Description
The planes surrounding Exandria are similar to the planes presented in fifth edition lore. Below are brief descriptions of some of the planes that a party of powerful adventurers may travel to. These planes go by many poetic and fanciful names.
Material Plane
The Material Plane is a land where natural laws work as we expect. It is a place of all four elements, and of plants, animals, and minerals. Exandria is but one of many worlds on the Material Plane—though none but the most accomplished astronomers have become aware of this fact, much less devised a way of traveling between material worlds.
Elemental Planes
When the Protean Gods discovered Exandria, it was like a barren ship adrift in a sea of churning, chaotic elements. As a part of their creation, the elements were thrust away from the world. Some theorize that the Elemental Planes were created from this banished chaos, while others believe the elemental chaos seeped into the Material Plane from tears in the fabric of the planes.
The latter may be more likely, as rifts between the Elemental Planes can be found across Exandria. The largest of these rifts are tended to by the four Ashari civilizations, and any who gaze within find wild wastelands of pure elemental power: roiling seas of fire, towering mountains of gnashing stone, infinite skies filled with cloud-top settlements, and endless, stormy oceans of water.
Faerie, Shadow, and Ether
Parallel to Exandria are odd reflections of its reality. The Fey Realm is a plane of natural beauty and ferocity, inhabited by fey folk. The Plane of Shadow is a dour, sinister mirror of the world that is. And the Ethereal Plane is a hazy film across the material world, as if it were viewed through an old, cloudy mirror, inhabited not only by restless spirits, but also by predators that target those who cling to the world of the living.
Astral Plane
All the prior planes exist directly adjacent to the Material Plane, buttressing and occasionally co-mingling with its inhabitants. All the planes that follow are separated from the material world by a vast sea of starlight, barren asteroids, and misty nebulae of unpredictable magic. In the ancient past, arcanists had to craft vessels to sail the treacherous sea of stars to travel between their home plane and the mysterious Outer Planes.
These days, magic such as the plane shift spell has allowed planar travelers to bypass these methods, but there are still a number of strange creatures and forgotten, imprisoned demigods who float eternally through the Cosmic Sea.
Outer Planes
The “Prime Deities” imprisoned the “Betrayer Gods” in prison planes after the “Founding”, and retired to planes of their own creation after the “Divergence”. Over time, the divine beings on these planes reshaped their new homes in their own image, creating places where natural laws don’t function as one native to the Material Plane might expect.
All of these planes are strongly aligned to one or more cosmic principles of good, evil, law, and chaos, based on the divine powers that reside there. Because of the Divine Gate established after the “Divergence”, no divine powers can depart these planes, for the sake of all Creation. The gods’ supernatural creations can pass through the Divine Gate, though the more powerful they grow—and thus, the closer they come to divinity—the harder it is for them to pass through. However, mortals and lesser supernatural beings who possess magic to travel between the planes can travel to and from Outer Planes like the Hells, the Abyss, Elysium, and Pandemonium unhindered by the Divine Gate.
Realms Beyond
Far beyond even the divine Outer Planes is a realm where all laws of nature break down completely. Mortal senses have no way of properly perceiving the nature of these far-distant realms, and most minds that try to comprehend them snap under the strain of so much unfamiliar stimulus. These maddening realities and the alien horrors that live within them are mercifully kept away from the known multiverse by the unimaginable distance of space.
Some creatures of the beyond have lurked on the Material Plane since ancient times, perhaps at the invitation of the Chained Oblivion itself, or because the divine powers unleashed in the “Calamity” punched holes in time and space that allowed such aberrations to slither into Exandria unimpeded.
Major known locations of aberrant activity in Tal’Dorei include “Yug’Voril” beneath “Kraghammer”, the “Crystalfen Caverns” beneath “Emon”, and the realm of “Ruhn-Shak” beneath the “Stormcrest Mountains”.
Demiplanes
Massive, infinite spaces such as the Material, Elemental, and Outer Planes are not the only types of reality. Through the use of powerful magic, arcanists can create stable demiplanes—finite pockets of extraplanar reality that they can shape to their whims. These “pocket dimensions” exist as bubbles of floating color within the Cosmic Sea, and can only be traced or penetrated by extremely powerful, lost magical arts.