[ Quasi-Elemental Vacuum ] [ Mapping Infinity | Pockets | Bestiary | Flora ]
[ Borders of Vacuum ] [ Air | Ash | Ice | Negative | Salt | Smoke ]
Borders of Vacuum
The Edges of Nothing
CORE VACUUM: Is there really any difference between any place in the Vacuum? Be it Core, Deep or Border—it’s all nothingness after all—right? Whatever stuff is left here unsupervised will drift away in a random direction, before disappearing completely into the darkness. Bloods who’ve explored the depths of Vacuum believe that the void of this plane constantly stretches itself, making more and more nothingness out of nothing. Distance between things, they say, always grows here, until it becomes way too great to cross, as everything from a floating fortress to a minute grain of dust is pushed together by some unknown (some Mathematicians say ‘dark’) energy. Others balk at that, simply saying that without anything to orient yourself by, you simply can’t navigate or measure anything properly in the first place.
DEEP VACUUM: The most barren part of the plane, in the Deep Vacuum there’s no matter at all, only empty space. The atmosphere is all gone, there are no elemental pockets, no light, and no warmth. While the temperature in Core Vacuum tends to be consistent and at least tolerable, here in the Deep there’s simply nothing to transmit heat or cold to or from. Anything here is exactly the same temperature it was when it arrived here, and the only way to find out is to touch it. There’s no decay, but also no food or water, and nothing to turn into food or water either. Conjuration spells that create matter simply fail to work, and you can’t summon creatures here either. This place is empty, and it seems to want to remain so.
From Vacuum to Air
Planewalkers who wish to travel windwards towards the Plane of Air need only to follow their nose. Sniffing out the faintest of breezes will give a cutter a clue as to the right direction to take, although the atmosphere is so thin that it’s still effectively invisible.
THIN AIR: Still too rarefied to provide enough breath for your average mortal, the region of Vacuum they call Thin Air is at least a start. Air elementals find this place uncomfortable and for a good reason—this close to Vacuum, rivers of powerful wind flow through the otherwise thinned-out airy void, as the Great Nothing seeks to suck every last bit of matter into itself. The complicated web of winds weakens and a chill downward breeze drift takes their place, squally and unpredictable. There is a fierce debate whether this place should be considered a region of Vacuum or of Air.
TWILIGHT SKY: On the edges of the Plane of Air, the atmosphere thickens enough to finally breathe without aid, and the sky becomes dark grey rather than black. Surprisingly for a border area of Vacuum, this place called the Twilight Sky actually has some animal life—nighttime creatures such as owls and bats. They’ve adapted to breathing and flying in the thin, low-pressure air. Some humanoids and more reclusive giants also make their kip here on the rare, and highly valuable, solid bubbles of matter that exist here.
From Vacuum to Ash
SPARKLING VAST: The border region between Ash and Vacuum is a vast desert of ashes, which lay undisturbed, resembling an endless expanse of white dunes under a starless sea. However, any intrusion, either from a traveller stepping atop these dunes or a movement from a Core Ash below fills the endless void above with tiny motes of sparkling fine ash. It would be beautiful, if it wasn’t so dangerous. This stuff gets everywhere, coating your skin, eyes, mouth and lungs with the finest of powders. If you’re travelling through quickly and protect yourself, you might get away with it, but berks who linger here will find themselves suffocating from the inside out. Don’t forget that ashes are still very cold as well—while you can’t feel it from the distance due to the lack of air, you’ll certainly notice the frigid chill once ash covers you inside and out. In the long term, this fine ash causes lung damage that is irreparable without advanced magic. To continue on emberwards you must dig down through the ash. As you do so, you’ll find the ashes thicken and become darker, until you are wading through the finest, blackest soot you can imagine—at this point you have reached Core Ash.
From Vacuum to Ice
FRIGID VOID: The Frigid Void is similar to Precipice, in being a rugged terrain of Ice, only under the ‘sky’ of Vacuum. However, you wouldn’t confuse the two of them in your sleep. While other border regions of Ice are scoured by tempestuous blizzards, the Frigid Void is completely and unnervingly silent and unmoving, with only dim light that emanates from the ice itself disturbing the surface. The ice here is strange as well, for it is not only made from water. Most of the ice in the Frigid Void is actually frozen air! While you might be relieved knowing you have a spot to renew your air supplies, you must be careful, for frozen air is much colder than frozen water, and thawing anything in Vacuum conditions is tricky as it is. Even using gentle magics like prestidigitation to warm the air-ice can result in powerful jets of gas which can blow a careless wizard off into the void.
From Vacuum to Negative
THE NOTHING: If the Plane of Vacuum is already the plane of nothing, then what happens when you press even further voidwards? Well cutter, you’re about to enter the only true subregion of the Vacuum, one of the weirdest and most dangerous places in the Inner Planes—the Nothing. Yes, the capital N is there for a reason. See, while the Plane of Vacuum is nothing but empty space, the kind of nothing that’s left behind when even all the Air is gone, the Nothing is even less than that. As the entropic energies of the Negative Material Plane emanate into the multiverse and find nothing to interact with, they start to fray the stuff of reality instead, perhaps empowering the mysterious dark energy of the Vacuum. The Nothing then is literally that—somehow less than empty space itself. The dimensionality of the multiverse breaks down here, and the utter blackness is an absence of not just heat, light, and stuff, but even the very space that stuff requires exist in. The effect is pretty terrifying; a slow erosion of matter over time. Berks who come here become thinner, paler, altogether less than they were. Their gear degrades, fabric frays, water boils away, magic is snuffed out. It is impossible to create anything in this place, only watch things degrade. Even the undead cannot exist here for long, for they too are reduced to ashes and dust, and then even that boilds away into nothingness.
Between the Vacuum and the Void lies an impossibly thin, invisible membrane that separates the two planes. This membrane can be crossed by simply pressing into it—if you for some reason want to enter the Negative Energy Plane. The nature of this border membrane is unknown, although Doomguards who chained their Citadel Exhalus to it must understand this phenomenon on some level. An important thing is that the moment of passing from the Vacuum to the Negative Energy Plane can be felt—and feeling it is the only way to avoid stumbling into the disintegrating Void as you fly around the Vacuum.
THE VOID: What goes beyond Nothing? Well, in fact, at least the Void is not Nothing. It might be a soul-sapping, life-draining, energy of entropy and death, but at least that is Something. As far as the Negative goes this is, in fact, a marginally less inhospitable part of the plane. Because the entropic energies of the Void are being continuously drained away by their proximity to the Nothing, it turns out this makes them less destructive to the living than the rest of the plane. On the flipside, this is the most desolate part of the Negative Material Plane, with no known permanent structures here.
From Vacuum to Salt
THE FLATS: It starts with pure white motes that hang motionless in space, that seem drawn towards the moisture of living bodies, encrusting eyes and lips with tangy salt powder. Continuing further brinewards, the motes turn to grains, which orbit and swirl in strange spiralling eddies. Like in the Sparkling Vast, these particles of salt actually come when someone or something disturbs the plain called the Flats, that marks the border between Salt and Vacuum. Imagine an endless expanse of flat white salt, almost perfectly smooth, that remembers every one of the very few footsteps that have ever pressed themselves into its surface. This place is a vast and almost completely featureless plain while above the Flats looms the darkest, most starless sky you can imagine. Surprisingly, the Flats enjoy the presence of living creatures, namely alchemists, who scour the land for rare salts infused with the weird energies that stream down from the Void above. Some Vacuum explorers call this place the Great White Wall, and you’ll need to tunnel downwards from here on to reach the Core Salt.
From Vacuum to Smoke
THE GRAY WAY: This strange border place, known as the Gray Way, is the grave of many unprepared adventurers. Heading fumewards from Vacuum, it begins with the faintest smell of woodsmoke, and much more dangerous fumes which have no scent. They cause dizziness that only exacerbates another horrible effect of this region—through some strange interaction between smoke and magical energies of the Vacuum, the Gray Way accumulates toxic gases that can cause madness and even permanent brain damage. Planewalkers call the affliction they cause gray mind, and describe it as a terrifying condition where a poor berk can’t tell friend from foe, kindness from wickedness, or up from down. What’s worse, monstrous undead beings known as vasuthants prowl this place, preying on those who succumbed to the poison. As a cutter travels further fumewards, the visibility worsens and the smoke becomes chokingly thick—but however grim it might be, at least there’s something here to breathe.
Canonical Sources: Start with the excellent Planescape Inner Planes [2e] book. Other references from D&D and Pathfinder lore are mentioned on the relevant entries. Core and Deep Vacuum, the Nothing and the Void are homebrew—the other border regions are from Inner Planes.
Source: Margarita and Jon Winter-Holt