Mud Hills
The Mud Hills are a bleak and treacherous region of the Elemental Plane of Earth, bordering the Para-elemental Plane of Ooze, where the solid certainty of stone begins to soften, slump, and dissolve into mire. This region marks a transition from unyielding rock to ever-shifting sludge—a land caught in perpetual collapse, where the laws of solidity begin to lose their grip.
The Mud Hills are a domain of decomposition and dissolution, a place where form begins to fail and structure yields to weight and wetness. Here, the implacable strength of the Plane of Earth is reduced to a primordial slurry, echoing the slow, inevitable surrender of all things to time, pressure, and entropy. It is not a place of death, exactly—but of subsidence, of the slow undoing of definition, where everything solid must eventually sink.
Geography
The terrain of the Mud Hills is a vast, undulating expanse of sodden earth, clay, and thick, half-liquid muck, forming mounded ridges and sinking basins that slowly rise and fall as if breathing. The “hills” themselves are massive heaps of compressed mud, often laced with gravel, shale, and decaying organic matter carried in from the Plane of Ooze. Some are firm enough to stand on; others conceal hidden sinkholes or ooze-filled pits that swallow the unwary without a trace.
Water trickles constantly through the landscape—not clear water, but murky rivulets the color of rot and rust. These sluggish streams bubble up from below or fall as oily rain from above, feeding an endless cycle of erosion and renewal. The air is thick and humid, heavy with the smell of wet stone, sulfur, and slow decay.
Nothing in the Mud Hills is truly stable. Hills may slump, tilt, or melt unexpectedly. Mudslides, quicksand-like bogs, and suffocating sinkholes are constant threats. Occasional geysers of liquefied clay erupt from deep within the plane, hurling steaming sludge high into the air before slopping down again in bubbling pools.
Despite the wetness, this is no swamp—it lacks the plant life or vibrant decay of the Plane of Ooze. Instead, the Mud Hills are defined by inert heaviness and slow entropy, where all structure breaks down not into life, but into weight and stillness.
Fauna & Flora
The region is home to creatures that thrive in semi-solid conditions—ooze para-elementals, mud mephits, and clay-bodied elementals that can reshape themselves to move through the sludge. Some dao send slaves or constructs here to harvest rare minerals that form in the layered pressure of the muck or to mine veins of soft stone rich with absorbed planar essence.
Occasionally, ooze creatures from the adjacent plane wander into the Mud Hills, either expanding their territory or simply flowing with the gravity of the terrain. These incursions are usually brief but often violent, as the native earth elementals view such creatures with disdain and disgust.
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