Demi-planes

Greyhawk

Greyhawk exists as a demiplane whose inhabitants live atop the residue of repeated creation attempts, divine overreach, temporal rewinds, and planar safety failures. Unlike more insulated Prime worlds, Greyhawk was never meant to be permanent. It is a byproduct of the Multiverse Project-an artificial pocket cosmology originally constructed by extra-universal beings known retrospectively as the Originators. The world's material reality is stabilized through alchemical principles rather than fully realized physics, giving it a mutable, symbolic solidity that responds unusually well to magic, belief, and narrative pressure. As a result, Greyhawk is not merely a setting where adventurers exist-it is a setting that knows adventurers exist. The concept of Player Characters is recognized by multiple strata of society: sages, archmages, certain gods, planar entities, and entire institutions understand that some individuals operate under different causal rules. These individuals survive improbable odds, acquire artifacts at unsustainable rates, reshape geopolitics through localized violence, and repeatedly violate statistical expectations. They are called different things in different eras-Challengers, Anchors, Prime Movers, AP-designates-but the underlying recognition is consistent. PCs are not myths. They are a known phenomenon. This awareness has shaped Greyhawk's history as much as any war or god. Greyhawk's geography reflects its unstable origin. Oerth resembles Earth not by coincidence but by design, seeded with human populations meant to mirror the Originators' own form. Yet the surface world quickly diverged, accumulating empires, migrations, and catastrophes at a pace that far exceeds natural historical development. The Baklunish-Suloise Wars, the Rain of Colorless Fire, and the eastward Oeridian migrations were not merely political events but structural stress tests on reality itself. Each devastation altered not just borders, but the metaphysical resilience of the plane. Beneath the surface, Greyhawk is riddled with anomalies. The Underdark, ancient burial grounds, psionically altered regions, and reality fractures caused by failed enchantments or divine feedback loops form a lattice of instability that periodically vents upward as crises. Entire regions-Red Dragon Mountain, Gateway Mountain, Gold Dragon Mountain-exist as convergence points where planar mechanics, mythic creatures, and PC intervention collide repeatedly across timelines. Time in Greyhawk is not linear in the conventional sense. It was introduced artificially, halted, destroyed, recreated, and later reconstructed by escaped Super-Gods operating without full access to the original systems. This has resulted in temporal artifacts, recursive events, and future entities appearing in the past. Dragons arrive from centuries ahead carrying fragments of impossible slabs. Wizards die, return, and later abandon the world entirely. Gods lose and regain multipliers as wars ripple outward into the Outer Planes. Certain inhabitants-most notably high-order wizards, psionic entities, and archivists of the Greyhawk Council-understand that history has looped before. Some know it may loop again. Administration of Greyhawk is fragmented by necessity. No single god, council, or planar authority can safely exert total control without triggering catastrophic feedback. Instead, governance emerges in layers: mortal states manage day-to-day affairs, divine patrons jockey for influence within defined constraints, and supra-mortal bodies such as the Greyhawk Council intervene only when existential thresholds are crossed. The Council itself is less a government than a containment mechanism, designed to prevent any one faction-mortal or divine-from escalating conflicts beyond recoverable parameters. Behind this visible structure lies a deeper, quieter oversight. Certain entities track Magical Factor, Temporal Factor, and Psionic Factor shifts, monitoring the world for signs of imminent collapse or uncontrolled ascension. Entire campaigns-Assassin's Guilds, Wizard's Guilds, Dungeon of Doom iterations-are permitted or terminated based on these readings. When PCs appear in sufficient density, systems adapt around them rather than attempting to stop them outright. History has shown that direct suppression of PCs fails catastrophically. Greyhawk's planar uniqueness is further defined by its relationship to the Concordant Opposition and the Great Funnel. The discovery of the Funnel, the emergence of Spheres of Annihilation as leakage points, and the eventual creation of Sigil as a wrapped severed plane were not abstract planar events-they were responses to existential threats introduced during the Multiverse Project's failure. Greyhawk is one of the few worlds whose inhabitants have found these truths, documented them, and then deliberately tried to bury them again. The Codex of the Infinite Planes, the Guardian of Forever, the Iron Flask of Tuerny the Merciless, and similar artifacts are not legends here-they are known hazards. Their appearances are tracked, their movements logged, and their rediscoveries treated as emergencies. Greyhawk persists because it has learned how to survive being wrong. It has endured gods who escaped their universe, councils that overreached, dragons infected by radiation, psionic grids built at planetary scale, and adventuring parties whose actions forced reality itself to adapt. Where other worlds pretend coherence, Greyhawk accepts instability as a baseline condition. It does not ask why heroes rise-it plans for when they do. And somewhere, in the deepest archives, suppressed treatises and half-destroyed appendices still whisper the same dangerous idea: This world is not natural. Its rules are negotiable. And someone, somewhere, is watching the dice.

Encounters: High-level adventuring parties operating under known causal exemptions, planar-aware wizards and psionicists, dragon and god-spawned entities tied to temporal anomalies, Greyhawk Council agents, escaped Super-God remnants, and reality-corrective forces triggered by excessive PC density.

Faerun

Faerun is a vast, internally coherent demiplane formed not by singular design but by layered accretion of myth, divine interference, mortal history, and unresolved catastrophe. Unlike artificial demiplanes, Faerun exhibits extreme narrative density: actions propagate outward across centuries, divine interventions leave permanent scars, and ruins accumulate faster than civilizations can erase them. The plane supports a full spectrum of alignments, cultures, and power scales, making it one of the most heavily trafficked adventuring environments known to planar scholars. The surface world presents itself as a classic high-fantasy continent, but its true defining feature is stratification-civilizations built atop civilizations, secrets layered beneath secrets, and histories that refuse to stay buried. Political boundaries shift constantly, yet ancient threats remain fixed in place, patiently waiting for rediscovery.

The Dalelands are a loose confederation of small, stubbornly independent territories defined less by borders than by tradition. These lands function as a stabilizing buffer against larger empires and a recurring proving ground for adventurers. It was here, in Shadowdale, that a group who would later be regarded as an epic adventuring party first came together-long before any of them were legends. Cesis Skelus was, at the time, little more than a blacksmith's apprentice with dangerous ideas. Alongside him stood Braume Doomstare, already probing the limits of psychometabolic power, Grim the Unknown, a druid whose communion with the wild felt older than the Dalelands themselves, and Wemic, a fighter and rogue whose instincts for survival and profit were equally sharp. The Dalelands, rich in ruins from fallen Netherese enclaves, ancient elven holdings, and forgotten human kingdoms, offered them endless incursion points into deeper history. The region's resistance to centralized rule was less political idealism and more survival instinct-Faerun has taught its people that empires attract cataclysms, and these four learned that lesson early. The Hullack Forest marked their first sustained exposure to Faerun's quieter dangers. Dense, brooding, and resistant to mapping, the forest exemplifies the way the wild remembers what mortals try to forget. Once tied to greater elven domains, it now harbors outlaws, monsters, and lingering magical anomalies that reshape paths and conceal threats with patient malice. The party passed through it repeatedly, never the same way twice, and Grim the Unknown's relationship with the forest deepened here, less as a master than as a recognized presence. Many planar observers note that Hullack behaves less like terrain and more like a slow organism-one that tolerates intrusion only until it decides not to. The party survived largely because it never mistook tolerance for safety. The Anauroch Desert came later, and nearly ended them. A planar scar left by the collapse of the Netherese Empire, Anauroch stands as a reminder of what happens when arcane ambition exceeds structural reality. Beneath its sands lie buried cities, mythallar remnants, and entities that were never meant to survive their creators. The group crossed it not as conquerors, but as trespassers moving through a graveyard that resented being disturbed. What they uncovered there informed much of Cesis Skelus's later magical philosophy and permanently altered Braume Doomstare's approach to power. The desert functions as both grave and quarantine zone, and the party learned firsthand that what awakens there rarely stays contained. Dragon Mountain tested them in a different way. Less a single peak and more a myth given geological form, it exists as a locus of draconic power, greed, and violence. Its caverns are layered with lairs, traps, and rivalries spanning ages. Entire adventuring companies have vanished there without ever encountering a dragon, claimed instead by the mountain's accumulated hostility and the debris of prior failures. The party emerged scarred, wealthier, and more cautious, having learned that survival did not require slaying the apex threat-only outlasting the environment that fed it. Undermountain followed, beneath Waterdeep, and nothing that came before truly prepared them for it. A megadungeon demiplane-in-all-but-name, shaped by the will and obsession of Halaster Blackcloak, it ignores conventional dungeon logic entirely. It expands, mutates, and repopulates itself in defiance of entropy. Levels shift, passages reconfigure, and threats adapt. The party's long exposure to Undermountain forced each of them to evolve or break. It was here that the idea of a permanent base of operations first took hold, leading eventually to the construction of Cyclops Tower-an early stronghold designed to anchor them against a world that refused to stay still. The Underdark remained a constant, looming pressure beneath nearly all their travels. A vast, lightless ecosystem of caverns, fungal forests, abyssal chasms, and ancient cities, it is home to civilizations whose moral frameworks are fundamentally incompatible with surface life. The party treated the Underdark not as a destination, but as an inevitability-something that would rise, be beaten back at great cost, and retreat only to grow stronger. Each foray into it left marks that never fully healed. Myth Drannor represented both aspiration and warning. Once a marvel of elven magic and multicultural harmony, its ruin radiates mythic failure. The city exists in overlapping states-past glory, present devastation, and future reclamation attempts-often simultaneously. Magic behaves unpredictably, and time itself feels bruised. The party walked streets that remembered being alive, and each of them took something different from the experience. Myth Drannor proved that even the greatest ideals could collapse under their own complexity, a lesson Grim the Unknown would later carry into his stewardship of the Prime Grove. Over decades, their temporary strongholds gave way to permanence. Cyclops Tower became Castle AO, a massive white marble fortress that served as their shared meeting place and symbol of continuity. Cesis Skelus raised an obsidian spell tower of his own, a structure as sharp and uncompromising as his magic. Grim the Unknown rose to become the Archdruid of Chauntea, presiding over the Prime Grove of Faerûn itself. Braume Doomstare founded Castle Doomstare and an academy for psionic research after ascending to the status of a lesser power, reshaping the understanding of psionics across the plane. Wemic, having amassed more gold and treasure than he could meaningfully spend, faded into obscurity by choice-a retirement so complete that it became its own kind of legend. Together, their story threads through the Dalelands, Dragon Mountain, Undermountain, Myth Drannor, Athas, and Anauroch, not as a single epic conquest but as a long, grinding engagement with a world that never stops producing challenges. Faerun did not break them. It absorbed them, reshaped them, and eventually let them become part of its permanent architecture-another layer of history waiting to be rediscovered.

Encounters: Regional powers, roaming adventuring companies, ancient monsters tied to lost empires, divine agents acting through mortal proxies, and threats emerging cyclically from the Underdark, fallen cities, and buried mythic strata.

Riverworld

On Riverworld, every human who ever lived and died-from the earliest Neanderthals up to 1983-is resurrected on the banks of a seemingly endless river on an unknown planet. Along the river's almost 18 million twisting and turning miles, some 36.6 billion humans are miraculously provided with food but given no clue as to the meaning or purpose of this strange afterlife.

Riverworld has been engineered to consist solely of a single long river valley that snakes across its entire surface. The river's source is a small north polar sea, from which it follows a tightly zig-zagging course across one hemisphere before flowing into the other, ultimately returning to the same sea. The river has an average depth of 1.5 miles (2.4 km), and its width ranges from 6.8 miles (10.9 km) to 24.8 miles (39.9 km). It is shallow near the shore but plunges to enormous depths toward the central channel.

The banks are generally smooth and gentle, expanding into wide plains on either side before rising into jagged hills and an impenetrable mountain range. The valley averages 9 miles (14 km) in width but includes narrows and occasional widenings into lakes with islands. There are no seasons; daily variations are metronomic. The only animal life consists of fish and soil worms. The vegetation is lush and varied, including trees, flowering vines, several kinds of fast-growing bamboo, and a resilient mat of grass.

Riverworld has no visible moon, but the sky is filled with stellar objects: gas sheets and stars close enough to show visible disks.

The resurrected awaken with nearly-indestructible containers tied to their wrists, commonly called "grails", which produce food, drink, cloth, and luxury items such as alcohol, tobacco, marijuana (and lighters), hair care tools, makeup, and a hallucinogenic chewing gum known as "dreamgum." To operate, grails must be placed on large mushroom-shaped "grailstones" found at intervals along the riverbanks, which emit an electrical discharge three times per day (corresponding to breakfast, lunch, and dinner).

In the Riverworld universe, sapience is the result of an artificially created soul known as a wathan , produced by generators distributed among many worlds by an unknown ancient alien race. Wathan generators create wathans that attach themselves to sufficiently advanced chordates. Wathans are indestructible but detach from the body upon physical death and then wander the universe without purpose.

The Funny Farm

This is a place where those not in touch with reality or sane of mind go to live out the rest of their days. The inside resembles the old TV trope of a bedlam house/lunatic asylum. There are other areas that resemble a more dream-like appearance. The surfaces are made out of this material that can be best described as pastel colored stones with blue, purple, & red stained tiffany glass windows that can appear on the floors walls or ceiling. Looking into these windows show that they are not windows in the traditional sense but instead glimpses of what is temporally imprisoned inside like insects preserved in amber. It is rumored that whoever rules over these particular areas have the ability to reshape the walls, floors, and ceilings at will. If you do find a window and look out, you would see the planes this place borders. The dilapidated nature is reminiscent of the music video for the song “The Devil In I” by the band Slipknot. There is a plane-wide status effect of SEL=1 Insanity and SEL=15 Frelled .

Encounters: Various committed NPCs who may have been PC’s once, run of the mill mental patients, Nightmare Spirits of the Land, various spiritual undead, Possible archetypes of figures from the band Slipknot, etc.

The Ozone

This is a plane made famous by Lemmy of Motorhead when he got lost in it. The terrain is a vast, hungry, empty sea of pale blue, pungent-smelling gas. It features winter storms that freeze you and summer weather that burns you alive. Notable places in this plane are the Islands of the Damned. Here everything is mute; sound doesn’t transmit. There is a plane-wide status effects of SEL=12 Lost in the Maelstrom, SEL=10 Broken, and SEL=2 Drowning. Priests are cut off from contact with their gods here. All beings in this plane always start in a group of [x1].

Encounters: Lemmy of Motorhead, lost, dying, and Broken .

The Ways

The Ways is a mysterious, eerie dimension-an ancient network of interconnecting pathways created by the long-gone civilization of the Aes Sedai. These paths exist outside normal time and space and were once used as safe, rapid transit. Now they are perilous, haunted by malevolent entities such as Machin Shin, the Black Wind, which devours the minds and souls of unwary travelers.

The atmosphere within the Ways is oppressive and decayed, steeped in a sense of slow-motion ruin. The paths are lined with towering stone columns and archways, shrouded in perpetual darkness. The architecture is both grand and ancient, reflecting the advanced craftsmanship of their creators, but the once-magnificent structures now stand in disrepair, overrun by encroaching shadow.

Navigating the Ways is difficult and dangerous: the pathways are labyrinthine and can shift without warning. Travelers require experienced guides or magical aids (such as the One Power or its Collective equivalent) to have any hope of safe passage. Despite its dangers, the Ways remains a critical means of long-distance transport, allowing vast distances to be crossed in a fraction of the time needed in the physical world-at the cost of risking annihilation by the Black Wind and other lurking horrors.

Tel’aran’rhiod

This is a parallel dimension that exists alongside the waking world. It is a realm shaped by the collective unconsciousness of all living beings and is accessed primarily through the ability known as Dreaming or the Talent of Tel'aran'rhiod. Fluidity and Malleability: Tel'aran'rhiod is a realm where reality is fluid and mutable. Dreamers can manipulate the environment according to their will, shaping landscapes, buildings, and even altering the laws of physics. This fluidity allows for incredible feats of creativity and imagination. Reflection of the Waking World: The Dreamworld often mirrors the waking world but can also incorporate symbolic or metaphorical representations of real-life locations and events. It is a realm where the subconscious mind can manifest in tangible form, offering insights into the thoughts, fears, and desires of both individuals and societies. Shared Dreams: Dreamers can interact with each other in Tel'aran'rhiod, enabling communication and collaboration across vast distances. This allows characters to meet and interact in the Dreamworld even if they are physically separated in the waking world. Timelessness: Time in Tel'aran'rhiod does not flow in the same way as in the waking world. Events can occur at different speeds, and dreamers may experience time dilation or compression depending on their perception. Dangers and Dark Entities: While the Dreamworld offers great potential for exploration and discovery, it is also fraught with peril. Malevolent entities such as nightmares, darkspawn, and even Forsaken can threaten dreamers. Additionally, prolonged exposure to Tel'aran'rhiod can lead to a loss of identity or sanity if one becomes too disconnected from reality. Astral Projection and Travel: Skilled Dreamers can use Tel'aran'rhiod for astral projection, allowing them to observe events in the waking world from a distance or travel to specific locations instantaneously. This ability is often used for reconnaissance or covert operations.

Encounters: Dreamerwalkers, Wolves, Wolfbrothers, The Forsaken, Environmental Weirdness.

Demiplane of Consciousness

There are only two things in this demiplane: bubbles of conscious thought and the void between them. These bubbles constantly wink in and out of existence as the beings they belong to fade into and out of consciousness through sleep and altered states of mind. This realm remains only a demiplane rather than a full plane because, despite containing the conscious thoughts of all sentient beings in the multiverse, that number is arbitrarily large but still finite. Travelers normally must arrive via astral projection or by not occupying physical space at all, as there is effectively no room between the bubbles. Movement occurs by pure intent, similar to traversal within the Astral Plan. If movement between bubbles is achieved, it becomes possible to invade the conscious thoughts of another being, literal voices in the head. Such actions are actively guarded against, as they would otherwise set catastrophic precedents. The invaded being is effectively the god of their own bubble, capable of thinking intruders into any number of horrifying fates. In a final, deeply dangerous twist, it is theoretically possible to invade ones own conscious thought. This causes a recursive thought-echo and almost invariably results in catastrophic insanity. Congratulations, you broke your own brain with your brain.

Encounters: Ultrawhite beings, Nightmare Dimension entities, Psionic beings, and creatures composed purely of thought (e.g., Thought Eelementals).

Rian’s Dreamscape

This is a demi-plane that encompasses all the dreams I have ever had and will ever have in my limited time alive. Most of the landscapes involve extra-dimensional spaces larger on the inside or containing extra rooms not normally belonging, abandoned buildings, major interstate highways, etc. Visitors to this plane gain flying. Plane-wide status effects of SEL=1 Forget and SEL=5 Lose Track Of serve as minor annoyances to those who travel here. I routinely forget or lose track of my vehicle when dreaming. Travelers who attempt to execute a plan generally encounter some form of resistance taking the form of distraction or a literal physical barrier.

Encounters: A “Lost” 2007 Silver Chrysler 300, various family members, a dog named Hudson, a dog named Logan, etc.

The Astral Hub

The Astral Hub is a stable transit nexus where long-range astral traffic converges. It functions as a metaphysical intersection for soul-travel, thought-based navigation, spell routing, and planar redirection. The Hub has no permanent terrain but manifests as shifting platforms, gates, and conceptual docking zones shaped by collective astral intent.

Encounters: Soul travelers, projection mages, astral constructs, transit wardens, echo-shades.

Concordant Opposition (The Outlands)

Concordant Opposition, commonly called the Outlands, is the absolute neutral hub of the Great Wheel. It exists as the stabilizing fulcrum between all aligned Outer Planes. At its exact center stands the infinitely tall Spire. Magic fades as one approaches its base, reality becomes increasingly static, and divine authority collapses into silence. Roughly one-seventh of the way up the Spire lies the city of Sigil, torus-shaped, sealed to direct divine entry, and ruled by the Lady of Pain. Farther up the Spire lies the realm of Smileylich, Lord of the Liches, connected directly to the Ultraplanes through the Great Funnel.

Encounters: Planar travelers, neutral immortals, Spire guardians, Sigil agents, Funnel anomalies, ideological refugees.

The Far Place

The Far Place is the outermost reachable region of the Astral Plane before conventional reality coherence breaks down. It is a thin conceptual buffer between organized thought-space and the absolute non-space of the Outside. Structures here appear unfinished, over-extended, or half-imagined. Distance becomes symbolic, memory becomes terrain, and intention substitutes for navigation. The Far Place is often used unintentionally as a misjump zone by reckless dreamers, projection errors, failed psionic translations, and broken recalls.

Encounters: Lost dreamers, broken projections, Outside leaks, conceptual predators, half-formed realities.

Maelstrom

This is the plane that’s “between” the Outer Planes. It is very easy to get lost, even for gods. There is a plane-wide status effect of SEL=12 Lost in the Maelstrom. It is known that the far side of the Maelstrom connects to the Plane of the Ultrablack .

Encounters: See below. Credit to the YouTube “Bard of the supernatural” Matthew Santoro.

The Immaterium

The Immaterium, also referred to as the Empyrean, the Aether, the Sea of Souls, the Realm of Chaos, Warpspace or most commonly, the Warp, is an alternate dimension of purely psychic energy that echoes and underlies the familiar four dimensions of the material universe. The Warp is the source of all psychic powers and known instances of so-called sorcery or magic as well as the home dimension of the powerful entities known as the Chaos Gods and their myriad legions of daemonic servants. The terms Chaos and Warp are often used interchangeably by those aware of their existence within the Imperium of Man. Superficially, the Immaterium is Mankinds solution to the problem of faster-than-light travel. The Warp functions as the medium for FTL interstellar travel, with voidcraft entering it using a Warp-Drive and navigating its flowing currents of psychic energy with the aid of a psychic Navigator. The psychic energy that makes up the Immaterium is believed to be the direct result of the existence of sentience in the universe, particularly the intelligent species of the Milky Way Galaxy. It is considered a dark reflection of the material universe, an ocean of chaotic psychic energy and raw emotion given physical form. The Immaterium is also rumored across many cultures, Human and xenos alike, to be the final resting place of the spirits of the dead, making it an effective underworld within the Warhammer cosmology.

Encounters: Daemons, Undead Spirits, Intelligent Worldthought Networks, Psychic Elementals / Eelementals.

Imaginationland

This plane is where all beings created by human imagination reside. Horror movie villains, fictional heroes, novel characters, and mythic constructs all exist here as fully realized entities. Native beings refer to humans as Creators. The realm is divided by a metaphysical structure known as the Barrier, separating the good and evil halves of the demiplane. At the center lies a neutral city governed by a mayor who insists that imagined things are no less real than any other existence. In recorded history, Imaginationland was once the target of a coordinated attack by militant extremist forces seeking to collapse the Barrier. Their goal was to unleash both halves into open conflict and reshape the balance of the demiplane through chaos.

Encounters: Woodland Critters, ManBearPig, movie villains and heroes, and minor imagined creatures.

The Outer Planes

The Outer Planes form the Great Wheel of aligned realities-afterlives, divine realms, ideological battlefields, and metaphysical end states. Each reflects an absolute moral or ethical principle made manifest as terrain. Travel within the Outer Planes is governed as much by belief and philosophical alignment as by distance. Mortal logic degrades rapidly.

Encounters: Gods, petitioners, exemplars, fiends, angels, ideological entities.

The Ultraplanes

The Ultraplanes are composed of annihilative pre-existence material identical to that which forms Spheres of Annihilation. They are not planes in the conventional sense but the exposed substructure of creation itself. Points of light within the Ultraplanes represent the closed tips of Funnels leading to entire Multiverses. These lights may divide or extinguish as universes split or collapse. At the absolute center reside the Pre-Ascended Ones surrounding the Cog, attended by annihilation-born servitors.

Encounters: Pre-Ascended Ones, Ultraplanar Cows & Bulls, Visitors, Living Annihilation Fields.

The Stage

The Stage is a demiplane whose sole responsibility is to ensure that adventuring never exhausts its supply of opposition, danger, or narrative momentum. Every dungeon that mysteriously repopulates, every trap that somehow resets, every “ancient evil” that appears suspiciously on schedule is ultimately routed through The Stage. What mortals experience as organic exploration is, at the planar level, a managed system of encounter pacing, power calibration, and controlled reward distribution. Each dungeon room on a Prime Material World has a corresponding representation here, monitored and adjusted throughout its lifecycle. Monsters are replaced or refurbished, traps are rearmed, treasure is reseeded, and the outcomes of every incursion are logged for archival use. Failures are studied, successes are normalized, and exceptional deviations are quietly smoothed out so that the next party encounters something appropriately challenging, lethal, and memorable.

The demiplane itself resembles an almost infinite expanse of sound stages and studio backlots, each one cataloging a single dungeon room from some Prime world. Stone corridors exist alongside scaffolding and catwalks. Lava pits glow beneath suspended lighting rigs. Illusory walls hide makeup stations, prop crates, and staging areas. Between the dungeon space and the rest of the plane hangs a thin veil of reality, often resembling a translucent curtain or shimmering scrim. From inside a dungeon, this barrier is nearly imperceptible; from outside, it is unmistakable. Beyond it, crews move freely-resetting spike pits, wheeling in replacement monsters, repainting sigils, or swapping out loot containers. The plane has no meaningful horizon, only more stages, more sets, and more infrastructure stretching into the Maelstrom, arranged in ways that ignore conventional distance and chronology. Adjacent stages may correspond to worlds separated by thousands of years, or to different versions of the same dungeon across multiple timelines.

Administration of The Stage follows the logic of a massive planar studio rather than a traditional bureaucracy. Smileylich is the acknowledged source and ultimate authority, functioning less as a tyrant and more as an executive producer who intervenes only when narrative continuity, causality, or planar stability is threatened. Day-to-day operations are handled by high-DL Directors assigned to oversee dungeon arcs, each responsible for maintaining difficulty curves, thematic consistency, and acceptable mortality rates. Beneath them operate assistant directors, script clerks, continuity wardens, and stagehands, all of whom treat dungeon maintenance as professional obligation rather than moral question. Loot inflation is monitored carefully to avoid attracting unwanted scrutiny from the Anguinum Synod, while excessive party competence is quietly countered through smarter monsters, better trap placement, or "unexpected" environmental complications. Every run is recorded, archived, and indexed, forming the backbone of dungeon lore that will later be rediscovered as ancient prophecy, lost history, or inexplicable coincidence.

The Stage is not malicious, nor is it kind. It exists to preserve the rhythm of adventuring itself. So long as heroes continue to delve, something must be waiting for them. When a dungeon door creaks open and torches flare to life, it is because somewhere in the Maelstrom a curtain was drawn aside, a checklist was completed, and the room was declared ready for the next take.

Encounters: High DL Directors, Recycled Extras, Omnipresent Cameramen, minor Hero/Villain/Legend celebrities, etc.

Unobservable Universe / The Outside / The Skein / Outside the Pattern / 5th Dimension

This is RDM"s synthesis that the "unobservable spaces" described in various fiction and theory are all pointing at the same conceptual region. It is a place that does not share physical space with any universe. Here are some of its major lenses:

The Outside (Ender's Game): An area that does not share space with the universe. It is accessible to entities with sufficiently vast mental capacity-such as Jane and the Formic Hive Queens. Jane uses it for instantaneous transportation, while the queens draw aiuas from there. In this view, anything can be created from the nothingness if held strongly enough in the mind.

The Skein (Warhammer 40k): The Skein of Fate represents the intricate web of fate and destiny connecting all living things. Every action and decision contributes to the weaving of this cosmic tapestry, influencing the destiny of individuals and entire civilizations. The Skein is the Eldar perception of the same extradimensional structure of causality.

Outside the Pattern (Wheel of Time): The Pattern is the carefully woven reality maintained by the Wheel of Time. "Outside the Pattern" refers to what lies beyond that woven reality-a mysterious, undefined realm that exists apart from the Pattern. Some entities or forces exist beyond the Wheel's influence, not bound by its cyclical nature, time, or destiny. These are often described as beings or powers exempt from the normal rules of the turning Wheel.

5th Dimension (theoretical physics): In string theory and related models, additional spatial dimensions beyond the familiar three (plus time) are proposed. These extra dimensions are often compactified-curled up at scales far smaller than can be observed. Conceptually, higher dimensions can encode alternate configurations of reality, timelines, and physical laws, providing a mathematical frame for "outside" spaces.

In the Collective cosmology, all of these descriptions map to a single domain: a non-spatial conceptual layer between multiverses and the Ultraplanes. It is a region where thought, fate, and extra-dimensional structure intersect-and where sufficiently powerful minds can treat existence itself as raw, editable data.