Introduction a Brief Note on the Planes

Introduction “Looking for work? You won’t find any in Eris. We’ve all got too much to do!” -L’rauka “Big Jim” Vuvuzela, Owner of the Chip Beef Saloon Welcome to Eris, basher! Headquarters of the Concordant Opposition Society and sometime home to some of the most renowned adventurers in the multiverse, this place is the definition of happening—largely because, without the collective belief of all those sword-and-spellslingers, it wouldn’t exist at all! Like the Society that calls it home, Eris is in many ways a paradox: a fixed point in the eternally malleable Outlands; a home for the homeless; a place of rest for the restless. Eris is both whatever you need it to be and absolutely not at all what you asked for. It’s charming, that way. But charm can only take you so far. Compared to Waterdeep or even Neverwinter, Eris is little more than a fortified shantytown organized around a single purpose: to provide support for the ongoing work of the Concordant Opposition Society. Somehow it all works, but people are damned if they know why or how. Perhaps, some say, it all works because it has to—because life on the Outlands is hard enough even without basing your entire livelihood around adventurers. Others perceive an invisible hand—no, not the free market—guiding events, as the unseen founders of the Society work their mysterious will through well-placed reward-feedback structures and the tacit enforcement of basic social norms. In the end, who can really say? A Brief Note on the Planes Stripped down to its most essential nature, a plane is just a framework for being. And much like the nature of being, that framework consists both of a conceptual component and a physical reality. In other words, everything that has ever been or ever will be has existed on a plane; a planeless entity is, by definition, a contradiction in terms, much in the same way a planet cannot exist outside of spacetime or the way the universe cannot have an “edge” or the way a painting cannot exist beyond its canvas. The point, which may be both obvious and overstated by this point, is that everything that is requires both a conceptual and a physical place for that is to manifest. This is where planes come in. Three points must be addressed here. First, and most obviously, not everything that is has to manifest that is in a similar way. The rules of reality in the Abyss, for instance, are markedly different from those in Mechanus, and the beings that exist as a function of those rules will also be markedly different. Thus, while every being in the universe views every other being through their own idiosyncratic frame of reference, none of those reference frames are universally valid. In other words, as some of the Clueless used to say, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Second is the notion that every permutation of the boring old physical world called the Material Plane—be it the world of Krynn, or Athas, or Greyhawk, or even Earth—exists in the same Material Plane. This is because, unlike almost every other plane in existence, the Material Plane exists purely as a function of physicality; concepts have no power here unless someone acts on them. Thus, while a dream may literally become a reality on one of the Outer Planes, a dream on the Material Plane cannot be instantiated without the volitional exertion of energy by the dreamer. What separates all these subcomponents of the Material Plane is the Phlogiston, a massive ocean of bright, combustible pseudogas that separates the Crystal Spheres of 2 Sample file each Material Plane from one another. A berk ordinarily requires a special ship called a Spelljammer to get from one Crystal Sphere (and its appurtenant iteration of the Material Plane) to another, but some say there are other ways to accomplish such a journey. A third point, equally as obvious as the first, is that reality is infinite. What is less obvious is the full meaning of that statement: everything that can happen has happened, in one version of existence or another. While the beating of a butterfly’s wings in one iteration of reality may ultimately lead to the hurricane that causes a particular individual to rise to heroic heights, that same butterfly may have been gobbled up by a hungry sparrow in another—saving the victims of the hurricane, but leading the otherwise-heroic individual to go into chartered accountancy, instead. All of these versions of reality are “true” from their own reference point—the product of an infinite number of variables stretched out across an infinite amount of time and executed by an infinite number of iterations of the same set of wills. There are sixteen known Outer Planes, plus the Outlands and the city of Sigil (pronounced “sih-GILL”—don’t look at us, we didn’t write it that way). Detailing each of them is far beyond the scope of this document; go check the D&D 5e PHB or the DMG (or older versions of the Manual of the Planes) for that information. But because Eris, the subject of this guide, sits by default on the Outlands (see the “Using Eris in Your Game” section, below), a brief description of that infinite plane requires a little discussion. But first… The Secret of Transcendent Harmonization, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Self-Efficacy All this infinity business—it’s all rather a bit much, don’t you think? The founders of the Concordant Opposition Society thought so too. That’s how they eventually stumbled upon the secret of transcendent harmonization—a ritual that collapses an individual’s wave function across the entire spectrum of infinity into a single singularity: the Awakened form of that individual. An Awakened “person” is technically a gestalt entity formed by ripping every version of that person out of their own realities and melding them into a single physical and conceptual form at a single point in time and space: the chambers of the Tower of the Archon, in the city of Eris, on the plane known as the Outlands. The process of transcendent harmonization sacrifices the infinite power of the Awakened individual’s own quantum immortality, converting the infinite potentiality of all the individual’s infinite permutations into a singularity of efficacy and actuality. In other words: while, prior to transcendent harmonization, the versions of the individual could theoretically do anything, the combined strength of all those individual permutations can actually accomplish anything. This process is both infinitely painful and infinitely enlightening. Some say that, just prior to death, you see your life flash before your eyes, with all your mistakes and all your successes neatly laid out before you like a banquet; imagine that, but multiplied infinitely by every mistake or success you could have made added in. Some have described the process as drinking from a firehose where the hose is also on fire; others, sulking about being ripped from their own realities by one version of themselves with a little more gumption—or a little more selfishness—have called it, “The worst decision I never made.” 3 Sample file One thing is certain, though: once Awakened, a person cannot go back to sleep. Nor can they fully and cleanly separate the individual permutations of their many different lives into a clean timestream; at best, they can just choose one reality to represent their arbitrary “prime” existence and try to make the best of things. This isn’t to say that the Awakened don’t have memories, of course, just that, at best, the collapse of one’s own quantum waveform renders their pre-harmonization past all a little hazy. (This also means that, unfortunately, they can’t simply draw upon their own infinite memories to figure out a solution to a problem—the mortal mind simply isn’t vast enough to sort out the signal from the noise.) For the Awakened, no better phrase describes their new existence metaphorically—if not literally—than the observation that, “You can’t go home again.” You certainly can— the Society’s whole purpose is to send Awakened out into the different permutations of reality for one reason or another, which generally involves re- writing an Awakened individual “back” into a reality—but your definition of “home” will never be the same. How can you find peace in your former existence when you know that the woman who was/is your wife in your “prime” reality was/is also the one who killed your family (and vice versa) in infinite other realities? Good luck sorting that cognitive dissonance out, and enjoy sleeping with one eye open! Perhaps this is why most Awakened choose not to dwell in the past. The collapse of an individual’s waveform leaves only one course open: forward. (Well, that’s not quite true—they could also simply choose to do nothing, although.) And perhaps that, when you come right down to it, is why the Society creates Awakened in the first place. Which brings us to… The Outlands While there are infinite permutations of the Prime Material Plane, the same is not true of the Outer Planes or the Inner Planes, which are already infinite, thank you very much. The Outlands is the hub of the Great Wheel, the paradoxically objective center of the infinite planar multiverse. Known as the Domain of Concordant Opposition to the Clueless back on the Prime Material Plane, the Outlands stretches out infinitely, both literally and conceptually, from the base of the infinitely tall mountain known as the Spire.

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