The planes beyond Agdaron

Agdaron is one world among several, and the Veil Piercers have spent their later years outside it. These are the places a mortal can reach, and what waits in each.

The Feywild

Reached through the Arc du Fey, among other doors.

Time runs differently there, and the rate is not fixed. A season spent in the Feywild can cost decades on the far side. Travellers have come back to find children they met grown old.

Its politics run on the seasons. Four courts — Summer, Winter, Spring and Autumn — with Summer and Winter as the powers and the other two as the ground they fight over. Summer and Winter had been locked into the same stalemate for generations, an arrangement that suited the two rulers holding it in place.

Older things are buried beneath the Feywild than the courts care to discuss, including a tomb that predates all four of them.

The Astral Sea

The Astral Sea connects the planes, and it is a sea in every way that matters. A traveller needs a ship and a crew. The things living out there treat both as weather.

Githyanki and Githzerai sail it, and have hated one another for longer than either remembers. So do astral dreadnoughts, astral sharks that eat souls, ethereal filaments that drift and feed on psychic energy, and storms that damage the mind rather than the hull. So do rogue wizards, other adventurers, and pirates.

Leviathan is a haven built on and inside the skull of a dead cosmic serpent. It is the nearest thing the Astral Sea has to a port worth trusting.

Somewhere in the same reaches, the Ruby Gate burns like a wound. It is the way into Hell, and it opens both ways. A dwarven nobleman fell through it and came out the far side a Devil Prince.

The Nine Hells

Asmodeus was a Prime Deity before he was a prisoner. He was cast down for siding with the Primordials against mortal life, and he turned his sentence into a throne.

What he built is a machine for punishment, running without an off switch and without a release valve. Nothing in it is designed to rehabilitate anyone.

That is the question the Veil Piercers have carried since the first layer.

• 1. Avernus — Zariel. A barren waste of fiery pits and the damned, and currently a warfront: Zariel and the Order of the Cleansing Flame against forces loyal to Asmodeus.
• 2. Dis — Dispater. A city of iron and fire, and the point at which Hell stops being a landscape and becomes an administration. Souls in ledgers, tolls between districts, True Names bound into infernal record. The dangerous devils here prefer signatures to swords.
• 3. Minauros — Glasya. A vast rotting swamp, a twisted mockery of Melorah's domain, and Glasya is Melorah's dark reflection: an archdruid of spores, with poisons worked into the ground itself.
• 4. Phlegethos — Geryon. A gloomy desert of jagged rock and searing sandstorms, whose ruler bends reality and whose landscape lies. Mirage cities, labyrinths of shifting dune, oases that poison the drinker.
• 5. Stygia — Cimeries. A frozen city. The damned are set into the ice in poses matching their sins, and the lord of the layer can animate them.
• 6. Mulciberus — Tiamat. A sea of fire hot enough to melt steel, crossed by burning ships. The damned burn in the lava, and can be raised as a shield.
• 7. Maladomini — Andrealphus. A carnival of horrors: rides built to torment, performers set to guard them, and a ringmaster who would rather turn a party against itself than fight it.
• 8. Cocytus — An underground mine of precious metals and gems, worked by demonic miners and deadly machinery. Its devil lord was not born to the title. He bought it with a soul that was not his to sell.
• 9. Nessus — Asmodeus. The bottom. Towering infernos, rivers of lava, and the throne. Asmodeus made the Hellfire Crown and the Retributive Soul Engine, and he holds Malyr, God of Battle, prisoner here.

The rest of the cosmology exists, and the party has brushed most of it in passing: the Shadowfell, the Elemental Planes where the surviving Primordials were bound, the Abyss, Limbo, Arvandor and the House of Nature.