This new information informs the entire book, which considers the Astral Plane to be an anomaly, a location no one is really intended to visit, and thus its rules are unique. With this, Cook radically redefines the Astral, and with this both makes more sense of why itвЂ™s so different from everywhere else, and makes the multiverse a good deal weirder and more interesting. ItвЂ™s not a plane, it has no space-it is the absence of space, the absence of plane. The mind sees distance, feels space around it, and perceives what it thinks is a plane. ItвЂ™s all a matter of perspectiveвЂ“or rather, perception. ThatвЂ™s why even though there is no distance to measure or space to occupy, it appears that there is.

How can anything-let alone a whole finite plane-fit into literally no space? Simple. It exists more in the minds of people than it does as an actual location you can visit, which expands and changes our understanding of the entire multiverse. ItвЂ™s the border between the outer planes and the prime material plane, and with this it is in essence not a space at all. The Astral Plane, he says, is the space between spaces, however tiny that might be. Cook begins the first chapter вЂњThe Spaces Between: Astral Space and TimeвЂќ with an analogy taken straight from ZenoвЂ™s paradoxes. In a book filled with ideas, perhaps my favorite ones appear early on in Astral Plane (itвЂ™s kinda hard to abbreviate the name well, so I guess weвЂ™ll just deal with what IвЂ™m using). IвЂ™m finally getting towards the end of Planescape (well, the second half at least), and as the releases keep improving, it saddens me to realize how many of these possibilities remain untouched. ItвЂ™s a book so bursting with ideas that you just want more, such as adventures that actually spend some real time in this planeвЂ™s weird non-space. I love the boxed sets for their maps and production design, not to mention how they spent plenty of time on relatively obscure places like Pandemonium and Arcadia, but imagine if theyвЂ™d been given this much space each? Weirdly, like all Planescape books, it also feels like a lot of details have been left out here so as to make everything fit into the tight page count, but thatвЂ™s really just the way of this type of design, focused as it is on setting up mysteries rather than answering them.

One of the few disappointments of Monte CookвЂ™s A Guide to the Astral Plane is that it makes you wish the entirety of the planes was given such a lush, luxurious treatment.

Astral plane d&d