Cosmology: The River of Dreams

By far the largest of the planes, some scholars feel that it belongs within a separate category, for it defies most attempts at fitting the definition of a plane of existence. No creatures summoned from it can describe it to researchers, so scholars are forced to extrapolate what they can from the bits and pieces that ancient texts describe and the rigors of conjuring its inhabitants.

     Like all planes, there are creatures that call it home. The most well-known are the water elementals, entities composed entirely of the stuff of the plane. Unlike the other planes, very few permanent settlements exist. These settlements act as neutral grounds between the inhabitants of the planes of Urzalak and Yinnola. On rare occasions, the largest of these settlements see fiery visitors from Zarth’s corpse on some mission that takes them away from their home. Some scholars theorize that the nature of the River prevent any such settlements from forming, the River reflects the minds that inhabit it after-all. Despite this malleability, or perhaps because of it, the River follows no consistent logic outside of the more stable settlements.

Fluid Inhabitants. Most the River’s inhabitants are the embodiments of fluidity and change. When summoned by mages, they take the form of the closest to what they embody: water. Called water elementals by the uninformed, the name tends to stick even amongst the most learned of mages. Only the Royal Arcanists of the elven cities of Wainryn and Drynaryn refer to them as their official name, Oogluug, exclusively.

     The River is home to more entities than water elementals. Various lake, river, and sea creatures somehow find their way to the plane and manage to survive. Here they are infused with the material of the plane. More than one mage has summoned a trout from the River of Dreams with the hopes that eating it will allow them to gain power over dreams. It hasn’t worked yet, but the flavor is described as being more intense than a fish from the Material Plane.

Frequent Visitors. The River of Dreams has, by far, more interaction with the average person than any other plane. When going to sleep, all except for elves project their slumbering minds into the River where it flows through the Material Plane. As elves do not sleep, neither do they dream. The majority of figures that dreamers interact with are truly the natives of the River of Dreams, interacting and communicating with the Material Plane in the only way that most can.

     The region of the River surrounding the Material Plane is a chaotic swirl of half-formed dreams and nightmares. Mages using teleportation magic describe it as a roiling mixture of a dozen different places, people, creatures, and things overlaid by a turquoise hue, as if looking at it through colored glass.

Neutral Grounds. The occasional stable settlement is often used by the inhabitants of other planes as a place to meet their enemies without fearing an ambush. The largest and most frequently used of these settlements is the bustling metropolis of Etahora. So large that the populations of the city-states of the Material Plane would barely fill up the slums, Etahora resides within the shell of an enormous clam and is ruled by the Piki Mimke, a name that roughly translates to Highest of Pearls.

     No mage or priest from the Material Plane has ever interacted with the Piki Mimke or the aristocracy of Etahora, most knowledge of the city comes from planar mercenaries. The majority of mercenary companies that are housed within Etahora name various fiends and celestials as leaders and among their ranks, usually not mixed but the Hell’s Grace company is famous, or infamous, for accepting any that wish to join. The leader and founder of Hell’s Grace is Ahk-an Turiel, the bastard son of Lekorch and a solar angel.

     The most well-known section of Etahora is the Diplomancer’s District, a place where cease-fires and treaties are discussed and drawn up between the various Urzalak and Yinnola factions. Only rarely are the meetings between factions from both planes, usually they are between warring factions native to the same plane. Each of these diplomatic meetings is overseen by a Tiatora, an Etahora native trained in diplomacy and politics. The Tiatora’s role is to prevent the meeting from breaking out in violence and come to an agreeable solution that benefits all parties.

           

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