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Planar Adventures / Building a Planar Campaign / Alternate Cosmologies

World Tree

Source Planar Adventures pg. 89
The Great Beyond has the River Styx as a planar pathway, whose twisting tributaries weave across the evil-aligned planes and, to a minor extent, beyond. What if there was only one way to travel between planes—not on the Styx, but via a singular transitory plane that touches all other planes known as the World Tree? The World Tree might exist on a Material Plane world, but its trunk extends upward into a sort of haze that connects to the Outer Planes, while its roots burrow unseen into the world below, tapping into the elemental and energy planes.

As the only route between the planes, the World Tree becomes a battleground unlike like any other. Armies of celestials, fiends, inevitables, and proteans seize terrain around the points where the tree’s branches and roots touch other realms in a vast and almost unfathomable war. Scorched-earth tactics abound; armies of demons march en masse to the gates of Heaven as long as they can manage to physically travel there. The Four Horsemen personally lead their armies down the tree toward the Material Plane, promising their daemons the chance to feast upon all mortal life with nothing but physical distance barring the way. Travel is hazardous, more often than not a question of passing through a war zone as noncombatants struggle to weave between the encamped armies.

What, though, if the World Tree hosted a native race—a species that spawned from the flesh of their great mother tree, perhaps existing in the strange overlapping area somewhere between plant and fey, with their own cities and their own societies that were devoted to protecting the World Tree and regulating travel upon it? Wars would still occur, of course, but with the only path of transit controlled by the outsider race that emerged from its very substance, the World Tree would be less of a war zone and more a neutral ground between the planes. Outsiders and even mortals could travel upon the tree’s branches and up and down its trunk—if their journeys were the will of the World Tree and its chosen servitors. Instead of transit aided by spells and magical components, travelers would offer tribute to the living goddess of the World Tree, hoping for an answer to their prayers in the form of either safe passage or escort.

Archives of Nethys

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World Tree