Travel

There's more out there than just the Inner, Outer, and Transitive Planes, though. They aren't all butted up against each other, nice and tight. There's roads and rivers between them, loosely linking the multiverse together. After all, how's a body to get around without paths? Fact is, there's three ways to move around the planes. All three methods of travel have their uses, because not all three ways are always there.

Information in this section is from "A Player's Guide To The Planes"

The Ethereal Plane

The Ethereal is the conduit between the Prime Material Plane and the Inner Planes. Every place on the Prime is touched by the Ethereal's vapors, and every point of the Inner Planes is part of the ghostly web, too. Just knowing it's there won't do much good, though - it takes power to break the wall between the planes. Spells and magical items can do it, if a berk's got them. Then again, vortices - rare places where the Elemental Planes bleed right into the Prime Material - can short-cut the whole journey, carrying a sod straight from the Prime to one of the Inner Planes, or maybe even back again. (A volcano's a typical spot to look for a vortex to the plane of Fire, for instance.)

Some folks say the Ethereal Plane's a big, misty place with nothing in it. That's one way to tell the liars, because the Ethereal's really a busy place. Along its edges (it's infinite and touches everything, but it still has edges, so go figure), a fellow can see into neighboring planes. Move off the edge of your plane, into the Deep Ethereal, and it's like an ocean. A body can swim for leagues without touching anything and then, all of a sudden like, there's an island floating in the mist. These are demiplanes, little pocket worlds with rules and realities all their own. Sometimes Sigil spits one of these out at the command of the Lady of Pain - special prisons called Mazes, for her would-be conquerors - and some demiplanes are "grown" by wizards. Most of them are safe enough, but there's rumors of one that's a place of absolute terror - few folks ever come back from that one.

The Astral Plane

The Astral is what's needed to get from the Prime Material to the Outer Planes. On the Prime it touches every place, just like the Ethereal Plane, yet those two planes - Astral and Ethereal - never meet. The Astral Plane also connects to each of the Outer Planes, provided a body knows where to find the door.

Some folks say traveling the Astral Plane's the hardest of all. Most of these folks are primes, who have to deal with silver cords that tether them to their bodies back on the Prime. Planars don't have that problem, of course, but it still isn't that easy to cross the boundary into the Astral realm. The best way's by the astral spell, granted by the powers to their special servants. Wizards favor magical devices. The most direct routes are through conduits and color pools, which can sweep a body straight from the Prime Material to any of the Outer Planes.

Although it looks empty, the Astral Plane's a pretty busy place. Travelers there better be ready to deal with the githyanki, because the silvery void's their home. Huge fortresses filled with their kind drift through the silver stream, and githyanki ships have been sighted sailing the Astral Plane. The githyanki aren't alone, either. There's other stuff bigger and meaner than them, like astral dreadnoughts, astral whales, and islands formed from the decaying corpses of ancient powers. Most travelers treat this plane as a good place to leave quickly.

The Outlands

With Sigil at the center, the Outlands are the last pathway to the Outer Planes. Sure the Outlands are one of the Outer Planes, but this one's different from the others. It's not part of the ring - it's the center of the ring. Journey across the Outlands (or the Land, as some call it) and eventually a body gets elsewhere - not just elsewhere on the plane, but into another plane entirely. The farther a body goes toward a plane on the ring, the more the Land looks like that plane, until at last he (or she, or it) comes to a gate between here and there.

Out on the Land the gates are fixed. If a body knows the way around, then he can always find the door. A lot of portals have little towns next to them, where traders and mercenaries who've got business with denizens beyond the gates meet - towns like Glorium (near Ysgard), Plague-Mort (near the Abyss), and Ribcage (near Baator). Some of them are actually quiet and safe little burgs, while others are almost as horrible as the planes they watch.