Planar Tour Guide: The First World part 1
(art by Nele-Diel on DeviantArt)
And we’re back with another deep dive into the planes of the multiverse, and this time it’s a realm that is inexorably tied to the Material Plane, and yet painfully separate. I speak of course of the First World, the home of the fey.
Imagine the act of creating the universe as a great work of art. Reality itself is the canvas, but you’re also defining how reality functions. Should all matter be the same protons and neutrons, or should every substance be wholly unique? How many legs should a bear have? How many legs should this creature that fills the same ecological role as a bear on a different planet have? Magnetism: Yes or no?
It’s all a lot to think about and a whole lot to discuss with your fellow gods, but nobody can just agree immediately, and so the gods tested things, creating and altering to see what would work, doodling all over that vast canvas until the majority of them agreed on what was and was not worth keeping. Well, mostly.
Once they had come to something approaching consensus, the gods began to truly paint, covering up their doodles with the vast new cosmos full of all their wondrous, harmonious, yet also conflicting ideas.
But beneath that fresh coat of paint, their original creation remained, forgotten, abandoned, but thriving. This is the First World, the realm of the fey.
So essentially, the First World occupies the same dimensional space as the Material Plane, but it’s under the present reality, inaccessible even by planeshifting, the only way to get in is by finding thin points that act as portals to that realm, and once inside, one will find a teeming world of vibrant colors, plants and animals that are strangely familiar yet unlike any seen in the material world. Rather than being a whole universe with multiple planets (though it does have a space in the sky above, if the fact there are space fey in Starfinder is any indication), it is instead a single massive flat world where every possible environ can be found (and some impossible ones too). Likewise, the prototypes of every living thing can also be found there as well at every stage of their evolutionary path, including some that never came to be or never were, and often also having oddities that didn’t make the final cut.
The infinite expanse of the plane is a somewhat moot consideration, as First World is ever-changing. Prototypes for landscapes, biomes, and more regularly shift and ripple, changing the topography constantly. Even the laws of physics are not sacrosanct, with sudden changes in gravity, how matter and energy interact, and even the laws of magic sometimes becoming unpredictable. The fey denizens learn to live in more stable zones, or are tough enough to weather the changes.
The only real islands of stability on the plane are the domains of the most powerful fey, especially the Eldest, whose will stabilizes the local realm into something that suits them just fine, a little pocket of reality that’s just how they like it.
Ah, but what are the Eldest? To explain that, let’s back up a bit.
When the gods created the Material Plane, the Universe, over the First World, they essentially abandoned it for their new more stable creation. No god visits their old doodling ground, and no love is given to its denizens. The only power from true divinity that exists there is what the Eldest hold and whatever a divine caster brings with them with their presence.
How the fey reacted to this abandonment varies. Some curse and resent the gods, some deeply wish to be good enough for them to come back, and others still are indifferent to the whole thing and keep doing what they are doing.
But regardless, the oldest and most powerful of fey-kind saw a need and opportunity, seizing authority and power in the First World, and with it came society, hierarchy, and culture. However, many Eldest are just as fickle as their lesser counterparts, making the laws of each realm very different, differences one needs to learn quickly.
And so the Eldest are the demigod rulers of the First World, most content to rule their petty kingdoms and extend what passes for law and order as far as they dare to reach beyond, though some dare politics with each other, and even war over things, which is what led to the creation of the Tane, a group of powerful monsters that the Eldest keep under lock and key (or at least a close watch), waiting for the time when they are needed, or someone tries to use them against them.
Another curiosity of the fact that the First World was abandoned by the gods is that the First World is outside of the Cycle of Souls. Normally when one dies, one’s soul is drawn to the River of Souls and the Boneyard, where it is judged and sent on its way to it’s final destination plane, where it either becomes one of the outsider types associated with that plane or is absorbed by the plane. Either way, the essence of each plane is then slowly eroded by the Maelstrom, which draws the raw quintessence to the final whirlpool and river of the Antipode, which feeds into the Positive Energy Plane, which spits out new souls to begin the process again. Not so with the First World.
Instead, souls that perish in the First World are absorbed into the plane itself, where they are, over time, spontaneously reincarnated elsewhere, albeit probably years later, often with most if not all of their memories intact. As such, fey that have never left to visit the Material Plane have a skewed idea of death. For them, death is simply an inconvenience, and therefore murder is often considered a somewhat mean-spirited but otherwise harmless prank by the more cruel fey creatures.
In the end, the First World has an air of childish creativity and whimsy, filtered through the lens of having been the fancy and frivolous expression of young gods, which lends an element of horror as mortals look upon what the gods made and discarded when they created with no consequence in mind.
Truly the wilds of the First World are so vast, diverse, and ever-changing that it’s hard to really pin anything down about it, but we shall try throughout the week. I hope you’re looking forward to it.
