Spoiler: The Astral Wilds (Holidayscape)
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This is a realm of unfettered growth, life, birth, predation, and rebirth. Unearthly (and often deadly) plants overgrow everything, filling the plane to the point of choking with thick jungles of vegetation that seems to stretch into infinity above and below. The Wild is a vast, untamed and untamable thicket of intertwining vines, branches, and trunks acting as a nursery to innumerable ecosystems both tiny and expansive. All pervading radiance fills this realm, banishing all traces of shadow and lighting it in levels from blinding glory to soft twilight. Colors here are richer, scents sharper, sensations pulsing with intensity. Everything in this realm is simply more.
Including the dangers.
One might think that the fountain of positive energy and the engine of souls would be a nice place, but they would be wrong. The Astral Wilds are, above all else, wild. Magical predators both bizarre and alien stalk the infinite canopies for food. Creatures are constantly devoured and reborn, bursting forth from amniotic pods in the trunks of the trees mere minutes after having their spine broken and their flesh consumed. Nothing dead here remains for long. Many of the material plane's more horrifying magical beasts are predators that have escaped from the Wilds.
Undead that come here will find the Wilds supremely unpleasant. The ambient positive energy will quickly overwhelm the negative, reducing them to little more than a corpse, meat waiting to be consumed. The living mortals not native to the plane face an even more unusual fate. Positive energy pours into them until they quite literally burst, birthing a new and unique monster native to the Wilds. Though this new creature retains the soul, memories, and (to the best of its ability) the personality of its progenitor, it has become a wildling at heart and may feel uncomfortable returning to the drab and dreary material world It's possible to ward both the living and the undead against the overwhelming life of the Wilds, but the adaptive nature of the plane makes any such defense tenuous at best.
Reasons to visit abound, however. As the positively aligned contemporaneous plane, the Wilds are the primary route between the Empyrean Spheres, Midgard, and the Elemental Ring. Vast highways have been cut through the endless tangle, maintained by modrons from The Clockwork Fields of Easter for the purpose of maintaining orderly travel between the planes. What's more, the Wilds themselves are filled to the bursting with rare and valuable reagents and materials sought after all over reality. These simple facts have made the planes' ruler, Demogorgon, the great Demiurge, exceedingly influential in the economy of the planes.
So, enjoy your trip through the Wilds, traveler. Just remember your bug repellent.
Spoiler: The Beneficent Mountain of Christmas (Holidayscape)
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Christmas is the plane of joy, goodness, hope, and compassion. It is a mountain with neither base nor peak covered in snowy forests and workshops. Despite the seemingly cold appearance, the glow of joy pervades here, warming all of pure heart in spite of the snow. The lands are home to tomte, snowmen, and reindeer who serve in the production of all fashion of good gifts for mortals, working under the watchful eye of Santa Claus. Crystal decanters of hope and joy are the primary currencies in Christmas, both valued at the ounce.
Spoiler: The Bottomless Chasm of Krampusnat (Holidayscape)
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Krampusnat is an awful place, a realm of punishment, suffering, torment, torture, evil, and constant conflict. This plane is a bottomless pit formed by four sets of connected spiraling rings that lead ever deeper into the depths of darkness. Each set of rings is home to a different set of fiends who torment both each other and the opposing factions. The self-righteous khanafe of Tartarus, the hedonistic belial Pandemonium, the impulsively destructive iysh'dam of the Abyss, and the tyrannical dibbah of Gehenna. Krampus drags the souls of the wicked into the pit and casts them headlong into the darkness to be twisted and tormented for the allotted time. The favored currency within the jagged depths of Krampusnat is dollop of suffering, a substance not unlike molten glass.
Spoiler: The Clockwork Fields of Easter (Holidayscape)
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Easter is a plane of precision, purpose, order, obedience, and regimentation. It is a beautiful place of perfectly wrought clockwork and machinery overseen by modrons, clockwork rodents of various kinds each or which has a command gear, its shape and number of teeth denoting their rank. Modrons serve the Easter Hare, Master of the Clockwork Field and Orderer of Eggs. Units of obedience are the preferred currency here.
Spoiler: The Elemental Ring (Holidayscape)
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The Elemental Ring is more or less exactly what it sounds like, a torus-shaped plane containing the essence of the elements. In order, they are fire, metal, earth, wood, water, ice, air, lightning, and finally back to fire. The elements smoothly transition from one to the other, becoming more predominated by the major element of that region. The element of each region represents a majority of the elements that exist there, NOT an exclusive presence of that element to the exclusion of all others. However, you will never find an opposing element in a region (no liquid water in a majority fire region, for example.)
The elemental ring is ruled over by various Elemental Lords, each of which control their own regions of the ring. Elementals, beings of more 'pure' elements rather than the flesh and bone of mortals, are the natural inhabitants of the Ring. Many portions of the Ring are lethal to unwarded mortals, though prizes to be found in the depths of the Ring entice many travelers. Ingots of pure elemental essence are the preferred currency here.
Spoiler: The Gloom (Holidayscape)
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This is a realm of undeath and stagnation, a realm where the living are not welcome.
Endless dunes of bone-white sand stretch in all directions, punctuated by massive weathered bones of aeons dead titans. Pools of black necrotic bile sit stagnant and stinking in the low points between the dunes and in some places form vast lakes of rotten fluids which unseemly abominations writhe and wriggle within. Bleached, leafless trees dot the landscape, their surfaces crusted with salt and worn smooth by biting, merciless winds. Headstones, coffins, monuments, mausoleums, and tombs decorate the Gloom. And above it all the permanent blood moon shines down on the dreary landscape, casting everything in an unearthly pallor. Mindless undead wandering, thirsting for the life of the living and finding no reprieve.
There are villages here, echoes of ghost towns scoured clean by undead. There are whole necropolises teeming with the restless dead, testaments to atrocities of ages past committed on horrifying scales. In some places the sands burn as a continual funeral pyre. In others they are frozen and bleak and crawling with creatures of hard, icy hearts. Living creatures that enter the Gloom rarely remain living for long as the plane devours their vitality, rips their soul out as a wraith, melts their flesh into a bile ooze, and animates their bones as a hungry skeleton.
Enthroned deep in the icy depths of the plane, built high atop the colossal skull of a dead god, sits the frozen citadel of Papa Orcus, Punisher of Oath-breakers and Father of Undead. Orcus longs for the life and riches of the Astral Wilds and has launched countless undead incursions into the realm of the Demiurge, but thus far the attacks have proven unfruitful.
Like the Wilds, the Gloom is a plane between planes and it has many paths stretching from Midgard to all corners of planes. The souls of the dead all pass through here on their way to their rightful destination, though without a guide they are left lost, wandering, and likely to be ensnared by an undead spirit and bound once again to a coporeal undead body. Spirit shepherds, the headless dullahan, wander the wastes, carrying their skull as a lantern in one hand and staffs of vertebra in other, in search of lost souls to lead home. All but the most vile and powerful undead give these guides plenty of space. Within the many sealed tombs and crypts forgotten riches sit, just waiting for some brave soul to plumb the depths of the horrors and retrieve them. Are you brave enough to raid these lost treasures, adventurer? Are you strong enough to hang onto your own soul?
Spoiler: The Riotous Revelries of Carnival (Holidayscape)
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Carnival is one vast, never-ending party, a realm of fun, silliness, foolishness, indulgence, pleasure, and a general care-free attitude. Feasting, dancing, singing, parades, it has got it all. Carnival is a massive city of incomprehensible size where the revelry never ends overseen by The Carnival King, the King of Fools. The inhabitants of this place, jokers, are widely varied in their elaborate and festive costumes that at times are more than simply costumes. They exist both to have fun themselves and to help everyone else have fun. Flasks of pleasure are the primary means of exchange in Carnival; let the fun times flow!
Spoiler: The Sanctuary Fortress of Lent (Holidayscape)
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The plane of Lent is a singular cathedral on a scale unimaginable. It is a place of piety, seriousness, self-control, discipline, and somberness. The inhabitants of this place spend their time in quiet contemplation, prayer, and partaking in acts of asceticism. There is no laughter here, no gayety, no frivolous words or actions, only stern and serious business. The archons of Lent, beings as awe-inspiring as they are somber, aid the faithful in their tasks within the hallowed walls of Lent under the watchful eye of the Rose Father. Piety by the pound is the most common form of currency accepted within the walls of Lent.
Spoiler: The Spooky Town of Halloween (Holidayscape)
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Halloween is a sprawling rural village without end to its uncanny fields filled with creepy trees, glowing jack-o-lanterns, and spooky sheaves. Halloween is a land of surprise, mischief, whim, whimsy, funny fear, and the sheer chaos caused by innumerable unruly children prancing about in the dark. Every turning of the moon the costumes of the child-like guisers change, keeping the experience every whimsical and fresh. Pranks are common all around, the tricks to go with the treats. Evil actions, however, are frowned upon by Jack the Pumpkin King. Candy corn packed with whimsy in place of sugar is the favorite form of money here. After all, no one actually eats candy corn.
Spoiler: Tir na nog (Mythosverse)
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Tir na nog, Otherworld, the Faerie, the Hedge, the Briar Patch, a place known by many names, a twilight realm between sleeping and waking. Tir na nog appears to be a vast, misty, enchanted forest where everything seems vague and somehow unreal. It overlaps the physical world such that landmarks and man-made objects have woodland analogs. Great hollow trees or caves replace buildings, roads give way to rushing rivers of dark water, cars are replaced with massive boulders thick with lichen and scrawled with strange markings. Faeries frequent the mists of Tir na nog, but these are no tiny, playful creatures. No, the fae are cruel, spiteful creatures that were once mortals that wandered too far into the unknown and were taken, twisted by the surreal environment of the Otherworld. Those are the fortunate. The unfortunate are caught by the Daoine Sidhe, beings that never wore human flesh, and dragged into the Dreamlands where they are subjected to the capricious whims of their captors. It is said that on the high mountain tops of Tir na nog one can evoke the names of the Old Ones to call them up, but few have survived such foolhardy endeavors. Entering Tir na nog is simple enough, simply knock on on any archway or door thrice at twilight and ask aloud, 'May I please come in?'. Leaving, however, can be far more difficult...