[Minor Spoilers] The Greatest Secret of the Multiverse [Must Read!!] [Forbidden Knowledge] [Gone Aberrant]

I feel like I should apologize for that title. Anyway, message to my players - this knowledge is marked as minor spoilers because... well, your characters can't really do anything about it. If you read any of this, your characters should know none of this. I hope I made myself clear.

Now that this is out of the way... let's see what this secret is.

Creation myths

---

Ever since the dawn of life, sentient beings have questioned where they came from. After all, they see that there can't be something out of nothing. Smoke comes from fire burning wood, clouds come from water that gets too hot, and water falls down from clouds. Of course, most of this stuff is hard to explain, and they think up gods - great and powerful beings, that were there all along, making rains and thunderstorms, making the ground drink up water, controlling what we consider the laws of nature.

But then, philosophers rose up with another question. Where did the gods come from? In fact, where were they before there was any space and any time? Surely they can't be truly eternal. This is a spot, in which most philosophers have been stuck for thousands of years, and not just in my setting of Staromoc. They do have several possible explanations, theories of the origin of gods - maybe the gods were created by humans and are just animated figments of their collective imaginations. Or they are a civilized race that is on a much higher level of progress when compared to the mortals. Another theory is that there are gods who created these gods. These are the major theories, but none of them is even close to the truth.

Here lies the last warning. The last chance to turn your eyes away before you see the truth. Are you sure you want to know? It may change your life forever, turn your eyes inside out, or just make you go "Eh, I like this other explanation better".

Go on at your own risk.

Alright. I see you want to go on. Let's start somewhere where one wouldn't quite expect to look for anything sane...

Far Realms

The Far Realm is usually depicted as alien and chaotic plane of existence with infinite amount of layers, and generally as something very far from the other planes of existence.

I find that to be a little bit incomplete, maybe not even precise, so I'll show you how I depict the Far Realms through the use of uncountably infinite layers, randomness, Great Old Ones and beings more powerful than the Great Old Ones.

First and foremost, they are chaotic and random (random here being random like a roll of dice random, not funny random). Long story short, anything that is possible exists somewhere in Far Realms.

Before I go on, let's have a look at the layers of Far Realms, and see if we can label them in some way. Usually, we think of planes with layers in standard settings (such as fifth edition's Great Wheel cosmology) as having a finite amount of layers, like three or ten, or one hundred. One exception in the Great Wheel is Abyss, with supposedly infinite amount of layers. There's first layer of Abyss, second one, third one and so on.

Now, Far Realms has more layers than Abyss, due to the fact that while Abyss is limited just to whole numbers, Far Realms can use any numbers at all, including ones that don't seem to make sense like division by zero, and actually uses an infinitely large amount of these numbers for all of the layers.

One last very important thing about layers of Far Realms to note is that they are different from just ordinary planes. Long explanations cut short, standard forms of planeshifting (including Wish spell) are not enough to move between most of these layers.

What do layers have to do with the creation of a world?

Now it's time to get to another part of how I defined Far Realms - random. Anything and everything possible ever can be found somewhere in Far Realms, on one of its layers. Each layer is what one would call a plane of existence, and it's populated by aberrations, or possibly Great Old Ones.

Trust me, this is one of the better-looking layers.

When someone says Great Old One, first thing that springs to my mind is Cthulhu. Or Azathoth. Or some other Lovecraftian horror - colossal uncaring eldritch abominations. But, with Far Realms containing anything and everything possible, there could be Great Old Ones that are not so Great, not so Old, not so Ones, or even ones that care.

On layer 0 of The Far Realms exist beings of immense power, able to shape all other layers, but unable of accessing it. Some call them Dreaded Mists, others refer to them as Gloaming Mists. They are ever-present, and - scarily enough - possibly more dangerous than Great Old Ones themselves.

Dreaded Mists can shape other layers of Far Realms to their whim, create and destroy beings as they will... or possess them.

The limitation to their powers are threefold. First, they can't leave their layer of the Far Realms. It's their prison, which protects them from anything and everything else too - nothing can enter this layer, not even the greatest of the Great Old Ones. Second,they can't shape their own layer as freely as they can shape all other layers. The third and final limitation is that these beings, despite being so amazingly powerful, can still die.

How a world is made

First, the Dreaded Mist possesses a Great Old One that is caring enough and lives on a nice enough layer to terraform. After it's done and made the layer into a much more hospitable place, it creates beings weaker than itself to finish the rest of the work. These beings are referred to by mortals as gods.

Whether the Great Old One stays in the layer helping the gods or leaves it returning to the uncaring state of mind is entirely up to the Dreaded Mist. It can still help out by connecting the layer to some other layers in the Far Realms after they're cleaned up, making what is known as a multiverse and not just a single habitable plane.

---

And there you have it, my friends, the ugly truth. The Far Realms as we imagine them were never the furthest plane in the existence, they were just hard to travel to all along. They were never only pure chaos; anything one could imagine can be found somewhere in there , including perfect order. It's just up to the Dreaded Mists whether they take the world and start working with it.

Somewhere in the layers of reality, there is a good reject drow with two scimitars and a panther. There is a different layer, where Vecna is the god of life. Or maybe a layer, where a mad technomancer takes his grandson on adventures across multiverse. There is a layer where a gun that can make holes through space exists. And there is also a layer, where two halflings are forever remembered for destroying an artifact of great evil by throwing it into a volcano.

Let us remember however that anything possible is in Far Realms. Which means that most of it is, much like white noise, weird, alien and incomprehensible.

---

So, where did Far Realms come from? Or Great Old Ones? Or Dreaded Mists? Well, my fellow Dreaded Mist, that is up to you to decide. Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!