Oubliette

There are gates to the world known as Oubliette across the Plurality, which has brought many visitors here throughout the ages; the problem is that those gates are one-way. Stepping through, travellers find just an empty stone archway behind them, and no means to escape the planet.

Most believe that the species dubbed the Trappists built the gates, although they may simply have discovered Oubliette and settled there. Whatever the truth, they raised impressive stone structures (many of which have weathered the aeons well), and were capable mages, leaving behind enchanted relics (as well as cursed ones). They created museums of artefacts from other realities and seem to have interred the remains of travellers with dignity, although it is not clear if those travellers were treated as guests or prisoners (or killed and dissected upon arrival).

The Trappists appear to have vanished suddenly, and the next notable civilisation was the Machinists, a technological species who attempted to unravel the secrets of magic and the operation of the gates through scientific exploration. At some point their focus changed from research to defence, as they built ever larger and more powerful Wardens; robots whose remains are found across Oubliette, some still active and pursuing millennia-old programming. The largest Wardens are found on the great plains, where monumental and grotesque skeletons have been found, unlike anything existing on Oubliette today. A few of the massive robots are still operational, sitting idle in low-power mode, as though waiting for such monsters to return.

It is unclear if the Machinists were organic beings, or machines themselves, but their reign also ended abruptly. Beings have continued stumbling upon Oubliette throughout the centuries, and the current civilisation (if it can be called that) is a melting pot of myriad races. Some species are represented more frequently, such as humans (due to them being endemic to so many realities) and orcs (descendants of a tribe led through a gate by religious visions). There are also familiars and robots used by other cultures to test the gates, and thus abandoned on Oubliette; an entire race seems to have arisen when a rat-like familiar arrived and bred with the various rodents already on the planet, creating a new sentient species (something like a cross between a large rat and small monkey, with a nose for magic).

Not everything that comes through the gates can be reasoned with, and there are many dangerous critters and horrific entities that have become part of Oubliette’s smorgasbord of an ecosystem, as well as hostile factions that don’t play well with others. Another hazard of the planet are the void storms; lurid clouds in which occur flashes of utter darkness. Sometimes this darkness takes the form of cracks in the sky, appearing with an awful high-pitched sound, as though reality itself was screaming. Normally these cracks fade rapidly, but occasionally they persist, and grow large enough for something awful to squeeze through from the void beyond.

There is growing agreement that the void storms are becoming more frequent, and more likely to deposit nightmarish terrors from that dark place. Some wonder if these rents in reality will eventually unleash gargantuan beasts, like the vast remains on the great plains; if this is a cycle that has played out again and again in previous epochs. Some whisper that this is the true purpose of the gates, to provide a harvest for the things from beyond, to sate their hunger so that they will slink back to the emptiness in which they dwell, at least for a while longer…