It’s always night in Mabar, and its shadowy moon, Sypheros, remains fixed in the sky. While the setting varies across its countless layers—a desert, a ruined city, the withered remains of fertile farmland—the story is always about loss, entropy, despair, and death. A layer might contain a massive battlefield filled with the intertwined bones of dragons and giants. Ossuaries and catacombs. Crumbling memorials, with names too faded to read. Barren orchards and dried riverbeds. And tombs, from tiny unmarked crypts to the death-palaces of fallen rulers, necropolises filled with traps and treasures. And this being the Endless Night, some of those dead rulers still dominate their domains, whether they take the form of undead or simply malevolent will.
Layers are linked in domains, and each one is bound to one of the Dark Powers. The denizens of the layers and the overall themes reflect the influence of that Dark Power, so layers in the Kingdom of Bones are largely inhabited by undead, while yugoloths dwell in layers bound to the Amaranthine City. Some layers are bounded by physical barriers, but most either loop back on themselves or end in walls of fog—not unlike the dead-gray mists of the Mournland—and any who wander into the mists reemerge elsewhere in the layer. Within domains, layers are often connected by physical portals—perhaps a massive gate or a pool of shadows. Moving between domains requires plane shift or performing a ritual tied to that domain. These rituals need not be magical; they’re simply secrets that have to be learned. If you’re in the Kingdom of Bones and you want to get to the domain of the Queen of All Tears, the answer is simple: All you have to do is sincerely cry, and your tears will take you there.
Here are three examples of Mabar’s domains, each of which could hold many layers.
The Amaranthine City
The Amaranthine City is widely seen as the heart of Mabar. Experienced planar travelers may find it familiar, for it’s a dark reflection of the Amaranthine City of Irian. Irian shows the city in its first days of glory: prosperous, clean, full of joy and life. The Amaranthine City of Mabar is a haunted shadow of this glory. Like its counterpart, this immense metropolis fills an entire layer, but here, its banners are faded and torn, walls are cracked, and fountains are dry. Shadows still move through the streets, a miserable reminder of the crowds that once filled the city. The rotting tapestries and chipped mosaics speak of a past age of wonders and glory. The two are unmistakably the same city, both in architectural style and the layout of its streets. This feels like the last days of a grand empire, an image of decaying grandeur; but there’s great power beneath the tragic façade. The walls may be cracked, but they are still mighty, and the mezzoloth’s rusty trident can kill you as easily as a polished one.
The city’s ruler, the Empress of Shadows, is the first and greatest of the Dark Powers. Her defining principle is hunger, the desire to consume all that is light, to expand her empire across eternity. She prefers an elegant fiendish form, with polished horns and chitin plates engraved with arcane sigils, but she can take the shape of any yugoloth. She spends much of her time presiding over the decaying pomp and grandeur of the Amaranthine City, but also closely monitors the campaigns in the Hinterlands and occasionally takes time to torment her hostages. The sages of Syrania believe that the Empress of Shadows chooses which fragments of other planes will be pulled into Mabar, and planar emissaries sometimes dwell in the Amaranthine City seeking to negotiate with her.
This city is the seat of the yugoloths; for every yugoloth in the Amaranthine City of Mabar, there is an angel in the city in Irian, all the way up to the Dawn Empress and the Empress of Shadows. Most likely, this is just a way of reflecting the planes’ core concepts—beginnings and endings, hope and despair. But it’s possible that Irian and Mabar are somehow the same—perhaps the Dawn Empress is the Empress of Shadows, and though they appear to exist at the same time, they reflect the beginning and end of the same spirit.
The layers tied to the Amaranthine City reflect its theme of imperial ambition and decaying power. Some embody desperation—a collapsing fortress awaiting an assault that will surely destroy it, or an abandoned sanitarium whose inmates are trapped and starving. These regions are inhabited by shadows, but the fiendish gardeners can instill near-sentience into them if it serves their purposes. Fragments claimed by the Empress of Shadows are drawn into her empire, and usually acquire a yugoloth outpost even as the life is drained from the region.
The Kingdom of Bones
Where the domain of the Amaranthine City feels like an empire in its last days, the Kingdom of Bones is one that’s already fallen. If a layer contains a fortress, it’s not preparing for a final battle; it’s what remained after the battle. The gates are shattered, and bloodstains and broken weapons are scattered across the floors. The people of this domain fought a dreadful war and lost . . . but this being Mabar, their bones remain. The skeletons of peasants continue their menial labors, seemingly oblivious to the futility of their actions. Even in death, these commoners are oppressed by their cruel lords. Wights, deathlocks, and vampire spawn might serve as the soldiers of the tyrants, while the overlords themselves may be vampires or mummy lords, still ruling from their ruined keeps.
All of the kingdom’s cursed nobles bow before the Bone King, who embodies the concepts of death and decay. A lich in rotting finery, he stands as a warning that even the mightiest lords eventually become dust and bone. He prefers to drain the life slowly from fragments he claims; he wants his hostages to dwell on their coming death while their land withers around them, for lords to turn on their people before he finally kills them all.
The Bone King’s statistics could be represented using Orcus as a foundation. He can serve as an Undying patron for warlocks, and is known to teach mortal wizards the foul rituals that allow ascension to lichdom. To all who serve him in this way, he grants titles in his kingdom—and the knowledge that when they die, they’ll be forever bound to serve in it. He makes few demands of these servants; they feed him whenever they use the powers he grants to slay the living. But a warlock may be tasked to destroy a lich or vampire—or even another warlock—because the Bone King desires them to serve in his kingdom.
The Last Desert
A desert of black sand under a starless sky—this is one of Mabar’s iconic images. In the Last Desert, there are remnants of glorious monuments: the half-buried head of a grand statue, its eye cracked; a fragment of a memorial wall, engraved with names that can no longer be read; ruins so worn that it’s impossible to guess what purpose the building once served. Characters proficient in History and Arcana can recognize that these monuments are drawn from dramatically different cultures; some are the work of celestials, while others might have been created by the giants of Xen’drik.
At the center lies a massive tomb-palace. Its style suggests the architecture of Aerenal, but it’s grander than even the City of the Dead. This is the fortress of the Queen of All Tears, the Dark Power of this domain. The Queen is an embodiment of misery, and her subjects are largely incorporeal undead, shadows and wraiths from the barren sand. Meanwhile, cruel specters and banshees attend the Queen, along with succubi and incubi who bask in the delicious misery that suffuses the region. The Queen herself takes the form of a mummified corpse, enshrouded by a spectral image of a beautiful elf woman. The suffering of others is her mead, and her only pleasure is the slow torment of the hostages in her Hinterland fragments.
The Queen of All Tears is one of the youngest of the Dark Powers. She was once a mortal who dreamed of mastering life and death, but her pursuit of these goals resulted in the deaths of everyone she ever loved and everyone who shared her blood. Her kingdom was razed, and she killed her own daughter and transformed her into a lich, so at least one piece of her legacy might survive. Her name was Minara Vol, and she was the mother of Erandis Vol. In the process of becoming a Dark Power, she’s lost much of her own identity and sense of her past. She despises both elves and dragons, but has forgotten even her own daughter. If the Queen were to somehow regain her memories, she might seek to strike at the Undying Court and Argonnessen, or to aid Erandis—or it may be that she continues to dwell in her despair and ignore her past.
The Queen’s layers are largely desolate and miserable, filled with wailing wraiths and banshees. One is a battlefield plucked from Aerenal, where the elves of bones and dragons lie intertwined; this may hold the key to discovering her past.
The Hinterlands
The Hinterlands are the outer edge of Mabar, the collection of planar fragments that are currently being consumed and integrated into the Endless Night. Here, the Hunger of Mabar property has not yet taken hold, which generally makes them safer to visit than other layers of Mabar. The Mabaran properties a fragment reflects vary depending on its nature and how close it is to complete integration with Mabar.
There can be infinite variety in the fragments within the Hinterlands. This largely depends on what plane a fragment is from. Is it a verdant forest of Lamannia? A floating tower of Syrania? Or is it a piece of the Material Plane—a fortress plucked out of the Last War or a Riedran village? The second question is how long the fragment has been under siege. To what degree does it retain its original flavor, and how much has the influence of Mabar overtaken it? The final question is which of the Dark Powers has claimed it—and why? What is it about this region that draws it toward a Dark Power’s domain? The Empress of Shadows looks for places that shine too brightly—places that bask in their achievements, sure their glory will never fade. The Bone King claims fragments where commoners suffer or where rulers turn to tyranny; there are a few Karrnathi fragments in his domain, though it can be hard to tell how close they are to being subsumed. The Queen of All Tears seeks the places where terrible tragedies have occurred, forcing the inhabitants to forever dwell in these moments of misery. With fragments of the outer planes, it’s more a question of reshaping the plane to fit these stories. By contrast, when it comes to the Material Plane, it’s the story itself that often draws the dire hand of Mabar