The Astral is the space between worlds. If the cosmos could be visualized in its totality, each physical reality, each world, would be a discrete object suspended within an infinite medium. That medium is the Astral.

The Nature of the Astral

The Astral is not empty space. It is magic in its purest, most fundamental form: the raw building blocks of reality, undifferentiated and omnipresent. Every world that exists floats within this magical medium, and every world interacts with it differently.

Some worlds absorb a great deal of magic from the Astral. These are high-magic worlds where ambient power saturates the environment and manifests constantly as essences, awakening stones, quintessence, and monsters. Other worlds absorb very little, leaving them magically barren by comparison.

Astral Spaces

Where the Astral meets a physical world, magic can congeal and stabilize into what are called Astral Spaces: pocket dimensions anchored to that world. These spaces are not part of the physical reality they attach to, but neither are they the raw Astral. They exist in between: structured enough to support physical laws, but fundamentally magical in nature.

Astral spaces cannot exist without a world to anchor them. If severed from their anchor, they immediately begin to break down.

The Deep Astral

Beyond astral spaces lies the Deep Astral, where no physical matter can exist. It is pure magic, nothing else. Physical substance - flesh, stone, steel - simply cannot be in that space. It does not dissolve or disintegrate; it ceases to exist entirely.

Only purely magical constructs, such as souls, can persist in the deep Astral.