Great Beyond

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The Great Beyond is the multiverse of planes unique to Golarion, the setting of Pathfinder. In many ways, it is a mash-up of ideas taken from both the Great Wheel which preceded it and its World Axis competitor. There are nineteen major planes that comprise the Great Beyond, modeled as two spheres: the Inner Sphere and the Outer Sphere. Connecting the two spheres is the Astral Plane. The spaces between the primary nineteen planes contain countless demiplanes. Despite the names implying a spherical layout, the planes exist on dimensions incomprehensible to mortals, thus these terms are used to represent the planes in two or three dimensions.

The Inner Sphere is depicted as consisting of the Energy Planes, surrounded by the Material Plane and the Plane of Shadow, and in turn surrounded by the Elemental Planes. The Ethereal Plane is a medium that insulates and touches upon all of these planes, serving as the Transitive Plane

The Outer Sphere is depicted as consisting of 9 alignment based planes, all insulated by the Astral Plane as a Transitive Plane. Most of these planes are virtually identical to their D&D Great Wheel counterparts; "Heaven" is conceived of as a mountain consisting of seven ascending layers while "Hell" consists of Nine descending layers populated by Devils, though these themes were not entirely unique to D&D or Pathfinder in the first place anyway. Additionally, the various "in-between" planes have been removed for simplicity, though several of the Pathfinder planes are synonyms with what were historically their neighbours in the Great Wheel (for instance, the Abyss is also called Pandemonium, while Abaddon is also called Gehenna and Hades) Other planes are unique to the Pathfinder setting, such as Boneyard and Axis, thanks to differences in the way the divinities are spread out and their interactions with mortal souls; although certain thematic cues such as impossibly tall spires and cities of portals still exist. They are divided into the Middle Planes of Axis, Boneyard and Maelstrom, the Upper Planes of Elysium, Heaven and Nirvana, and the Lower Planes of Abaddon, The Abyss and Hell.

Scattered throughout the cosmology are multiple demiplanes and dimensions, which defy neat categorization. The most important and oft-referenced of these is the First World, a prototype for the Material & Shadow Planes which is the Golarion equivalent of the Feywild.