Entering and Exiting the Wasteland
Reaching the Wasteland is easy; even inanimate objects can do it. Exiting, however, can be vastly more difficult.
Travelers using plane shift, the Wastelander’s Map of Lost Things, and similar magic to reach the Wasteland always arrive at the entrance of the Hall of Conception. However a creature can move to the Wasteland much more easily, and more randomly, simply by being forgotten. Such a lost creature appears within the Wasteland in the region that most closely resembles their most previous location. No spell, no magic, no effort is required; it simply happens.
However, no magic spell within the Wasteland allows one to escape. Plane shift and similar spells simply return you to the Hall of Conception. To leave, a forgotten creature must be remembered by those beyond the borders of the Wasteland.
Creatures that reached the Wasteland by magic must return by a more perilous route: they must cast themselves off the Wasteland and toward the Gyre. While falling through the liminal space between the Wasteland and annihilation, the restrictions on magical travel are lifted, and the creature has one round to perform whatever spellcraft or other hail mary maneuver they can to leave the plane.
Wasteland Regions
The Core
The central regions of the Wasteland are known loosely as the Core. This is where most planar travelers and almost all forgotten concepts or lost thoughts arrive in the Wasteland. It is also the most rapidly shifting point of the plane, as everything is constantly being pushed out by new arrivals spilling forth from the Hall of Conception.
The Hall of Conception is a large, open edifice where the gods of various realities once forged their creations. Those that they disliked, or felt were lacking, were discarded: cast aside to become the first inhabitants of the Wasteland. Things and people within the Hall of Conception and its immediate environs find themselves temporarily resistant to the Quintessent Decay of the Wasteland.
The Core is dotted with villages and towns. But due to the slow and continual expansion from the center, such settlement is displaced outward in an ever-widening circle. No matter how much changes, there is almost always a village called Lakeside and a city called Dawnwake. On any given visit to the Wasteland these may be entirely different settlements.
The Secret Forest
In the shadowed lands beyond the Core, where only pinholes of light streak down from the sky in glimmering shafts that spread and become diffuse before reaching the ground, a twilight forest grows along the borders of the Core, separated from Dawnwake by an open hilly region through which the city slowly slides before being swallowed in the forest.
The trees of the Secret Forest are wrong. Not in a twisted or terrible way, but simply off. Squat oak trees that seem more like shrubbery, pine trees that bend into loops, children’s drawings of trees like green lollipops on brown trunks.
In those shrouded paths live the creatures known as secrets. Here, real-world secrets take the forms of strange, stealthy mammals. Most are innocuous enough, manifesting as simple small furry creatures that whisper innocent confidences. Some are ugly, however. And far too many are dangerous, stalking the forest on the prowl for lesser secrets and killing anyone who might learn their nature.
The Sea of Dreams
Spreading out from the center of the plane is a freshwater sea called the Sea of Dreams. Those who sail it and drink of its waters know that there are different currents within this sea. Some of the largest areas are the Shoals of Wasted Youth which flow bitterly into the Mere of Potential, the calm waters of Cape Hope, and the sinful depths of dark fantasies surrounding the Illicit Isles.
Nearer to the edge of the world, the seawater thins into streams that cascade and tumble over the edge of the Wasteland and into the Gyre.
The Shambles
A rising mass of perpetually tumbling stones, the Shambles are where lost minds wind up. The very bones of the world stretch up into the sky from the Cackling Foothills to the heady Spires of Ambition, fading into a quintessent jumble of tumbling thoughtforms perpetually cascading into the Gyre.
When characters traversing the Shambles roll initiative,, have each character make a Wisdom saving throw with a DC of 10 plus their Quintessent Decay value. On a failed save, the character gains a random short term stress effect which persists until the encounter ends.
While actually thoughtforms and experiences rather than stone, material mined from the Shambles can be worked into strange and wonderful objects. When transported from the Wasteland, art objects created from the stone of the Spires of Ambition are worth 10 times their value.
The Outer Rim
The furthest reaches of the Wasteland are broadly known as the Outer Rim. Everything which decays to its quintessence finds itself drifting to the rim: trees, houses, people, concepts. Here remains only the most basic imprints of what once was. Concepts distilled to their final essence find it difficult to move back toward the center, or even impossible once they’ve decayed to a certain point. And the only thing they can do is wait for the day their quintessence is pushed off the edge of the plane into the void beyond.
A somber region in many areas, as fantasy collapses into the stark reality of destruction, there is still goodness to be found on the Rim. Here, the remnants of imaginary friends congregate as they prepare for what comes next. Joy and Comfort drift through like clouds before dispersing past the edge, bringing with them Peace and Hope in flowing rivers from the Sea of Dreams. Even Bliss can be found, now and again, before it fades as all things do.
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