Shadows of Eternity [OPEN] [WIP]

[The Glyphstone]

The Planar Pyramid

Spoiler: The Planes

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The orientation of the planes can be imagined as a rough pyramidal shape. At the bottom are the five Elemental Planes, the most solid and fundamentally stable. Portals to each of the Elemental Planes can be found in various places on the Material Plane, though most are temporary in nature. Only a rare few locations host permanent, stable portals and they are inevitably guarded jealously by the nations surrounding them. On the Elemental Planes themselves, there are only ever temporary portals between them.

The Plane of Earth is a vast, infinite expanse of rock and soil riven by countless tunnels and caverns. Most of the native elementals are disinterested in visitors, but the Plane itself is enough of a danger to unwary travellers. Cave-ins and collapses can come without warning, or solid ground suddenly crumble into a plunging crevasse.

The Plane of Air is a similarly infinite stretch of empty air, broken up only by floating islands where material from the Plane of Earth passed through a natural portal. Native elementals run the range from aggressive and hostile to invitingly benevolent, but can unpredictably shift from one to the other with little warning. Other hazards include spontaneous thunderstorms and clouds of poisonous or acidic gases, some of which can be very hard to spot from a distance.

The Plane of Water is an endless ocean, with no breathable air except that a traveler provides themselves and almost no visible landmarks to navigate by. Elementals of the plane of water tend to be highly territorial, defending their particular portion of the plane against any intruders including others of their kind but not otherwise aggressive. Few other dangers present themselves - the lack of breathable air alone is enough to make the plane a dangerous place to visit.

The Plane of Life is a massive, primordial forest filled with endless layers of trees and jungle canopies that stack endlessly upon each other, with no discernable ceiling or floor to the growths. The elementals here are more varied in shape and form than any other plane, manifesting as a limitless variety of plants and animals that grow, crawl, and fly between the interwoven branches. Many are predatory as well, making them the most outwardly dangerous of any elemental plane's natives in contrast to the comparatively welcoming environment.

The Plane of Death is an enigma, even to its dedicated scholars. To start with, no mortal can survive inside it - entering a portal to the plane is instantly lethal to any living being. Those souls who are resurrected from death retain no memories of their time on the plane, nor are summoned death elementals ever willing to share details of their home. Only the undead revenant-sorcerers of Wanui have traveled the Plane of Death and returned, and no two of them have ever experienced exactly the same environment - bone-dry deserts of sand, howling icy wastelands, and seething hellscapes of ash and flame have all been described in writing.

'Above' the Elemental Planes sits the Material Plane, home to all sapient mortal life and associated with Present. It is orbited in turn by the Temporal Planes.

The Plane of Dreams is associated with Future, infinite branching possibilities of what might yet become Present.

Its twin is the Plane of Memory, associated with Past and fading echos of what was before. All mortal minds briefly brush against one of the two Temporal planes when waking or asleep, but there are no natural portals to either.

At the very tip of the pyramidal arrangement is the Plane of Faerie, the most fragile and insubstantial of planes. Much like its fae inhabitants, Faerie is an ephemeral and ever-changing place of illusions and phantasms made real. It is highly prone to altering itself in response to the emotions and willpower of sapient minds within it, at time seeming to sport a deliberately malevolent nature and other times merely whimsical. Natural portals between Faerie and the Material Plane open and close seemingly at random, though the magical power of the greater Fae lords allows them to heavily influence such formations. The Fae are also prone to traipsing though Dream and Memory at will, drinking greedily of the sights and emotions they encounter.


Lastly, there are the two quasi-realms referred to as the First World and Second World. Neither are coherent worlds in their own right - rather they are an uncountable number of broken shards from previous iterations of reality, drifting and intermingling in a cloud of non-existence around the pyramid of planes. From time to time, a shard of one or the other will overlap with a plane, temporarily overwriting and altering the laws of physics in its proximity and disgorging its own inhabitants hungry to exist, however destructive and corrupting their presence is to natives. Only concentrated effort of will and violence can force these Outsiders back where they came from, ending the incursion and letting the world begin to heal. The longer an incursion lasts, the more enduring the changes to the area it overlapped with and the harder they are to reverse.

The First World was a place of shifting, seething Chaos, that collapsed due to a lack of Order to give its form any coherency or permanency. Outsiders from the First World are similarly protean, roiling shapeshifters of protomatter that sprout features or appendages without rhyme or reason. The Second World was an impossibly rigid construction of pure Order, build of countless paradoxical contradictions that shatted from a lack of Chaos to give its rules context and flexibility. Outsiders of the Second World are unnatural constructs of crystalline edges and fractal patterns, bending light and space around themselves or fracturing it entirely.

No portals exist to either of the Outside realms, nor can portals be formed. Some deranged cults exist who deliberately attempt to invoke incursions, worshipping the unnatural beings found there, but outside of such activities no travel between a plane and a shard of Outside is possible.