DM_PC Written Book
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My character is the librarian and got approach IC to write a book about the Astral Sea for Qunon. Before I sent him anything, wanted to just double check out of an abundance of caution - that what I wrote up is fine for my own character to know. 9th level wizard with maxed lore and 18 intelligence who works in the city library. So I figured the answer is a "he knows a lot, most of it is still vague and contradictory".
Toril drifts upon the Astral Sea, circled in its long voyage by the moon Selûne and her scattered Tears. Yet what is the Astral Sea? Even among sages—and indeed among those native to that silver vastness—there is little accord regarding its true nature. This treatise endeavors to order these disputes, to classify the perils therein, and was composed by virtue of a most generous grant from Qunon Vyr.
Firstly, even the very appellation Astral Sea is contentious. The term has gained favor among human loremasters and explorers, many of whom have built anew upon half-remembered Netherese arts to sail the Astral by means of wondrous vessels. These ships are driven by Spelljammer Helms, the craft of whose making is either lost with lost Netheril or jealously hidden by the most puissant wizards. It is commonly accepted, however, that these Helms draw their puissance from the destruction of enchanted objects and move according to the sheer will of the helmsman.
The elder races regard the Astral as a complete plane of existence in its own right, one in which the Prime Material drifts and from which the Outer Planes are reached. This remains the prevailing consensus of most scholars today. Yet some—among them the elves—espouse the World Tree theory of the cosmos: that the Astral Sea binds all planes together, both Outer and Inner, but that some ancient cataclysm—most oft ascribed to the Dawn War—wrought a sundering ward between the Astral and the Inner Planes, thus necessitating ingress to the Inner Realms through the secret paths of the Ethereal.
Navigation of the Astral is notoriously arduous, for there exist no steadfast landmarks. Pilots, and githyanki willing to discourse upon the matter, aver that time bears no meaning within that realm. One intuits the locations of so-called color pools—named aptly for their hue—portals granting egress from the Astral into those planes with which it lies coterminous. There appear to be general consistencies between a pool’s color and its destination, but these correspondences vary according to the viewer. Moreover, the absence of time creates a peculiar paradox: one’s voyage leaves behind a argent thread, a silver cord binding the traveler to the point of their entry.
From this arise the foremost perils of the Astral Sea. There are astral soul-eaters—creatures of uncertain form, known chiefly for their habit of lurking near color pools to ensnare travelers and consume their very souls. Some hold these beings to be demons; others contend they are native to the Astral itself and possess the dread ability to sever a voyager’s silver cord, thus destroying them outright or casting them adrift in eternal wandering.
There are also astral parasites, capable of infesting the blood of living wayfarers or the psychic aura of any sentient traveler. Some argue these parasites are but maladies curable through customary magics, while others insist they are aberrant spawn of the Far Realms. At least one scholar has claimed that the first illithids were begotten when such parasites found purchase within a human whose silver cord had been severed—though this account, attributed to a githzerai monk of Candlekeep in the 4th century, is largely discredited.
More dire still are the astral dreadnoughts, greatest terrors of the Astral Planes—beasts more dreadful than the famed tarasques of legend. They drift about the husks of dead gods said to float upon the Sea. Little is truly known of them beyond tales that they arose from the pride of a fallen deity and are now drawn to divine remains. Cultists whisper that they are pride itself made manifest, refusing death and devouring all that nears so as to reclaim lost divinity. Nearly all accounts agree that magic avails little against them; their baleful gaze unravels enchantment more potently than even a beholder’s disjoining eye.
The githyanki are reckoned the most numerous denizens of the Astral Sea, though not native to it. There they build fortresses, marshal warriors, and sail mighty vessels across the silver expanse, engaging in piracy and waging war—oft alongside their red dragon allies—upon illithid enclaves wherever such colonies lie near to the Astral. They are ruled, it is said, by an immortal Queen, perhaps a goddess in her own right, named Vlaakith.
Beyond these known threats lies something far more obscure. In the Arabel museum hangs a depiction of Atropus, the World Born Dead. With proper lensing, one may perceive this body in the night sky. Many sober scholars deem Atropus naught but a vast stone, no different in essence from the Tears of Selûne, though more distant and drifting beyond Glyth in its circuit of the sun. Cultists, however, insist it is a being from beyond time and space—perhaps of the Far Realms—kept at bay by the sun’s holy fire and the divine order established since the Dawn War. Others claim it to be the first god of death, born lifeless in the cold and unmapped reaches of the Astral Sea, whose approach to Toril would herald fire, ruin, and desolation.
This leads to a dread hypothesis: that beyond the Astral Sea lies a realm of pure chaos—stranger even than Limbo—where geography defies meaning, where numbers take on intangible forms, and where mortal notions of good and evil are supplanted by wholly alien design. These theories are dismissed by most, save the unhinged or those scholars driven to desperation in isolation. Yet they intimate that Atropus may not be the gravest peril lurking in the farthest deeps of the Astral.
A more measured conjecture holds that Atropus is merely a slain Primordial, left to drift near Glyth since the Dawn War.
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Seems fine to me, no issues from my side
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Did this get done / do you need it @Mr-Moloch?
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