The Astral Sea

The Astral Sea is a shimmering expanse that makes up the vast majority of the known Multiverse, a near-boundless realm saturated with raw aether. It occupies the silent stretch where the upper edge of the Material Plane thins and blends into the distant borders of the Nine Realms. When the Syzygy shattered the early foundations of creation, whole tracts of planar matter splintered into isolated pockets, many of which later became the dominions of the gods. Drifting among these sanctuaries are the scattered pieces of Annwyn, the elven home plane whose ruling Eldest were killed or driven into hiding when it fell. Yet even these divine realms circle a deeper anomaly: the Maelstrom, a vast, spiraling gulf where aether condenses into a violence unmatched elsewhere. Here, the line between thought and substance breaks down, spawning the proteans — serpentine agents of mutability who twist the Maelstrom’s living energy toward their own inscrutable aims.

Far beyond the orbit of those drifting dominions lies the Outer Darkness, an ink-black void that fills the space between stars and stands wholly apart from the rest of creation. In ancient times, strange travelers would slip in from this frontier, drawn by the spark of mortal consciousness, until the gods sealed the Black Door and fixed the limits of the Multiverse. Since then, nothing passes through the Black Door without divine sanction, and the Astral Sea has settled into the role of both barrier and thoroughfare for the planes. Its transitive nature is strongest near these borders, where projection spells and other out-of-body workings find the least resistance, though physical passage is just as possible for those willing to brave its emptiness. Astral sailors, mystics, and the handful of explorers who treat it as a navigable ocean chart their paths by drifting isles of broken realms, distant dominions, and the faint pull of planar gravity that hints at what lies beyond sight.