The Umbra, or the spirit world, is one of the most fascinating parts of the World of Darkness, and, unfortunately, it’s also one of the most confusing. This page is meant to explain in as clear terms as possible how the Umbra is structured on TowersMUX, what the various terms mean, and how everything fits together on an OOC level — so at least everyone is on more or less the same page.

The Gauntlet

The Gauntlet is a metaphysical barrier that separates the Earth — also sometimes known as the real world, the material world, or the mortal world — from the spirit world. Garou, mages with mystical paradigms, and creatures associated with the Wyld find it easier to pass through this barrier in wilderness areas or near places of magickal power, and more difficult in densely populated or highly technological locations. Technocracy mages, Ananasi, and creatures associated with the Weaver are just the opposite — easier in more technological locations, more difficulty in wilder and more magickal areas.

In some particularly remote places, or areas of great power, the Gauntlet thins away to almost nothing, and can be crossed without needing any special knowledge or power. Such places, referred to as shallowings, are very rare today, as civilization has penetrated to all but the furthest corners of the Earth. There are none in the Greater London area at present, at least on the surface — Subterranean London is an entirely different story.

The Penumbra

Crossing the Gauntlet from the mortal world normally leads travelers to the Penumbra — the part of the spirit world that is directly adjacent to Earth. While all parts of the Penumbra are connected, different methods of crossing the Gauntlet can lead to different Penumbral areas, even if those methods are used from the same physical location. For this reason, some people and some organizations consider the various Penumbral areas to be separate individual Penumbras, and, honestly, that’s a reasonable way to look at it, too.

The Spirit Wilds

The best-known part of the Penumbra is also known as the Spirit Wilds, or sometimes the Middle Umbra — although properly speaking this is only the very edge of the Middle Umbra. This is the area that Garou and Fera, as well as vampires with Spirit Thaumaturgy and some mages, are able to see (and, if applicable, transport themselves to). The Wilds reflect the mortal world in a more overtly animistic sense: spirits are everywhere, and moral and physical corruption — or purity — are easy to perceive, rather than hidden away. What might appear on Earth as a peaceful and quiet glade might appear much the same in the Spirit Wilds, as long as that accurately reflects its true nature — but if it’s been used for decades by a secret cult as a place of human sacrifice, the Penumbral version will be very much a place of horror as well.

The Shadowlands

Somewhat less well-known are the Shadowlands. In the same way the Spirit Wilds are the borderlands of the Middle Umbra, the Shadowlands are the border of Dark (or Low) Umbra, the realm of the dead, things lost or destroyed, memories, and decay. The Shadowlands, too, reflect the mortal world, but in a much different way than the Wilds; here everything is muted, gloomy, dim, and cold, known to those ghosts who maintain their sentience as a Necropolis.

It’s a place of ghosts and of memories, rather than of spirits, and for this reason, its reflection of Earth is — for lack of a better word — quirky; some things that are relatively new appear old and decayed already, while other times, the vividness and strength of memories of a place old and ruined in the real world makes its Shadowlands reflection appear up-to-date and well-maintained. Vampiric Necromancers, certain types of mage, and mortal mediums are the only types of people who can normally peek into, or travel to, the Shadowlands directly from Earth — although anyone who can reach the Penumbra at all can find their way there eventually.

The Astral Plane

The Astral Plane is to the High Umbra as the Spirit Wilds are to the Middle and as the Shadowlands are to the Lower. Here, the reflection of the mortal world is almost painfully clear and sharp, and layered with metaphors, and symbols made very literal. Houses in a wealthy neighborhood may in the Astral may appear to be bejeweled and made of precious metal, possibly with tarnish or corruption visible in some out-of-the-way spot. Schools might appear to be factories or prisons or worse, depending on the attitudes of the people who work or learn there. The spirits of memes, thoughts, ideas, and concepts are constantly darting back and forth, making it extremely challenging to stay focused. This part of the Penumbra is, for the most part, accessible directly to mages alone — although a few vampires who’ve mastered the art of astral projection can visit it as well.

Finally, there’s the Digital Web. Primarily the domain of Virtual Adept and Techocratic mages, and a few technically inclined shapechangers, the Web is a spirit realm that mimics virtual reality — elaborate graphical constructs, computing resources and data visualized as objects, and an almost self-consciously retrofuturist cyberpunk feel.

Regardless of where you are in the Penumbra, you can travel to almost any other part of it if you know the right way to get there, but those methods are not always straightforward. Traveling toward the Shadowlands isn’t just a matter of picking a direction and walking for a while; it’s a question of making choices (which way to go, what to do, how to behave) that associate you more closely with the Shadowlands’ governing ideas of death, decay, forgetfulness, gloom, and memory. It’s not easy, especially if you don’t have a guide who’s been to your destination before; many, many travelers have spent days seeking out a way to a different part of the Penumbra only to find themselves stuck in the same part they started in.

Subterranean London and the Hollow Worlds

The Hollow Worlds are a collection of Umbral Realms that reflect the fictional ideas of the hollow, and inhabited, Earth — one might be a savage jungle of dinosaurs and other extinct animals, while another might be a wintry, mountainous land of sternly disciplined ascetics. Unlike most of the Umbra, the Hollow Earths are closely connected to the mortal world, to the point where ordinary people can sometimes find their way into one of them through deep catacombs or undersea caves or other means of descent. By the same token, however, it is not usually possible to travel directly from the surface world into the Hollow Worlds — magick can help find a pathway there, but it isn’t as simple as just crossing the gauntlet; actual travel is required.

Subterranean London is a similar case. The areas closest to the surface are almost entirely mundane, but, as one goes deeper and deeper, one is more and more likely to find — intentionally or otherwise — a way to pass into a subterranean Middle Umbral realm that reflects the mundane underworld. Go deep enough and the distinction becomes so blurred that it’s for all intents and purposes erased entirely, and monstrous Bane spirits and other terrifying creatures of the Umbra can be encountered by people with no ability to cross the Gauntlet or even any knowledge that it exists.

No one is entirely certain what lies at the bottom of Subterranean London, or if there even is a bottom. Various explorers have various theories, and most of them have at least some evidence to support their theories, but no one is known to have found a comprehensive answer to the question.

The Middle Umbra

The Middle Umbra is often referred to just as “the Umbra”; it’s the part that the majority of Umbral travelers spend most of their time in. There’s no real clear dividing line between the Spirit Wilds and the rest of the Middle Umbra, and different authorities regularly disagree on which of the two any given destination is part of. The Middle Umbra is initially almost indistinguishable from the Wilds, a place of spirits and a close reflection of the mortal world, but the further out one goes, the emptier things become, with the verdant landscape gradually giving way to just an occasional cluster of spirits or a gateway to an Umbral Realm.

Each such Realm is, roughly speaking, its own separate infinity, an alternate dimension that can contain almost anything. Realms in the Middle Umbra mostly reflect the natural world and its concerns; abstract or conceptual Realms are the domain of the High Umbra. There’s no limit to the number of Realms that can be found; the challenge lies in locating the one you’re looking for and journeying there (and back). Realms have their own Gauntlets that travelers need to pass in order to enter, and it’s said that some “lost” Realms are less lost than simply impossible for anyone tainted by the mortal world to reach.

The Lower Umbra

Journeying out into the Shadowlands away from the London Necropolis will eventually lead one to encounter a massive and ever-raging storm known as the Tempest, which bars the way further into the Lower, or Dark Umbra. Very knowledgeable or skillful venturers can sometimes make the dangerous journey through the Tempest — either into another Necropolis, or deeper into the Lower Umbra to Stygia, although many who make the attempt disappear forever in the swirling maelstrom instead.

Stygia is an incomprehensibly huge city of the Underworld where the wraiths carry out their endless danse macabre — only one of several such, but by far the easiest (and often the only one practical) to reach from London or western Europe in general. There are few reasons for the living to visit a place so utterly inimical to their very existence, but on rare occasions the need to retrieve a forgotten artifact, or consult with a long-dead ghost who’s no longer tethered to the Shadowlands, is great enough to tempt someone to make the journey.

Beyond Stygia is a chaotic, shifting maze known as the Labyrinth, filled with maddened, hostile ghosts. At the very bottom of the Labyrinth is Oblivion: the end of all things, from whence nothing returns. To descend into the Labyrinth is to invite being drawn further and further by the seductive lure of nothingness, a temptation that only the wisest and most strong-willed could think to resist. Returning from such an expedition would be a truly legendary achievement.

The High Umbra

The Vulgate, or realm of basic concepts, is the first part of the High Umbra that travelers who continue past the Astral Plane reach. Inhabited by the spirits of simple individual concepts — the idea of a cat, the feeling of warmth, and so on — they form a sort of foothills of the Spires, upward-reaching continuums of ever-more complex concepts that rise higher and higher toward the cloudlike Epiphanies high above, and yet never manage to touch them.

Journeying through the High Umbra is less overtly perilous than some of the other subdivisions, but it has its own dangers: it’s very easy to be distracted from your goal by a fascinating concept or an idea that’s close to, but not exactly, your reason for coming here in the first place. Even if you can stay focused, the process of climbing upward through the Spires toward a particular destination is an arduous one, with storms of metaphor ripping the unwary explorer away from their handholds and casting them back down to the Vulgate or the Astral — if they survive at all.

Horizon

At the edge of Earth’s Umbral atmosphere — or, for those with a more mystical bent, at the top of the sky — is a second Gauntlet-like barrier, referred to as Horizon (or, more precisely, Near Horizon). While there are analogs to Horizon in both the High and Low Umbra, by convention the term applies only to the Middle Umbra … although Horizon is also the point in the Umbra where the distance from Earth is great enough that these distinctions have begun to break down.

Horizon was once the location of the Traditions’ Horizon Realms, pocket universes that served as refuges from the Ascension War. These realms are mostly gone or inaccessible now, and the ones that can still be reached are extremely dangerous. The Shade Realms, each connected to one of the planets of the solar system and dominated by that planet’s associated Sphere of magic, are still reachable from Horizon, although thanks to the risks of unrestrained magic they are nearly as risky to visit.

The Near Umbra

Near Umbra is the term for what lies between the Near Horizon and the True Horizon. Technocrats and technomancers (and those of like mind) consider it to be a sort of Umbral near-Earth space distinct from outer space in the mortal world — the area between the Sun and the asteroid belt. Shifters and mystics tend to view it more as a kind of swirling haze through which various Realms drift, illuminated by the spirit-forms of the Moon, the inner planets, and the Sun.

The Near Umbra is the home of the thirteen Near Realms familiar to the Garou — Erebus, the place of purification for the tainted; the Abyss; and so on — along with the planetary realms of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, known as Shard Realms. This area was also formerly host to a number of the Traditions’ Horizon Realms, but, like those within the Near Horizon, they are now almost entirely destroyed or inaccessible.

True Horizon

Also known as the Membrane or the Second Horizon, this is the barrier beyond which lies the Deep Umbra (or Deep Universe, as the Technocracy — which sees the Umbral asteroid belt as the physical manifestation of this boundary — calls it). Unlike the Gauntlet and the First Horizon, crossing the True Horizon is almost impossible without the use of gateway known as an anchorhead. The very greatest Umbral explorers among the Awakened are known to be capable of this feat, but all other rumors and tales of people able to do so remain just that — rumors and tales.

The Deep Umbra

Out beyond the Membrane lies the endless and mostly empty expanse of the Deep Umbra, primarily explored by the Technocracy — and even they, with their ultra-advanced technological weapons and Umbraspace warships, are wary of what they may find out there. A few brave souls from the Fera and the Traditions venture this far out from time to time, but for most the risks outweigh the rewards.

Although the Deep Umbra is often described as outer space, with alien races, other solar systems, and so forth, this is a Technocratic convention: characters with a mystical worldview might perceive it as a vast empty void punctuated by the occasional Umbral Realm or exotic spirit, or with some other comparable imagery. There is no real difference between “Umbral Realm” and “other solar system”, or between “alien race” and “exotic spirit”, other than the perspectives of the people who encounter them.

The Deep Umbra is, paradoxically, at once among the safest and the most dangerous places in the World of Darkness. It’s safe because you can travel for days or weeks without encountering anything at all, other than your own companions. It’s dangerous because the further from Earth one travels, the less the things we think we know hold true, and, when you do encounter something, it’s very likely to be entirely alien to you, to be powerful, and to be either hostile or simply indifferent to any concerns you might have.

Most of the creatures of the Deep Umbra are simply not capable of understanding the human perspective, or even grasping that humans are sentient thinking creatures. But, like everything else, they do need to sustain themselves, and they have no more qualms about devouring an entire party of explorers than the average Londoner has about enjoying a plate of fish and chips.

The Dreaming

The Dreaming is a kind of spirit world, but one that does not connect directly with the Umbra in the way that the various sub-realms do — specific means are required to travel from the Lower Umbra to the Dreaming, or from the Dreaming to the Middle Umbra. As a result, most fae have little knowledge of or understanding of its laws — in the same way that very few non-fae have any level of understanding of the Dreaming and its workings. The nunnehi are an exception, having an innate ability to enter the Middle Umbra much like that of the Garou, but they are not currently available as PCs.

There are, of course, exceptions. The Black Paths of Balor connect the Dreaming (and the Autumn world, and potentially other realms) with the Shadowlands, while the Green Paths sometimes lead through, or to, the Spirit Wilds. Changelings who are able to find and make use of such paths — or Umbral travelers who can do the same — can use them to pass from one realm to the other. This is extremely dangerous, no matter which way one is traveling — far more dangerous than venturing into the Umbra at all, which is itself by no means safe, and one of the most dangerous things one can do in the World of Darkness.

The Umbra and the Dreaming do share some similarities, but they operate under fundamentally different laws and in fundamentally different ways, and what will keep you safe in one may lead you to your doom in the other. That’s not even taking into account the possibility that you may encounter Fomorian minions — or other equally horrible creatures — making use of the same Paths, who are unlikely to overlook the intrusion. Even in the very rare event that you might have a guide with a better knowledge of the destination realm, there are many, many ways in which you can inadvertently endanger yourself and others. The beings who built these paths were far more powerful and knowledgeable than any PC, and even they treated their creations with caution.