The Planes of Creation

Mortal Realm

Faerie

The Underworld

Chaos

The world you know, as it exists outside your window, isn’t all there is.

Hiding beside our world, slightly out-of-sight, just a step sideways from the mundane world you know, lie the Supernal Realms. These five reflections of the Earth bridge the world of mortals with the inner-outer reaches of reality and fundamental forces of creation. Where these realms border upon the mortal world, they take upon aspects of it. But the deeper in the Supernal Realms one travels, the more alien, abstract and hostile these worlds become, dominated as they are by the primal forces of the Pillars of Creation.

Mortal Realm

Other Names: The Material, the Prime, the Middle World

Inhabitants: Humans, the Undead, Dragons, Giants, Werebeasts, the Created, Cryptids and Abnormals

The Mortal Realm is the axis around which the multiverse turns. The Supernal Realms and the Astral Domains are all merely reflections and aspects of the Prime. The Mortal Realm is governed by physical laws, not metaphysical ones. Forces such as gravity, electromagnetism, thermodynamics and time all function as one would expect, so long as magic or other supernatural powers are not involved.

The most populous inhabitants of the Mortal Realm are humans, and there are billions of them, far outnumbering all of the other races combined. But other beings, such as dragons, giants, werebeasts, cryptids and myriad forms of the undead also call the Mortal Realm home

Faerie

Other Names: Arcadia, Fairyland, Fusang, the Storybook Realm, the Otherworld, the Wilderlands

Inhabitants: the Fey

Pillar of Creation: the Fountain, pillar of Life and Passion

The verdant, vibrant realm of Faerie embodies the forces of life and passion. Everything in this realm is alive, from trees to rivers to winds to the stars to space and time to stories themselves. Indeed, stories have great power in Fairyland, and narrative forces are often just as important as conventional ones.

The fey who call the Storybook Realm home are divided into numerous courts, most notably the Summer Court of Titania and Oberon and the Winter Court of Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness. These courts have been at war since the dawn of recorded history, passing the Sidereal Crown, and control of Fairyland, between the victors of these endless battles.

Faerie's borderland is known as the Wilderlands, a reflection of Earth where civilization never tamed the land. Trackless forests, windswept steppes, and teeming swamps all stand, untouched by plow or axe.
At the heart of Faerie stands the legendary Fountain of Youth, also known as the Well of Souls. The Fountain is the source of all the anima--or life force--in the cosmos and is the cause of Faerie's extraordinary vitality.

The Underworld

Other Names: Sheol, Stygia, Gehenna, Diyu, Patala, Purgatory

Inhabitants: Shades and Reapers

Pillar of Creation: the Gates, pillars of Death and Fate

The bleak Realm of the Dead embodies the concepts of death and the inevitability of fate. It is the waiting room of souls, where they linger on before ultimately passing through the Gates to whatever afterlife exists, be it paradise, eternal torment, or reincarnation. The reapers, guardians of the dead, do everything they can to ensure the living do not meddle in the affairs of the dead, and so much of the Underworld remains shrouded mystery.

The Underworld's borderlands are known as the Paths of the Dead, a series of tunnels, catacombs, and caves that lead down from the mortal world and into the vast caverns of the Underworld. The Paths of the Dead are zealously patrolled by the reaper to prevent both the living from stealing into the domains of the dead and the dead from escaping back into the lands of the living.
The pillar of the Underworld is only hypothesized, as no one has ever been able to confirm the existence of the Gates to the Afterlife. What is known is that the Underworld is not the final destination for the souls of the dead--there is something that lies beyond.

Chaos

Other Names: The Elemental Domains, Jinnistan, Hundun

Inhabitants: Genies and Elementals

Pillar of Creation: the Keystone, pillar of Creation and Change

Chaos is a roiling realm, dominated by the forces of creation and change. Primordial elements flare into being, unshaped and not yet constrained by the forces of the mortal realm. Seas of fire lap against mountains of clouds, while trees of crystal reach up towards a sky of shifting stone.

The genies who call Chaos home have learnt to harness these primal forces through the art of wishcraft. Over the ages, they have used their powers to tame regions of the roiling chaos, allowing them to forge great cities and nations out of the stuff of creation. Greatest of these is Schadou Kiam, the fabled City of Jewels, greatest city in all the supernal realms. Beyond this, there are the marids’ Emirates of the Seven Seas, the sylphs’ Republic of the Four Winds, and the gnomes’ Kingdom Under the Mountain.

Chaos' borderlands are known as Jinnistan, a chaotic, primordial reflection of Earth where one element dominates, creating lakes of molten brass or solid clouds the size of islands. Unique among the Supernal Realms, jinns tend to inhabit Jinnistan, as the further one gets from the stabilizing influence of the Material, the harder the realm becomes to tame.
Chaos' cosmic foundation is the Keystone, the great monolith upon which is written all the natural laws of reality. It is the Keystone that determines the strength of gravity, the interactions of the nuclear forces, the properties of electromagnetism, the speed of light, and many other fundamental properties needed for the rest of creation to exist as it does.

Shadow

Other Names: The Netherworld, the Realm of Terror, the Twilit Realm, the Dark, Under the Bed, Closetland, Liusha

Inhabitants: Horrors

Pillar of Creation: the Pit, pillar of Destruction and Fear

Shadow is a dark and fading realm that incarnates the primal forces of destruction and fear. It is a world where every day is Halloween, and every night another horror show. In the Netherworld, terror rules, creating a realm of shifting shadows and strange geometries. Distances are not consistent, doors open to places they shouldn’t, buildings loom too tall and are filled with rooms that are too large to fit inside them.

Shadow is ruled over by the thirty bogeymen, ancient lords of terror who carved domains out of the eternal twilight. Each of these domains reflects a certain primal fear of mankind, and include such places as the Obsidian Desert, the domain of fire; the Forest of Fangs, the domain of the wilds; the Screaming Asylum, the domain of pain; or the Bleak Moor, the domain of death. At the heart of the Netherworld, hanging over the Pit on titanic chains of adamant, is the Citadel, an ancient fortress that serves as capital of the realm and seat of the horrors’ Parliament of Shadows.

The borderlands of Shadow are known as Twilight, which resemble a post-apocalyptic Earth, where all of mankind's great monuments and cities are twisted and left to crumble into dead, grey dust under an eternally twilit sky.
At the deepest, darkest part of Shadow lies the Pit, the End of Everything itself. The Pit is oblivion, entropy, and the inevitable heat death of the universe made manifest. However, destruction is a necessary part of creation, for it allows room for new creation to flourish. The Pit is especially notable for being the endpoint for both the anima produced by the Fountain and the raw matter generated by the Keystone.

The Spirit World

Other Names: The Invisible World, the Totemic Realm, the Axis Mundi

Inhabitants: Spirits, Ghosts and Werebeasts

Pillar of Creation: the World Soul, pillar of Balance and Free Will

This strange, animistic realm is dominated by the twin forces of balance and free will. In the Spirit World, everything has an animating spirit or soul. The region closest to the Mortal Realm is home to local spirits, such as the spirit of a particular river, town, mountain, business, forest, pack of animals, or other landmark.

Travelling deeper into the Spirit World, one begins to encounter stranger spirits, such as those who embody the days of the week, or archetypes of animals and plants, the spirits of nations, and even the embodiments of scientific and mathematic principles, before reaching the palaces of the Archetypes, the most fundamental of spirits: the Spirit of Law, the Spirit of Nature, the Spirit of Time, the Spirit of Death and their ancient kin.

The borderlands of the Spirit World are known as the Ether and are perhaps the easiest of the borderlands to visit. Humans can sometimes project themselves into its grey mists in vision quests, dreams, or on particularly interesting drug trips. The Ether also serves as the refuge of ghosts, spectres, phantoms, and those other spectral undead who refuse to move on to the Underworld.
The pillar of the Spirit World is the World Soul, the greatest of all the spirits of the spirit world. It is the spirit of the Earth itself and represents the zeitgeist of our age. It is also the only pillar known to be sentient, willing to converse with mortals who are able to brave the strangest and most abstract reaches of creation.

The Astral

Other Names: the Firmament, the Celestial Sphere, the Noosphere

Inhabitants: Angels, demons, gods

The Astral is a great noosphere that represents humanity's collective unconsciousness, the bounds of human understanding. It surrounds all the other realms completely, and infuses them all. There are many small domains carved out of the Astral by various powerful entities, all of which orbit freely around the Mortal Realm like planets in a solar system. Some scholars even argue that the five supernal realms are merely stable astral domains created by the interactions of the Pillars with the mortal realm. Mages, dragons, and powerful creatures from other realms can create their own small domains within the raw potential that is the Astral. Some of the most notable Astral domains include:

the Abyss, a wound on human understanding created by sin and evil, and the domain of demons.
Agartha, the Hollow Earth, a lost world filled with ancient civilizations, creatures from out of time, and wonderous technologies
the Akashic Records, a great library that stores the collective sum of humanity's knowledge.
Cyberspace, a virtual world first created in the 80s, shaped by the internet and the growing digital networks connecting mankind.
the Dreamland, countless small domains made from the dreams of mortals.
the Empyrean Realm, the shining home of the angels.
Oceanus, the World Sea, the great river that connects to all other bodies of flowing water in existence.
the Wheel of Ages, the primordial orrery that lays out the path of history, both past and future.
the World Tree, a great tree whose roots reach deep into Shadow and the Underworld, and whose brows reside in Faerie and the Empyrean. Climbing its trunk will bring you from one realm to another.

The Abyss

The Abyss is the home of demons, the very incarnations of mortal sin and vice. When a demon is created from the utter corruption of a mortal soul, that soul's sin and vice literally rips open a tear in the fabric of the Astral Plane, creating a personal hell for that demon, a place of torment that inflicts on them punishments their shattered morality believes they deserve. However, while this personal hell is torture for the demon, in their twisted state, they will also use it as a place of torment against those unlucky enough to fall into their grasps.

Each demon has a unique personal hell. One may have a sea of acid. Another may have a blazing desert where each grain of sand is searing-hot iron. Another may have a cavern where every rock is as sharp as a razor blade. And so on, and so forth. The size of a demon's personal hell depends on the demon's power. A weak imp has a hell the size of a small house, while the greatest demon princes control realms the size of entire countries.

While a demon may use their personal hell as a lair, a place to rest and recover, many also use it to torture mortals stupid enough to make a deal with them. A demon may spend months or even years torturing the poor souls before they finally break, and are transformed into a demon themselves, with their own personal hell. This hell usually forms near their former captor's lair, and is often connected to it in some way. While it is possible to find a lone hell, or a small cluster, out in the darkest reaches of the Astral, over the millenia, many demons' hells have become woven together in a great nexus the size of a continent--one of the largest astral realms known. This vast domain of spiritual decay and sin is known as the Abyss, and it is the source of more suffering and torment than any other realm known to mortal scholars.

Of course, there might be a place even worse... many legends speak of *the* Hell, the prison and personal hell of Lucifer, the fallen archangel. Fortunately, however, the Gates of Hell have never been discovered, and their existence remains little more than a tale told by fearful mortals or desperate demons. And yet, the worrying thing is that in Horror Shop 'verse, most myths have an element of truth to them. So, the question is... how many of the legends of Hall are actually true? Because if it is a hell designed to torment a demon made from the soul of an archangel, it would have to be vast, horrible and completely hellish in every way possible.

The Outside

The Outside lies beyond the Astral. It is the blind infinities between the stars, the void beyond creation, it is the time before the Big Bang and after the Pit consumes all of creation. The things Outside defy the expected rules of science, of life, of existence itself.

Carcosa

Carcosa, domain of the King in Yellow, avatar of Hastur the Unspeakable, Great Old One and master of Yellow Sign.

Carcosa was once a world much like Earth. However, through the actions of Hastur's cult, they manifested the King in Yellow within their pocket of reality, unmaking their world's fundamental forces sending Carcosa crashing through to the Outside--the vast unreality that lies beyond creation. Here, black stars and alien moons hang in the sky above the twisted and corrupted planet. Here, insane entities dance in the streets of fallen cities, singing songs to their Yellow King.

Cults to Hastur, established by emissaries such as the Pallid Mask, seek to bridge space and time and make the worlds of mortals conterminous with Lost Carcosa. Such breaches causes the unreality of the dead city to paradoxically lie atop our own world in ways that defy comprehension. Geography, geometry, time and space mean nothing in places touched by Carcosa. Exposure to the nature of the Outside slowly breaks down and corrupts our own reality, allowing more of Hastur's agents--and even the King in Yellow himself to manifest.

Incidentally, performing the play the King in Yellow is the easiest way to bring Earth and Carcosa into alignment, as by the end of the play the two are one and the same. It's for this existential threat to our world that the Men in Black have destroyed every copy they have become aware of. Thankfully, the efforts of the Earth's defenders has meant that incursions of Carcosa have been few, far between, and generally contained. But more cultists bearing the Yellow Sign arise every year, carrying with them more copies of that damned play.

Mars

Mars had life until the last decades of the 1890s. Of course, we hadn't had contact with them since the Mythic Age, but astronomers, cosmographers and seers in the 1700s and 1800s did note the canals and even a few of their major cities.

By the 1910s the entire planet had become a cold, dead planet. Its cities fallen to ruin, its canals dried and desiccated, its atmosphere stripped away by the solar winds. Whatever killed the red planet did such a complete job that by the time we sent our first missions to Mars, there were only a few scattered remnants of the civilizations that once flourished there--the Face being the most notable one--and even those were crumbling to ruin.

The fate of Mars is one of the greatest mysteries of the modern age, and information about it is kept tightly under wraps by Majestic-12 and their agents in NASA. They want to figure out how to stop whatever happened to Mars from repeating here on Earth--hopefully without alerting mankind to just how tenuous their lives here on this planet truly are.

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