The Fastness of the Divine

Last of the "other places"... for now.

After the Great Deluge, when Choriam the Morningstar led the remnants of humanity to Terafa, they found a green and unspoiled world. And all was well, for a time. However, in Terafa's firmament there were other gods, and they were jealous of Choriam and consipired against him. They seduced the men of that age into following their ways, and cast man's rightful god into bondage, denying him his rightful place.

Ages passed, and mankind prospered despite himself. In time, all knowledge of the Morningstar passed out of memory, and the name Choriam was lost. But in the darkness, he endured.

Eventually, Choriam freed himself from his prison, and reclaimed his birthright as the sole god of mankind. He overturned the false gods. In the struggle that ensured, many of these were slain, victims of Cavcari's Last Invocation - a true proof of their weakness.

But in the end, once Choriam had laid his enemies low before him, he chose mercy. Rather than slay the remaining gods outright, he confined them to a great prison: the Fastness of the Divine. Their forms he petrified, and fixed in a great ring in the skies over Terafa, there to watch as a constant reminder of the price of jealousy and ambition.

The Fastness of the Divine is one of the benefits of the "ultimate edition" of the setting that I'm working on - it's actually something I came up with for another setting that happens to fit really well here. I've always liked the image of a planet with a ring system, though I'm reasonably sure it doesn't work outside of fantasy. So the idea of having a fantasy world with a ring system, and that being a fixture in the cosmology of the setting, is one I rather like.

The Fastness of the Divine isn't really a plane, as such - like the moon, it's really just another part of the Prime plane. However, actually getting there probably requires planar transport, so it works.

The rocks that make up the Fastness are, essentially, the petrified remains of the gods, but held in a statis that the 'true' dead gods don't enjoy - thus rendering mining of the essence of the gods impossible. However, the Fastness is not uninhabited; it is a place of pilgrimage for powerful worshippers of those gods, and also a gathering point for many of their agents, demonic and otherwise.

(Incidentally, it's also worth noting that the Fastness is the prison for the gods of man only. The elves and dwarves have their own patron deities, while the goblin races have gods that they don't so much worship as attempt to intimidate.)

One last thing: this ties in, in large part, to the nature of the divine in Terafa. Here, the dominant religion is monotheistic, though flavoured by the use of various saints to intercede with Choriam himself. The secondary faith is much more naturalistic, and mostly noted for being the source of primal (druidic) magic. However, there's also more than a little of the conflict between "the old gods and the new" going on - although imprisoned, the other gods are not entirely without power...