Editing Skein of Worlds:The Transitive Planes (section)

== The Astral Plane ==
The Astral Plane is, more than any other plane, the fabric upon which everything else rests. All places connect to the Astral Plane in some way. Being the place between places, it's a fairly strange place. Few of the normal rules apply there. Distance is especially tricky. For example, while near a sphere (or more correctly, the vortex leading to a sphere) it may appear like a grapefruit held at arms length. You can circle around it just as if it really were such a ball; however, you can't simply reach out and grab it. As you try to move closer, the ball simply gets bigger. Even once it seems to be the size of a house, it's still out of reach, but it takes longer to circle around. Eventually, you get close enough to begin to vague shape of the terrain below, until you suddenly appear on the surface of the sphere you were approaching. This isn't at all precise though, so you may end up a long way from where you thought you'd land. All this time, this one sphere is the only one you can see clearly. The other spheres in the same system are just faint dots in the distance. Other systems are completely lost in the gray of the plane.

There's more to it than that though. Any spheres connected by a portal will be connected by a thin gray thread. While the gate is open, this thread appears as a bright silver and is fairly easy to see; however, while the portal is closed, the thread is dull, fading into the background of the plane. In this state, it's quite hard to see. 

Following a thread away from a sphere is fairly simple once you've spotted it, but again, nothing is ever as simple as it first seems. Since you can rarely see where a thread is going (and fairly quickly you won't be able to see where it started) you just have to follow it blindly until you eventually get somewhere. If you lose track of the thread somewhere in the middle, it is practically impossible to find it again. If you have the magic to get back to where you started, you can try again. If not, you may have to find somewhere else to settle down. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the time it takes to travel between spheres seems to have more to do with how well you know where you're going that with the distance between those spheres on the material plane. Moving between two familiar spheres might only take a day or two of travel. Traveling to an unknown destination could take several weeks.

You can also attempt to follow a thread down to the sphere it came from. Unless the portal that thread came from is out in the open ''and'' the thread is glowing, you're sure to land fairly far off the mark. If neither are true, your chances of success are very slim.

In addition to the weirdness surrounding spheres and portals, there's the rest of the plane. At all times, there are three great orbs hanging in space around you. One is a bright white. The second is a deep black. The third is a chaotic swirl of color. The relative size and orientation of these three orbs might change, but this movement seems to have little to do with any movements you might make.

These great orbs always seem very large and very far off. If, however, you leave the spheres and attempt to travel towards one of these orbs, it will slowly get bigger, while the other two will begin to shrink. Eventually you'll get to the point where the orb fills half of the area around you. You will then find yourself traveling ''away'' from a great gray orb with two small spots on it. Soon afterwards, you'll land in one of the outer planes.

There's still more to moving around the Astral Plane than this, but that will have to wait for the description of the Divine Realms.

Finally there is all of the other stuff that exists physically on the Astral Plane. Random bits of matter, ranging from dust to continents, wind up on the Astral Plane from time to time. Finding this stuff seems to be mostly a matter of luck, at least the first time. Various creatures call these places home. Some scholars believe that all life on the Astral Plane was brought there from other places at some point in the past. Some other scholars believe that while this may be true for most creatures, some may actually be native to the plane.