The Emptiness, "Exile"

Dimensional Fractures

Upon travels throughout the coin and beyond, very rarely adventurers may stumble across something unusual - a thin line which seems to hang in the air, known as a "Fracture". These Fractures have no detectable affinity, no known magical signature at all, and cannot be interacted with. Attempting to touch it will result in nothing, simply a hand passing through. Fractures are the only known way to gain access to The Emptiness, and only by the use of paradoxical casting of soul magic or similar things such as Shadowbane magics (notably, Soul Affinity magic is a critical component).

The Emptiness is not a place in the traditional sense, it is closer to another dimension - a plane of existence which stretches infinitely in all directions, and exists "beneath" the conscious realm. The Emptiness is always there, simply out of reach. In many ways, The Emptiness is akin to an aberrant Nexus and can be used for much the same purpose, with a few limitations. First off, The Emptiness is unable to be forced into or out of - the only way to slip beyond the veil is the use of a Fracture, and creation of a fracture is inadvisable. Second, The Emptiness itself is far from a safe place - while it is eerie and uncomfortable, some hazards do exist, both from the peculiar magics which govern it as well as its "natural" inhabitants.

The Emptiness is, however, barely known to many in the modern world. Those few who have had the ability to pull a rift open to see it have assumed it's a portal to the Umbral Sea and quickly closed it back up, and on the surface the realms do appear similar. It has been given many names by those who discover it, "Between the Planes" and "The Unwoven Realm", and so on.

Exploring The Emptiness

Most of The Emptiness is a barren wasteland of mottled, dark rock. A void of a 'sky' hangs above, and occasional pockets of pure nothingness dangle below. This place is ancient beyond measure, and has had few visitors. Mages would detect that there are no leylines here at all. Except in certain zones, spells must be cast from a mage's personal mana reserves and lacking mana potions or crystals will soon see travellers becoming cripplingly exhausted with no recourse. This aberrant expanse stretches in every direction as far as the eye can see, with some rare signs of life - petrified or desiccated trees normally. Occasionally the husk of…something unidentifiable.

Certain zones of The Emptiness are more stable than others in a magical sense and will have large amounts of affinated magic in the air - one might find a zone full of Life and Arcane magic, as an example. In zones like these, an equilibrium is formed, and any over-abundance of mana crystallizes - A good visual indicator as to whether or not it's safe to cast magic is if there are crystals of your affinity nearby. It is theorized that these zones are caused by tiny fractures which have trickled in magic over aeons, slowly filling these zones with magic which settles into crystals. The slow introduction of magic is the only reason why these zones are stable, as introducing unnatural magic too quickly to The Emptiness often has catastrophic results.

Not just that, but the longer one spends in The Emptiness, the more they will feel a certain sense that they're being watched, or at least that they have been noticed. While this is almost certainly just paranoia, it's easy to get paranoid about such an unsettlingly empty and old realm.

Almost every Fracture found from the side of The Emptiness is closed. The only fractures which have been opened were opened by someone not native to The Emptiness. Soul Magic is the key to opening those Fractures, something which The Emptiness lacks almost entirely. Ambient soul magic seems to destabilize and delineate unusually quickly here. Additionally, usage of soul magic will begin to draw the attention of various forces amidst The Emptiness.

Environmental Hazards

Lingering Polarity Clashes

Due to the lack of Leylines and an odd trait of The Emptiness which forces Soul affinity mana in the air to quickly destabilize into other affinities, Polarity Clashes in the Emptiness can be sustained for far longer than normal - mana combining explosively into soul, only to have that soul mana delineate into a variety of differing affinities and re-clash with itself.

The result is that polarity clashes tend to "linger" and do severe damage to an area and to those involved in casting it, a repeated series of magical explosions which eventually results in a cloud of magic of a random affinity. It will also almost always invoke wild magic, at DM discretion.

Polarity Storms

Polarity Storms are rare "weather" events which are the result of two different zones of magics which oppose eachother meeting. Doing so will create a very large "storm" which can slowly drift and spread, a truly chaotic zone where magic is constantly stuck in a cycle of clashing, delineating and recombining over and over. These storms are often heralded by a sheer wall of fog expanding across a large zone of The Emptiness. While they can happen in the material plane if every leyline in an area is broken at once, here they occur "naturally".

Polarity Storms, while incredibly dangerous, can also be quite lucrative. Due to the massive amount of mana present, a good deal of crystals tend to form in the midst of a storm, including some very abnormal and unique ones - assuming that one braves the storm during the turmoil.

During a polarity storm, if players venture inside one, they will be receiving constant damage rolls without some means of magical protection - and such barriers are very draining to maintain amidst such a sea of wild magic. However, unique crystals are abundant when exploring in such, determined by rolls:

• 1-9: Regular, naturally occuring affinity crystals of random affinities
• 10-15: A bi-affinity mana crystal, of two random non-opposing affinities
• 16-19: A tri-affinity mana crystal, of three random non-opposing affinities
• 20: A locus crystal, an incredibly rare mana crystal with 4 non-polar affinities.

Should one wait until the storm has finally "Settled", then all that will be left in its wake are pure soul crystals of high quality and density. However, waiting until the end of a Polarity Storm is quite dangerous - due to the various entities at play in The Emptiness, soul mana is coveted more than anything and many denizens of the emptiness will appear, interested in reaping the rewards of such a storm. In fact, this is the only real way to see a Keeper in the wild of The Emptiness, as they always endeavour to collect the soul mana crystals left in the wake of polarity storms.

Wild Magic Surges

The Emptiness tends to be prone to wild magic surges far more than the material planes and these wild magic surges lead to far more dangerous and unusual results a lot of the time.

WIP: D100 Table for Emptiness Wild Magic Surges — 25% chance to create a magical abomination.

Denizens of The Emptiness

The Emptiness is not completely devoid of life despite its first appearances. There are four different types of sentient life in The Emptiness, which we shall cover off shortly. Certain regions of The Emptiness can also have plantlife, minerals, etc., though again this is rare.

Abominations

Simply known as "Abominations", this is what happens when magic not native to The Emptiness is used too giddily. With no leylines to speak of, that magic lingers in the aura after being cast, and when too much of that magic lingers… the aberrant magics of The Emptiness can and will reform it into something…"living".

Many of these creatures are mindless husks, woven from chunks of rock and flesh given form by mana. They consume more magic in order to grow, and oftentimes can spread most unpleasantly - parts of The Emptiness are covered in so-called "Flux Fields", where masses of tainted magic have turned 'sentient' and spread, sometimes even miles of nothing but writhing tentacles and abominable beasts, corruptive forces seeping into anything which could harbour magic to drain it empty. Abominations always look different - there is rarely a rhyme or reason to their existence - but they all share two characteristics.

They are hungry. They will spread.

Voided / Natural-born

Sometimes called "Void-touched" or simply "Voided", these are creatures who are natural to The Emptiness. They are few and far between, as The Emptiness has few resources with which to sustain themselves on. These creatures are always aberrant in nature, usually lone hunters with a penchant for being stealthy. It is unusual for them to be immediately aggressive with a lack of tactics, as such creatures tend to be picked off by smarter, stronger beings. Rarely, Voided creatures will hunt in packs, and gods above help you if you find yourself at their mercy.

Having developed to live fully in The Emptiness, The Voided possess no traditional magic to speak of, instead making use of low-level Psionics. They are ultimately very dangerous aberrant animals - always aggressive, as for them The Emptiness is an infinitely long game of cat-and-mouse where it's kill or be killed. If lucky, one may get curious about you then back off for fear of being slain, but the Voided are almost always aggressive.

Failures

The only "friendly" "faces" you may ever see in The Emptiness, mutated and twisted creatures simply known as Failures. They are (often) sentient experiments which were discarded and ultimately left to fend for themselves. Many die, husks littering the emptiness. Some still press on, wandering endlessly and aimlessly, some for purpose, others for food. Some further still band together, forming towns, settlements, shelters. While incredibly rare, these settlements tend to be deeply distrustful of outsiders, a paranoia burnt into their very souls from their history of being experimented on and discarded.

Due to the dangers present in The Emptiness, settlements of Failures covet soul mana crystals highly as they are one of the only ways of ensuring a level of protection from Polarity Storms. Risking the use of soul magic in a place like this will almost certainly invoke the attention of greater powers, so they are only used in dire cases of emergency - or if They will show up anyway in the cases of Polarity Storms. Failures are, however, willing to trade a great deal in exchange for such supplies with visitors to the Emptiness.

All Failures are insane in one way or another, and none can clearly remember any of the details of their experiments - all memories that come to them are contradictory and imagined. These shelters and sanctuaries are often composed of second and third generation Failures, the original failures having died off long ago.

Some tribes of Failures are outright hostile, others simply wish for a quiet existence. Some may even offer to help, but… all are scared of the ones who experimented and declared those test subjects as failures. Every last failure is afraid of…Them.

Them

GM Only — THEM & Their Motives

The pit in your stomach with every step. The eyes watching your every motion. The hands that envelop you every time you close your eyes. The feet that scurry just out of sight. The whispers you don't tell your friends you hear. The laughter of a joke you aren't in on.

Did you really think you were alone here? As an organism within a greater organism, your intrusion has been noticed. You are a visitor. Do not forget that.

There is a force in The Emptiness. A sentient force who oversee all. Some believe that They created The Emptiness. Some believed They ARE The Emptiness. Others still that They were exiled and imprisoned here. The signs of Their presence are minimal - mainly The Abominations. In rare instances when you have caught the attention of something, you may feel a spike in your mind. Something sharp yet dull, itching yet soothing, a dark radiance which calls to you while begging you to stay away. Amidst this choir of contradiction, you can feel a location, somewhere in the emptiness.

This pull eventually leads to a structure of Theirs. Perhaps a spire, an observatory, a laboratory… many of Their landmarks exist, though they are nigh impossible to find unless you are being called to. Those of incredible luck may stumble into one uninvited.

While They seem to have no physical presence that you can perceive, you may in rare instances find yourself under assault by their Keepers, eldritch constructs. Some disturbingly organic, others entirely metal and stone, all very complicated and hard to unravel. However, should one manage to survive an engagement with a Keeper (or gods above, multiple) the knowledge to be learned from its corpse would be staggeringly potent. Merely surviving an engagement with a Keeper is a tall order, let alone defeating one. Regular keepers are player-killers and require a whole team of players to take down one. Even lesser keepers require on average 3 PCs to defeat. They are to be used sparingly.

For convenience, They are sometimes referred to as The Powers That Be by the failures that dot the Emptiness. They do not need a name. They simply are.

Their Motives & Influence

While very few know Their motives and desires, they do exist. The Emptiness is a prison for them, a cage, limiting Their influence and shackling Their hands. They wish to escape. They wish to influence more. For what ends, few can definitively say.

This manifests in a few ways. One is drawing certain individuals into The Emptiness, towards Their structures, making their victims' minds more malleable. Soul magic is something that they particularly covet - it cannot seem to form naturally in The Emptiness and is key to escaping. Study of soul magic is pivotal to their escape.

Another is the desire to alter magic outside of The Emptiness to create a more suitable habitat. It is not known if The Emptiness is Their perfect habitat or if they seek some blend between The Emptiness and the outside world, but whenever their influence grows strong enough with individuals, they will always circle back to trying to "change" magic, to alter it at a fundamental level.

The only known location where this happened is The Shifting Realm, an incredibly unstable realm where the very fabric of magic was changed no less than six times, to varying degrees of success. The last instance of this was colloquially called "The Shattering", though its true name in Their tongue was Apertis Oculus, or "The Opening Of The Eye". Other than via The Emptiness, The Shifting Realm is nigh impossible to get back to, and the magic there is so damaged that it resembles The Emptiness, with leylines completely absent.

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GM Only — DM Cheat Sheet

Shorthand info required for DMs:

• Basically an Aberrant/Umbral-Like Nexus that's been abandoned and drained of magic
• Mana potions/crystals are a necessity here, otherwise near impossible to recover mana
• Soul magic is the key to getting out and in - soul magic doesn't exist naturally here
• Usage of Soul Magic attracts attention of EVERYTHING, it is heavily coveted
• Soul Magic in the air quickly turns into random affinities, it decays rapidly
• Polarity clashes are far more unpredictable and chaotic due to lack of leylines
• Can't (easily) manufacture a Fracture, have to find one. They're all shut by default.
• Fractures can lead everywhere - In the coin, Outside the coin, any elemental plane, etc.
• Most regions are disadvantage rolls to cast magic in (mages cast flat)
• Miscasting or over-abusing magic will create/entice Abominations
• Some Zones have affinated magic present (light, decay, etc.) - casts are normal here when using those magic types. These areas have abundances of magic crystals in too.
• Rare, massive weather events, "polarity storms" which are high risk high reward. Rare crystals can be obtained by going into the storm, but storm attracts the attention of Keepers (Eldritch Constructs) which come to mop up crystals if the storm ends.

Reasons to go

• Fast travel + travel to hard-to-reach locations if lucky
• Harvesting large quantities of magical crystals (high risk/reward)
• Harvesting other Aberrant materials (wood, rock, carcasses, etc)
• Aberrant/Eldritch research (NOT PSIONICS FOR NOW)
• Curiosity about The Failures
• Trade with The Failures
• Acquiring rare crystals from Polarity Storms (high risk/reward)
• Studying Keepers, the Eldritch Constructs/Wardens

Entities Summary

• Abominations — created by magic miscasts, also just…around. Dumb, aggressive, grow when consuming magic, resistant TO magic. Can come in swarms.
• Failures — Experiments created by "them", outcast - sometimes form towns/villages. Creepy and offputting but sentient and usually not hostile. Lone experiments and failures make for good creepy encounters.
• Voided — Natural psionic, aberrant creatures which exist in the emptiness. Aggressive, smart.
• THEM — No physical presence. VERY strong constructs called Keepers, rarely. Keepers are playerkillers. Only to be used if someone's actively pissed off The Eldritch or is asking too many questions/poking around Eldritch ruins. Keepers also show up to collect after Polarity Storms. There is NEVER any direct physical manifestation of THEM.