Interesting Features of Mystaraspace

The Green Asteroid

Long before the civilizations of Nithia or Blackmoor arose on Mystara, elves populated the great southern continent.   This colony was established in the early years of the Multiverse during a time known as the Dispersion.  The elves fled their home world through many different means.  Some created gateways to other planes, some crossed the dimensional flows, while yet others entered wildspace and the phlogisten in great crystalline ships.  The elves which colonized Mystara came in just such a vessel.

The Green Asteroid follows an elliptical orbit around the central sun, Ixion.  It orbits between Alphatia and Valerious.  The asteroid itself is a massive jumble of crystalline patterns and protrusions.  It consists of the same material that the space faring elves use to grow their ships, in fact the asteroid was an ancient elven ship.  In the dawn of elven space travel, there were no spelljamming helms.  Travel was slow and cumbersome, and a normal sized ship could not hope to reach another planet before its atmosphere became deadly.  The elves accounted for this by constructing huge generational vessels.  These ships were hard to start moving, but once on course they never veered.  Because of their size the elves could keep enough plant life on board to sustain the ship's atmosphere indefinitely. 

Over the eons, this particular ship has gone wild and overgrown.  The ship has become lost in a jumble of overlapping growths and protrusions, without any hope of ever discerning its original pattern.  The asteroid is huge and continues to grow.  Its atmosphere can sustain landing parties and refresh the air envelopes of ships which pass through it.   The crystalline growths have formed cavern complexes which house descendents of the plant and animal life forms originally brought on board the vessel.

See Adventure 2 - Elven Secrets for more details.