The Staff of Unfixed Horizons

Aura strong conjuration; CL 18th
Slot —; Price 162,000 gp; Weight 5 lb.

DESCRIPTION

This finely balanced staff is carved from pale sweetgum wood, its surface subtly striated with natural grain patterns that seem to shift when viewed from different angles. Faint motes of silvery light drift along its length when its magic is invoked. When agitated, the wood darkens subtly, and distant sounds entirely foreign to the surrounding world may briefly echo nearby - crashing waves beneath alien skies, whispering voices spoken in impossible languages, the groaning of vast unseen structures, or winds carrying scents from worlds no mortal map records.

The staff has 50 charges and allows use of the following abilities:

• Plane Shift, Greater, 3 charges

This effect functions as plane shift (self plus up to eight willing creatures touched), except that the wielder arrives precisely at the intended destination without deviation, as though possessing perfect familiarity with the target plane and arrival point. Unlike the standard plane shift spell, no error in arrival occurs.

The wielder must still possess the appropriate planar tuning fork or equivalent attunement normally required by plane shift.

• Perfect Transit, 5 charges

The wielder may transport himself and up to eight willing creatures touched to a specific location on any plane regardless of prior familiarity, possession of a tuning fork, dimensional obscurity, or most conventional planar restrictions.

The destination may be a plane never before visited, a hidden or isolated demiplane, or even a location known only through reliable description, magical scrying, conceptual identification, or sufficiently detailed records.

This ability ignores inaccuracies normally associated with planar travel and may penetrate weaker dimensional barriers or restrictions at the DM’s discretion, though effects created by deities, major artifacts, or similarly overwhelming powers remain capable of blocking transit.

• Dimensional Rejection, 2 charges

As a standard action, the wielder may target a single creature within 60 feet. The target must succeed on a DC 22 Will save or be violently expelled from the current plane and hurled into a random dimension.

The destination plane is determined by the DM, though it should never immediately result in unavoidable death unless the wielder intentionally employs the staff within an especially unstable planar region.

A creature banished in this fashion arrives disoriented and stunned for 1d4 rounds upon arrival. Returning home typically requires planar magic or extraordinary circumstance.

Creatures with the extraplanar subtype take a –2 penalty on the saving throw.

A creature successfully banished by this ability cannot be targeted by Dimensional Rejection again for 24 hours.

• Violent Convergence, 4 charges

The wielder may forcibly overlay fragments of incompatible realities atop a target creature within 60 feet. The target suffers 12d6 points of force damage and must succeed on a DC 22 Fortitude save or become nauseated for 1 round as contradictory dimensional energies tear through its physical form.

The staff recharges 1 charge per hour when exposed to the full moon on the Material Plane, with a maximum of 10 charges restored per lunar cycle. If the Material Plane possesses multiple moons, the staff only recharges beneath the light of the primary moon.

CONSTRUCTION

Requirements Craft Staff, plane shift, greater teleport, banishment, maze;
Cost 81,000 gp + 6,480 XP

LORE

The origins of the Staffs of Unfixed Horizons remain uncertain, though many planar scholars quietly suspect this uncertainty is itself part of the design. Unlike most instruments of dimensional traversal, these staves appear to function without reliance upon the rigid calculations, sigil harmonics, or anchoring methodologies typically required for safe interplanar movement. Instead, they respond to intention with unnerving efficiency, reducing the vast complexities of planar transit into something alarmingly instinctive.

To most conjurers, dimensional travel is an imprecise and frequently hazardous undertaking. These staves circumvent such instability not by imposing greater structure, but by behaving as though the intended destination had always been correct to begin with. The wielder does not force reality open so much as persuade it, briefly and quietly, to acknowledge a different arrangement of truth.

The greater variants possess an even more troubling capability: the ability to deny another creature’s place within the current plane entirely. Witnesses describe victims disappearing not in eruptions of magical violence, but with eerie abruptness, as though existence itself had calmly amended an inconsistency. Survivors of such banishments occasionally return altered by their experiences, bearing fragmented recollections of dimensions that seemed strangely suited to their fears, obsessions, regrets, or private dispositions.

Many scholars insist these staves should not function at all. Their magic lacks the orderly foundations normally associated with high conjuration and appears disturbingly adaptive in response to the wielder’s subconscious intent. Nevertheless, they continue to operate with impossible consistency in the hands of explorers, occultists, wanderers, and those sufficiently reckless to treat the multiverse less as a fixed structure and more as a negotiable condition.

Some theorists quietly speculate that repeated use of such staves leaves subtle impressions upon reality itself, gradually carving pathways through the planes over time. Others fear something considerably less comforting - that the staff is not merely navigating the multiverse, but teaching it new habits.

Kelwyn’s Notes…

There are certain objects whose danger resides not in what they do, but in how quickly one becomes willing to permit them to continue doing it. I have carried this staff for many years now, across marsh kingdoms, drowned catacombs, fungal inversion-realms, silent observatories suspended below dead stars, and at least one city whose inhabitants possessed the deeply unhealthy habit of aging backward whenever exposed to direct sunlight. Throughout all of this, the staff has remained unfailingly reliable, which I assure you is not an entirely comforting trait in matters concerning planar transit. Reliability, in magical instruments, often suggests limitation. This staff possesses very few.

At first, I regarded it as merely elegant - a refinement of conjuration principles stripped of the usual inconveniences associated with dimensional traversal. No imprecise arrivals. No unfortunate materializations within cliff faces or submerged architecture. No exhausting negotiations with the peculiar mathematics by which lesser conjurers attempt to persuade reality into temporarily misbehaving. One simply decides where one belongs, and the staff, with deeply unsettling confidence, behaves as though the matter had already been settled long before the question arose. That alone would make it remarkable, though I have found remarkable things rarely remain content with modest ambitions for very long.

I discovered the staff’s more troubling capabilities quite accidentally along the southern canal roads beyond Ville des Marais during an altercation with a highwayman whose understanding of risk assessment was tragically underdeveloped. There was rain, shouting, an ill-considered knife, and then - with no more ceremony than the turning of a page - there was one fewer person standing upon the road. No flash accompanied the event. No dramatic rupture of space. The world simply continued forward with the quiet composure of a servant removing an unwanted chair from a room. One moment the man was present; the next, reality appeared entirely untroubled by his absence.

What disturbed me was not the disappearance itself, but the overwhelming sense that the staff had not transported him somewhere else so much as concluded he no longer belonged where he had been. That distinction has only grown more uncomfortable with time. Ordinary planar magic behaves like travel. There are routes, thresholds, calculations, attunements. One studies the structure of existence and learns, however imperfectly, how to move within it. This staff approaches the matter from a profoundly different philosophy altogether. It treats dimensional boundaries not as laws, but as preferences - suggestions maintained largely through habit and mutual agreement. Habit, unfortunately, is alarmingly easy to interrupt once one acquires sufficient confidence.

Its more advanced functions are especially revealing in this regard. Perfect Transit does not concern itself with whether a destination is obscure, isolated, hidden behind dimensional barriers, or theoretically inaccessible according to accepted cosmological doctrine. Such objections seem to interest the staff very little. If provided with sufficient certainty - a description, a conceptual anchor, even an adequately formed understanding of where one intends to arrive - the staff proceeds with the quiet confidence of a thing utterly unconvinced that reality possesses meaningful authority to refuse. I once used it to enter a sealed observatory suspended beyond a collapsed stellar boundary, a place inaccessible by every conventional principle of planar navigation known to the expedition accompanying me. The staff did not force the barrier open in any dramatic sense. It simply behaved as though the barrier had never been especially relevant to begin with, which I confess remains one of the less reassuring magical experiences of my life.

As for its offensive capabilities, I find myself increasingly reluctant to describe them as acts of banishment. Banishment implies force - a violent expulsion from one state into another. The staff operates with considerably less hostility than that. It is calm. Administrative, almost. Creatures removed by it do not appear torn away so much as quietly reassigned. I have spoken, on rare occasions, with individuals who survived such experiences. Their recollections are inconsistent in detail yet curiously aligned in tone. The dimensions into which they arrived often seemed strangely appropriate to them in ways difficult to articulate without sounding deeply unwell. A compulsive liar once described a realm where spoken falsehoods accumulated physically upon the body until acknowledged. A scholar obsessed with celestial prophecy returned from a world where the night sky watched him continuously. Another man - selfish, cruel, and pathologically incapable of reflection - spent several years trapped entirely alone within an immaculate city populated only by mirrors.

Coincidence remains possible, I suppose, though I confess the staff has gradually made me less confident in coincidence as a meaningful explanation for anything. There is another concern as well, subtler than the rest though perhaps more dangerous. Prolonged use alters one’s habits of thought. One begins, slowly and almost imperceptibly, to perceive presence itself as conditional. Enemies cease to resemble obstacles requiring confrontation and instead become inconsistencies reality may simply choose not to accommodate nearby. I cannot overstate how unhealthy a philosophical development this is for a living mind, particularly one already inclined toward curiosity in matters best approached with restraint.

And yet the staff encourages such thinking without ever appearing to do so directly. Nothing so crude as corruption or whispered temptation occurs. Rather, it rewards certainty with such effortless efficiency that certainty itself gradually becomes difficult to distrust. That, I suspect, is how many dangerous things begin - not through seduction, but through convenience. One grows accustomed to impossible solutions arriving without resistance, and eventually the distinction between what should be possible and what merely is possible begins to erode quietly beneath the weight of repeated success.

Still, I continue to carry the staff everywhere despite these concerns, which should tell you either how indispensable it has become or how profoundly compromised my judgment now is. Perhaps both explanations are equally accurate. Lately, however, I have noticed that the grain within the pale sweetgum wood shifts subtly before moments of danger, rearranging itself in tiny flowing patterns beneath the surface like roads adjusting upon a map. Whether the staff is anticipating my intentions, preparing pathways in advance, or simply indulging in habits of its own remains unclear to me, and I find I no longer possess the enthusiasm I once had for discovering the answer.