- Type: ?
- Size: D? E?
- Day Length: ?
- Population Analysis: ?
Nobody - except maybe the Voidwalker and the possibly mythical `Dark Things' - really knows just what the Maw is. It shows up on planetary locators and can be detected via divination spells, but the results are vague and confusing at best. It seems to be about a thousand miles across (but even that is little more than a guess). It might be a world, a vortex to some other sphere or plane, or perhaps the magical equivilent of a black hole. Nobody knows. And the Invaders have lost almost a dozen ships trying to find out - vessels that penetrate too far into the zone of blackness surrounding the Maw simply vanish, never to be heard from again.
The Dark Zone
At the center of Passarspace, surrounding the Maw, is a huge region of absolute darkness, more than fifty million miles in diameter. Conditions within this region are much like being within a Continual Darkness spell; objects within its confines become essentially invisible. The most powerfull magical light producing spells create a dim glow at best, which cannot be distinguished more than a few hundred yards off; even the radiance emitted by the minature suns that provide heat and light for a the Gamma and Epsilon clusters cannot be seen from the surfaces of their attendant planetoids while those groups are within the Dark Zone.
Rumors - firmly denied by the Invader authorities - insist that the Dark Zone is inhabited by sinister spectral beings rather unimaginatively named `Dark Things'. These `Dark Things' - whatever they are, if they even exist - are supposed to visit ships and other objects that pass through the Dark Zone, bringing with them nightmares and madness. At times, they are reputed to have `possessed' living sapients, causing them to embark on sprees of murder and destruction.
Two of the asteriod clusters (Gamma and Epsilon) have orbits that take them through the outer fringes of the zone of blackness surrounding the Maw during their closest approach.
