Xana: Ghost Empire

Back in 1987, the 1st edition Manual of the Planes released. I was running one of my homebrew campaigns, and I was inspired by the way that the Ethereal Plane was described in the new supplement.

I had a small hidden kingdom, set in a large oasis in a great desert. It was loosely inspired by Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” but of course I fiddled with it now and then. The “sunless sea” seemed sure to be an underworld setting attached to it, for example.

I decided I wanted it to be the capital of an empire, despite being cut off from its own world by an unforgiving desert. So, I put the Tarrasque in that desert, and had it held back from Xana by a magical wall.

Then, I had the people of Xana have developed “etherships” which let them sail into the Ethereal Plane to get to faraway worlds circling other stars. Their ships would fade from the physical realm into the Border Ethereal, and then sail to the Deep Ethereal. In the Deep Ethereal, they would sail from one part of the ethereal curtain which led to the Prime Material to another part, and then emerge into the Border Ethereal again.

From there, they would peer at whatever world they had found, and decide whether to emerge from ethereal state. Thus, they would create colonies and tributaries far from their own world.

I imagined one of their vessels had been lost, and it had become a terrifying Ghost Ship. I also imagined one being cast through an ethereal cyclone into the astral plane. I dabbled with the idea of using the astral plane instead of the ethereal but if I recall correctly, I was not sure I wanted to deal with the githyanki being a major threat and I liked the idea that perhaps elemental associations from the Ethereal might better fit a kingdom hidden in an oasis in the desert. I remember thinking that my ghost ship idea would still work, because an astral storm could still cast a ship into the ethereal.

My campaign players never even visited that part of the world. Of course I used to talk to my players about various parts of the world I was designing which they had never visited, it nonetheless never was shown “on camera”. Xana didn’t really get much flesh to beautify its skeleton of ideas, because it never became important to the game.

Then in 1989, Spelljammer came along, and my group was for a time enamored of its space-fantasy where ships simply flew into the sky, kept their own atmospheres, and sailed to other worlds through actual space. Who needed Xana when you had space opera on flying galleons? To be fair, we were also moving to 2nd edition, and that brought its own tsunami of changes to our games.

I have come back to the idea on occasion. I have reimagined it a few times. One of those times, I instead chose the Plane of Shadow and worked a bit on the Classis Umbra for 3rd edition. At the time, I liked the crazy speed with which players could reach another world, yet not do so instantly.

And then, for 5e, I put forth the idea of the empire of my Astralis setting. Here, the travel from world to world would be done by way of the astral plane, but hopefully with me having thought through it a bit more over the years. The githyanki threat started to seem like a “feature” to me, rather than a bug. Another feature, in my mind, was that astral ships making the journey could NOT hang out invisibly in the Border Ethereal, spying on their prey. Neither did they have aerial superiority, from a deep space level, such as was given to spelljammers. Indeed, a vessel entering the Prime Material through a color pool would likely be doing so blindly, with little idea what waits on the other side of the portal.

For Astralis, there is my Astralis Pitch, and a couple of followup articles I threw on here: the Home World and the Fate of Astralis.

But what about Xana? If you prefer an imperial navy of etherships, a hidden oasis capital and its pleasure dome, a terrifying desert with legendary beasts held back by an arcane wall, and a sunless sea beyond where the river disappears into dark caverns, then perhaps it is for you.