Backed this one by Gnome Mage Games on Kickstarter looking for some planar action, something a little different. I had been tracking Fernando Salvaterra through his hex-art and that lead me to this one - pitched as "loosely connected fantasy demiplanes are all that's left of a fractured multiverse" for Those Who Wander and 5e systems. The various contributors of the individual planes were a who's-who of interesting creators so this whole effort harkened back to some of the great works of the 2010's OSR like Petty Gods.
Cover design by Joshua Mendenhall with art by Fernando Salvaterra
What we get is an 80 page book that covers 15 demiplanes and 6 pocket planes await in this original fantasy campaign setting." Each demiplane is a fragment of reality from a multiverse that shattered - each ranging from dungeon-sized to a few thousand square miles at most. These are all connected by interplanar gates to allow marvel-seekers to pursue adventure across these reality splinters.
The book comes in three chunks:
First Eight pages introduce the setting and guide on how to use it.
Second Sixty eight pages covering the 15 demiplanes, each 3-7 pages, averaging 4.5 pages
Lastly Three pages at the end covering the pocket planes, each with half a page.
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
Welcome to the Demiverse gives a paragraph of all the demiplanes in the book, worlds unto themselves and the much smaller pocket dimensions. Guidance on How to Use This Book chimes with my own sensibilities suggesting planes to act as connector planes, others to act as realms to adventure in or to introduce the demiplanes as planar escapades from an established prime campaign. The advice on creating your own Demiplane gives a block of topics to consider to establish if and how weird a given plane might be. The best advice in that is 'come up with a tagline for the plane' and if players are not keen on a given demiplane, move on! The planes are infinite after all.
The section on the Demiplanes gives us a few pages on each with some artworks to set tone which is neat - the different artists for different planes is a very effective way to convey the different flavour of each. We have 12 planes that are 'destination' planes split into places to fear, places to tread carefully and places to potentially act as bases
Places to fear:
Blackwood - a twisted forest, a corrupted fey realm which attempts to draw you in and trap you there; home to a potentially redeemable bunch of dark fey.
Carrion, the Endless City - a nightmare city ruled over by the undying Maggot Queen under the light of the Iron Moon
Thalasso - the last town above an ever-expanding ocean, desperately staving off things emerging from the depths
Places to seek fortune with care:
City of Clay - A mining boom-town on a shard of elemental earth, surrounded by the roiling chaos of Limbo
The In-Between - a place to confront ones spiritual unfinished business
Marketplace of Yiolah - competition red in tooth and claw in this endless market
The Tangle - A fey-warped forest of immense trees and wilder-than-wild ecosystem
Places to rest
Cathad - A necropolis transformed into an accessible metropolis that calls to all those in search of acceptance
The Fair Kingdom - a charming community where a fey revel and a real-world carnival amicably melded
Mourning Dove Palace - A place of courtiers and balls, with fey lurking around the edges of the masquerades
Safe Harbor - A settlement and cult surrounding a literal piece of heaven
Zephyr - A city of djinni intruded upon by the dread river Styx
Maybe others might make different judgements - Carrion and Thalasso as places to seek fortune rather than fear and avoid, more power to you in that case.
Three planes act as connectors and transit-hubs: the Capricious Bus, Derelict Station, and Grand Observatory all act as nexi - the bus shuttles between places on a schedule, the station has trains resembling their destination planes arriving and departing and the observatory has portals appear in the pictures on the walls.
The Pocket Planes of Brass Dragon Lair, The Lightmass, The Lotus Lamp, Nicole's Greenhouse, Room of Respite and The Twisted Temple all offer smaller locations to investigate.
Altogether this is a great set of locations to use as presented for a stand-alone planar setting once players find one of the connector planes or they could easily be stirred together with Planebreaker or Planescape. These feel to me more like great points of interest to scatter throughout some other planar architecture - Great Wheel, Yggdrasil, whatever - as they don't feel like a complete cosmology in and of themselves - we catch very oblique glimpses of celestial and fiendish realms but do not get any great detail on either. There is a strong core of fey influences running through a lot of this, a feywild-shadowfell campaign could be the spine to bolt all these onto.
Some favourites are Zephyr, which I like a lot - we so rarely get djinni settlements and this is a really interesting one, and the Derelict Station which has great potential to be an interesting planar nexus. Everything in here is modular enough you could add just one or two of these into your non-planar game. The pocket planes could be things you stumble into in a wizards tower. All in all good addition to a planar roster, some great adventure-sparking ideas, well worth having a look.
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