Editing Outlands (section)

==Geography and Traits==
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First, the most noticeable thing about the Outlands is the '''Spire''', which is a needle-like mountain that juts up into the sky. It can be seen from all points in the plane and makes for a great landmark as an indication of your direction. On the top of the spire can be seen the floating ring which is the city of [[Sigil]]. The odd thing is that the Spire is infinitely tall, despite the fact that you can see both ends of it, so don't bother trying to climb it. Although mischievous locals get a kick out of encouraging [[clueless]] strangers to try and attempt it. 

The Outlands has no layers like other planes do ([[Sigil]] isn't counted as a layer), it is simply a land mass of ''theoretically'' infinite area. That's because it has some absolutely mind-bending geometry and magical inhibitions that no-one can make sense of, but people accept as being part of the nature of the plane, and nearly everything has to do with the Spire.

Distance on the plane is entirely subjective depending upon your direction of travel: The further outwards one moves from the spire the more that distance compresses itself. It actually gets to the point where the land outward from the Gate Towns, called the Hinterlands, operates in an especially notable way. If you start at a Gate Town and travel outwards, then no matter how far you traveled, if you turn around and travel back, you will find that not only had you never traveled more than 320 miles from the town in the first place, but that the terrain you covered will be as unfamiliar as if you had never traveled that way at all. Even creepier, old cities and abandoned settlements dot the Hinterlands, with any information on them lost to time. There are also tales of stranger still oddities in the Hinterlands, such as portals to unknown planes or even entirely new realities.

Another odd feature of the plane is its inhibition of magic and divine power. Starting at 1,100 miles from the Spire, magic starts to cease functioning. Standing in a Portal town, 9th Level spells don't work, and this only gets more severe the closer to the spire you get. When you stand at the base even the most powerful Gods find that they have no power.

It's for that reason that the wars between various alignments and races don't spill into the Outlands, despite its favourable location, those armies would just end up hamstringing themselves before they'd even begun.

===Places of Interest===
The Portal Towns represent the link to the outer edges of the wheel; they are evenly spaced in a roughly 1000 mile radius around the spire. Each outer plane has its own respective Portal Town positioned in the Outlands accordingly with its position on the wheel, so it is closest to its planar neighbors and situated furthest from its diametric opposite. The portals allow planar travel to and from the Outlands, so you're obviously most likely to find Archons in the portal town for [[Celestia]] or Slaad in the portal town for [[Limbo]] for example.

If the prevailing attitude and alignment of the town shifts too far from its neutral position, it drops out of the Outlands into the plane it was connected to (this is actually true of any afterlife plane, as the inhabitants of [[Arcadia]] can assure you, it's just that the Gate towns of the Outlands are particularly prone to this), its portal getting reassigned to a different town which then takes up its position in the ring around the Spire ''(the new town doesn't literally "move" into position, but just remember that terms like "distance" are flexible on the plane, and it is likely that the landscape rearranges itself to fill the void)''. Some within the various portal towns are extremely hostile to those that might hold them back from reaching the Outer Plane. Others seek to keep the town (and its merchants) securely moored in the Outlands by making sure there is some darkness in every light, and some light in every dark.

There are plenty of other "normal" towns on the Outlands, filled with Petitioners and Mortals of a variety of alignments and philosophies, but they typically prevail towards inoffensive neutrality and are relatively unremarkable places to visit. Though there are exceptions: the realms of the Gods located here can be as grand as anywhere else on the planes, and their inhabitants can be just as zealous.