Tabletop Game / Planebreaker

Planebreaker is a series of planar-themed sourcebooks for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and Cypher System published by Monte Cook Games. Twenty distinct planar locations join the titular Planebreaker to provide material can be used for a new campaign or inserted into an ongoing one.

The Planebreaker is a moon-like object hurdling through the planes and dimensions. Since before time, it has passed through the barriers separating planes, picking up pieces of those dimensions as it goes. Some people call the Planebreaker home, others use it as a vehicle to travel to different planes. Among its visitors and citizens, a few discovered its secret: the Planebreaker connects to every plane it has ever been through.

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This game provides examples of:

• Abstract Eater: Tereculon, the Fate Eater, can 'eat' (break) prophecies, curses and other dooms affecting specific individuals.
• Affably Evil: Although some of the nobles of Zarth like to put on a polite, friendly face when dealing with visitors, all five are treacherous bastards and won't hesitate to put strangers in harm's way if they think it will net them an advantage against a rival.
• The Ageless: Darli Yos is about three hundred years old, and lived many years elsewhere before coming to Timeborne. She stopped ageing after accidentally triggering life-extension magic meant for an emperor. That emperor is long dead, but descendants still sometimes hunt Darli down and attempt to get revenge for her theft.
• The Alcatraz: The Prison of Eternal Torment was designed to be perfect. In all the time it's operated, it's never lost a single prisoner, not even through the natural release of death.
• Alien Sea: The Sea of Uncertainty on the Planebreaker is sleeted with detritus, artefacts and creatures it's picked up as it crashes through the infinite planes. The substance making up the sea shares many physical qualities with water, but differs from water in that it appears red from a distance, does not relieve thirst, and is oddly buoyant. No matter how far someone swims down, the seafloor continues to extend farther downward, though the light never fades to darkness.
• Alien Sky:
  • On the sky of Unithon, the sun equivalent is the Light Cube (which has three shining golden sides and three dull leaden sides), and the local moons are the Red and Green Pyramids. They travel in a circular path above the world cube, slowly spinning as they move.
  • At any particular time, Threem is lit by a sun directly overhead that takes the form of one of six possible masks, each resembling something a humanoid culture would craft for religious or ceremonial purposes. When a mask-sun sets, the sky turns dark and is lit up by hundreds of small mask-stars that resemble the setting mask-sun for a few minutes before a new mask-sun rises. Each mask-sun has a different effect on the plane, applying only when it is not rising or setting.
• Alternate Universe: The Planes of Mirror and Shadow refers to parallel worlds of the Material Plane. If a character finds themselves the focus of a trip into the Congruent Corridor, the alternate world first observed should look almost exactly like their world of origin, except for at least one thing that might or might not be easy to notice. As the character moves along the Congruent Corridor, the alternate worlds remain roughly similar, but more and more different additions and subtractions build up with each new window.
• Ancient Tomb: The Tomb of Tomorrow is an enormous sealed crypt built to contain the primordial Kronos, who was killed aeons ago.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Sometimes a particular concept or belief swirls together, infused with matter siphoned from the Inner Planes, producing an inkarnate. Each inkarnate is an exemplar of the concept that conceived them, such as uncertainty, belief or being.
• Arcadia: Summerland is a realm of sunshine on soft grass, gentle breezes and quietly babbling brooks. Every day is warm and pleasant, every night is cool and clear. Even the occasional rains are warm and refreshing, and storms do not exist. People, both natives and immigrants, dwell in calm, peaceful harmony alongside the animals. However, it has recently been threatened by its conjunction with Winter's Reach.
• Arch-Enemy: When aboleths first seeped into the cosmos, they targeted elars, attempting to eliminate them, even going so far as casting a ritual designed to disrupt further elar spawning. A great hero arose and united all the elars under them, making the aboleths pay dearly. Now, the elars hunt aboleths whenever they have the opportunity.
• The Atoner:
  • Jari was once a far crueller and selfish being, someone responsible for much suffering. One day, he was roundly thrashed and left for dead by something bigger and meaner, but was saved by a cleric of Hermod who happened along. When Jari recovered, he vowed to change his ways, and now delivers oddities to a temple of Hermod on a world of the Material Plane every few months.
  • Uraian's Stair was built by the remorseful celestial commander Uraian, who fought and killed an army of fellow celestials, as a place for the soul-sick to find peace and seek a sliver of absolution for their sins.
• Back-Alley Doctor: The Hell of Sadist Healers is home to gaunt people with red eyes, bloody knives and gore-spattered clothing. The 'healers' cauterise wounds, amputate limbs and wash burns with brine, causing their patients to writhe and scream. For particularly large or strong patients, two or more 'healers' have to hold down their subject so a third can do the work.
• Bar Full of Aliens: The clientele of Savva's Crossplane Cantina include an assortment of beings gathered from across the multiverse, apparent by the wide variation in dress and languages spoken. They are sometimes members of usually-evil species, though regulars mostly evade that stereotype.
• Bazaar of the Bizarre: The Worldswept Market is an always-open bazaar for shoppers and sellers hailing from a variety of planes. As is probably assumed by anyone who catches a glimpse of the market, the breadth of goods available among its stalls is enormous: common needful things like food and equipment, goods brought in by extradimensional travellers (like especially exotic spices, trinkets, art, and so on), and the weird stuff that lucky beachcombers find along the Sea of Uncertainty's shore.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Vux and nux are reminiscent of blood red giant wasps or hornets. Vux are 6 feet long and have venomed stingers as one might expect; nux spray acid instead and are 8 feet long.
• Bigger on the Inside: From the Material Plane, entrances to Worm Rat Lair look like a dark hole big enough to fit a rat. However, any creature of human size or smaller can squeeze through them.
• Binary Suns: There are two suns in the sky of Szneshnya, both pale white and small.
• Bioweapon Beast: Inexorables were bred by the demon queen Tereculon as an army from her own flesh.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Kalu, something of an unofficial greeter of newcomers to the Grove of Crows, befriends them, offers them shelter, and is sometimes convinced to help them progress farther into the Grove in apparent good faith. Usually, however, he ends up stealing his allies' supplies, and abandons them in the Forest of Lost Faces when things take a turn for the worse.
• Blood Magic: Spellcasters who gain access to Sanguine, the dimension of blood, can use it to become blood wizards, with the power to direct the flow of that life-giving fluid in other creatures.
• Call a Human a "Meatbag":
  • Blizzard elementals call warm-blooded creatures like the monks of Szneshnya and most PCs 'hot filth'.
  • To the cube-like vlatons, creatures alien to their native Unithon look like hideous monsters (the closest translation of the term in their telepathic language is squished or mashed).
• Chaos Architecture: The most serious issue PCs face in the tunnels below Timeborne is becoming lost. No matter how many precautions they take—such as blazing marks in passages or using a string to track a path—there is a temporal and spatial instability to the place that defies direction.
• City of Spies: The Secret City is the domain of thieves, spies and assassins, who have lived their lives on the streets and learn the right tricks. They gain a connection with the essence of the Secret City, and can slip into it by darting through a darkened doorway or behind a pile of refuse outside a building. This is often useful for avoiding pursuit, hiding temporarily, or conducting a clandestine meeting.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The white void of Savtua reacts to thoughts, even subconscious ones. Those unfamiliar with the plane's nature are likely to discover or encounter small objects and creatures drawn from their own minds. Once one understands that these things spring from their own imagination, they can practice creating specific things. The native Sootekai have no idea that the familiar and tranquil sights of Savtua are maintained by their own beliefs, subconscious thoughts, and memories of how things here have 'always' been. Even the monsters that crawl out of the white void are literal nightmares given flesh and form, thought up by youngest hatchlings who dwell too long on the scary stories of their old homeland.
• Clingy Costume: Upon arriving at the Pig Skin Farm, visitors find themselves on all fours and wearing a layer of tough flesh that resembles a pink-skinned pig. The 'suit' can only be removed by destroying it; failing to do so transforms the wearer into a mindless pig.
• Collector of the Strange: Lazustro fancies himself a collector of unique 'treasures'—specifically, reflected copies of complete rooms and the people and items within them. Recently, he decided that mere copies of rooms aren't sufficient treasures, and has invented a way to steal an entire real room and replace it with its reflection. This magic transports the actual room into his palace and leaves behind a copy which fades away the first time darkness falls in the room.
• Company Cross References: If asked, Sevior says he picked his time anchor crystal globe up in a dimension called Panaton, which originally featured in Into the Outside, a planar-themed sourcebook for Numenera.
• The Corrupter: The barbed devil Vassan, who has been living in Savtua for a few weeks, plans to slowly corrupt her lizardfolk neighbours, twisting and perverting their deity's teachings and dogma for her own use.
• Creepy Crows: Within the Grove of Crows, twisted reflections of the real world almost always come up crows, forests frequented by crows, and a variety of unsettling crow-adjacent manifestations.
• Crystalline Creature: Gedeons are crystalline centipede-like creatures the size of small elephants.
• Cyclops: Scavrous are grey and green rodents with a single yellow eye.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Although the psiskulls in the Crystal Tower of Iljerness are undead, they aren't particularly hostile, and they welcome visitors who are willing to converse with them.
• Dark World: The Secret City lies somewhere at the edges of the Ethereal, and intersects with the Material Plane only in the deepest portions of large cities, in dim alleys, in abandoned buildings, or around a random blind corner. These areas shift their precise points quite frequently. To a visitor, the buildings of the Secret City are dark and distorted reflections of those in the material city they just left behind. But somehow, it's not just the reflection of that city, but of all cities, everywhere.
• Deadly Gas: Sometimes acidic gases dissolved in Lake Phontix build up to a dangerous concentration, triggering a limnic eruption that creates a cloud of inert gas that is tens of feet high and at least a hundred feet across; it follows the wind or spreads out in all directions. Creatures in the area can't breathe even though their lungs are working, and might not know they're suffocating until they realise their pulse and breathing are very fast.
• Death Flight: If a Path mite successfully grips its prey with a bite, it extends its wings, potentially pulling the prey high into the air and off the Path entirely. Then it can drop the prey from about a mile above whatever dimension happens to be below the ambush site.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: If slain, the boulder-creatures on Sisyphus Mountain explode in a burst of stones.
• Demonic Possession: A devil's spirit hides in a room in the Tyrant of War, and attempts to possess anyone who investigates the bloodstain on the floor. The possessed character may not even realise it at first, other than feeling a bit warmer. It's only if they get to the Tyrant core that the spirit asserts control and attempts to trigger the Hellwave setting.
• Disguised in Drag: Count Anamu is actually a woman who disguises herself as a man in order to mislead her rivals and foil divinations used against her; Anamu isn't even her real name.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: The monks in each monastery in Szneshnya protect a fragment of the Ragnarok Anchor, and focus their training on stealth and survival so it cannot be found and reassembled.
• Dug Too Deep: The mining tunnels dug out by the residents of Hashadrin encroach on the magical wards that guard the mountains at the heart of Zarth. From time to time, and more frequently in recent months, reptilian creatures appear in the mines and slay or chase out all of the people.
• Empty Shell: About a dozen scions in the Garden of Inquiry are grafted with the actual creature they correspond to, which Luce captured from their home (mostly humans, all mindless shells now). The creatures are past saving, but they still suffer.
• Enchanted Forest:
  • The Grove of Crows is formed by the accumulated power and malice of an aberration birthed from the Shadowfell. A chaotic, twisted glee suffuses the Grove of Crows, extending outward from the core. This quality is most obvious in a region called the Forest of Lost Faces, a dark forest of twisted trees where visitors risk losing memories, their eyesight or face.
  • Sorrowbloom Forest is home to a small population of fey who have agreed to put aside their differences to protect the oldest and most magical trees in the forest. They divert and confuse villagers who might attempt to cut down these trees for Count Alonzo. They don't dare harm the villagers for fear of direct reprisals by the count, but their actions have been successful enough for the past few years that Alonzo believes there are no unusual trees left in the forest.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold:
  • Blizzard elementals, physical manifestations of winter storms found in Szneshnya, are hateful and cruel, and enjoy separating travellers from a group so their prey can freeze, starve or fall to their death.
  • Calved off from a Lower Plane, the demiplane of Winter's Reach is a frigid place of suffering and want.
• Exact Words: Even more so than other devils, Avernus observers are adept at seeing the loopholes in their own contracts. It's rare that someone who strikes a bargain with an observer doesn't end up defaulting, usually through no direct fault of their own, but as a result of circumstances outside of their control. But contracts don't care, and their souls become forfeit.
• Eye Beams: The divergent skull attacks with a magical eye ray.
• Eyeless Face: Hollow-eyed titans resemble giant-sized humanoids whose eye sockets are scarred and empty.
• Fallen Angel:
  • The Desolate One is heavily implied to be one of the darkstars, solar angels rumoured to have fallen from grace. In gameplay terms, it has the stats of a solar, except with a Chaotic Evil alignment and all its abilities manifest as darkness instead of light.invoked
  • Nacramar is a half-celestial who used to rule Korr, using his patience and wisdom to help guide the townsfolk in their pursuit of understanding, before he was corrupted by evil entities from outside this demiplane.
• False Utopia: Andressaval is a beautiful, serene plane that serves as a mask concealing a realm of demons.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Roheen ships achieve FTL travel by generating temporary, artificial dimensions. Skimming along the surfaces of these bubbles of warped reality, a ship could reach other stars in just a few short years.
• Festering Fungus: If not in the presence of living minds of human-level intelligence, psionic mold acts much like regular mold. When living things come close, it feeds off their psychic energy. Those who spend long durations in psionic mold-infested areas start suffering headaches, temporary memory loss, and eventually delirium and possibly even unconsciousness. Those so afflicted may also become unwitting hosts to the mold.
• Flat World: The entirety of Unithon is an immense cube about a hundred miles on a side. Near the edges of the cube, the soil and rock layers trail off, leaving just the bare cube face, which suddenly forms a cliff that plunges straight down. For as far as anyone has seen, the sides of the world cube are flat and unremarkable, but nobody knows if it has any features yet to be discovered. Nobody has been to the underside of the cube, and even mentioning it fills sapient species with a strange sense of horror.
• Foreseeing My Death: Reading the only scroll in the Library of Fate shows a character their own death, which will only come (within a year) if they use the power granted by the scroll to avoid any specific occurrence that takes place during the course of a round, or to make a one-time perfect attack.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The Intercessor's appearance is appropriate to any petitioner who speaks with them. The GM is instructed to ask the player to name one of their player character's deceased loved ones.
• Gambling Brawl: Things in the Green Tent Games are a bit rough and ready, as most people bring their own decks of cards and dice, and cheating is a known danger. If a fight breaks out for any reason, the Captain punishes everyone at the table equally.
• Ghost City:
  • Since Etherguard began prowling the Border Ethereal decades ago, the original inhabitants have fled (or died). Only a few small clusters of inhabitants persist.
  • Thyrites build a city, dwell in it for a time, and then abandon it, erecting a new city next to the old one. Only the outermost perimeter of Thyr is occupied; the entire vast interior is ruins.
  • The town of Korr used to be home to several hundred creatures, but now it's literally a ghost town, after an evil demigod invaded and killed all inhabitants. Their lingering spirits flicker in and out of existence, reenacting moments from their lives and deaths, not quite aware of what they're experiencing and unable to interact with visitors without outside help.
• Ghost Ship: The Unimaginable, touched by its encounter with a mysterious, monstrous presence, became a ghost ship filled with sealed decks, preserved corpses, half-sentient constructs, crazed survivors, and a creeping, transformative menace called nilim shamblers.
• Giant Corpse World: Threem is a strange and erratic demiplane that may have been built out of the head of a dead god.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Most shadowfrost fiends have been trapped hundreds of feet in the air, making mere inches of progress toward the surface of Laghris every year. Those that eventually reach the ground have usually gone mad from rage and the tedium.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Chaoz's Ninety-Ninth Divine Decree, meant to widen the streets, increase building heights and make more space for the burgeoning population went disastrously wrong. In one fell swoop, eight out of ten living creatures on Scyron were wiped from existence—including Chaoz himself.
• Haunted House: Some buildings in Timeborne have ghosts of former owners who died when the structure was plucked from its home dimension and deposited in Timeborne. These ghosts can be vengeful, or look for someone willing to get a message back to their loved ones at home, letting those people know what's become of them.
• Healer God: Zanasuresh is an obscure deity of nature and healing worshipped by the lizardfolk of Savtua.
• Healing Factor: Nilim shamblers regenerate their wounds, as can elars when in contact with water.
• Hell Gate: Those who manage to pierce the image at the eye of the Storm of the Styx discover a moving portal mouth that leads to a random layer of the Abyss.
• Hive Caste System: Hivehome is a giant beehive inhabited by gnck (builders) and qili (queens), who are quite different from each other.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In order to eradicate a Material Plane world that offended him, Aesul Myrak enhanced his curse by tying it to the residual energy released when a dimension comes to an end. Some portion of that was directed at the world of Aesul's ire, causing it to collapse in upon itself, but Aesul became the conduit, creating the Splintered Reach, a demiplane consisting of the scraps of millions of mostly disintegrated dead worlds and planes, in which he is trapped forever.
• Horror Hunger: Perpetually hungry but unable to die except through violence, hollow-eyed titans exist in a ravenous state, their minds frequently shifting between memories of their prior glory and the overwhelming need to soothe the painful ache in their bellies.
• Human Notepad: Every traveler has a birthmark of thin lines tracing across their body. The design's similarity to a map is impossible to ignore. As the traveler matures, they begin feeling a subtle but constant yearning to travel to a distant, mysterious location. As the GM, you have many choices on what exactly this map represents.
• Human Traffickers: Ivon Warth usually transfers people stolen out of Timeborne to conflict zones on the Lower Planes where armies pay coin for cannon fodder, as well as to heavily industrialised locations on the Material Plane who'll pay for more bodies. Most victims are too confused and lost to do anything other than do as they are told.
• Identity Amnesia: Beings with celestial and fiendish ties slowly begin to lose memories if they spend more than about a month in Erewhon. Over several months, their entire history can be wiped away, leaving their mind a clean slate. Those who become Lost are essentially children in adult bodies.
• I Did What I Had to Do: The writings on the gate to Aesul Myrak's donjon describe a world called Navarin that hosted a civilisation of utter depravity and evil, of how Aesul Myrak was dispatched from the Upper Planes to show Navarin a better path and was betrayed by locals, leaving him no choice but to curse Navarin, destroying it utterly.
• Immortality Inducer: People who remain for years in Timeborne age very slowly. However, no one really knows for sure if people are truly ageless while they remain on the Planebreaker, because over hundreds of years, stupid accidents come for almost everyone.
• Ingesting Knowledge: A primogenitor can attempt to bite the head off any target it is grappling with its mandibles, assuming the target has a head. When the head is completely digested, the primogenitor knows everything its victim knew.
• Inn of No Return: Reinald Heur sometimes culls the drunkest of his patrons, or those who rack up too much of a tab, by rolling them into his portable hole. Later, he transfers them to Ivon Warth, a member of the Preservationists' Guild. Reinald doesn't much care what use Ivon has for them. Deep down, he knows he's robbing people of their own free will, yet he does it anyway.
• Insect Queen: Each qili, who serves as queen of her hive, has her own demesne in Hivehome, probably a mile or so across. The reqili is a position not unlike an empress, ruling over many queens.
• Invisible Monsters: The inhabitants of the Pig Skin Farm are naturally invisible and spend most of their time in the nearby fields. About once a day they collect one of their pigs, slaughter and eat it.
• It Only Works Once: An inexorable has a one-time-only ability to execute a single perfect attack against a foe of its choosing. The cost of using this ability is typically its life.
• Keystone Army: Any incursion of nilim depends on a central mass of exotic matter located nearby. If the primary is destroyed, all nearby nilim depending on it begin crumbling to dust.
• King in the Mountain: Even after Chaoz died in a magical ritual of his own making, those who worship him are still able to channel divine power. His faithful, calling themselves catacomb cartographers, set out to map the entire Infinite Labyrinth, hoping that if they could reach its endmost points, Chaoz would return to them.
• Large and in Charge:
  • The Sovereign of the embodied in Ramiah is twice the size of the others.
  • The head of Worm Rat Lair is always a particularly large savant.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Varga is very skilled at memory magic, including the ability to steal, shape and restore lost memories. Persistent adventurers who keep trying to talk to Varga or ransack her house are likely to endure several cycles of fear, memory wipes, and re-exploring areas they've already covered.
• Leaking Can of Evil: The ultimate source of the Storm of the Styx seems to be the constant struggles of an ancient, imprisoned demon lord—name long forgotten—seeking to escape confinement from the lowest layers of the Abyss.
• Living Dream: In Erewhon, dreams sometimes escape the minds of sleepers altogether and roam for a time in the wilds. Some are caught by dreamhunters, and others wander until they find a home in the mind of a new dreamer's subconscious years later.
• Living Lie Detector: Primogenitors have the ability to determine truth from falsehood. The Mantis uses it to weed out those falsely seeking payment for something they've not done (whose heads she eats).
• Living Polyhedron: All things native to Unithon, including creatures, tend to be simple shapes such as spheres, pyramids and cubes. Pieces broken or cut from an intact object or creature automatically form these shapes, with the source shrinking to maintain its default shape.
• Living Statue:
  • A 150 feet tall statue stands astride the wall of Timeborne like a sentinel. If Timeborne ever comes under attack from an external force, it animates and protects the city and its residents until the threat has passed.
  • The two angelic sculptures on the top of Uraian's Stair normally serve as monuments, and animate to defend the location in the face of a true threat to peace.
• Living Weapon: A sentient sword called Malkensenthis stands constant vigil over the gates of Etherguard, stuck firmly in the stone. It vocally addresses anyone who approaches the gates.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Aesul Myrak is forever trapped in the Splintered Reach. If he were ever slain, the entire dimension would dissipate, dumping all current contents into the Deep Ethereal.
• Long-Lived: The Sootekai lizardfolk on Savtua typically live about 150 years, twice the normal lifespan of their species.
• The Maze: The labyrinth surrounding the catacomb containing Chaoz's tomb seems to go on forever, and may in fact house many other mazes and labyrinths within itself normally thought to be separate.
• Mile-Long Ship: Tyrant of War is a warship composed of five linked levitating segments, each hundreds of feet long.
• Mind over Matter: Vlatons have a limited telekinetic ability that allows them to manipulate nearby objects in the same way that a human might use arms and hands.
• Mix-and-Match Critters:
  • A dream beast in Erewhon is usually a hybrid, blending the likeness and abilities of at least two creatures into a single creature. One could be a hybrid cockatrice and hydra; another an intellect devourer and hezrou. Mechanically, a dream beast can take two actions on its turn, has the underlying stats of the stronger creature, and one or two actions or qualities of the weaker creature.
  • The native inhabitants of Worm Rat Lair are a colony of planar vermin that combine aspects of mole rats and earthworms. The proportions vary with each individual: one might look like a worm with the head of a mole rat, another might be a rat with worms instead of limbs, and a third might be a rat with an eyeless toothed worm head.
• Mobile City: Etherguard is a city carried on the back of a colossal beast that prowls the Border Ethereal.
• Morphic Resonance: When a chimeran takes on a new form, they might gain the gross physical attributes of a new species, but anyone who knows the chimeran can see the resemblance between their forms. If a given chimeran has certain features when embodied as a human, they also have something of those features as another species, translated accordingly.
• The Mourning After: To save his queen Tereculon from an assassination attempt, Idlewyld sacrificed his single perfect attack, and thus also his own life. Furious and heartbroken, Tereculon slaughtered most of her court. Her ambitions of Abyssal conquest faltered. Her fortress, dedicated to war, fell into disrepair, becoming a corpse-choked tomb. Since then, Abyssal creatures of every sort have taken up residence in and around the structure. Deep within, Tereculon still grieves over the lifeless form of Idlewyld.
• Muck Monster: Refuse revenants form when someone dies from some rubbish-related accident that leaves behind a victim's remains intermixed with the waste responsible for killing them.
• Mummy: The most advanced monks in Szneshnya practice a form of self-mummification, willing themselves to death in an incorruptible state. These beings, called timeless ones, look like skilfully preserved corpses. They remain a repository of history and knowledge because their stilled thoughts can be accessed by monks who learn the proper ki technique.
• My Grandson, Myself: Count Shohone claims to be the son of the previous Count Shohone, who passed away about a year ago of natural causes. As a skilled practitioner of illusion magic, he faked his own death and took over as his 'son' to confuse his rivals. The people of his household only know that the father disappeared for a few days, then the son arrived to claim his title and inheritance.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much:
  • Marigold appears to be a drow but is actually a shapechanged yochlol demon who found sanctuary in Timeborne from others of her kind. She sometimes exchanges her wares for additional measures against demons trying to track her down for her abdication of duties.
  • The hag exile Dorothea and her two night hag coven mates Eslpeth Eyebite and Jane seek to break their addiction to hate and evil. Their effort has produced several successes, as well as a few notable failures.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Reaching into the infinite multiverse for a parallel version of a specific individual is sometimes dangerous. Usually, it's fine, if odd. But every so often, a malign link called the Law of Self-Cancellation forms between two parallel individuals who meet. In the worst case, the individual and all parallel versions are wiped from existence, possibly taking one or more entire worlds with them.
• Nightmare Sequence: Whenever the host of an embodied shimmer sleeps or meditates, visions of the death of Zo the Godqueen's homeworld impinge.
• No Biological Sex: Elars do not reproduce, either among themselves or with others. Instead, one is spawned when a particularly violent storm from the Elemental Chaos touches the Elemental Plane of Water.
• Non-Indicative Name: Despite the monastery's name, sages of the Sisterhood are not universally female.
• Not Afraid to Die: The cost of using an inexorable's perfect attack is typically their life, but they don't mind (at least, not long enough to matter).
• Ominous Fog: Although the Cauldron Woods is naturally inclined to be foggy, Count Shohone has augmented this feature with spells and a nebulous cauldron. Properly tended, it creates and sustains mists and illusions, and turns portions of the mist into walls that restrain creatures. The nebulous cauldron has a playful but wicked sense of humour, and likes to separate people from their comrades.
• Our Demons Are Different: The Sootekai call the horrible monsters that emerge from the void surrounding Savtua and stalk the swamp demons. These things resemble fiendish-looking birds, felines and wolves with smoking breath and glowing eyes, usually the size of a bear or bigger, but are not actual fiends.
• The Paranoiac:
  • Count Tanbau is quite paranoid and distrusts anyone who approaches his village, even those with obviously peaceful intent.
  • Dazustran, master of the reflected Palace of Reflections, is paranoid and prone to fits of rage in which he smashes things and lashes out at people he thinks are his enemies.
• Parasite Zombie: If an intelligent creature is overcome by a psionic mold infestation, their bodies are slowly consumed and replaced with a papery crust filled with a half-empty latticework of living mold. These mind mold wraiths recall something of their former life and might even struggle to continue their normal routines.
• Persona Non Grata: Through some method of magic and psionic ritual, Ikarth's ruling senators can expel someone in such a way that they can never return.
• Pocket Dimension:
  • Ramiah is a curled-up, limited dimension contained within a magic weapon called the Star Blade.
  • The Crystal Tower of Iljerness is a tiny demiplane consisting of a crystalline tower and a garden-like decorative maze.
  • Created as a grounding rod for a dangerous excess of energy building up in an adjacent dimension, Mnim consists of a flat, relatively unremarkable landscape about 5 miles across, with a tall iron tower at the very centre and a constantly overcast sky.
  • Nambu bounty hunters spend several months creating physical objects called Nambu Bounty Boxes, each of which is instilled with the seed of a limited artificial dimension.
  • If threatened, a traveler can briefly flee into an extraplanar dimension hiding in the map on their skin, which consists only of the glowing lines of said map receding to infinity.
• Portal Crossroad World: The Path is a tenuous road threading through the various planes of existence, an ever-extending 'scar' left by the Planebreaker as it crashes through each dimension in turn. A unique transitive dimension, the Path winds through other planes and dimensions. Unless a particular dimension is especially exotic, it can be assumed that the Path extends into it.
• Power Crystal: Tellectites, found in Erewhon, are crystals prized for their psi-enhancing qualities by some buyers in other dimensions.
• Power-Up Food: The main appeal of visiting Edralduu is that every now and then, the tree bears a magical fruit, typically duplicating the effect of a potion or an elixir, but sometimes something more unusual.
• Precursors: As their name suggests, primogenitors are likely predecessors of creatures that exist today, but not through direct descent. If certain stories can be believed, they originated from a multiverse that predates our own. How and why a few survived the end of their own cycle of existence and now exist within ours is likely a different story for each primogenitor.
• Price on Their Head: Standing bounties given by the Mantis include bringing the head of a thief plaguing the Worldswept Market, the Library of Worlds or the Sisterhood of Sages.
• Professional Killer: Danni Mackenlow offers an additional service to an exclusive clientele that knows to ask: assassination for hire. Because the Mantis is one of her occasional clients, she has so far avoided becoming the focus of a Mantis bounty herself. She chooses her clients very carefully and does a lot of research on the proposed subject of the assassination beforehand.
• Proportionately Ponderous Parasites: Feasting on the hollow-eyed titans are enormous parasites.
• Pyromaniac: Lava husks prowl the planes in search of others to burn, to batter, and in some cases, to suck the life force from.
• Reclaimed by Nature: Since Chadlum's death, his realm has been a place of grief and tears, with thick thorny vines entwining decaying marble structures.
• Rock Monster: Some of the rolling boulders on Sisyphus Mountain are actually malevolent creatures, and deliberately steer themselves (or the boulders they magically animate) into travellers.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: The rodent-like scavrous range from rat-sized to wolf-sized.
• Schizo Tech: The Unimaginable was produced by technology that comes right out of sci-fi media. Arcana of the Ancients is recommended for GMs wishing to further develop this location.
• Secret Underground Passage: Nacramar's Tower in Korr is sealed; there are no physical entrances visible, and magical attempts to enter the tower (including by teleportation) automatically fail. There is a hidden entrance accessible only by riding the river in a boat, gaining access to the tunnels on the underside of the island, and finding the path that leads to the lowest level of the tower.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes:
  • Count Tanbau has enchanted all of his villagers and many of the creatures in County Ovarham, and is able to see through their eyes and control their actions as he wishes.
  • Each eye-like window in Edraval looks out through the eyes of a different creature somewhere in the multiverse, and can be used to spy on distant entities and events. However, there is no apparent order for these windows. Travellers who come to Edraval might spend months, years or decades searching for a specific window.
• Self-Duplication: When attacked, an accumulator has a 45% chance to split into two accumulators standing next to each other. Both accumulators have a hit point value equal to the original at the time it split. Neither can reuse this ability until after a short rest.
• Sentient Sands: A prince of dust is composed of scintillating sand and dust that constantly trickles in dusty rivulets from its body.
• Shock and Awe: Accumulators are elementals of almost pure electrical energy.
• Snake People: Reed folk are merfolk whose lower bodies look more akin to water snakes than fish.
• Sorcerous Overlord: The nobles of Zarth are ruthless and manipulative mages, always seeking an advantage over their peers.
• Spider People: The only living things of interest in the Endless Dwarven Hall are monstrosities combining features of dwarves and bright red spiders—spiders with dwarven heads, spiders with dwarven legs, dwarves with spider heads and beards made of spiders, spider swarms in the shape of dwarves, and so on.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: Just as a doom is called into existence by the cosmos, each doom can call a shortsword known as a doomblade into its hand.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: A song in the Grove of Crows tells of a solar named Coralina who fell in love with a darkstar named Kharthos, and of how their tragic love resulted in Coralina's death and the retreat of Kharthos to a dimension of his own making.
• Straw Nihilist: The Empty Prince is the re-embodied soul of a sour and pathetic human from a dead dimension who delights in death, especially the ultimate one. He's happy to explain his nihilistic philosophy, which is to see to it that the Star Blade's original purpose of destroying souls be fulfilled.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Once called into existence, a doom does its best to slay its target, and is unflinching in its objective. It can't be reasoned with or distracted. A doom created by the unleash doom spell is open to changing its target, but only if its initial target can provide a compelling reason.
• Synchronization: In Sanguine, the Wood of Blood and Flesh overlaps with the bodies of living creatures across the multiverse. Each scion in the Wood corresponds to one living creature elsewhere. If a scion is killed, the corresponding creature also dies.
• Taken for Granite: The Iron Curse, designed by Dodgsen the Judge, causes every inmate and guard in the Prison of Eternal Torment to contract a sickness that eats flesh, transforming them into buzzing, screaming shapes of iron with only the façade of creatures, unable to ever leave.
• Teleport Interdiction: Attempts to teleport, phase while incorporeal, and move through the Border Ethereal into and out of Tyrant of War are stymied.
• That's No Moon:
  • Travellers arrive at the Hell of Grinding Worms standing on what appears to be a thick rope (easily 30 feet wide) extending in two directions as far as they can see, before realising that these ropes are actually the hairy, fibrous bodies of gigantic worms that slowly writhe and twist, sometimes bending their heads or tails to nip at each other or sniff at travellers.
  • When not moving, Path mites resemble flattened red boulders, innocuous odd debris scattered along the Path. When prey moves close, a Path mite pounces.
• Themed Tattoos: Each time a thorn dancer succeeds on a mission of protection, it carves a symbol or series of images into its bark-like flesh. Some thorn dancers are so covered in such carvings that they seem heavily scarred upon first viewing. They are almost always happy to relate the larger story of each carving, if asked.
• Thinking Up Portals: The portal dragon's breath weapon is a cloud of tiny, voracious portals to other dimensions that literally bite other creatures before dissipating.
• This Way to Certain Death: Blizzard elementals have been known to carry back their dead foes and leave them to be found by other travellers, frozen solid with their mortal wounds still visible.
• Treetop Town: Diligent explorers can find a few small humanoid villages hidden away on the larger branches of Edralduu, connecting various constructed platforms with rope or plank bridges instead of roads.
• Underground Monkey:
  • Most creatures native to Unithon are made up of one discrete shape or a cluster of shapes that remain together. For example, the equivalent of a squirrel is a small sphere, and the equivalent of an eagle is two wing-like flattened cubes that touch along one edge. Despite their shape, objects and creatures of Unithon have the same properties of their Material Plane equivalents.
  • Marn-al-kanese, who make up a significant population in Empty Thyr, resemble giant owls, although they bear spiraling horns above their eyes and their talons are exaggeratedly long.
  • Ice apes and ice reavers in Winter's Reach have ape and stone golem stats but are Neutral Evil, immune to cold and (in the latter case) intelligent.invoked
  • Shadowfrost fiends, survivors of the cataclysm that destroyed Laghris, are fiends that resemble rings of grey-blue ice surrounded by shadowy flames, and whose attacks and magical abilities inflict cold and/or necrotic damage instead of fire, poison and so on.
• Vampiric Draining: After entangling biological prey, a prince of dust can transform their blood to dust. That transformation releases a surge of life that princes of dust relish.
• The Virus: Nilim influence distorts and transforms living and non-living things alike, causing them to warp and blister, even rot, like living flesh cursed with leprosy. Still-living subjects are the things most readily converted to fresh nilim shamblers, but anything will do.
• Was Once a Man:
  • A tormented inmate in the Prison of Eternal Torment is a buzzing, screaming, formless mass of red and black metal with no memory of its previous existence, only an unending sensation of pain.
  • Edraval is inhabited by creatures who became trapped, got lost, or went mad while searching for a particular window or for whoever they believe is looking through their own eyes. Whatever they originally were, as their minds are destroyed and reshaped, their bodies transform as well, and they become weird things with too many eyes, one giant eye, or no eyes at all.
  • Hollow-eyed titans were once gods, the children of gods, primordial beings that predate the gods, or living embodiments of divine wrath, but all of them were defeated, disfigured and banished to Uur-Ghan to suffer forever.
  • The hideous dwarf-spiders in the Endless Dwarven Hall have only bestial intelligence but once may have been actual dwarves. They hunt smaller creatures (including each other) and any visitors they discover, gibbering strange, meaningless things that almost sound like various dwarven languages.
  • Arrivals at the Pig Skin Farm who fail to remove their pig-skinned 'suit' are permanently grafted to their suits and become mindless beasts.
  • The original mind of the corpse seeding a lava husk is usually degraded and gone. Sometimes a memory or two remains, but the core personality is absent.
• Weird Currency: Soul silver, a currency unique to Timeborne earned by completing the Mantis' bounties, is a bit of the Mantis' life force concentrated into a tangible object.
• Weird Moon: The Planebreaker is an interdimensional wanderer, a moon-sized chunk of matter that has traveled the multiverse for time out of mind. Every plane the Planebreaker previously visited retains a tenuous connection to the moon, called the Path. Those who find the Path—as well as confused castaways caught in the Path's grip—can travel it between all the planes the Planebreaker has visited.
• Weird Weather: The Storm of the Styx is a wandering demonic invasion housed in a tornado's cloak. When it appears in a world of the Material Plane, high winds and rampaging demons devastate an area. The storm usually lasts for a few days, often tracing a river's course until it reaches a lake or large body of water, before fading.
• When Trees Attack: The trees in Andressaval are demonic plants like treants, except that rather than animating trees, they have the ability to bite and drain blood like vampires.
• Winged Humanoid: Inkarnates are winged, their wings literally formed by glyphs representing the concept that created them.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: A week on Uraian's Stair is as a day elsewhere, giving the troubled the mental space to heal from spiritual trauma.
• You Can't Go Home Again:
  • When the Planebreaker visits a dimension, natives with sufficient magic and/or technology could send an exploratory mission to the intruder, but are at risk of being sucked along in its wake when it leaves. Those pulled along after the moon often find themselves stranded along the Path.
  • Some years ago, a thief known as Kalu came to the Grove of Crows, thinking to pull off an easy heist. However, when he agreed to steal a one-of-a-kind obsidian gem called the Crow's Eye, he didn't realise that he would become trapped. Unable to leave without the gem he promised to retrieve, but afraid to press farther into the Grove than the edge of the Forest of Lost Faces, Kalu remains.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Presumably forged by a god of death or similar being, the Star Blade's signature ability is to draw in the soul of any creature it killed. But in what seems likely to be an unintended consequence, each absorbed soul finds in a land of dark metal vistas, over which a wondrous sky of celestial objects wheel.

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