Shard, the Plane That Never Was (3.5e Location)
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Contents
Shard, the Plane That Never Was[edit]
Cataclysm. A terrible force threatens the multiverse and manages to destroy large sections of it. Then the heros of the campaign gather and end the destruction just in time for the worlds to be saved and letting everyone rebuild. Or, so it seemed.
The afterlife is very real in D&D, and the same can be said for entire planes. Just as the souls of the fallen have somewhere to go when they die, so do the planes. Only planes don't suddenly die. They fracture, small and large pieces breaking away to fade into nothingness. And they all fall to form the Plane That Never Was.
Shard was a hungry void, an emptiness between the multiverses. But then event came that broke and fractured the worlds of the multiverses. These broken pieces fell, and found their way into the void, where they settled into their current places. Shard is still a void, but floating and orbiting in the void now are pieces of world from across time and reality. These shards, as they are called, can be the size of a pebble to the size of continents. Many of the large pieces are completely unaware of their state, unable to see through their atmosphere the other fractured worlds and convinced the catastrophe that sent them here was mass hysteria imagined ever so long ago. Yes, the beings that inhabited these broken worlds are trapped with their shard, for dying alongside your world is doom for your soul. It can be blissfully unaware of it's state if the piece it died on is large enough, but some are painfully aware of their predicament, trapped on small villages or boulders watching other doomed souls float by. They can leave their shards, and some do, but they can never leave the void, and the inhabitants of the Plane That Never Was grow in number.
Plane Traits[edit]
Physical Traits[edit]
- Gravity: Objective. Gravity pulls in the direction of the center of the closest and largest shard, with a strength determined by what world that shard came from.
- Time: Normal. On most shards and in the void between shards time flows normally, though there may be exceptions on shards from worlds with different time tables.
- Size: Infinite. Depending on how long Shard has existed in your campaign, the shards themselves can be a small cluster a few miles in diameter to the size of a galaxy, but the void in Shard is infinite, with a limitless capacity needed to consume the broken pieces of all worlds.
- Morphic: All, as dependent on the world a shard came from.
Magic, Alignment, and Energy/Elemental Traits[edit]
- Elemental Dominance: All, as dependent on the individual shards and the worlds they came from.
- Energy Dominance: All, as dependent on the individual shards and the worlds they came from.
- Alignment Trait: All, as dependent on the individual shards and the worlds they came from.
- Magic Trait: Wild Magic. The shards of all the world mix in various and often incompatible ways, with the magics of various planes and even multiverses. For the added weirdness of magic in Shard, the GM is encouraged to rewrite the table to include results that produce magic effects from any other game system he might own, such as Mage, Exalted, or the Hero system.
Plane Links[edit]
Shard lies beneath the various cosmologies, if such a term could ever apply to a multiverse. As far as getting to Shard, the only way there is to dies in an event that would cause a shard to fall into the Plane That Never Was. To put it simply, to get to Shard you have to die along with a piece of your world.
Plane Inhabitants[edit]
Shard is made entirely of the pieces of other worlds, and thus the inhabitants of Shard are from across reality. Many prefer to stay on their broken worlds, but some are daring and raid the other shards of the Plane That Never Was. The only thing that will never be found in Shard are the greatest of heros. A powerful individual who sincerely and whole hearted loves his world who gets caught in the creation of a shard never falls into Shard. Instead, his body is torn away and incinerated upon the destruction of his world, and his soul is left to crystalize into an intelligent item befitting his nature. This item maybe found by others later, and can be used to gain entry into Shard if destroyed. But anything that enters the Plane That Never Was can never leave by any means short of divine will. A wish or miracle can be used to grant escape, but the caster is absolutely destroyed in the process.
The Physics of Crushing Your Soul[edit]
Heros have much more endurant souls than regular people. While regular people worry primarily about their own problems, heros take upon themselves the problems of others. Much like how diamonds are formed by the constant crushing weight of the world, so too are the souls of heros hardened by the weight of the their worlds problems. Thus, when a part of a heros world dies while hero is there, the hero dies much like everyone else- Shard is the supreme afterlife of planes, afterall. However, only their body dies this way. Their diamond like soul is too resilient to subcumb to the pull of the Plane That Never Was, thus there soul is left behind. These souls take the form of intelligent magic items, retaining the goals and memories of the vesels that contained them.
Features of the Plane[edit]
Shard can be divided into shards and void:
Shard is the term for a broken piece of a world drifting through the void of the Plane That Never Was. To randomly create a shard, roll for random plane destination to determine the planar traits of the shard and then roll d20 for size of shard:
- 1-2 Small rock (small to large object)
- 3-4 Large boulder (huge to colossal object)
- 5-10 Village (hamlet to small town sized land)
- 11-15 Mountain (large town to metropolis or mountain sized land)
- 16-18 Island (stretch of land measured in ten of miles in size)
- 19-20 Continent (stretch of land measured in hundreds of miles in size)
Void is the empty space between shards. Here gravity pulls in the direction of he nearest and largest object, which may cause problems for travelers in a rock field. There is little a traveler can do in the void except fall with style toward other objects, though some groups have clustered together in a effort to stay in place. This works well, provided A) one is not too close to a much more massive object and B) they have the means to survive being pelted and buried under the smaller objects that are drawn to the group.
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