Celestial Bodies
There’s more out there than just stars and planets. Below are a few of the stranger phenomena found in the endless dark.
Other Stars
Most stars on the Material Plane center around portals to the Positive Energy Plane. These portals are almost always guarded by jyoti determined to keep their plane sacrosanct. In addition, stars’ intense heat often opens rifts to the Plane of Fire; the elementals and other fire-loving creatures that emerge through these rifts typically make their homes in the stars’ photospheres. Though civilized races have long drawn constellations, and some eccentric astrologers seek to name and number every light in the sky, most scholars prefer to focus on the “moving stars”—other planets in the solar system, which have more easily observable qualities.
Black Holes
Just as most stars contain portals to the Positive Energy Plane, so do many black holes provide a similar entrance to the Negative Energy Plane. Such black holes are formed when a dying star collapses in on itself, its gravity growing so great that it punches through the fabric of both the Material Plane and coterminous planes, sucking anything that comes within reach into the Negative Energy Plane. Undead grow in power near such cosmic wounds, and nightshades the size of small planets swim through the darkness around them, seemingly unfazed by the massive tidal forces as they devour the worlds pulled into the black holes’ accretion disks. Sceaduinars guard the portals at the black holes’ centers, though adventurers who manage to survive the bone-shredding voyage to the heart of a singularity may find the creatures cautiously respectful, especially if the adventurers are themselves undead. While portals to the Negative Energy Plane are the most common centers of black holes, other supermassive presences can occasionally result in their formation as well. Those traveling to a black hole’s center might instead find a nascent or imprisoned god, a world-shaking artifact, or a bound entity from another reality—something so powerful that its mere existence warps space-time around it.
Galaxies
These collections of many millions of solar systems are almost unimaginably vast, but so distant that only a few distinct ones are visible via telescope. Much like constellations, these galaxies are often named for their shapes or observable qualities.
Wormholes
Like a black hole, a wormhole is a channel drilled through the fabric of reality by gravity, creating a one-way tunnel to another part of the Material Plane. Most scholars believe that such portals can—and perhaps have—been used to move creatures through both space and time, yet the powerful magic required to avoid being crushed, turned into molecule-thin threads of matter, and slowed in relative time by the tidal forces involved make this a difficult means of travel for most mortals.
Chronicles of Naboria 