Cosmology is a useful subject for a delver. All spellcasters are attuned to some part of the world’s undercarriage, but even a salt-of-the-earth equine fighter needs to know the way home if they’re dumped in the Astral Sea. Here’s a quick summary of everything that exists.
What’s the difference between an Allemagnian wolf selling crusty bread in the market square and a quiet-minded animal wolf wandering Oria for food and a mate? Intelligence is an explanation, but anyone who’s used magic to speak with animals knows that some quiet-minded animals have far more going on in their heads than the dumbest guest at any house party.
Willful creature describes a living thing with a unique spark of awareness. This extra layer of consciousness changes how they perceive the world around them.
Material worlds have three ingredients. They’re the symbiotic forces that allow for the birth, growth, and flourishing of willful creatures. A world without any one of the three loses the capacity to create that spark.
The word world is defined by all the space traversable without magic, with its own physical laws and natural order. The Beast World, Ancestral Homeland, and Broken World are all material worlds. Some worlds don’t meet a material world’s qualifications, but are still discrete spaces with their own rules.
“Plane” and “world” are interchangeable. “Plane” more often describes a pocket world in the Astral Sea created by a magic user, while “world” is more commonly used to describe naturally occurring infinite places like the Beast World.
The Absolute Veil is the foundation of the Beast World’s cosmology, acting as a boundary separating worlds. The analogy of a veil is used because this boundary’s size and shape are flexible. With a localized stretch of the Absolute Veil, travelers pass through gaps in woven fabric to access other worlds.
The Veil also serves other purposes. At the edge of the universe, it keeps the nebulous stuff of the Astral separated from whatever exists beyond that barrier. It also traps nonexistence within its layers and thus separates everything real from everything else. Paladins call this nonexistence Unnature.
There’s no evidence proving that a person’s soul goes to an inaccessible afterlife when they die. The few beasts and brethren resurrected after death haven’t remembered anything after their demise. Some Pirhouans find comfort in the belief in an afterlife they call Pirhoua’s Court, where the dead congregate with her. However, death is an impenetrable unknown that’s the subject of philosophical discussions in universities and taverns alike.
For Player's. If a creature is resurrected from death, they have no memory of being dead. Speaking with a creature who is dead can only glean information from their living memory. Deities and others who may know the answer themselves are unwilling to share it with mortals, and using magic to search their minds yields no relevant information.
The four elements of fire, air, earth, and water are building blocks of a world’s natural material. Rather than pulling these elements from separate planes, each material world is a collection of them expressed by Nature, Divinity, and the Arcana. When one casts a spell to create fire from thin air, they’re using magic to “express” the fire already present throughout the world. This elemental expression is balanced by the sheer volume of each element. A spellcaster will never miss the miniscule glint of sunlight borrowed by the Arcana to create their fireball.
