What non-combat stuff is there to do on the astral plane?

[Gort]

My campaign's hit 18th level, and we're doing our first planar adventuring. The party is a level 18 rogue (technically an 8 rogue, 10 "slayer of domiel" or good assassin), his level 15 paladin cohort, a level 18 warmage, and a level 18 druid.

They've done a little adventuring on a huge asteroid floating on the astral plane, fought off a few githyanki pirates, and so forth. However, the problem is this - they're getting tired of combat. Since we're such high level, an equal-CR combat can take hours, and they're a bit burned out. So I'm looking for ideas for stuff that can be a challenge to this party that doesn't directly involve beating things up.

The party are on a quest to retrieve the soul of a friend from the Lich Queen. (this friend is a powerful wizard, so the Lich Queen is studying her soul before she devours it) If anyone knows where I can find some info on her as well, that'd be good too. (I only have the Monstrous Manual 3.5 for reference on her)

 

[Shemeska]

The 2e 'Guide to the Astral Plane' is the best source of detail on the Astral that you'll find.

I've handled tons of stuff on the Astral, and here's a random list of things on the astral in general, and a few things that I've used myself: renegade githyanki conspiring with fiends to mine the bodies of dead gods; the so-called "Colorless Pool" which has a number of legends surrounding it; the notion that the Astral Dreadnaughts either project into the Astral from another plane and/or answer to some figure such as the Guardian of Dead Gods / Anubis; there's the madman Ghyris Vast and a pair of Rakshasa allies who seek to wrench deific essence from the corpses of gods through a device he terms "The Divinity Leach"; there's a massive ocean complete with all manner of sea life drifting in the Astral having been sucked from a prime material world through an astral breach; there's a massive and drifting mass of undead called the Bone Cloud who as mindless beings can't move on their own, though more powerful undead have made themselves a home within places carved out of the bulk of bone, there's even the broken godisle of Aoskar the dead god of portals, killed by The Lady of Pain and now drifting, pierced through with blades, with a look of terror upon his petrified face.

Lots of stuff on the Astral besides killing Githyanki One of the segments of the prelude to my 2nd storyhour starts on the Astral actually.

I currently have my PCs searching the Astral for a possible astral sublayer called the House of Memory. In my conception it's a sort of universal repository of the memories of dead mortals that manifest and crystallize as their souls funnel through the Astral and into the outer planes to become petitioners. Normally these "memory cores" appear to dwindle and erode over time, vanishing into nothingness and becoming one with the astral wind; but what if they actually go somewhere? Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is lost. But does such a place exist, and what would be its purpose? I've been spinning a campaign around it.

For info on Vlaakith herself, you'll want to look at the various Dungeon magazine issues that cover the Incursion series of adventures and the 'Beloved of the Lich Queen' material. Really nice stuff.

 

[Joshua Randall]

The Astral is also covered pretty well in the 3.0 version of Manual of the Planes.

One non-combat challenge for the PCs could be a sufficiently large astral storm, which can have severe mental and locational consequences on the PCs.