventures © 2015, Paizo Inc.; Authors: John Bennett, Logan Bonner, Robert Brookes, Jason Bulmahn, Ross Byers, John Compton, Adam Daigle, Jim Groves, Thurston Hillman, Eric Hindley, Brandon Hodge, Ben McFarland, Erik Mona, Jason Nelson, Tom Phillips, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, Thomas M. Reid, Alex Riggs, Robert Schwalb, Mark Seifter, Russ Taylor, and Steve Townshend.

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Planar Adventures © 2018, Paizo Inc.; Authors: Robert Brookes, John Compton, Paris Crenshaw, Eleanor Ferron, Thurston Hillman, James Jacobs, Isabelle Lee, Lyz Liddell, Ron Lundeen, Joe Pasini, Lacy Pellazar, Jessica Price, Mark Seifter, F. Wesley Schneider, Todd Stewart, James L. Sutter, and Linda Zayas-Palmer.

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