Planes, Wards & the Nagarin Legacy
The world of Asphodel does not exist in isolation. It floats within a complex web of planar boundaries, divine barriers, and arcane constructs — many of which were engineered by the ancient Nagarin Empire and have deteriorated since its fall. Understanding these structures is essential to understanding why magic works the way it does, why certain places are haunted or holy, and why the world's boundaries occasionally fail in spectacular and terrifying fashion.
The outermost barrier separating Asphodel's reality from the void beyond. A multidimensional membrane that the Nagarin reinforced with their Plane-Binder Device. Since the Device's destruction, the Shroud has thinned in places — most notably around the Maw of the Abyss, where extraplanar entities find easier passage into the material world.
A secondary barrier between the waking world and the realms of dream, memory, and perception. The Veil is not a wall but a gradient — reality fades into dream over a threshold that shifts with the lunar phases. During Conjunction, the Veil thins dramatically. Nagarin scholars mapped these fluctuations with Stardream Lenses; modern mages work largely by intuition and inherited charts.
The Nagarin developed a base-16 runic system for encoding planar barriers into physical structures. These wards were inscribed into their Glyph-Towers, roads, and city foundations. The system is partially understood by modern scholars — enough to maintain existing wards, rarely enough to create new ones. The wards operate on principles that blend mathematics and divine invocation in ways that suggest the Nagarin understood reality as fundamentally computational.
The world of Asphodel itself — three continents separated by the central ocean, the Maw at its heart. Where mortals live, die, and occasionally reshape reality.
Four classical elemental domains — Fire, Water, Earth, Air — accessible through natural convergence points and Nagarin gateway ruins. Elemental creatures cross over during planar thinning events.
Realms of fiends and demons. The Nagarin Plane-Binder Device once held these realms at bay; its destruction during the Sundering weakened the barriers permanently.
The borderland between material and immaterial. Ghosts linger here. Nagarin Memory Orbs allow brief transit. The Veil of Dreams intersects this plane at unpredictable angles.
A mirror of the Prime suffused with wild magic and ancient emotion. Accessible through standing stones, fairy rings, and certain Caledrian sacred groves. Time flows differently here.
The dark reflection — entropy, memory, and sorrow made manifest. Necromancers draw power from this plane. Noctis strengthens the connection during her full phase.
Pocket realms of tremendous variety: Nekrosyl's Blight (the fungal god's domain), the Labyrinth of Anachron (time-locked maze), the Maw's Depths (Angharad's throne), the Bloom of Mirrors, and the Hammer of Echoes.
A Nagarin construct that reinforced planar barriers across the entire world. Its destruction during the Great Sundering permanently weakened the boundaries between planes.
Massive stone towers inscribed with hexadecimal ward sequences. Ruins of these towers still dot the landscape, some still faintly active, anchoring local reality against planar incursion.
Crystalline spheres that store experiences as complete sensory records. Some allow brief ethereal transit. Scholars who activate them relive Nagarin memories as if they were their own.
Focusing instruments that amplify magical energy along precise ward-frequencies. Essential to the Nagarin hexadecimal system. A handful survive in university vaults and private collections.
Devices that allow observation of planar boundaries in real-time. Through a Stardream Lens, the Shroud of Oblivion becomes visible as a shimmering curtain of impossible colour.
Patron pacts exploit thinned planar boundaries. Where the Shroud weakens, warlock power surges — and patron influence becomes harder to resist.
Arcane magic draws on residual Nagarin ward-energy. Spells cast near intact Glyph-Towers are measurably more potent. The hexadecimal system remains the foundation of advanced theoretical magic.
Divine magic channels through the Veil of Dreams. Gods whose domains align with weakened barriers gain disproportionate influence. The Conjunction supercharges all divine magic unpredictably.
Scholars propose five competing theories for why Asphodel's cosmology takes its current form:
Mining town
Dwarven forgehold
Lakeside village
Trading post
Frontier outpost
Coastal watchtower
Monastery village
Highland shepherds
Naval garrison
Border outpost
Blighted village
Elvish settlement