The Void is where everything in D20 Deathmatch happens: a dark expanse beyond all time and space, crowded with lost and broken worlds, realms and peoples floating in its emptiness. At its heart sits The Dread Fortress, seat of the Grandmaster, and from every corner of it the Acolytes come to watch champions plucked from anywhere imaginable fight to the death. Crossing out of the Void is extremely difficult, even for the most powerful beings in it.
Overview
The Void is not a single world. It is many worlds at once. As the werebear Lyrus put it to two newcomers, it is “an amalgamation of lost planes. Existing in the same space at the same time.” There are planets out there, realms, cities, and whole peoples who washed up from somewhere else. The Void also has its own native people, to whom both the Grandmaster and The Arbiter belong. They are a race with extraordinarily long lives, measured in thousands and thousands of years.
Everything revolves around the Dread Fortress and its lava region, which can be seen from every realm in the Void. The realms are all connected ethereally, even when they don’t touch directly. Travel between them usually happens through portals, but the passage is seamless either way. Even the arena isn’t fixed in one spot. Asked whether the arena was nearby, Lyrus answered: “Yes, it’s here. It’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere.”
The universal force of the Void is chaos energy. Ordinary people tap into it in daily life, for portals and the like, but only a select few truly master it: the Arbiter, The Shadow King, Grimnar Stormclaw and, sometimes, the Grandmaster. Lyrus described the Void’s magic in almost reverent terms:
“The magic itself comes from the void. It surrounds us, it’s all around us. It’s almost a living being.” (Lyrus)
Time behaves strangely too. Visitors have found that it does not run in step with the worlds they came from. In Lyrus’s words, “we are beyond time and space. And all known realms. We are in the void and beyond it.”
Because the Void sits outside everything, anything from anywhere in time and space can turn up in it. That is why champions arrive from every world imaginable, and why real-world oddities keep appearing. Some come from inside the Void and some from far beyond it. There are even hells both inside the Void and outside it, because realms have collided.
Getting out is another matter. Crossing beyond the Void is extremely difficult, even for the most powerful beings in it. Cor’thun, where Elusia was raised, lies outside the Void, and the tale of Skypiercer is the only story so far to leave it.
The Acolytes
The Acolytes are the residents of the Void, living across its lost and broken realms under the Grandmaster’s rule. Every Sunday the Arbiter opens portals that carry them to the floating grandstands of the ever-changing, moving arena. There they cheer, throw blue slushies, rip their shirts off, sacrifice their grandmothers, and sometimes decide a champion’s fate.
Notable places
- The Dread Fortress, the centre of everything
- The Ether Drifts
- Prexmarin, the Hanging City
- Emmery’s Tavern
- The Midnight Mausoleum
- Chinchilla Forest
- Duck Village
- Cor’thun (outside the Void; see Skypiercer)
- Many more arenas, found on the episode pages
History
The Night of the Long Shadow and the Shadow King’s reign
About seven hundred years before the first Deathmatch of Season 1, Agdrel staged a coup on the Night of the Long Shadow and killed his brother, Faucius Golden Shield, Elusia’s father. That same night Elusia was sent out of the Void to Cor’thun. Breaking out was so hard that it took the Knights of Chaos sacrificing themselves in a blood rite in the Ceremonial Chamber to manage it. Agdrel, now the Shadow King, ruled the Void for the next three hundred years.
Skypiercer
In Skypiercer Part 1, the Arbiter, then known as Vythorn the Endless Scholar, came through a portal to find Elusia in Cor’thun. Even he called it a great feat, saying it took “an incredible amount of magic to break out of the void.” Reaching her had cost him decades of study, and the return trip needed three days of recharging. He told Elusia that her father had been killed three hundred years earlier by her uncle Agdrel and asked her to come home. She agreed and brought Kaja and Atalantos with her. Emperor Thornos listened to the whole thing leaning on his sword and eating popcorn.
Back in the Void, Elusia, Atalantos and Kaja defeated the Shadow King. Elusia became the Grandmaster, and the first Deathmatches began. That was roughly four hundred years before Season 1, and she ruled the Void from the Dread Fortress through all of those centuries.
Fate of the Faithful
The clearest look at the Void through outsiders’ eyes came in Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover). John Carmichael and Asena had been hunting Ralzamon, “Master of the Unknown,” and he was on the verge of defeat when “a gateway ripped open behind Ralzamon’s psychic shade. A hand reached through, said, I still have need of you, and dragged him into the void.” John and Asena leapt in after him, through a conduit “beyond the astral plane itself, beyond this dimension, beyond the multiverse.”
They landed in the middle of a fight and were rescued by Lyrus, son of Orin and servant of the Grandmaster. His twin black swords were “like a void in space”: they drank in the light around them, and one cut opened a singularity inside an enforcer that swallowed him whole. When the dust settled, Asena asked the obvious question. Lyrus gave the official answer: “This is the Void. We are beyond the Void… this is the Void, the realm of the Grandmaster, who resides in the Dread Fortress.” He also noted, with a small and difficult bow, that it was “not often we get champions here in the Void after the matches.”
Lyrus pointed out Prexmarin, the Hanging City (“You might come here for some shopping later on”), and sliced open a doorway-sized portal to take them to his headquarters. For Asena, a seasoned traveller, this portal felt unlike any she had used. It was colder and more jagged, without the misty feel of astral portals, “like stepping out into the wind, into the snow, but without the moisture.” When she tried to widen it, her usual power did almost nothing, except that the edges began fraying like bad cloth. Lyrus shut it fast. Asena’s verdict: “Your void is weird… It’s gonna tear.” Lyrus admitted his own mastery was modest: “I’ve seen sorcerers, wizards, champions far greater than I who really know how to wield it. This is all I can muster.”
John, meanwhile, tried to fit the place into everything he knew. Every world he had visited had kept time in step with the others, except the paused world of Lacunas and the Fae. The Void reminded him most of Leftover, but even Leftover stayed in step. He concluded that the Void simply doesn’t follow the universe’s rules. Lyrus agreed and added that he tries not to think about it too much, because it “gives me headaches.” Later, alone with Asena, John wondered whether the Void gathers souls on the brink of death, as Ralzamon had been when the hand took him. Asena’s question was blunter: “Are you saying everyone here is dead? Are we dead?” John’s answer: “I don’t know. I hope not.”
Into the Mirror
In Into the Mirror 10 Shatter + Into the Mirror 11 Mortaurios (ITM session 3), a player asked at the table what their home world was actually called. The answer was that the plane of the Dread Fortress and all its realms, “an amalgamation of lost worlds,” is “simply just called the Void.” In character, Flynry asked Cerys whether she came from there. “From a part of it, yes. A long time ago,” she said. When Toddleheim guessed she had been killed, she confirmed that was how she had found herself where they were. “We too were killed and arrived here,” said Flynry.
Notable Moments
- Vythorn crossed out of the Void to bring Elusia home while Emperor Thornos watched the whole conversation with popcorn.
- A disembodied hand dragged Ralzamon into the Void with the words “I still have need of you.”
- Asena nearly tore a Void portal apart by trying to widen it and summed up the place as “Your void is weird.”
- Lyrus told John Carmichael that time in the Void “doesn’t work the same way” and that thinking about it gives him headaches.
- At the table, the whole sprawling setting turned out to have the simplest possible name: just the Void.