Great Beyond

The Great Beyond. Click or tap this image to enlarge it for improved readability.

A map of the River of Souls that depicts much of the Great Beyond.

The Great Beyond is a term that encompasses all the planes of existence that make up the known multiverse. These realities beyond our reality are the domains of the gods, and play home to non-godly powers fit for worship, planar dragons, and entirely alien species.

There are nineteen major planes that comprise the Great Beyond, modeled as two spheres: the Inner Sphere and the Outer Sphere. Connecting the two spheres is the Astral Plane. The spaces between the primary nineteen planes contain countless demiplanes. Despite the names implying a spherical layout, the planes exist on dimensions incomprehensible to mortals, thus these terms are used to represent the planes in two or three dimensions.

History

See also: Age of Creation

No records exist of the creation of reality, only legends and apocryphal texts of varying degrees of credibility. The Windsong Testaments of Windsong Abbey and purported copies of the angel Tabris's Concordance of Rivals are among the most prominent such sources.

While the Windsong Testaments and Concordance of Rivals diverge on many details in their stories of the creation of reality, they do both tell that Pharasma was this reality's first deity, having emerged into the current reality as the sole survivor of a previous reality. They also agree that she arrived upon a platform called the Seal, the sole remnant of that previous reality, which would serve as the center of creation for this reality.

Concordance of Rivals

Concordance of Rivals claims that Pharasma emerged into this reality upon the Seal in a cloud of quintessential dust, and that she reflected upon both the errors of the previous reality and the silent entities known only as Those Who Remain, which existed beyond the multiverse.

Concordance claims that Pharasma then wove the quintessential dust into the form of a rod and used it to stir and spin the quintessence into a vortex consisting of the fabric of reality. She affixed this spindle to a point of space and pulled the vortex into the shape of a shell around the Seal in order to protect it from Those Who Remain.

Rather than shape life directly, an error from the previous reality, Concordance suggests Pharasma instead coiled some of the quintessence and used it to pull the astral expanse into motion, swirling it around the exterior of the shell as an outer shell. At the points where this outer astral vortex collided with the inner quintessence, sparks of creation formed prototypical new life.

Concordance then claims that Pharasma spun this inner sphere in counter-rotation to its outer sphere, which caused storms to form, rage, and fade at the twin vortices' boundaries. Eventually a large four-armed storm emerged and tore itself free of the vortex, a hurricane composed of memories of the prior reality and motes of quintessence that grew as it consumed parts of this new reality, leaving holes of nothingness in its wake. This hurricane turned its eye to Pharasma and showed her the future events and eventual end of the new reality, destined to create tumultuous new life and eventually fall as the previous one had.

Pharasma assigned this vortex, the first new creation of this new reality, with the task of protecting what she had created, and it faded and dispersed without acknowledgement back into the shell. Soon after, smaller versions of this vortex spun across the surface of the shell, repaired the holes it created, and patrolled it to fix future flaws.

Pharasma then watched the Seal as more sparks of life formed, and in each she could foretell all of their possible fates, all the way to their eventual ends and across all of the multiverse. Every last thread, including the longest, ended, and she acknowledged with certainty that the reality she had created would also end, just has her previous reality had.

Windsong Testaments

The Testaments claim that Pharasma was deposited in the protoreality of the Maelstrom with no knowledge of her previous reality, and then claims that Pharasma instead instinctively walked the eight-sided Seal of creation, first by attempting to step off of it, only to find that it expanded to support her.

In doing so, she found that her steps created the Great Beyond, starting with the Outer Sphere. As she walked outward from its center in a spiral, the Seal expanded to form a spire. This circuit of the Seal would become known in the Testaments as the First Walk, and while it also created the forming the Inner Sphere, it contained nothing but the few Outer Gods, remnants of other realities.

In the wake of her steps, new deities formed. The Speakers of the Depths retreated immediately into the Maelstrom; Desna created the first night, Sarenrae the first day; Ihys and Asmodeus brought good and evil, respectively, and Achaekek stood between them as an arbiter. One unnamed deity is described as having "tread forth beyond the Eclipse", but for lack of death it was instead bound to a throne in the shadow of the Spire.

The last deity to form from Pharasma's steps was Rovagug, borne from the fear she experienced from her first step, and the Testaments claim that no deity could recall if the Rough Beast embodied or consumed that fear.

At this point, the Testaments suggest that Pharasma also became aware of Yog-Sothoth, the Watcher to her Survivor, both a counterpart and second anchor of creation. The Great Beyond thus became defined as the reality existing between Pharasma and Yog-Sothoth, and the Age of Creation and dawn of the Universe began.

Inner Sphere

The Inner Sphere is the center of the Great Beyond, sitting at the hub of creation surrounded by the Astral Plane, and is the source of souls and origin of quintessence. It is composed of the immensely huge, yet finite layers of the Elemental Planes, which surround the Universe and Netherworld, which are in turn separated by the Ethereal. At the metaphysical center of these sit the dualistic Creation's Forge and Void.

• The Universe, also known as the Material Plane

Elemental planes

• Elemental Plane of Air
• Elemental Plane of Earth
• Elemental Plane of Fire
• Elemental Plane of Metal
• Elemental Plane of Water
• Elemental Plane of Wood

Transitive planes

• Astral Plane (see below)
• Ethereal Plane
• First World
• The Netherworld, also known as the Shadow Plane

Energy planes

• Creation's Forge, also known as the Positive Energy Plane
• The Void, also known as the Negative Energy Plane

Astral Plane

The Astral Plane surrounds the Inner Sphere, and fills the space between planes of the Outer Sphere. The Plane of Fire, outermost of the inner planes, is often depicted in maps of the multiverse as a dot or burning sphere floating in the Astral Plane at the center of the Outer Sphere.

Outer Sphere

While the Inner Sphere contains the elemental planes, the Outer Sphere contains nine planes, each with a strong link to a particular philosophy and alignment. Composed of quintessence, these are the dwelling places of Golarion's gods, as well as the afterlife for mortals' departed souls.

• Axis
• The Boneyard
• The Maelstrom

Lower planes

• Abaddon
• Hell
• The Outer Rifts, also known as the Abyss

Upper planes

• Elysium
• Heaven
• Nirvana

Demiplanes and dimensions

The Reading Room of the Akashic Record, a finite demiplane with numerous special properties.

The multiverse is hardly a neatly-organized system, and innumerable planes and demiplanes exist outside the schema of the Inner and Outer Spheres. Demiplanes are generally small, finite planes, most of which are connected to either the Astral or Ethereal Planes. Most are created when reality is sufficiently warped that small pieces of its substrate fragment and fuse together, thereby creating a stable dimension. The Akashic Record is an example of a demiplane.

Dimensions have recently also been understood as discrete extraplanar realms that defy categorization and simultaneously overlay all other dimensions and planes. Modern scholars uniformly agree that two infinite realms, that had previously been classified as demiplanes, should be classed as dimensions: the Dimension of Time and the Dreamlands.

Planar metaphysics

The mortals of Golarion have several philosophies that attempt to describe the metaphysical relationships of the planes to each other. The most prominent is known as the orthodox scheme or arcane tradition, which envisions the planes as nesting spheres of realities with the Inner Sphere at the center and Outer Sphere as the infinite exterior. In this model, Creation's Forge and the Void govern the powers of creation and destruction in opposition to one another.

An alternative philosophy, known as the esoteric tradition or ancient wisdom, suggests that Creation's Forge and the Void are instead complementary to each other, serving as the source and destination of all creation and forming a cycle that is temporally and dimensionally infinite. All forms of life in this cycle are part of the monad, a transcendental oneness that unites all souls into a single spiritual existence, with aeons existing closest to the source of creation and mortal souls existing further away. This tradition minimizes the role of the Outer Sphere as well as the Elemental and Transitive planes.

Researchers of planar metaphysics also suggest that the multiverse is itself one of many, and point to the indeterminable depths of planar rifts in the Outer Rifts that might extend beyond the Outer Sphere into an undefined space untouched and uncontrolled by any deity and exempt from the laws of dimensionality. Dou-Bral traversed the undefined space beyond the Great Beyond long ago and returned as Zon-Kuthon; it is unclear whether this space is one in the same with the Dark Tapestry.

References

For additional as-yet unincorporated sources about this subject, see the Meta page.