The Drift

The Drift is a colorful plane of impossible geometry and unlikely physics, reachable only with technology that a newly ascended god, Triune, broadcast to the galaxy just over 300 years ago. While there are many who claim secret knowledge of the workings of the Drift, only Triune knows the true purpose and scope of the plane. But every starship pilot knows that each time she activates her vessel’s Drift engine, a portion of another plane—the Negative Energy Plane, Axis, or the Elemental Plane of Earth, to name a few—is ripped from its home and added to the Drift. These appropriated fragments often retain their local atmosphere and gravity for a time, becoming self-contained representations of their planes in miniature. The sizes of the stolen fragments range from that of a single stone to entire planetoids. These pieces often maintain the alignment traits of the plane from which they came, from portions of Hell that are anathema to virtuous beings to patchy expanses of the Maelstrom that shrink and grow according to no observable pattern.
The Drift pulls from every plane, and as sections of various planes that would never otherwise interact mingle, surreal thunderstorms of mixing planar energy can cause phenomena never before recorded in even the most chaotic and unstable parts of the multiverse. A starship captain who orders her vessel into the Drift has no way to predict which of these many pockets she might end up passing near—or find herself dropping into—so even the most routine journeys through hyperspace are not taken lightly.
In virtually every system, there are those who refuse to travel through the Drift on the grounds that their use of the technology may result in great suffering for an intelligent being in some distant realm or perhaps right next door. In The Pact Worlds, this small but vocal faction calls itself the Moored, and proponents frequently organize non-violent protests on Absalom Station, especially on the docking arms. In truth, though, most planes are so enormous that the chance that any single Drift engine activation will negatively impact an intelligent being is vanishingly small.

Geography

DRIFT PHYSICS

Despite its strange appearance, the Drift isn’t very different from Material Plane space. The plane is mostly empty and airless, and sports no appreciable gravitational pull. The exception to this is what Drift explorers call “planar bubbles.” When a piece of another plane is torn away and added to the Drift, part of its essence expands the Drift’s planar fabric, yet the physical components are added whole cloth—the fragments’ terrain and any creatures or items present at the moment of theft are set floating in the Drift’s expanse. The largest of these annexations are able to maintain localized regions in which their former planar properties remain dominant. As soon as anything is removed from these bubbles, it immediately loses these former planar qualities. Some scholars believe that over time these bubbles slowly break down, “digested” by the Drift, but if so, it’s an inexplicably random process.

DRIFT TRAVEL

While starship crews occasionally wander through the Drift looking for valuable scrap or hidden treasures, trying to locate a particular location within the Drift, such as a known site, is exceptionally difficult. Most Pact Worlds residents know how tricky it is to return to the same place again and again, though stories exist of exceptions that result from magic items, divine fiat, or mysterious “beacon codes” provided by the Church of Triune. This is especially true of Alluvion, the Drift’s de facto capital city, which Triune has publicly claimed as its divine realm. Travelers can accidentally end up in the city during the course of their regular jumps, but reaching the city on purpose requires divine coordinate codes granted by the church, often encoded on limited-use items that interface directly with a ship’s Drift engine systems.
Hyperspace jumps between places on the Material Plane also require a certain amount of time spent traveling through the Drift, and thanks to the plane’s mutable nature, travel through the Drift between the same two points on the Material Plane can take varying amounts of time, even for the same ship. Similarly, these paths through the Drift should be thought of less as established trade routes and more as an expression of planar dynamics. This variation means that two ships can’t exit the Drift onto exactly the same point in Material Plane space, nor can a ship exit directly into a solid object—a great fear of early explorers. On the other hand, it is also impossible for anyone to fortify and thus control specific jump points within the Drift, and someone attempting to guard a planet from invasion would need to mine every inch of space around the world, as ships might reasonably appear anywhere in its vicinity.
All of this is useful for individual ships, but adds complications for ships attempting to travel to the same place and arrive at the same time, let alone the same formation. In these situations, multiple ships can couple their ships’ Drift engines to one another so that they effectively become a single entity for purposes of travel time and arrival position. The downside of this method is that it forces all the ships to use the worst Drift engine rating of the group, though some militaries have crafted specific jumpships capable of circumventing this restriction and moving an entire armada quickly and coherently.

Localized Phenomena

TRANSITIVE PLANE Like the Ethereal and Shadow Planes, the Drift is generally considered a Transitive Plane in that it is used by mortals primarily for transportation, though it has some major differences from those planes. It appears to be technically coterminous with the Material Plane, meaning that a given point on one corresponds to a point on another, yet the fabric of the Drift is folded so strangely and changes so rapidly that these points are hopelessly scrambled—two points apparently an inch apart in the Drift might correspond with locations thousands of light-years apart on the Material Plane. The mysteries of this relationship are still poorly understood by most and the subject of much study.
NO GRAVITY While individual planar bubbles may have their own regions of localized gravitational pull, for the most part the Drift has no distinguishable gravity.
NORMAL TIME Time within the Drift passes at the same rate as time on the Material Plane.
INFINITE AND EXPANDING Although the Drift is technically finite, in much the same way as Outer Planes like the mountain of Heaven or Hell’s many-layered pit, it is so vast as to be effectively infinite where mortals are concerned, and no one has ever found an edge or border. Additionally, divine investigation has shown that the plane is still growing as it absorbs tiny pieces of other planes.
DYNAMIC MORPHOLOGY The Drift is fundamentally consistent, and objects within it follow the normal rules of Material Plane physics—if you break something in half in the Drift, it stays broken. The twist is that due to the plane’s constant and random growth, objects’ positions in space are unstable: two objects floating next to each other one moment might suddenly be thousands of miles apart the next, without apparent movement. Fortunately, this random shifting rarely affects people or equipment during their jumps, for unknown reasons generally attributed to Triune’s oversight.
MILDLY NEUTRAL-ALIGNED While the Drift has a slight metaphysical alignment with neutrality (possibly due to Triune’s presence), creatures of any alignment can exist within it without taking any penalties.
LIMITED MAGIC Most magic functions normally in the Drift, but no spells or magical abilities have yet been discovered that are capable of transporting creatures or material in or out of the Drift. This means that spells or abilities like shadow walk and plane shift simply fail to work when used in relation to the Drift, as do summoning spells and abilities.

Tourism

At the same time the first few brave Pact Worlds explorers of the Drift returned safe and sound from trips to impossibly far star systems, alien civilizations throughout the galaxy were also adopting the use of the technology, and it quickly became widespread. As travel has pulled more fragments of other planes into the Drift, innumerable reports have arisen of impossible vistas, floating caches of natural resources, aberrant horrors, and mysterious locales within the infinite plane. A few of these are detailed below.
Adamant Fragments: When Triune’s instructions for Drift engine construction went out via the Signal, the leading engineers of one ambitious alien race attempted to construct an enormous Drift engine to take their entire planet into Drift and eventually to another system. They created an enormous network of subterranean tunnels and chambers throughout their planet, all lined with an advanced metal alloy. When they fired up the engine, however, the resulting catastrophe brought only continent-sized chunks of the planet into the Drift and most likely caused that race’s extinction. Now, this debris floats through the plane, rich in advanced metals and unsurpassed, albeit ruined, technology.
Alluvion: This holy city of Triune serves as the spiritual and cultural center of the Drift.
Bulwark: This large, floating hill of green grass seems to glow with its own pleasant light, standing in stark contrast to the multicolored void of the surrounding Drift. In fact, the glow comes from a single shining archon sitting at the rise of the hill and welcoming all good-aligned creatures. Ripped here from Heaven, the miniature realm is often used as a resting place by those lucky enough to happen across it.
Doldrums: There are pockets in the Drift known as doldrums where all technology ceases to function. Usually, a ship that enters the doldrums with conventional thrusters has enough momentum to eventually carry it out of the pocket, but no crew that has survived such a harrowing trip has been consistent in its estimation of how much time has passed. Luckier starship crews are in such pockets for only a few minutes, and can survive on the atmosphere left over from their now-defunct life-support systems (Androids’ biological components can keep them alive during that time). Others are not so lucky; entire crews have died in quiet vacuum before their ship eventually blinked back to life, proceeding aimlessly. Given the difficulty of measure the size or location of the doldrums with any great precision, it’s hard to say how many of these pockets exist throughout the Drift, but there have been enough reports of the harrowing experience that some starship manufacturers have begun including distress beacons with mechanical timers that can be manually launched from a disabled ship.
Dreadworm: This enormous, wormlike creature can swallow even the largest Pact Worlds starships whole—and it rarely passes up such an opportunity as it wends its way through the Drift, searching for the Abyssal home from which it was ripped. Its long, segmented body splits in two just behind its head, and those divisions split again shortly thereafter, and so on, such that it terminates in a seemingly infinite cloud of fine filaments. Inattentive science officers on starships that pass near the dreadworm have mistaken it for a comet, disbelieving something so large could be alive. This is often their last mistake.
The Failed Gate: A Drift beacon hangs at the epicenter of a massive magical storm, rending reality around it and periodically summoning great bolts of force and grotesque magical beasts. The storm is the result of a sect of worshipers of Eloritu, the god of magic and secrets, who took affront to the idea that a plane could be inaccessible via magic. They stole a Drift beacon from the Vast, performed intricate magical rituals linking it to an artifact hidden on an asteroid in The Diaspora, and then took the modified beacon into the Drift. There, they attempted to open a magical gate between the beacon and its attuned artifact still on the Material Plane, but they succeed only in destroying themselves and creating an anomalous field of raw arcane magic that seems to be growing ever more powerful.
The Feystar: This planet-sized spherical lattice has an interior composed of constantly shifting cords of purple-and-pink molten rock, while its outermost edges gradually cool to a bright-green obsidian. The strange structure was created when a pocket of the aggressively ephemeral First World, the realm of fey, suddenly appeared inside a massive molten lake ripped from the Elemental Plane of Fire, causing the energies of the unrelated planes to fuse in a massive explosion. The obsidian in particular has strange and potentially valuable properties: it is as strong as steel but, when viewed at a particular angle, is nearly invisible. The Feystar is not without its dangers, however, as brightly colored, fey-touched fire elementals swim through the molten threads connecting the structure, looking for entertainment and protecting their home.
Flotilla of the Devourer: Acolytes of the Cult of The Devourer hide throughout deep space on the Material Plane, but at least one large contingent makes its home in the Drift in a massive flotilla. This collection of starships serves both as fleet and fortress: each ship is the spoils of a brutal raid and rafted to others by way of tether cables and temporary bolting. The cult’s berserker shock troops cover their ships in frightful imagery and adorn them with menacing-looking spikes and spines meant to evoke the horror of the Star-Eater. By joining their ships together and making their home in the Drift, these cultists can easily travel en masse to the Material Plane to plunder defenseless colonies and commit all manner of terrible atrocities in the name of the destruction of all things, then retreat back to the Drift before a larger force can respond. The bounties on this particular flotilla are innumerable.
The Heap: This vast assembly of junk and technological debris has an extremely powerful magnetic force of unknown origin at its core. As the Heap tumbles slowly through the Drift, it draws ferrous material to itself, thus growing in size and strengthening its magnetic draw in proportion. Curious pilots of smaller starships who pass too close risk being added to the pile in a sudden crunch of metal. Improperly oriented larger ships can also end up with their starboard or aft hulls attached to the massive metal; their thrusters impart a slight spin to the heap but do little to set them free of its magnetic grasp. A number of parasitic silicon-based alien species make their home within the heap’s tangled interior, scavenging its surface for newly added resources (especially unfortunate biological beings trapped in the metal coffins their ships have become). There is an impressive variety of alien technology represented in this floating junkyard, and many corporations and governments would pay handsome sums to be able to harness the power of the magnetic force at its center.
Horizon’s End: Many Drift travelers can share tales of meeting the Horizon’s End, a high-tech explorer-class starship whose crew all claim to be mortal avatars of the deity Weydan. They wander the plane, searching its near-infinite expanse for new experiences and returning to the Material Plane only for supplies. Skeptics find their story hard to swallow and think the voyagers are nothing more than con artists.
Iron Steeple: Believed to have been torn from the elaborate cathedral of one of Hell’s infernal dukes, this massive metal spike spins lazily through the Drift like a compass needle reacting to a slowly changing magnetic north. Occasionally, contingents of devils enter the Drift and spar for control over the barbed Iron Steeple, leading planar scholars to posit that a powerful artifact or being still resides within the structure but either cannot or will not be removed from the Drift.
Rimeblaze: A curious anomaly of Drift physics, the Rimeblaze is a 100-mile-diameter expanse of commingled aspects of both the Plane of Fire and the Plane of Water. Simultaneously frigid and fiery, the Rimeblaze seems an impossibility, but starship pilots that have braved its outskirts report that is very much real. The intense and dichotomous temperatures can cause cracks in even the toughest of polycarbon plate hulls, making any journey past the Rimeblaze a hazardous proposition. Some travelers have reported seeing beings within the expanse that look like twisted amalgamations of fire and water elementals, but such accounts are as yet unverified.
Tesseract: This impossible cuboid structure was clearly created by an intelligent race; its myriad surfaces are etched with fine markings and it emits a loud, rhythmic thrumming that may be a song or a warning signal. It appears to be roughly in the shape of a cube, with small hatches dotting each of its sides, but those who enter quickly find themselves hopelessly lost as the extradimensional space contained within the structure wreaks havoc on their orientation and any navigation equipment they may have. It remains to be seen whether this structure contains anything other than the bodies of those who have died a slow and lonely death as they struggled to find their way out.
The Umbra: While most of the Drift is alight with brightly colored clouds of energy, there is a patch of unmoored space known as the Umbra that is completely devoid of light. Thought to be a stolen chunk of the Shadow Plane or Negative Energy Plane, the Umbra is avoided by most Pact Worlds vessels whenever possible. Most pilots rush to re-chart their courses when they see they might pass through the Umbra, as rumors state that starships that pass through the dark cloud either disappear completely or are changed irrevocably. The grimmest tale is that of the Golden Mean, whose crew members committed horrendous acts of violence years after their AbadarCorp transport passed through the Umbra. The corporation denies the existence of the Golden Mean, and no records can be found about it or its murderous crew.

Type

Dimensional plane

Included Locations

• Alluvion

Inhabiting Species

• Drift Leech
• Drift Mote
• Drift Native
• Driftdead
• Driftlure
• Garaggakal