I'm working on a new D&D setting

This week I turned a previous post from this newsletter into a video! Check it out if you didn’t read the original. Or if you did.

And now, here’s a sketch of a D&D setting I’ve been thinking about.

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The multiverse is not a wheel. It’s a funnel.

Above reality lies Crucible, the inscrutable source of all magic, and from Crucible magic flows down into the upper planes. Each time a spell is cast, excess magic is released to descend to a plane below, both depleting its potency and condensing its form as the funnel narrows. From pure energy it becomes wind, and from wind it becomes like water, until at last it rains down upon the final plane at the root of the cosmos.

This plane takes the form of a shallow sea 50 miles wide, encircled by a great wall of storm clouds. In the center of the sea is great hole, down which the ocean pours in a thunderous torrent.

From the center of this torrent rises a great tower.

The tower is a rough shard of white limestone perhaps a mile tall, carved with arcane glyphs the size of cathedrals. Whether it stands on a foundation or simply floats in the void cannot be seen, as its base is shrouded by the billowing mist of the waterfall.

All around the tower, emerging from the ocean and clinging to the circular waterfall’s edges stands the City of Quay. The city is a bric-a-brac of castles, ramshackle manors, and spires, linked by bridges and canals.

Every resident of Quay lives their life with a single goal: escape.

This plane is the ground of magic, the place it tends towards unless carefully controlled. As such, it is the destination of all misfired teleportation spells, and given wizards’ general distaste for mundane forms of transportation, they now comprise over 98% of the plane’s population.

The most commonly failed teleportations are ones where large objects are being transported. The larger the object, the more likely the misfire. This means that wizards seldom arrive alone; they more commonly appear with their entire tower or arcane sanctum, which they were attempting to relocate after the local villagers had finally had enough of them. Occasionally the spell encompasses too large of an area, resulting massive chunks of rock and earth (with a wizard tower on top) appearing out of nowhere, plunging into the waves, and forming a new island.

No one is sure how long this has been going on, but what they do know is that the floor of the shallow sea is not sand or mud, but broken masonry, as far down as you care to dig.

The trouble that Quay’s wizards have encountered is that the spells that brought them here cannot take them back. All transportation spells, no matter their formulation or power, always return the caster to their origin point. This plane is a kind of arcane black hole in which all directions out point back in.

Everyone is sure that the massive tower at the plane’s center is the key to their release, but so far studies of it have proved fruitless. Its exterior is utterly impervious to magic, and the parties of explorers sent through its only gate rarely return. Those who do report a labyrinth of chambers and corridors that seems much larger than the tower’s dimensions, filled with strange and lethal challenges.

Over the centuries, many names have been proposed for this plane. Cauldron. The Last Land. Magesea. But in the end only one name stuck, the name of the spire that dominates the view and the mind of every citizen of Quay.

The name of their prison is Scepter.