Traveling Through Conduits (GAP)

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For the most part, the dead spirits that are on their way to become petitioners don't need any advice on what it's like to travel through a conduit. The spirit is just drawn to the nearest conduit (and conduits always seem to ground themselves near, but not directly in, a populated area) and goes on his way, with no fuss. It's not quite so easy for the living to use them as transport, but plenty of well-lanned folks still do.
==Finding them==
The hardest part about using a conduit is finding one. While a portal has to be within a bounded space, like a doorway, a conduit has no such limitations. The ends of a conduit are invisible holes in space. A spell like true seeing must be used to detect them, in which case the opening looks like a reflective, opaque cloud. There is never a way to determine where the conduit leads by its appearance. Only experience or divination magic will reveal such facts.
Plenty of planar sources claim to have information on conduits and their locations. The Book of Grey Lesh is said to be a good source, but it's already somewhat out of date. The modrons supposedly know of all of the conduits which lead to and from Mechanus. Likewise, it's probable that the baatezu are familiar with most conduits that lead into and out of their own plane. Some primes have done a fairly good job of cataloging the conduits connected with their own prime-material world. 'Course, the Guvners do a good job of keeping up with the shifting positions of conduits, but even their sources are incomplete. A few among their number have made it their life's work to find the order in the spiritweb. They still haven't tumbled to the real dark yet, though. Conduit movement and creation still elude all attempts to predict them. It is a fact that no single (known) source knows of all the conduits in existence. Bodies discover new conduits every day.
Conduits can exist anywhere and are usually so hard to come upon that they can't be found accidentally. Usually is, of course, the key word. A prime author named Thiris Nam Hiarth once wrote a tale called The Stranded Fiend, in which he states the following:
Wings of fury, claws of blood, the horrid creature stood amid the carnage and wept. Though firstly, I thought him to be one with remorse for the horrors that he had committed upon the fair folk of the village, I then was to hear his plaintive cry: "Where is my home, my land, my kindred? How have I been torn from these and brought to this realm of unbefouled air and weak flesh?" I knew then this to be no ordinary monster.
This story and other tales like it indicate that people have accidently blundered into a conduit, only to be hipped on the other end. These stranded sods probably didn't even realize they'd come through a conduit and so didn't even think to discover if they could simply ride it back to where they started.
The other difficulty involved in finding conduits is that they move. Although this movement is usually exhibited in the newer specimens, all conduits move, sometimes only slightly over centuries of time.
==Using them==
Once a body's found a conduit (usually after someone else reveals its location), entering it is pretty easy. No key is needed, for there's no known way to lock or bar a conduit, unless a body happens to be a power. (The drow goddess Lolth once created a set of actions which were required to access a conduit from the prime world of Oerth to her layer of the Abyss, essentially making it no different — in effect — from a portal. Her followers had erected a temple dedicated to her around the underground conduit end, and her avatar was known to spend a good deal of time there, which suggests that the limited-access conduit was a special situation and probably no easy task to maintain.
A body who's entered a conduit doesn't have to do anything to travel through it. There's just a bit of a disorienting pull, and the trip's over. Though he's shooting through a (virtually infinite) astral tunnel, he arrives at the other end in less than a second. No one ever perceives that they've gone through a conduit, because it happens so fast. All the traveler realizes is that he's moved. Some claim they experience a feeling of dizziness, queasiness, or disorientation that doesn't necessarily come with the use of a standard portal or gate.
On the Outer Planes, conduits only connect to the topmost layer of the plane. This connection is so limited because the upper layers are the only layers which border the Astral. This, however, seems to be enough to get the spirits of the soon-to-be-petitioners where they're going.
Movement through a conduit causes it to thrash and whip about on the Astral itself. Anyone within 50 yards of a conduit at such a time might be struck by the whipping tunnel (assume a THAC0 of 15) for 6d6 points of damage. Needless to say, most canny bloods don't go near them. Those that have touched a conduit from the outside say that it feels like both a tingling energy construct and some very smooth, membranous tube. Only specially created items or spells can affect this substance, whatever it is - and those traveling through a conduit cannot affect, harm, or alter it in any way. Since most conduits have a diameter of about 10 feet, a body should think twice before trying to hold on to one - especially if it's thrashing about.