Conserning the material plane #

During the time of the Great War, an Avenari named Proteus—an explorer of the void and a creator by nature—witnessed an immense explosion rip through the nothingness. From it spewed strange fragments unlike anything he had seen before. It was the first time he beheld what he would later call "base physical matter." Intrigued, he traced the source of the explosion.

At its origin, he found a vast, gaping wound in reality—a rift that expelled matter in a chaotic stream. After observing its behavior, Proteus theorized that similar ruptures might exist in the elemental planes, many of which had been crafted by his siblings. Swiftly, he journeyed to those realms, and his suspicions were confirmed: matter from multiple elemental planes was leaking into the void, mixing and condensing into this new, crude form of existence.

He recorded his findings but did not linger. The war was going poorly, and his kin needed his aid. He returned to the fray.

That explosion—the rupture now known as the Great Wound—seeded the void and even the Prison of the Other with base matter, introducing a concept previously unknown. Not even the earth or metal elemental planes—though dense and solid—were composed of this corruptible, entropic substance. In the old order, such realms were immune to decay and imperfection. But now, the Great Wound has changed everything. Even the higher planes are polluted. Entropy has crept in where once only purity reigned.