History

Arrival of the Kingdom of Ayris

As the plane between the planes, mages are able to create highly stable portals to the plane. It’s also a place where enterprising planefarers can most easily find new portals to hitherto unknown worlds. Controlling a liminal plane such as the Astral has been the giddy dream of countless empires across history. About a century before the current day, two mighty nations from different worlds on the Material Plane discovered the secret to creating stable portals to the Aetherial Expanse, the only part of the Astral Plane they could explore by using their naval ships (with mild arcane adjustments) to sail through the aether. Of these two nations, the first to enter the Expanse was the Kingdom of Ayris, a tiny coastal nation on its home world, which prospered as a realm of traders that its warlike neighbors maintained good relations with. Ayris kept a small naval fleet at home but protected its homeland with a well-paid mercenary army and an equally well-off navy of privateers. The boldest of these warriors for hire were offered huge sums to enter the Ayrissian mages’ portal to the Astral Plane and go on the adventure of a lifetime, guarding Ayrissian settlers, botanists, geologists, and explorers as they hunted for new, valuable resources across the Expanse. They found this resource in the form of aetherium. Though the aether itself was overflowing with magical power, actually immersing oneself in it for long caused horrific poisoning and quick death. Crystallized aether, however, was stable, nonpoisonous, and easily transportable. Ayrissian mages longed for the substance to advance their experiments, and the kingdom’s warlike neighbors all but salivated at its destructive potential.

Invasion by the Empire of Karel

A scant decade after the Kingdom of Ayris began colonizing the Aetherial Expanse, a new contender entered the scene: the Karelagne Empire. Hailing from another world on the Material Plane, the vast Empire of Karel had likewise discovered the potential of aetherium to enhance its military capabilities and catapult its technology centuries into the future in an instant. Equipped with a navy that, if mustered in full, could stretch across the horizon uninterrupted, the Karelagne Empire swept across the Astral Plane, and engaged the Ayrissian colonists and their privateer navy in a bitter war that raged for decades—one that ended in a stalemate driven by both war-weary nations’ desire to return to hunting for aetherium.

Rise of the Drakes

The Astral Plane is hostile to mortal life; no humanoid creature is native to the Expanse. Over the centuries, however, countless people have been lost on its deserted islands, and the spirits of those who die at sea are claimed by the roiling consciousness of the aether. Bodies lost at sea have been known to rise again, inhabited by a restless spirit broken off from the aether’s gestalt consciousness. These astral emergents are few and have only scattered communities, but they call the Expanse their home—and no one has more right than them. Defectors were common during the aetherial wars between Karel and Ayris, or the War of the Invaders as the emergents called it. Many of these defectors took their ships and settled on islands where a handful of emergents had already made their settlements. Defectors and emergents banded together to form pirate crews that harried imperial and kingdom vessels alike for wealth and the resources they needed to survive. Of these pirates, the most feared was Captain Teruko the Drake, and her ship, The Drake, which shared her epithet. The Drake’s crew settled on an island cluster far from the military encampments of the Kingdom of Ayris and the Karelagne Empire and declared it a free haven for pirates across the Expanse. Following Captain Teruko’s death, her islands were named the Isle of Drakes. And in the decade since the War of the Invaders ended, jobless sailors have flocked to the Isle of Drakes in search of fortune and glory in the only way they know how: sowing death across the sea.

Astrium and Cosmic Turtles

Creatures of the Astral Plane, as well as creatures from other planes banished to the Astral by magical mishap or experimentation, found their way to the Aetherial Expanse. Over centuries, the magic of this realm caused them to mutate and adapt to their new home. The greatest of these creatures were the cosmic turtles. Tales of the earliest surviving planefaring civilizations say the cosmic turtles were once ordinary beasts no larger than a human fist, but that over centuries of exposure to aether, they gained the capacity for great wisdom and grew so large that islands could form upon their backs. Nevertheless, cosmic turtles are now believed extinct, for no sailor of the Expanse has seen one for a century. These scant surviving myths come from records of a civilization of Astrium, a great city inhabited by planefaring giants that was lost many centuries ago. Legend says the giants made their home in the center of the Aetherial Expanse—but the center of this realm holds only the Maelstrom, an immense aetherstorm that rages without end. If Astrium ever existed, its magical secrets, and the astral titans that discovered them, have been lost forever.