Conduits (PWH)

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Looking for another way off the Prime Material Plane besides dealing with portals and spells? Search for a conduit. Astral conduits tunnel through the Astral Plane, leading from the Prime to one of the Outer Planes. They only touch the top-most layer of any given plane, as only these layers border the Astral. Conduits seem as instantaneous as portals and gates, but planewalkers who've been on the Astral know that conduits are infinitely long, wispy tubes that stretch through that plane. These arterylike passages whip, twist, and writhe about the Astral, making them hazardous to approach. 
Although it happens extremely quickly, bashers who use astral conduits physically travel through these tubes to reach their destination. This fact is important because some astral monsters, storms, and certain spells can interrupt the natural workings of a conduit and grab a body as he moves through it. In the Astral, a conduit makes a vibratory hum as it's being used, alerting anything nearby. Further, although conduits constantly weave and ebb through Astral space, they buck even more wildly as a body passes through them. These signs tell inhabitants and travelers on the Astral when a conduit's "occupied," giving them an opportunity to interfere if they wish (and are able to affect the conduit). Despite the danger of interference, however, most conduit travel is perfectly safe. Fact is, it happens so fast that berks mistake it for instantaneous transport, not realizing they're made a long trip. 
The difficult part of using a conduit is finding one in the first place. Invisible on both ends to normal sight, it's possible—even common—for things to get drawn into them accidentally. (With a spell like true seeing, a conduit appears like a smoky mirror or a reflective cloud.) This explains the presence of some prime-material monsters on the planes and planar creatures wandering the Prime, especially in the case of young conduits (see below). But because they do move and are hard to find, it's highly improbable that any prime-material town will be invaded by conduit-traveling fiends. Further, there's no way to peer through the conduit or to predict where one leads without a spell or magical item designed to do exactly that. 
Those in the know refer to conduits by their age, since their age determines their stability. Young conduits only work in one direction—they dump a body on another plane with no way back. Young conduits aren't yet fully stable, and sometimes one or both ends move or shift slightly—not to another plane, but to another location on that same plane. Mature conduits remain firmly anchored at both ends, offering two-way passage between two set points. 
Rare in the extreme, ancient conduits once again become unstable, causing them to shift and eventually even fade completely. The conduit ends ground themselves randomly, making them unreliable at best. Thing is, a body can't tell the age of a conduit just by looking at it, so using one may become more of an adventure than a berk expected. 
Conduits usually begin and end in unoccupied spots in the middle of nowhere. In one instance, a mature conduit was found linking the Prime Material and Elysium. A bunch of primes set up a small trading village around their end, and some folks on Elysium did the same. After a year or so, however, the conduit moved. It appeared miles away on the Elysium end and on an entirely different Prime world on the other end. Folks figured that the occupation and activity around its ends (or maws, as they're sometimes called) repelled it somehow. In any case, the tendency for conduits to ground in unoccupied territory means that a planewalker can be fairly sure that if he leaps into a conduit, be won't end up in the middle of Dispater's palace. 
Those bashers who care, like the Guvners, theorize that while somebody—probably a power or some such—put all the portals and gates in place, the conduits formed naturally. Perhaps they're some normal outgrowths of the Astral Plane, or just simply proof that the planes were intended to be connected and interrelated. A more oddball theory suggests that conduits are alive in some sense—although they certainly ain't organic. This'd explain their maturation, since they seem to age like living creatures. Whatever their origin, conduits are fairly stable in general, and so maps of some of them can be bought in Sigil and other locales. The accuracy of the map depends on the trustworthiness of the seller, of course, but a great many conduits have been reliably documented and recorded. 
Although conduits don't require keys (which is certainly a relief to weary gate-key-seeking planewalkers), their use is limited as astral conduits link only to the Prime Material Plane. A body just isn't going to find an astral conduit leading from the Beastlands to Mechanus. If a basher knew the location of an astral conduit to the Beastlands and another to Mechanus, however (assuming that they were either two-way conduits or one-way the necessary way), he could travel from the Beastlands to the Prime and from there to Mechanus. Unfortunately, this plan requires a trip through the Prime Material Plane, which isn't always easy or quick. If the conduits are really far apart—like on different crystal spheres—a planewalker might have to travel on a special craft called a spelljammer to reach it. And not all prime-material worlds are even aware that other worlds exist, or have spelljamming technology....
A few planewalkers tell of conduits that branch, the passages they create splitting off one or more times as they meander through the Astral. This means that if two bashers use the same conduit, they might end up in different places, and probably on completely different planes. Such reports have never been confirmed, however.
==Planar Conduits==
Aside from the fact that planar conduits link different layers of the same plane, these're just like astral conduits: invisible clouds of reflective haze connected by a wispy tube (which is also invisible unless true sight magic is used), just like those described above. Planar conduits can be young, mature, or ancient, and they usually terminate in isolated locales. 
Sometimes travelers believe planar conduits to be keyless, always-active portals. Other times, they appear on paths and take a berk to the next layer without his knowing that he even jumped layers. Portal, path, conduit—in the end, there's not much difference, so it probably doesn't really matter what they're called. 
Now, here's a fact that starts to drive people a little barmy. A few conduits—in defiance of all natural laws—actually seem to connect different layers of different planes. It's said that on the 492nd layer of the Abyss, there's a mature conduit that leads to the first layer of Ysgard. This fact seems to slap the previously mentioned rules governing conduits right in the face. Well, it's things like this that keep the scholars of the planes busy. No one knows why a few exceptional conduits seem to fly right in the face of the laws thought to bind them. A Xaositect or a Bleaker, of course, would see nothing wrong with this, but the exceptions confound folks who expect to see order in such things. 
One explanation is that these aberrant conduits are actually a series of linked planar and astral conduits that take a berk from a deep layer of a plane to the upper layer of a plane, from there to the Prime Material, then into another conduit to the upper layer of the destination plane and down a planar conduit to the ending layer. No one knows exactly how these linked, consecutive conduits are supposed to work. The idea of consecutive conduits arose from the discovery of a conduit that was originally thought to lead from the Elemental Plane of Fire to the first layer of the Atiyss (obviously breaking the rules). It actually was an elemental vortex connecting the plane of Fire to a spot on the Prime Material where a young astral conduit had formed linking the Prime and the Abyss.