Planes

## The Planes

Secret worlds and invisible domains surround Aarde. Astral dominions, elemental chaos, shadow kingdoms, and faerie realms are all around of Aarde. Most mortals know little of these things, but heroes are a different matter. Heroes often find that adventure calls them to distant and strange dimensions indeed.

### Prime Material Plane

The Prime Material Plane (also called the Prime) is the central plane of existence. The Prime is the plane most similar to real-world Earth, with the same basic physical laws and features. The Prime Material Plane consists of Spacetime and all of its contents, including Aarde. It is spatially infinite, and contains countless stars (and presumably planets) beyond that. Even in multiverse ideology, there is only one Prime Material Plane, which contains many different universes.

### Faerie

The closest of these alternate worlds is Faerie. It is an “echo” of the mortal world, a parallel dimension in which the natural features of the lands and seas are arranged in much the same configuration. If a mountain stands in a given place in the mortal world, a similar mountain stands in a corresponding place in Faerie. However, Faerie is not an exact reproduction. Built structures and terrains are not copied in the faerie realm, so a valley dotted with farm fields and towns in the mortal world would simply exist as untouched, unsettled woodland in Faerie. Faerie’s many vistas can catch your breath with beauty, but it is far from safe.

#### The Elemental Chaos

"Beyond" Faerie lies an infinite expanse of chaos, a place where all fundamental matter and energy seethes. Go too far North, and you enter and endless plane of ice-choked earth; to the east, endless water; to the south, fire; To the west lies fog and air and nothing. All of these are somewhat formless, though, and floating continents of earth, rivers of fire, ice-choked oceans, and vast cyclones of churning clouds and lightning collide in the elemental plane.

Powerful beings tame vast portions of the chaos and shape it to their own desires. Here the efreeti City of Brass stands amid a desert of burning sand illuminated by searing rivers of fire falling through the sky. In other places in the Elemental Chaos, mighty mortal wizards or would-be demigods have erected secret refuges or tamed the living elements to build their domains.

Elemental creatures of all kinds live and move through the Elemental Chaos: ice archons, magma hurlers, thunderbirds, and salamanders. The most dangerous inhabitants are the demons. In the nadir of this realm lies the foul Abyss, the font of evil and corruption from which demonkind springs. The Abyss is unthinkably vast—thousands of miles in extent—and in its maw swirl hundreds of demonic domains, elemental islands, or continents sculpted to suit the tastes of one demon lord or another.

### Ashlands

Just as Faerie is an echo of the natural world, so is Ashlands. However, Ashlands mimics the mortal world in a different manner. Ashlands is the land of the dead, where the spirits of the deceased linger for a time in a dark reflection of their previous lives before silently fading beyond all ken. Some undead creatures are born in Ashlands, and other undead are bound to it, but some living beings dwell in this benighted realm.

Like Faerie, Ashlands also reflects the mortal world imperfectly. Towns, castles, roads, and other objects built by mortal kind exist in Ashlands about where they should be, but they are twisted, ruined caricatures. The Ashlands echo of a thriving seaport in the mortal world might be a dilapidated, desolate port whose harbor is cluttered with the rotting hulks of shipwrecks and whose busy wharves are empty except for a few silent and furtive passersby.

#### The Astral Sea

Beyond the Ashlands lies another extradimensional realm: the Astral Sea. If the Elemental Chaos is the manifestation of physicality, the Astral Sea is a domain of the soul and mind. The divine realms, located in the skies, the dominions of the gods, drift within Astral Sea’s unlimited silver deeps. Some of these are realms of glory and splendor—the golden peak of Mount Celestia, the verdant forests of Arvandor…. Others are below Aarde, and belong to dark powers, such as the Nine Hells where Asmodeus governs his infernal kingdom. A few astral dominions lie abandoned, the ruined heavens and hells of gods and powers that have fallen. Only the mightiest of heroes dare venture into the dominions of the gods themselves.

No one is knows how many astral dominions there are. Some dominions, such as the Nine Hells, are the size of worlds. Others are no larger than cities, rising like shining islets from the Astral Sea. Several dominions have been ruined or abandoned, usually because the gods who made them were destroyed or forgotten. What sorts of treasures—or perils—might slumber in such places, only learned sages could say.

### Deities

Deities are the most powerful (im?)mortal creatures, residents of the countless dominions that swirl through the Astral Sea. They appear in dreams and visions to their followers and wear countless different faces, and artwork depicting them shows them in a variety of forms. Their true nature is beyond any physical form. Eru Ilúvatar is often depicted as a Tuatha, but he is no more an Tuatha than he is a Baloth — he is a god, and he transcends the physical laws that bind even angels to their concrete forms.

Most people revere more than one deity, praying to different gods at different times. Commoners in a small town might visit a temple that has three altars, where they pray to D'ael for protection, Mother Aarde for fertile crops, and Krazadin to aid their skill at crafting. Clerics and paladins more often serve a single deity, championing that god’s particular cause in Aarde.

Are deities truly gods? Are they just powerful aliens? Is there a functional difference?