Manual of the Planes

Planar Rips: Planar rips are holes in existence—holesthat want filling. A planar rip stresses the fabric of coterminousand coexistent planes, and the hole starts to consumethe plane’s edges. In time, a planar rip can irrevocablyswallow entire portions of a plane. Once a planarrip has momentum, it is difficult to reverse the fall of acoexistent plane, though only part of a coterminousplane will be affected.On a coexistent plane being engulfed by a planar rip,storms of ever-increasing severity are common withinfifty miles of the rip. Within a one-mile radius, a physicalembodiment of the planar rip is visible: a whirlpool suckingup reality itself and swirling nearby matter into anight-dark aperture a few hundred feet in diameter.Some planar rips form when a plane is subject to massiveenergies concentrated in a very small area. Theplanes are robust, and almost every instance of greatenergy or magic use leaves them none the worse for wear.But sometimes planes break, and the result is a planar rip.Other planar rips may be permanent connections to theNegative Energy Plane, and still others are remnant timelines negated by temporal paradox or mortals experimentingwith time travel. Planar rips can be tombstonesmarking extinguished planes, or they can lead to entirenew cosmologies yet unborn.Gap to Might Have Been: The manifest destiny of the evilillithidsy, as they see it, is to control the multiverse and allthat inhabit it. Once they had such an empire, but itslipped through their fingers ages ago, and is now nothingbut ashes.Or is it? The illithids have built a miles-wide structurearound a distant planar rip. Powerful lances ofmagic siphoned from suns cycle within the ring beforedischarging into the maw of nothingness. The illithidsintend to turn the planar rip inside out, reversing itspolarity and restoring their empire. Illithid researchershave identified a what-if cosmology where their interplanarempire never perished. So far, the mind flayershave failed to reverse the planar rip. But illithids arenothing if not tenacious.Time Loops: Time loops are rare—thankfully,because being captured in a time loop is to be lost to therest of the universe. Within a time loop, the history of acertain structure, ship, or region of landscape repeatsover and over, never failing to jump back to the sameprevious point in the region’s history. Creatures caughtup in a time loop rarely recognize their fate or realizethat they’re repeating the same actions over and overagain. From their perspective, each time through thetime loop is the first time.When a time loop forms, the affected structure or regionis somehow separated from the surrounding plane, eitherforming its own small demiplane or an outpocket. Sometime loops may be wholly impregnable, without entranceor exit, but others allow visitors to enter via a translucentplanar boundary. However, if visitors are unable to resolvethe origin of the time loop, they too will be incorporatedinto the time loop, doomed to repeat their entry into itagain and again.Time loops form when magic or other concentratedenergy is released in a wild, uncontrolled fashion in justthe right way. Even so, time loops happen so rarely thatsome sages dismiss them as idle tales. But in an infinitemultiverse, such time loops do indeed happen.The only way to end a time loop and return the area backto its original plane is to prevent the release of the wildenergy that catalyzed the time loop in the first place. Thus,visitors have a chance of doing so, because they enter a timeloop with some knowledge of the truth. But sometimeslongtime participants retain snatches of memory betweenrestarts, allowing them to alter their behavior enough oversuccessive repetitions to finally avert the catastrophe.Time Wrinkle: When the fabric of a plane is stretchedor compressed locally, it may become “wrinkled.” A timewrinkle normally affects only a small portion of plane,such as a single lake, structure, or cavern, though it canencompass a larger region.A time wrinkle is an area where time passes at a differentrate than on the rest of the plane. Most often, time runsmore slowly in a time wrinkle than on the surroundingplane. Inhabitants of a region that possesses a time wrinkleregard it as a natural feature, avoiding it much as otherswould avoid a difficult mountain range. Passing throughthe outskirts of a time wrinkle could cost a traveler hoursor days, while striking through the heart of a wrinklecould cost years, relative to the surrounding plane.This is not to say that areas affected by time wrinklesare lifeless. Plant and animal life that flourished millionsof years ago may be common in a large time wrinkle. Lostraces, monsters, and whole civilizations might still call atime wrinkle home. But explorers who want to explorethe past must forget the present and forsake the future—they’ll return from their journey to find their own livesare but distant memories.APPENDIX:VARIANT PLANES& COSMOLOGIES221