The Planes

Nardish is the name given to the material plane of a much larger system. Many of these planes are rarely thought of or experienced, but there are several with influence on the game, so the main ones are detailed here.

The elemental planes

Four planes of earth, air, fire, and water, who's features are entirely alien and where any outsiders suffer a painful death, unless they are supremely well prepared. On these planes elementals dwell, as well as societies of monsters that rarely leave. Travel between them is possible without standard planar travel, as they are joined by demiplanes where the elements meet in a crashing chaos. (Imagine a d4 where each face is a plane, each edge a demiplane.) They are often referred to as the inner planes, and small amounts of their essence can be drawn into the planes of life.

The planes of life

Aside from the material plane, three other planes contain life in a similar way. They are: the overside (aka celestia, heaven), the feywild (aka the maddening plane), and the casarow (aka fiendom, hell). Accordingly they are home to celestials, fey, and fiends respectively, and have environments that these creatures favor. All planes of life draw from the elemental planes, and are connected to the transitive planes, and the arcana. Whilst there is some slight variation, the material plane tends to neutrality, the overside to good, the feywild to chaos, and the fiendom to evil.

The transitive planes

So called because they are the most easily accessible from the planes of life, the transitive planes are the ethereal plane and the astral plane. The astral plane is the plane of dreams, a strange silver ocean with streaks of colour, where souls drift in their sleep and their dreams manifest themselves out of the colours in the opaque water. It is stunningly beautiful. The ethereal plane is the plane of memory, full of silver fog, and a perfect reflection of the plane of life closest to it, but with all past landscapes happening at once, including houses and trees. Older things get fainter and fainter, but the ethereal plane is still a mess of uncertain edges, made worse by strange drifting shapes. The shape of a recently dead mortal may occasionally be seen in the ethereal plane, but can't be interacted with. Nothing there can touched.

It is said that the astral plane is the plane of all the futures at once, and the etheral plane all the pasts at once. Both planes contain the drifting souls of the once living. When a mortal dies, their soul is first cast into the ethereal plane, to float endlessly. Whilst it is newly dead, it is restless, and called into the astral plane many times by force as their image is dreamt about. Eventually, as a person is forgotten, a soul loses it's sense of self by spending too long in the ethereal plane.

Once a soul has let go of it's old life, it is called into one of the planes of life via the astral plane.

The arcana

The plane of magic, the arcana is technically a sister plane to the ethereal and astral planes, as it works in a similar way. However, it's inaccessibility and recent collision with the material plane means it is treated much differently. It is a fabric of essences, strands, of every possible idea on any of the planes of life, and draws itself from them. All magic is cast by tapping into this raw power.

Historically, the arcana was equally accessable from all the planes of life. However, the beings on the material plane, with little need for it's magic (as neutrality demands the least from it's practitioners), forgot the ways of getting to it. In an attempt to change this, four of the beings known as the first people in nardish, used their innate connection to the arcana to call a powerful ritual. Where many before them had failed, they succeeded, and threw the full power of the arcana into a plane starved of any and all magic. This event, called the wave in nardish, threw the material plane into magical chaos. The arcana itself became tangled in the material plane, allowing otherplanar beings onto the material plane much more simply than planar travel before. Many souls exist in the arcana now, cast into it as demigods, and can leave into the astral plane if they let go of who they are. The original four are trapped there permenantly.