The Crystal Spheres
Ever wonder why scholars always say ‘the worlds of the Prime Material Plane’ instead of figuring all the different worlds have their own Material Plane? Given that the Astral Sea is between them, it’s clearly not all one contiguous plane, right?
Wrong! There really is only one. Up until a few years ago, the Astral Sea didn’t overlap Wildspace at all. That’s a new development. Nobody knows why, or where this haze at the edges of each Wildspace System came from, but it started appearing around the same time as those strange black obelisks you see all over the multiverse these days. You know the ones: knock ‘em over and something nasty and powerful pops out to kill you?
Coincidence? I’ll let you be the judge of that. But yeah, it’s true: There’s just one Prime. All those Wildspace systems are separated by physical distances so vast even at Spelljamming speeds there’s no way a creature with a regular lifespan could travel between them though—not without a special kind of help.
Each world on the Prime is surrounded in a vast and unbreakable Crystal Sphere, black and beset with stars. It just so happens—and nobody really knew this before the haze showed up—the stars are arranged as maps of the galaxy.
That is to say, where a star is fixed on a Crystal Sphere corresponds to a distant sun in another sphere. The other Wildspace system is in that direction, but its trillions of miles away.
What the stars within the sphere are, exactly, varies from system to system. In some systems they’re great fiery braziers embedded in the ceramic-textured surface of the sphere. In others they’re great jewels, and in more still they’re portals to various planes of fire and radiance.
Nobody knows who built the crystal spheres, but I’d bet good money on the flumphs. Nobody ever suspects the flumphs.
So, if these jet-black spheres are indestructible, how does anyone get in or out?
In a word: Portals.
Most Crystal Spheres have naturally occurring portals that appear in their surface from time to time. Sometimes there are patterns or rhythms to the appearance, but other times it seems to happen completely at random. Spells can locate one while it’s open, of course. Spells can also create portals—at least most of the time. Some Spheres are finnicky, with portals that only open under certain conditions, like if your ship is made of living matter, or if you only approach while singing “Your Beardy Face” on the second Tuesday of the month. And gods help you if you end up with a sphere like that and the Wildspace system doesn’t have Tuesdays.
So, what about the haze that surrounds the edges of each Wildspace system? We don’t know why it’s there, or who put it there, but fortunately some intrepid pirates, smugglers, and explorers who find the dangers outside the sphere less terrifying than those of the Astral Sea have managed to figure a workaround: a magic item called a Crystal Foghorn .
*Item: Crystal Foghorn
The Foghorn makes a subsonic tone in the Treble Arcana that disrupts this Astral Haze and reveals the Sphere behind it in a 600 ft. radius. It is not permanent, however. The Astral Haze returns within 10 minutes of the Foghorn’s use, but ten minutes is plenty long enough for a spellcaster to get in close and open a portal outside the Crystal Sphere.
Of course, that raises the question: what is outside the sphere?
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