Outlands & Gate Towns
Welcome to the Outlands, the plane of concordant opposition and perfect neutrality at the center of the Great Wheel. This vast disk serves as a buffer where the infinite extremes of the multiverse are held in a delicate, shifting balance.
I. The 16 Major Outer Planes and Their Powers
The Outlands is bordered by 16 Outer Planes, each representing a core philosophical alignment.
- Mechanus (Absolute Law): An infinite machine of grinding gears where every movement is calculated. Primus, the One and the Prime, oversees the modron hierarchy from the realm of Regulus.
- Arcadia (Lawful Good/Neutral): A realm of ordered beauty and harsh conformity. It is governed by the Storm Lords, four elemental paragons of law.
- Mount Celestia (Lawful Good): A seven-layered mountain of ultimate virtue. The Sunweaver (a deity of light) is revered here through High Chancellor Forough.
- Bytopia (Neutral/Lawful Good): A plane of industrious labor where two layers face each other like a sandwich. Dugmaren Brightmantle (Invention) and Dumathoin (Secrets) have realms here.
- Elysium (Neutral Good): The plane of peaceful rest and overwhelming tranquility. It is guarded by monarchs known as the Lightcaller and the Nightwhisperer.
- The Beastlands (Neutral Good/Chaotic Good): A wild patchwork of untamed nature inhabited by Animal Lords. The guardian colossus Wrath watches over its gate.
- Arborea (Chaotic Good): A plane of extreme passion and revelry. It is the home of the elven pantheon and the Seven Spiritors.
- Ysgard (Chaotic Good/Neutral): A heroic domain of endless battle and valor. Annam the All-Father (creator of giants) originated here, though he now hides in the Outlands.
- Limbo (Chaos): A seething mass of elemental soup where thoughts shape reality. It is the home of Slaad Lords and powerful Githzerai sages like Almera.
- Pandemonium (Chaos/Chaotic Evil): A lightless maze of howling winds that drive travelers mad. The giant Cirrus the Silent serves as its distant gatekeeper.
- The Abyss (Chaotic Evil): A bottomless pit of infinite layers and demonic horror. It is ruled by rival demon princes like Demogorgon, Orcus, and Graz’zt.
- Carceri (Neutral/Chaotic Evil): The ultimate prison plane of betrayers and exiles. It holds the Titans and the Burgomaster Villigus Bazengar.
- Hades (Neutral Evil): A gray waste of apathy and hopelessness. High Cardinal Thingol, the Maiden of Misery, rules through a pack of beholders.
- Gehenna (Neutral/Lawful Evil): Four volcanic mounts with no level surfaces, where greed is the only law. It is the home of the mercenary yugoloths.
- The Nine Hells (Lawful Evil): An oppressive bureaucracy of cities made of iron and chains. Asmodeus and the Archdevils enforce rigid, predatory contracts.
- Acheron (Lawful Evil/Neutral): A plane of clashing iron cubes and constant, meaningless war. The goblin god Maglubiyet and the Crown Generals lead its infinite armies.
II. The Gate-Towns: Thresholds of Belief
A ring of sixteen towns sits at the edge of the Outlands, each built around a portal to its respective plane.
- Automata (Mechanus): A perfect street grid of clockwork precision. Unique: Players are attracted to its Inverse, an underground sanctuary for freethinkers and rebels.
- Fortitude (Arcadia): A town of puritanical purity and "ordered beauty". Unique: The Pavilion of Purity, where citizens confess sins to physically drain "shadows" from their souls.
- Excelsior (Mount Celestia): A radiant city of floating gardens and cloud-palaces. Unique: The Godstrand, an ivory tower that tests the hearts of all who climb it.
- Tradegate (Bytopia): The center of Outlands commerce and industriousness. Unique: The Trade Master, a many-horned bariaur who is a living portal.
- Ecstasy (Elysium): A pastoral city of monoliths known as plinths. Unique: The Moondark Tower, which opens only at night for its silver dragon defender.
- Faunel (Beastlands): A "rebirth" of a city amid overgrown tropical ruins. Unique: Its primary citizens are sapient animals who bartered for survival.
- Sylvania (Arborea): A boisterous glade of nonstop revelry and festive music. Unique: Its planar gate moves on a whim through the woods, requiring the Spiritors to find it.
- Glorium (Ysgard): A village of hardened warriors nestled among glacial fjords. Unique: It has two gates—a whirlpool in the bay and a secret root of Yggdrasil.
- Xaos (Limbo): A town as barmy as the chaos it borders, shifting shapes constantly. Unique: The Cube, a modron outpost that reality corrupted into a mechanical horror.
- Bedlam (Pandemonium): A windswept crater filled with runaways and insults. Unique: Sablereach, an obsidian tower shaped like a reaching hand.
- Plague-Mort (Abyss): A demon-infested autocratic cesspool. Unique: Blightsteel Keep, where a bariaur tyrant ignores his subjects' plots.
- Curst (Carceri): A dismal burg where anyone is welcome to enter, but leaving is forbidden. Unique: The Wall Watch uses maelephants to ensure no prisoner escapes.
- Hopeless (Hades): A dreary pit where color leaches from skin and fur. Unique: The Screaming Gate, an archway carved as a howling face.
- Torch (Gehenna): Three volcanic spires where greed is a survival trait. Unique: Reaching the gate requires a literal leap of faith from a caustic precipice.
- Ribcage (Nine Hells): A blackened heart of law and corruption inside a mountain vale. Unique: The Court of Cinders, where devil magistrates rule on "fine print" legal codes.
- Rigus (Acheron): A tiered military encampment where everyone has a rank. Unique: The Crown, where generals use a mile-long lift to lower entire armies to the gate.
Gate Towns found within the Outlands
III. Shifting Perspectives: Magic, Law, and Chaos
The landscape of the Outlands provides a stark contrast to the eternal "Cage" of Sigil.
- Magic and the Spire: Unlike Sigil, where magic functions under the Lady's sufferance, the Outlands is governed by the Spire. As you move spireward, magic begins to fail in concentric rings until all spells are nulled. Invisible antimagic pockets also drift through the Spire's interior, making high-level casting a risk.
- Belief and Authority: In Sigil, the Lady is the absolute, silent authority. In the Outlands, belief literally reshapes the land. Through a phenomenon called Cosmic Realignment, if a gate-town's residents act too much like the plane they border, the town is physically absorbed into that plane.
- Good and Evil: While Sigil is "backstage" where fiends and celestials share drinks, the Outlands Gate-towns are often polarized. In places like Plague-Mort, holiness is a crime, while in Excelsior, evil creatures find the ambient light physically repulsive.
IV. The "Unwritten" Ending: The Modron Vector
Your journey is no longer a simple tour of the City of Doors. You are the "Violation Flags" in a multiverse experiencing Data Drift—a catastrophic failure of cosmic bookkeeping.
Shemeshka the Marauder has sent you to find R04M (Delta-Nine), whom she calls a "rogue accountant". In truth, he is a Logos-Vector, a living cache for illegal war-contracts she seeks to monetize. By tracking his "leakage" across the Outlands, you are collecting the "Accurate Data" needed to replace her poisoned records.
Prepare yourselves: you are no longer just travelers;
You are the Sovereign Authors of the multiverse's next turn of the Wheel.
Gehenna, known to planewalkers as the Fourfold Furnaces or the Fires of Perdition, is a realm of ultimate evil and neutrality defined by a total absence of mercy. The plane consists of four layers—Khalas, Chamada, Mungoth, and Krangath—each of which is an immense volcano floating in the void with a peak at both its top and bottom. These volcanic mounts are hundreds of thousands of miles high, and there is no level ground anywhere on the plane. A traveler who is not anchored to the surface can roll off the slopes of Khalas and fall into the infinite void between the mounts. The environment shifts dramatically across the layers, starting as a fiery and tempestuous landscape in Khalas and cooling until it becomes cold and dead in Krangath.
The yugoloths are the primary residents of Gehenna and act as the "crosstraders" and mercenaries of the Lower Planes, profiting from both sides of the Blood War. Among the most powerful and cunning of their kind are the arcanaloths, who maintain a secretive and dangerous Tower of the Arcanaloths reputed to hold vast archives of forbidden lore. Canny planewalkers also know of the Orb-town of Nimicri, which hangs above the second layer, and the Teardrop Palace, the realm of the power Sung Chiang where anything stolen in the multiverse is likely to be found. The first layer, Khalas, is plagued by lava explosions, acrid steam, and ground so hot it deals fire damage to anyone walking upon it without protection.
Most travelers arrive via the gate-town of Torch in the Outlands, where the planar gate hovers one hundred feet above a volcanic spire. Survival on Gehenna requires significant preparation, as fire-resistant magic is essential and typically costs double or triple the normal price in nearby markets. The plane is also home to the Tacharim, who operate a metallic fortress called the Flower Infernal that uses the polluted waters of the River Styx to fuel its insidious operations. Because the plane mirrors the violence of its inhabitants, destructive spells like fireballs are enhanced when cast within its borders.
Hags, particularly night hags, relate to Gehenna primarily as a vital marketplace for the multiversal soul trade, where they act as the principal merchants of larvae. These hags track the slime trails of the unclaimed damned in the Shadowfell to harvest soul larvae, which they then transport to be sold or bartered as currency across the Lower Planes, including the volcanic mounts of Gehenna. Within Gehenna, hags use these souls to trade for rare goods and services or to pay tribute to more powerful entities, such as the yugoloths who dominate the plane.
The yugoloths of Gehenna maintain a constant demand for these larvae, using them to power infernal machines and demonic devices, creating a permanent economic link between hag covens and the fiery furnaces. Hags also frequent planar hubs like Sigil and its gate-towns, such as Torch (the gateway to Gehenna), where they may hawk rare spell components or bottled spirits like "Swamp Water" gin. In these markets, night hags are often so entrenched in their trade that they refuse any currency other than fresh larvae from Hades, a practice that dictates the flow of wealth into planes like Gehenna.
While the patron goddess of hags, Cegilune, maintains her divine realm of Hag's End in the Gray Waste of Hades, her influence and the "wicked schemes" of her daughters extend into Gehenna's neutral-evil territory. Some hags serve as divine envoys within the Lower Planes, such as Zhelamiss, a night hag who leads a coven and acts as a representative for Cegilune’s interests across planar boundaries. Furthermore, the legendary Hag Countess represents the peak of hag ambition; though she ruled a layer of the Nine Hells, she was a night hag by race and maintained covens of green hags and annises to secure her military and political might throughout the dark planes. Ultimately, hags use Gehenna as a strategic center for cross-trade, capitalizing on the plane's total absence of mercy to profit from the ongoing needs of the Blood War.
The Gray Waste of Hades, often called the Three Glooms, is the Outer Plane of ultimate neutrality and evil. Unlike the structured tyranny of Baator or the chaotic slaughter of the Abyss, Hades represents the quiet, crushing end of all things—a realm of absolute apathy and despair. The plane itself is predatory, possessing a "soul-draining" quality that leaches color, emotion, and eventually memory from anyone who enters its borders, leaving them as listless shells of their former selves.
The Three Glooms of Hades
Hades consists of three layers, known as "glooms," each representing a different facet of the death of hope:
- Oinos: The first gloom is a desolate wasteland defined by disease, decay, and the Blood War. It is the primary staging ground for the eternal conflict between demons and devils, who despoil the land so thoroughly that it has become a scarred expanse of mud, bone, and iron. It is also the home of the yugoloths, who maintain their spinal-column fortress, Khin-Oin, the Wasting Tower, which descends twenty miles into the Blood Rift.
- Niflheim: The second gloom is a land of chilling mists and stunted pine forests. This is the domain of the Norse power Hel and serves as the entry point for the roots of the World Ash, Yggdrasil, which are eternally gnawed upon by the dragon Nidhogg.
- Pluton: The deepest gloom is a featureless gray expanse of never-ending twilight. It contains the realm of Hag’s End, where the goddess Cegilune stirs her cauldrons in a bone-strewn cave beneath a hovering replica of a full moon.
The Gate-Town of Hopeless
In the Outlands, the threshold to Hades is the gate-town of Hopeless. Aptly named, the town is built within a spiraling pit under a perpetually overcast sky, composed of worn gray buildings that trudge listlessly toward the center.
- The Screaming Gate: The only entrance to the town is a garish red stone archway carved in the shape of a howling face, where streaks of red paint run from empty eyes like pained tears.
- High Cardinal Thingol: The town is ruled by the "Maiden of Misery," a tyrant who floats through the streets in an iron mask and robes of rattling chains. She is known for the Gallows, a stage where she disintegration entertainers who fail to move her to feel a single ounce of emotion.
- The Wishless Well: At the center of the town’s lowest pit lies the gate to Hades: a bottomless well bubbling with thick, black gunk. Travelers who submerge themselves in this squelching reservoir arise in Oinos covered in sticky tar.
The Night Hags and the Soul Trade
Hades is the center of the multiversal soul trade. Night hags are the dominant merchants of the plane, stalking the Shadowfell to round up soul larvae—the yellow, grublike monstrosities that represent the unclaimed damned. These hags drive their larvae across the Field of Nettles in Hades to sell them in the markets of the Abyss and the Nine Hells, where they are used as currency, fuel for war machines, or food for demons.
Planar Dangers and Geography
The River Styx meanders through all three glooms, its wine-red, oily waters carrying the threat of permanent amnesia for any who touch it. The environment is further compromised by wasting pigments, a regional effect that leaches color even from a traveler's skin and equipment until they match the ashen tones of the plane.
The Gray Waste is also the original home of the yugoloths, who utilize the plane’s apathy as a neutral ground to broker their mercenary contracts with both sides of the Blood War. Because the plane consumes belief and passion, magic used here is often suppressed, and even the powers themselves must frequently leave Hades to sustain their own identities in more "vibrant" realms.
The Iron Fortress of Rigus
Rigus stands as the ultimate monument to military strength within the Outlands, serving as the threshold to the infinite conflict of Acheron. Constructed upon a seven-tiered hill girded by eight octagonal iron battlements, the town is a massive encampment where every resident—from the lowliest "slate" to the Crown Generals—possesses a military rank. The atmosphere is defined by the punctual call of brass horns and the rhythmic drum of marching boots as warriors hone their bodies for an unending struggle. At the town’s highest district, the Crown, a mile-long wrought-iron staircase descends into a deep, steel-lined bunker containing the Lion’s Gate. This portal, which resembles a burning feline eye, transports armies and war-engines directly to the floating cubes of the plane beyond.
Acheron: The Infinite Battlefield
The plane of Acheron is a realm of absolute law and eternal strife, composed of four layers—Avalas, Thuldanin, Tintibulus, and Ocanthus. Its geography consists of country-sized iron cubes and other geometric masses that float through an infinite, air-filled void. These masses constantly collide, ringing with the sound of metal clashing on metal and creating catastrophic conditions for any units caught on the impacting faces.
- Avalas (The Battleplains): The first layer is the most populous, home to the goblinoid and orc pantheons, where armies clash endlessly over every inch of habitable cube-surface.
- Thuldanin: The second layer serves as a multiversal scrap-heap, littered with the broken war-machines and failed inventions of a thousand civilizations; however, the layer possesses a predatory magic that slowly turns all items and flesh to stone.
The War of the Shattered Compact
Deep within the shifting cubes of Acheron lies the site of the War of the Shattered Compact, a conflict that has ground on for over a millennium. Legally, this engagement was sealed within the ledgers of Mechanus as a "self-consuming lawful conflict," intended to be a closed loop of attrition. Historically, it served as a profit engine where "machine-men" and war-assets were treated as mere requisitioned inventory rather than living souls. The war only recently fractured when certain units, labeled by the Iron Pursuit as "breaches in the war’s ending," failed to stay concluded and escaped through an illegal passage.
The Tower of the Unwritten Archives
Hidden within an abandoned clocktower in Rigus that never finishes its chime lies the entrance to the Unwritten Archive. This "negative archive" serves as the base of operations for the Masked Court and the Khen-Zai twins, who monitor the margins of narrative causality. Inside the tower, the walls are lined with blank books and shelves that shift when not observed, while silver sand drips upward from a cracked hourglass. It is a place where identities are stripped to their structural remains, allowing the twins to track "Impossible Futures" and ensure that the stories of the Great Wheel do not fatally contradict themselves.
Limbo, the ever-changing soup of ultimate chaos, is a plane where reality is only as stable as the thoughts that bind it. It is a seething maelstrom where the fundamental building blocks of existence—flame, wave, wind, and rock—tumble together in a mass of unfiltered potential.
The Nature of the Chaos
In Limbo, hot and cold, noise and silence, and life and death are all encompassing and simultaneous. A traveler entering the plane is immediately plunged into this churning maelstrom and must use conscious effort to stabilize a small cocoon of sanity around themselves. This process is known as Chaos Shaping; while any intelligent mind can do it, trained specialists known as Anarchs are far more adept at maintaining terrain without the need for constant concentration. Even within a stabilized area, minor possessions frequently fall victim to miniflux, a regional effect that causes small items to change color, consistency, or transform into something else entirely.
Natives: Slaadi and Githzerai
The plane is primarily inhabited by two groups with diametrically opposed philosophies:
- The Slaadi: These are the true natives of Limbo. They reject the need for stabilized reality and thrive within the chaotic soup. Their homeland is the Spawning Stone, a legendary site deep within the chaos-matter where some believe a cutter can achieve immortality.
- The Githzerai: Refugees from the Astral Plane, they have built massive, stabilized cities like Shra'kt'lor through sheer force of will. They generally view intruders—particularly rigid forces like the Modron March—as a "stain" on the chaotic beauty of their plane and seek to usher them through as quickly as possible to prevent "pockets of order" from polluting the soup.
Wild Magic and Navigation
All magic is wild in Limbo. Spells often produce unpredictable results or dangerous backlashes called wild surges. Navigation is equally treacherous; travel often involves finding whirlpools of chaos, which act as intraplanar conduits to different regions like the Immeasurable. For those seeking an anchor, the site of Pinwheel remains fairly stable without mental effort, and the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Ash, provide a reliable path to other planes.
Xaos: The Gate-Town
The threshold to Limbo in the Outlands is the gate-town of Xaos. The burg is a reflection of the plane beyond: its roads are tumbling waves of cobblestone that upend and rearrange themselves without warning, and the climate can shift from balmy to arctic in an eyeblink.
- The Shifting Gate: The gate to Limbo never stays in one form. It might manifest as the eye of a cyclopean statue, a sassy sapient mouth that demands secrets, or a humming door in the middle of a lava river.
- Chaotic Combustion: A regional effect in Xaos substitutionally changes the damage types of spells (acid, cold, fire, or lightning) at random, reflecting the instability of the gate.
- The Cube: A notable landmark in Xaos is the Cube, a polished brass polygon originally intended to be a lawful modron outpost. However, the chaos of Xaos eventually corrupted it, causing it to collapse into an undulating mass of repeating fractals and mathematical impossibilities.
The Modron schism
Limbo is the site where the Modron March frequently suffers its greatest casualties. During previous cycles, even the presence of a few modrons has been known to trigger "Chaotic Combustion" logs in planar ledgers. It was here that the rogue modron Ylem was waylaid by red slaadi, who injected it with eggs; the resulting fusion of flesh, metal, and chaotic influence is what granted the monodrone its forbidden self-awareness.
DM META: This page is cannon information. It has not been customized to FF. This information is meant to inspire and inform you on your travels through the Outlands as if studied from the Book of Planar Wonderings & Wanderings.
Comments
Post a Comment