[ Smoke ] [ Mapping Infinity | Pockets | Bestiary | Flora ]
[ Borders of Smoke ] [ Air | Ash | Fire | Lightning | Radiance | Vacuum ]
Borders of Smoke
Into the Smog
CORE SMOKE: Core Smoke is the mixture of Air and Fire, a plane of endless thick fumes, geysers of superheated air, rivers of fine white smoke, and thick, black stormclouds. Hidden amongst them are all sorts of elemental bubbles—earth motes with fortresses or cave systems, enormous water droplets covered in a thick oily membrane preventing anyone from seeing inside, or eternal bonfires issuing smoke so dense you can fee it in your soul. All of these places have one thing in common—their inhabitants seem to be trying to remain hidden. The locals of Core Smoke are a secretive bunch, who love the freedom of movement they get in the endless smoggy skies of their plane, but also value the obscurity that the impenetrable fume clouds offer them.
DEEP SMOKE: The majority of the Plane of Smoke is obviously the Core Smoke, a realm of the endless smog and cinders. Judging by what other planes can offer, there ought to be Deep Smoke too, although this is much harder to find in the barely navigable landscape. It’s likely that little of interest can be found in the Deep Smoke, where the clouds of fumes become monotonous and featureless, with neither floating cinders nor pockets to be found. Of course, is just as likely that this is exactly what the secreting high-ups of the Great Conflagration would want us to believe.
From Air to Smoke
SIROCCO STRAITS: Heading fumewards away from the Plane of Air, the fresh breezes start to smell stale. Fragments of grit settle on your clothing and itch your skin. The clouds become thicker and darker, though they are not heavy with rain, only soot. The Sirocco Straights are a region of hot dusty winds that blow in from Para-Elemental Smoke, warming the plane of Air, but also spreading pollution and the smell of burning.
ETERNAL HAZE: Closer to the Big Smoke, the air becomes strangely cooler, somehow colder than either Air or Smoke, and poisonous, somehow even more so than in the Core Smoke. This place is called the Eternal Haze, and it is primarily inhabited by dust devils, the elementals of hot air. Perhaps they feed on the heat that should be in this place, or perhaps the cloying atmosphere of fine pollution sucks the warmth away. Whatever the reason, it is not a pleasant place to tarry for long, not least because the poison in the atmosphere will get you before long.
From Ash to Smoke
EMBERS: As a planewalker leaving Smoke nears the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Ash the fumes become more grainy. Flakes of hot ash appear in place of tiny particles, getting stuck in your nose and scratching your skin. At first they are hot, even hotter than Smoke normally is, but the temperature quickly drops, until it becomes uncomfortably chilly. Hot cinders become more rare amidst the cold, sticky, unsettling grime, earning this place the moniker Embers. Since the plane of Ash itself has its own gravity, the border region between Ash and Smoke forms an endless desert where Smoke is the sky and the Ash is the land. However, since gravity here is much weaker than, say, on the Precipice, the so-called Ember Dunes feel like a truly alien landscape, where there’s hardly any difference between the ashen dunes beneath your feet and the clouds of cold soot you kick up into the air around you. Natives of quasi-elemental Ash travel across these dunes and clouds on makeshift ships, seeking residual warmth. It is much faster to skim the surface of Ash in this way rather than plough downwards deep into the solid, so ash ships tend to take a roundabout route up to the surface, along the Ember Dunes, before diving back down under the surface once they reach the area of their destination.
From Fire to Smoke
THE EVERLASTING FIRESTORM: As any respectable planewalker knows, the Crematorium differs from other elemental planes in that it has clearly distinct sky and ground. Thus, one can approach this plane from the Smokeside in two ways. Most travellers, of course, will try to locate the Fire’s atmosphere. There they can observe how the black soot burns away, leaving only the glorious flame behind. This is where the Plane of Fire, more precisely the region called the Everlasting Firestorm, starts. However, less fortunate smokewalkers may instead stumble upon the border between Smoke and the solid half of Fire that abruptly cuts away at the border. Unlike other similar borders, however, this one doesn’t have its own gravity, so few creatures (the most notable exception, perhaps, are the para-elemental sun beasts) make lairs here. In many places, liquid fire flows downwards from the fiery seas of the Plane of Fire, creating beautiful jets and streams, before evaporating into smoke. These magnificent sights are known as the Wall of Firefalls.
SCALDING SKIES: Heading fumewards away from the Everlasting Firestorm, the flames become less intense but the heat remains, threatening to cook planewalkers in their armour. The air becomes thicker and more dense, and visibility gets even worse. Good luck navigating here cutter, because the superheated smog is so obscuring it can be impossible to even see a map in front of your face, let alone read it. This churning sea of hot air and even hotter cinders is known as the Scalding Skies or simply the Scald.
From Lightning to Smoke
AURORA: The border between Smoke and Lightning is humid, vibrant and filled with strange sensations and phenomena. As highly-charged clouds from Lightning come in contact with hot cinders from Smoke, they provoke volatile lightning flashes that are every bit as powerful as those in Core Lightning, and perhaps even more awe-inspiring. This border is known as the Aurora, although lightning mephits call their side the Dark Lands. This rather uninspiring name is of no particular importance, since it is pretty much impossible to distinguish where one plane begins and another ends without magical assistance. Aside from sightseeing, this area is visited by artificers and alchemists in search of fulgur, tiny magically charged glassy spheres that can form when lightning strikes a clump of cinder. These can be used in a creation of the fluxcharger constructs.
From Smoke to Radiance
SEA OF STARS: The choking fumes of Para-Elemental Smoke are just as thick here, but instead of greys and whites, they billow with all the colours a cutter can imagine. Brilliant flashes and surges of supercharged plasma illuminate the noxious fumes here in the Sea of Stars near the border with Radiance. Cinders here are strangely inert, not as eager to burst into flames, but rather to glow with a fierce and persistent heat. Instead, tiny motes of plasma flicker here and there like fireflies as far as the eye can see—which is, admittedly, not that far.
CURTAIN OF ALL COLOURS: As the Plane of Radiance gets closer, a traveller will perceive a churning wall of colourful light that spews streams of red and yellow plasma into the dark expanse of Smoke. This place, called the Curtain of All Colours, is the border of the Plane of Radiance, where its pure colours repel the contamination from the grime and soot of the Great Conflagration. This makes it seem a little dimmer and darker than the rest of Radiance, as well as far more volatile, constantly producing explosions and flashes of energy. Occasionally, a storm of plasma might spiral out from the Curtain, collapsing in upon itself into a sphere of intense radiance. These extremely hot and dangerous vortices are thought to lead to the Demi-Elemental Realm of Sun.
From Smoke to Vacuum
THE GRAY WAY: This strange border place, known as the Gray Way, is the grave of many unprepared adventurers. Heading stillwards from Core Smoke, it begins with the fumes around them becoming cooler, less dense, and less pungent. Emboldened by this, berks don’t realise that the air they are breathing is also becoming thinner and thinner. This causes 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 it gray mind, and it’s 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 stillwards, both the air and smog become vanishingly rarefied, and at the point where the last wisp of smoke disappears, a basher can be sure they’ve entered the plane of Vacuum.
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 Smoke and their regions are my homebrew, the other border regions are from Inner Planes.
Source: Margarita and Jon Winter-Holt