This is just a list of concepts I have come up with that explain some of the ways Vishteer functions.

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The Underdark

The basis of underground ecology and food sources:

There are three things which support life in the underdark.

     1) The Bitter Core radiance, as described here.

     2) Jewel springs; every so often a miner of the deep, frequently a dwarf, will find a Jewel Spring. This unusual gemstone, which cannot be moved from its originating source when found in the wild, produces a flow of water bearing incredibly rich nutrient values. At the same time, a treelike structure of crystal can be encouraged to grow from the spring, the water pouring out of its roots... This crystaline tree grows slowly and continuously, and eventually grows large enough to burst into blossom and then fruit. If these fruits are carefully gathered, they can either be planted, to grow further crystal trees (though they will not sport the nutrient-rich water of the original tree) or eaten to provide a day's food for a single person. These secondary trees will continue to fruit and grow when properly tended and watered. The dwarves highly prize these trees, and are experts at tending them. Many a dwarvish city is built around a single Jewel Spring and radiating lines of jewel-trees which feed the residents. A single fruit will provide enough nutrition for a dwarf or other being for an entire day.

Arcanists who have been allowed to study the Jewel Springs suspect that they may be direct links to some other plane of existence, but which one, and how and why the linkage occurs, are not well understood.

     3) Other nutrient sources, such as volcanic vents, guano mines, and etc...

The Gods

The gods are not "real" beings. They are usually powerful outerplanar beings who for their own personal reasons have chosen to "play" with humanoids and other intelligent species. They are well aware that the power they gain from the belief of their followers is theirs only so long as their followers believe in them. They have the ability to pull power from their followers and use it to create miracles and divine magic. When a god has no followers he or she cannot continue to draw on this power. They fade back into a more "normal" existence. Saints and other semi-divine beings are often outerplanar incarnations of souls who were once mortal beings.

It is possible the Gods were once real. Some claim that the Gods were slain at the beginning of the Interregnum. According to the history of the church, this time period of no magic was when the Gods were lost, and gradually they found their way back to life, being gods who cannot truly be slain. In my concept of how the world works, the Gods were never really Gods. They were simply very powerful beings. When something drove them off/killed them/distracted them, the interregnum occurred. Eventually the "gods" returned, or other beings found Vishteer and discovered the role the "gods" had played. They inserted themselves into the voids the gods had left, thus taking their places and restoring to their worshippers the power that the original gods had offered; in return, they gained the ability to feed on the power of their worshippers.

Followers of gods are not generally aware that their gods are not real. Most folk believe wholeheartedly in the actual physical existence of their gods, and thus many stories and legends reflect their belief. Creatures such as demons and angels, which exist to serve the gods, may be aware of the physical nature of their higher powers, and either this doesn't matter to them or they cynically use the name of the one they serve despite this fact. Good beings tend to believe that the service of the idea of the "god" is what is important, not the true form of the being served.

"The beings who are commonly worshipped by most humanoids on Miraboria and Mistland as "gods" are a group of traveling outsiders (call them Adventurers) who stumbled onto a pocket plane that had not been formed as yet. They awakened it with their careless presence, and then found themselves trapped there. They spent many bored centuries playing gods as they learned to create and destroy, shape and unshape and reshape. Eventually they grew bored of their sandbox, and left it to mature. Thus was born our world. We call it Vishteer. What the "gods" call it is unclear. Whether they are still here is debatable. Perhaps they watch and give us their power in return for our worship, or perhaps our divine abilities are a mere after-effect of their earlier play. We do not know. Even the most powerful divinatory spells do not reveal such answers. And those who die and return to our world, come back with either no memory, or so radically altered that we do not trust the answers they give."

Planes and Existence

 The universe is a finite place. It has a closed number of planes of existence. All living beings within the universe are "souls"; whether insects or demons or outsiders or humanoids, each living thing bears a "soul-spark". Most ordinary creatures don't really understand that when they die, that soul-spark is loosed from their now unliving body and goes elsewhere (to the shadowfell?). Depending on the "balance" of the soul, it may be reincarnated as another being of the same type, or it may shift and become the soul of another type creature. Evil sparks will naturally gravitate to becoming more evil-natured creatures, and good sparks move towards the celestial side, etc... Typically the spark carries no memories or personality with it, merely an impulse to good, evil, law or chaos. Even creatures which spontaneously come into existence via abiogenesis have souls; they are simply pulled from somewhere else when the creature generates. In fact, it may be the availability of such souls in the form of newly dead beings that allows abiogenesis to occur at any given time. In other words, souls move to the Feyshadow when their material body dies. They dwell there, memory- and form-less until they are needed elsewhere. Sometimes elsewhere is the prime, sometimes another plane.

The Feyshadow

I really like the new 4e draft of the planes: especially the feywild and shadowfell. I will call the merger between them the Feyshadow Realm. I'm hereby stating that the places in my site where I refer to elves and the "ethereal" really are references to this Feyshadow Realm. Elves (no eladrin here) most often live on the feywild and visit the prime as they feel the need. Some elves have developed the ability to move freely of their own will, but most must use gates such as are found in elf-hills or similar places. There are a few elves who were born on the material plane who may or may not "know how" to move back to the feywild. They've lost their gate access, in other words.

The Feyshadow can intrude into the prime, where the separating barriers wear thin. Magic is usually the cause of this thinning. Also locations where extremely powerful emotional events occured can be thin spots. Therefore places of ritual, battlefields, places where tragedies occurred, etc... all may allow bleeding over. Sometimes it is a clear, specific and obvious bleed-over, but other times it may take a very observant person to realize that the events occurring in a location may be affected by bleedover.

The Shadowfell and the Feywild are not different planes. They are ONE plane (often called the Feyshadow Realm) which, in various spots, is cold, dark, haunted, and plagued with undead, or is twilight, warm, and enchanted, often with fey creatures in residence. The "shadow" regions may also house the "unseelie" or dark fey. The transition between these zones can be as slow as an hour's walk, or as sudden as the blink of an eye. Residents of the plane tend to call it by the name that is most appropriate to the region where they live (or they may simply use a domain name associated with a region). 

Abiogenesis;

the spontaneous generation of life from "nothing".  In the magazine Kobold Quarterly an article by Derek Kagemann ("Dragons without Belly Buttons; Spontaneous Generation in Fantasy Campaigns" KQ Vol 4, spring 2008, p 43) caught my eye. In it he discusses abiogenesis as a method of "monster generation".

I have decided that in my campaign world, abiogenesis is very much possible. Simple to complex, there is a chance that any non-intelligent life form could generate spontaneously if conditions were correct.

Aberrations are the most common biogenerators, with oozes, vermin and animals being each more rare. Plants, magical beasts, and undead are very uncommon spontaneous generators, but it does occur. Intelligent forms of life almost never spontaneously generate (but see dragons for a reputed exception).

Abiogenetic Recipes

Dragons

There are five types of true dragons. When they are born, dragons are all nearly identical. Their color develops over the first few years of their lives, becoming generally apparent by the time they are about five years of age. The five colors of dragons are red-gold, black-bronze, green-copper, white-silver and blue-steel. Dragons tend to prefer to live in an environment that suits their color, but obviously since a red dragon could birth a white offspring, it will not always hold true. As a dragon matures and leaves the birth-lair, it will tend to migrate to an environment it finds most comfortable and suitable.

Some scholars insist that a dragon inherits his color from his parents. If his parents are of mixed color, there is a 50/50 random chance of each color occuring in each offspring. A dragon with grandparents of multiple colors has an even chance of inheriting any given color. Thus a dragon offspring with four separately colored grandparents has a 25% chance of inheriting any given color. Other scholars insist that dragons, unlike all other intelligent lifeforms, are abiogenetic. They do not inherit anything from their parents, as they have none. Each dragon egg forms spontaneously within the hoard of its parent(s), and it depends much on what the hoard contains as to what color and nature the dragon will be imbued with. No dragon has ever been known to discuss this with a non-dragon.

A dragon's true nature is visible in his color. A "good" dragon will predominate with metallic tones and an "evil" dragon will develop pure nonmetallic color. True dragons are the only creatures for whom this trait is true.

A dragon's color also reflects his breath weapon and the climate/terrain in which he prefers to dwell:

Dragons can change their natures as they age - their hide color will gradually change if they do so. A dragon with a substantially neutral outlook will have a pearly sheen to his hide, which can fade or intensify even as his moods shift.

Dragons consider a metallic hide a valued status symbol and many a neutral dragon has performed acts of "altruism" to counteract otherwise "evil" acts to keep his "sheen". Truly good dragons have learned that a metallic hide is merely an outward reflection of inward spiritual purity and are not inclined to (very much) pride on the matter.

Dragon statistics tend to be more like the pure non-metallic dragons than their metallic counterparts, unless I decide otherwise...

Dragonhide Armor and Shields:

Dragonhide can be used to create armor or shields. Each type of Dragonhide has some special resistances, as well, as listed in the table below. Standard construction and size rules apply, as here: 

Armorsmiths can work with the hides of dragons to produce armor or shields of masterwork quality. One dragon produces enough hide for a single suit of masterwork hide armor for a creature one size category smaller than the dragon. By selecting only choice scales and bits of hide, an armorsmith can produce one suit of masterwork banded mail for a creature two sizes smaller, one suit of masterwork half-plate for a creature three sizes smaller, or one masterwork breastplate or suit of full plate for a creature four sizes smaller. In each case, enough hide is available to produce a small or large masterwork shield in addition to the armor, provided that the dragon is Large or larger.

Because dragonhide armor isn’t made of metal, druids can wear it without penalty.

Dragonhide armor costs double what masterwork armor of that type ordinarily costs, but it takes no longer to make than ordinary armor of that type.

Dragonhide has 10 hit points per inch of thickness and hardness 10. Each "color" of hide has a different added resistance:

Disease and Illness

Disease is created not by tiny living viruses or bacteria, but by literal "miasmas" or bad air, and by evil wishes or by evil spirits. Curses, enchantments and other magic also create disease. Only magic, whether divine or arcane, can cure disease if a person's own constitution cannot fight off the infection. Lycanthropy is an example of such a magical disease. Miasmas can be spontaneusly generated by the anger, hate, grief or other powerful negative emotions of a group of people (rarely one person of very great willpower) dwelling over time in an area. This is why areas of poverty are often filled with disease as well - those living there unconsciously generate it with their very souls.

Technology

Technology on the level of gunpowder and steam engines simply does not function. No high tech exists. Magic completely replaces and fills this role in my world. If you want a steam engine, it will be powered by an elemental or by raw magical power. Simple mechanical devices such as water wheels, printing presses and similar devices work, but anything more complex is not possible. This may be arbitrary, but the DM's call always wins.

South of Greenvale, between that kingdom and Laigladen, I would like to insert another nation. The reasons for this are multifold -

1) to provide a more closely positioned political "enemy" for Greenvale - so they have someone to feud with

2) to provide an economic trade partner for Greenvale - so they have someone to trade with

3) to provide a slightly different political/social atmosphere - so they have someone to admire/look down on

4) I'm sure there are other reasons that will come up!

Greenvale is a pretty stable, self-satisfied place. It has grown virtually unchallenged from a small town that survived the 2nd Empire's collapse into a self-sufficient kingdom of many counties. It is flanked by a few independent Baronies which have never been strong enough to challenge it. It has a feeling of medieval feudalism in the sense that the folks in power are the protectors who fend off evil monsters and humanoid invaders while the farmers and peasants provide the food and other resources needed to make that possible.

But they are surrounded by wild forests and high hills that shelter all sorts of aggressive evils. Greenvale may be strong, but the folk know they must remain vigilant and ready to apply force to survive. They're essentially defense-minded but understand instinctively that the best defense is a good offense.

The new kingdom/nation/culture I want to create needs to have a different feel, but I'm not sure what. I already have a "remains of empire" nation that feels it is the true ruler of all (not that anyone else thinks so...) and a couple of "young explorer" lands. I have a "reclusive fae realm" in Laigladen and a "hidden dwarf city" in Koruzd. My elvish lands are also fairly "fae" in that elves have retreated to the Feyshadow plane where they hide from the evils of the material world (not that it really works). I'm thinking that perhaps this new nation will be fairly small, be a mix of humans and another race (could be a standard one, or a new race, possibly anthropomorphic like the cat-folk), but will have some kind of power base that challenges or could challenge Greenvale. Perhaps they should be an innately more magical race than humans, but not in the way of elves and fae, nor in the magitech sense.

Note that there's no reason this nation could not be a substantially "deepearth" connected realm. I've always wanted one! Or cloud based?

The Woodsfolk