The Maelstrom

With its fluid borderlands touching upon every plane of the Outer Sphere, the churning expanse of the Maelstrom eternally laps at its neighbors like the tide of an endless sea, threatening to inundate and consume them, just as it birthed them from its raw potential. Ever changing and never static, the Maelstrom is home to the serpentine proteans, who epitomize its dualistic creative and destructive spark, birthing wonders within its cerulean heart but also raging against what they see as the crippled reality of the other planes. The Maelstrom is strongly chaos-aligned and has the wild magic planar trait.

The Maelstrom is a plane of unformed and ever-changing potential, a plane of chaos that surrounds the other planes of the Outer Sphere like a vast, unplumbed ocean, a swirling sea lapping at tiny islands of stability. The Maelstrom is also perhaps the only plane that can truly be called infinite. While others may encompass massive, virtually unimaginable space, or bend the constraints of geometry and encompass a limited but unbounded region, the Maelstrom is beautiful, deadly, and without end; it is an infinite plane large enough to surround and contain multiple infinite planes.
Beyond the unstable and fantastical (but ultimately rational and familiar) borderlands, the Maelstrom’s depths grow more and more detached from the familiar tropes of reality as most mortals and immortals understand it. As the borderland shallows gradually transition into deeper realms, the environment grows prone to greater and more whimsical changes, and the distant sky takes on a blue sheen until ultimately the region called the Deep Maelstrom reveals itself as a formless cerulean void. Walking transitions to something between f lying and swimming, with the air possessing an almost liquid viscosity.

Geography

Notable Sites

Despite the instability of the Maelstrom, there are several sites that remain stable, usually backed by the magic of a powerful entity.

• Besmara and the Seawraith

• The Ossuary

• Realm of Nethys

• Sivanah’s Realm

Fauna & Flora

Native Creatures

As a physical manifestation of creative and destructive potential, the Maelstrom continually generates new and bizarre forms of life. The vast majority of such creatures live transient, mayfly existences before the Cerulean Void subsumes them once again, but in a land of manifest inconsistency, there exist some paradoxical constants.
The Maelstrom’s borderlands, adjacent to the other, more stable planes, harbor their own bizarre ecologies filled with creatures native to those neighboring planes and their chaos-touched descendants. Additionally, the Maelstrom’s shallows harbor transient groups of celestials, fiends, and even axiomite and inevitable armies crusading against the chaos.
The Cerulean Void harbors such beings as chaos beasts and the plane’s most populous (and perhaps original) natives, the serpentine proteans. Enigmatic creatures of chaos, the three protean races are creatures of creation and destruction in equal measure. The bestial naunet proteans emerge from the borderlands like a living, seething tide, seeking to break down the infection of more stable realities.
The imentesh proteans seek the same, but through subtlety and persuasion, like wandering prophets of chaos infecting minds, philosophies, and even religions. Finally, the keketar proteans dwell within the Maelstrom’s f luid heart like a race of priest-kings communing with the plane itself, seeking to divine its will.
Scholars describe the proteans as living embodiments of the Maelstrom, crafting the chaos like artists before tearing it down again in a natural cycle of instability. Others say the creatures behave not unlike the Maelstrom’s immune system, viewing the chaos like a living thing seeking to reabsorb the reality that it spawned, or which was carved out of it and stolen by the gods or other powers—and the proteans indeed view their plane as a living thing, worshiping it as a dualistic being called the Speakers of the Depths. This pair of entities might be actual gods, primordial protean lords, or simply a personification of the Maelstrom itself given form by the proteans’ worship.

Type

Dimensional plane