Spirit Planes
Spirits are not only present in the world. Each spirit is the center of a plane: a realm of existence that embodies their concept and radiates it outward from that core.
These planes are not metaphorical. They are traversable, if the entry can be found. The concept of the spirit intensifies the deeper one travels inward, which means proximity to the center means proximity to the spirit’s concept at full, unmediated force.
Nature of the Planes
Section titled “Nature of the Planes”A plane does not merely evoke its spirit’s concept. It is that concept, made into space, terrain, atmosphere, and experience. The plane of Blood is not a place that resembles blood. It is blood: vital, urgent, pressurized, dangerous in exactly the way blood is dangerous. Too much or too little, and the system fails.
The spirit at the center is not a guardian or a gatekeeper. They are the source. Every quality of the plane emanates from them.
Access
Section titled “Access”Spirit planes are not entered by accident. The barriers between the material world and a spirit’s plane are substantial, and breaching them requires either exceptional Ren ability, a site of unusual convergence, or a methodology no other organization on the continent has managed to develop.
The Gate of Zerathrain has developed, through decades of Marathat research, a means to open passage to a spirit plane. The process is stable enough to attempt roughly once every few years. What they extract from the periphery — Ren-dense materials, artifacts, resources with no material-world equivalent — funds much of their operation.
The Gate harvests from the edges. What lies toward the center, they have not tried to reach.
Known Planes
Section titled “Known Planes”Any concept that has a spirit has a plane. For a full list of spirits and their associated concepts, see Polarities.
GM: The Marathat and the Planes
The Marathat did not merely access spirit planes. They colonized them.
Their ruins on the material world are what they abandoned. Somewhere in the planes, remnant Marathat civilizations have been isolated since the fall of their civilization, an age before any nation on the continent existed. They have no knowledge of any nation, event, or development since. They are alive, and they have been living inside the concept of their plane for every generation since.
People shaped by an age inside the plane of Blood are not the same as the people who entered it. Each remnant civilization has been formed by its environment in ways that are not immediately legible to anyone who finds them. They share an ancestor culture and nothing else.
The Gate of Zerathrain is opening planes for resources without knowing anyone is inside them.
GM: The Plane of Dreams
The plane of Dreams contains something sleeping.
The Marathat who colonized it evacuated deliberately. They identified the presence, assessed what disturbing it would mean, and left. Whatever records they kept of what they found are somewhere in the ruins, on the material plane or in other planes they still occupy.
This sleeping presence is the eighth corrupted race: the corruption of Emergence, the same Law carried uniquely by the Theridim. Where Emergence in its true expression is convergence, all lineages synthesizing into something new, its corruption is the inversion: forced assimilation, the erasure of distinction, contact that dissolves the boundaries of things rather than synthesizing them.
The spirit of Dreams resides at the center of this plane, as every spirit resides at the center of theirs. Their relationship to what is sleeping in their plane has not yet been established.
What wakes the sleeping race, and whether the emergence of Theridim in the world is the trigger, remains an open question.