Isolation of the Dark Sun multiverse

[Roman]

No, I am strictly a pen & paper gamer .

A pity, but I would be a strictly PnP gamer too if I had a group.

I'm also on a brief hiatus at the moment, following the birth of our third child

Congratulations!

 

[Cristian Andreu]

The theory a friend of mine, and the DM for a 1st edition campaign I was in, came up with made a great deal of sense.

The reason, he said, that Athas is isolated from the Outer Planes is because the plane is sitting in the eye of a permanent psychic wind, an astral hurricane as it were.

The psychic wind snaps the silver cords used to project between the planes, and would be very disruptive to Outer Planar connections if it were something like a permanent storm. Think of the astral equivalent of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.

That explains why the Astral is referred to as "the Black" on Athas; it's a side effect of the astral winds.

Travel through the Ethereal, "the Gray" is not affected very much; the Inner Planes are easily reached.

I like that theory!

In my games, I often put the blame on the crystal sphere itself; Athasspace is mentioned merely as a rumour in Spelljammer, so I figured maybe it was known in the past and not anymore, so perhaps something happened.

The custom explanation is that the unusual nature of magic in Athas affected the shell of the sphere itself, hardening to all sorts of external influences and darkening in the process. This affected the metaphysical flow of magic, faith, and souls from the sphere into the Material Plane and then into the rest of the Multiverse, while it also started to repel the phlogiston itself. This caused a slow drift that, as time went by, eventually throwing Athasspace so deep into the outskirts of the Prime that it fell off the seas of phlogiston and ended up in the unknown darkess, almost impossible to visit or even detect.