One of the occasionally visited realms that manifested during one of my Spelljammer campaigns in the early nineties, Astrophikus likes to keep popping up in current campaigns ever since, a strange fantasy realm which is inextricably tied to the weird realm of fantasy wildspace. Astrophikus has appeared in 2nd, 3rd, 4th edition and pathfinder campaigns. It may make an appearance again soon in my planned 5E playtest. I'll be throwing some data on this into the blog in the coming weeks for fun...
Astrophikus: Principia Geographica Mythologica
"The Jewel of Chaos"
Astrophikus is a small world, perhaps half
the size of the Earth. It exists in a region dubbed by Spelljamming explorers
as “chaos space,” a solar system where it is said that the power of the
Primordial Chaos God ruptured the fabric of space-time, as it attempted to
reclaim the vastness of the material plane in to its crawling chaos. It has often been dubbed "The Jewel of Chaos" for the small but lush world is regarded as a paradise by those who have traversed the empty realms of the ether and the phlogiston for far too long.
Astrophikus operates like a fairly dense but
otherwise normal world. It is spherical, and has normal gravity, despite its
smaller size. The world has modest oceans, one at each polar cap, and several
large lakes and a single inland sea, though less than 40% of the world’s
surface is covered in water. The world has temperate extremes across the globe,
with strong, humid equatorial regions rife with growth, leading out to vast
cold deserts in the inland regions furthest from or most protected by the
coastal regions. At the poles much of the water is locked in ice caps;
likewise, many of the largest mountains stretch out in to the thinnest regions
of atmosphere, where ancient glaciers remain forever locked in ice.
Astrophikus has a thick crust and deep
mantle, beneath which the mythology of the land claims lies one of the more
terrifying progeny of chaos, the destroyer god Sulziddaran. Indeed, most of the scholars of Astrophikus assert
that this world is, in fact a vast prison designed to contain the dreaded god,
forced in to perpetual slumber by his prison-keeper, the baleful elder god Draeggaron, usually called the Star God. Astrophikus is notorious for
its terrifying earthquakes and volcanic events, and these are usually
attributed to the restless movements of the slumbering Sulziddaran.
Astrophikus has two small, curiously shaped
moons. The mythology of the moons is complex, a strange tale of dark power, in
which the moons were once a single whole. Each moon contains the ruins of a
vast city that was once said to be a single great metropolis from which
Dreaggaros and his minions held watch over their charge, the entombed chaos god
below.
As the story goes, Draeggaros’s lesser
seraph minions grew complacent, and in time they lost sight of their overall
purpose, for Draeggaros himself had passed on the the Astral Sea and moved in
to the outer realms of thought, only occasionally being called back to his
realm through great sacrifice or need. This complacency led to corruption from
within, and a dark cult of infernal beliefs insinuated itself within the city
of the seraphs.
Over a period of eons the cult expanded and
turned in to a terrible conflict that wracked the Great City
Thousands of years later, the myths of the
two moons are known to all. The dark moon, called Ternikos, is a vast graveyard of undead and infernal devils. The
powerful and evil entity called Halistrak the Lich Lord is the ruler of this
realm, or at least portends to be. The other moon is called Metaros, and its ruins are filled with
weird and ancient mysteries, mad angels and other strangeness. Rumors suggest
that somewhere deep in the heart of this moon Metatron still dwells, where he
was instructed to continue vigilant watch over the prison world below.
Current belief on Astrophikus suggests that
the two moons, which can fall in to alignment once every century, will bring
terrible doom, earthquakes and bad luck during this period if a valued living
sacrifice is not offered to the god Draeggaros, to call him back from the Outer
Realms to impose his will upon the world and set things aright.Though it has
been many thousands of years since at least one of the major cities of
Astrophikus failed to offer sacrifice, the stories do tell of a terrible
cataclysm two thousand years ago, in which the planet suffered a year of
quakes, floods, plague and famine the likes of which none could imagine. As
such, all of the kingdoms of the world today invoke regular sacrifices to call
upon the protection of Draeggaros during lunar alignments.
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