The legacy of Icespace, like that of many other dead spheres, is a legacy of total war and total destruction. For the 8 centuries prior to 1373 DR, the planets of Icespace were encased in ice, and were lit by a weak, flickering sun. The population of the sphere was limited to a tiny handful of refugees dwelling on small asteroid clusters free of the sphere's icy doom. These refugees, made up mostly of humans, but also evidencing a smattering of other sentient races common to the Known Spheres, survived only because the deadly ice coating the planets, which otherwise could have eventually expanded to fill the entire sphere, was held at bay by an astonishing number of huge stars. Each of the sphere's stars is a gateway to the Plane of Fire constantly belching out massive fireballs that travel throughout the sphere shedding heat and light. These spelljamming hazards came to be called the Life-comets of Icespace.
Histories suggest that during a sphere-wide war, one or more of the sphere's dominant governments: the Inethar Hive, the saurial's Saurian Empire, the yuan-ti's Brotherhood of the Snake, or the Kreen Collective, unleashed an artifact or an equivalently vast magic which created the Great Freeze.
Not until the final months of 1373 DR did the Great Freeze come to an end. The reigar Cruleon, with the assistance of his fellow reigar Riggler, and of the Knights of the Sword Coast, activated a manifestation of the Darkgate which Cruleon had constructed in Icespace.
The brief, dramatic firestorm which consequently engulfed Icespace reinvigorated its sun, melted away the ice which had given the sphere its name, and left behind hundreds of newly created Life-comets ricocheting throughout the sphere.
The surfaces of Icespace's planets stood revealed for the first time in centuries. To no one's surprise, most of what had stood there had long ago been obliterated by the ever-present ice. A myriad of civilizations and races were no more, and even most of their possessions and habitations had been ground to dust. With so little to mark the passing of Icespace's former inhabitants, even the restless undead found no reason to linger, and relatively few undead were uncovered by the vanishing of the ice.
However, to the shock of many, all four major spelljamming races emerged from the Great Freeze mostly intact. Somehow, all four empires had shielded themselves from the full effects of the Freeze, and merely slept quietly beneath their icy shroud until awakened by Cruleon. Their mutual survival created immediate suspicion that one, or more than one, had unleashed the Freeze. While the empires prepared for their inevitable hostilities to resume, the spelljamming descendents of the Great Freeze's few survivors from outside the four empires quietly whispered that all four empires had likely colluded in unleashing the Freeze in order to become the undisputed masters of Icespace.
Icespace contains five planets and a spatial anomaly left behind by the defeat of the Great Freeze. During the Freeze, the two planets nearest the sun were the most habitable, dotted with limited ice- adapted flora and fauna. In addition to creatures of ice, both worlds were known to harbor very small populations of nomadic human and dwarven ice-barbarian civilizations, thought to have arisen from stranded spelljamming vessels or to have survived the initial cataclysm of the Freeze. The fate of these small populations since the activation of the Darkgate is unclear.
The third, fourth, and fifth worlds were entirely encased in ice during the Freeze, and were inhabited only by ice creatures, primarily elemental creatures of the Para-Elemental Plane of Ice. The planets of Icespace are, in order of their proximity to the sun:
Even prior to the catastrophe of the Great Freeze, the four empires already were dominant forces in Icespace. The most populous, and arguably the most powerful in Icespace's wildspace, were and are the kreen, who swarm over the closest planet to the sun. These sophisticated insectoids maintain a large spelljamming presence, and often engaged in brutal warfare with other spelljamming powers in pre- Freeze days. Although the Kreen Collective only ever officially claimed ownership its home planet Tz'itchiss, where the kreen races have always been utterly dominant, the Kreen Collective was such a potent spelljamming force that many kreen had made successful intrusions onto other worlds in colonization attempts. While none of these colonization efforts survived, the Kreen Collective on Tz'itchiss itself emerged relatively unscathed from the Great Freeze.
The kreen races are said to be ruled by a form of collective (thus their empire's name), from an ancient crystal city also named Tz'itchiss. Their world is home to at least a dozen subspecies of kreen, and probably many more. Outsiders know very little of the strange philosophies that the kreen follow, or of how they choose to organize themselves.
The second planet is an extremely warm and humid jungle world with wide, deep oceans. Prior to the Great Freeze, it was inhabited by numerous reptilian races. The saurials were the planet's dominant species before the Freeze killed their competition, and they remain extremely powerful. Few in present day Icespace use the name Asaru. Instead, the planet is known as the Saurian Imperial Homeworld.
Little is known about the saurial race in general. The Icespace saurials differ considerably from the other saurial civilizations encountered by explorers of the Known Spheres. Confronted with constant attacks and forays onto their world from hostile spelljamming nations, the saurials abandoned their tribal governments and formed a worldwide planetary empire under the leadership of their divine Emperor. The Emperor lives a mortal lifetime, but the saurials say that he is the stairway to heaven, the spirit of rain, the soul of the sun, and life itself. Their Emperor dies, but is eternally reborn.
Although once peaceful, the Saurian Empire has become militant and aggressive in defending its world against hostile intruders. Although trade without outsiders is encouraged, it takes place within precisely circumscribed (and even ritualistic) boundaries. Icespace saurials are tradition-bound and conservative.
The saurials seek to acquire knowledge, magic, craft goods, and metals (for their world is somewhat poorer in metals than the other planets of Icespace) through interplanetary trade. In exchange, they trade craft goods and art of their own, knowledge, unique magic, rare timbers, plants, herbs, and herbal potions.
The third world in the system is much like the second, save that it is somewhat cooler and less humid, and dotted with deserts and dry regions. It has smaller oceans than the Saurian Imperial Homeworld, but much of its landmass is so steep and rocky that it is uninhabitable. The world is ruled by an amalgam of over seventeen yuan-ti nation-clans collectively known as the Brotherhood of the Snake. The Brotherhood wars amongst itself constantly, pausing internal conflicts only to repel invaders that dare threaten it.
Although Kuljim is rich in minerals, its extreme volcanic activity prevents extensive mining. What mining is undertaken is extremely dangerous. For this reason, the yuan-ti use slaves to operate their mines, especially preferring those who are resistant to heat. Prior to the Great Freeze, the yuan-ti maintained significant slave populations of fire salamanders, saurials, lizard men, and nagas, many of whom had been defeated by the yuan-ti in wars for planetary dominion. Most of the slave population died during the Great Freeze, leaving the yuan-ti little choice but to aggressively seek to replace it.
The yuan-ti involve themselves in spelljammer trade primarily to acquire these slaves, and in turn sell rare metals from their mines and rare herbs from their forests. Prior to the Great Freeze, the yuan-ti competed for territory with fire-loving beasts that claimed the great furnaces of the volcanoes. Clans of fire giants, azer, and even a few red dragons were said to make their homes there. As only the deepest and hottest of the caverns retained enough heat to permit these creatures to endure the Freeze, the abandoned homes of these fire-loving beasts now draw adventurers and pirates from throughout the sphere and beyond. The yuan-ti do not expend as much effort fighting off these claim jumpers as one might expect; foolish adventurers help provide a renewable source of able slaves for their mines. Whether any of the ancient races remain hidden in deep caverns or beneath the hottest volcanoes remains unknown.
The fourth planet is home to a little known race called the inethar, created by elven experimentation during the First Unhuman War. The inethar are an elven-insect hybrid race organized into a caste-driven society. At the end of the Freeze, the inethar emerged with very few casualties, and immediately set about repairing their cities and sending forth scouts. Enari itself is a temperate, well- cared for world. It is approximately half water, with the other half consisting of forested hills and wide, grassy plains which are crisscrossed by deep ravines.
The inethar have dotted Enari with their huge hive-cities, and maintain large shipyards which grow hulls for their warships. However, the Council of Queens strictly controls population and development in order to insure that inethar civilization remains in harmonious balance with nature. Because of this edict, and the natural inethar tendency to stay close to their native hive, much of Enari is in fact uninhabited wilderness. Each hive-city surrounds itself with the vast lengths of carefully tended fields and numerous domestic herd animals necessary to feed its population, but leaves the remaining territory in its region to the freedom of the wild.
A few non-inethar nations allied with the Council Queens made their home on Enari prior to the Great Freeze. These included several city-states dominated by human spacefarers. The inethar relied on their allies to facilitate trade with the rest of the sphere, and beyond. In return, they provided military and magical protection.
The largest such nation served as the trading center of an island chain thickly inhabited by humans of several cultures (all thought to have migrated there from spelljamming space). This city-state, known as Sel-Kai, is believed to be the only non-inethar community to have survived the Great Freeze, due to the power of the artifact disk-city of Eidolon which floats over Sel-Kai and which houses Sel-Kai's nobility and wealthy merchants. Just before the Freeze overwhelmed the area, the sky city and its hidden guardian projected a stasis field over both the upper and lower cities which preserved both intact. When released from stasis, many of the power factions, merchant coasters, gangs, and crime syndicates of this most cosmopolitan trading city discovered themselves bereft of their assets. The survivors initiated a mad rush to pillage what remained of the outlying regions of their native island chain for wealth, though this rush was soon monitored and regulated by the inethar. Perhaps as a side effect of the stasis field, the Freeze did not grind the remains of the other communities in Sel-Kai's island chain to dust, as it did to the homes and possessions of most of its other victims throughout Icespace. Thus the mad rush for wealth was not entirely in vain, though it produced more sad remnants of the unmourned dead than it did gold.
The upper city of Eidolon is known to have many spelljamming docks which survived the Freeze entirely intact. With its diverse population, the city has become an ideal trading hub where members of almost any race can venture to trade and conduct diplomacy. Outsiders entering the unfrozen Icespace for the first time have naturally gravitated towards Sel-Kai, and all four empires native to the sphere have stationed permanent embassies in Eidolon.
The fifth world of Icespace - already frigid even before the Great Freeze - was dominated by a highly intelligent centipede race which closely resembled remorhaz. Prior to the Freeze, these creatures wandered the great icy tundras of their world, crossing the seasonal ice bridges from continent to continent. Over time, they developed the necessary stability to build a relatively advanced civilization. Because of the vast appetites of these predators, however, the remorhaz population was never large. Although they continued to survive during the Freeze, and even migrated somehow to isolated pockets on the other worlds of Icespace, their population levels declined precipitously due to lack of food. In the centuries of the Freeze, they lost almost all vestiges of their civilization. The surviving members of this race are still somewhat more intelligent than their cousins in other spheres, but they are only a shadow of their former selves. However, with the end of the Freeze, their population levels should quickly recover to their former levels - perhaps within a hundred years or less. Until then, however, the ancient remorhaz cities buried in the deep glaciers will draw headstrong adventurers who seek to challenge the elements and the great beasts themselves. Adventurers are warned to be wary, however, for many sages speak of hidden guardians of these cities. If the remorhaz do manage to recover their lost civilization, they may find many pieces of it missing by the time they can put it back together.
Chaspath is also known for its volcanic activity. Deep within its frozen reaches lay precarious zones of lava and superheated gasses venting from within the planets core. Here dwell tiny communities of dwarves and gnomes. They mine rare gems and channel the lava into massive forges where they craft tools and weapons of the finest caliber. There are fewer than thirty communities of this type on the entire world, varying in population from two hundred to over a thousand. They are almost impossible to locate, for they are shielded from divination magics by the strange properties of a rare crystalline material formed from the planet's hot gases freezing on the surfaces of the ice caverns. Trade into and out of these hidden deep caverns is conducted by a merchant clan in the city of Eidolon (House Beltieran, which pretends to be a clan of tinker-gnomes, but in fact is controlled by cousins of the tinker-gnomes who make devices that actually work). This trade is difficult and dangerous to maintain, as the ice tunnels from the surface which access the deep communities often collapse and must be re-cut through painstaking effort and time.
Rumor and legend speaks that the largest deep community on Chaspath is not inhabited by dwarves or gnomes, but rather by a clan of about 5,000 rockseer elves who have adapted to the harsh mixture of cold and heat which characterizes deep Chaspath. Although some gnomish explorers claim to have wandered across this legendary city during their travels, none have ever been able to locate it while actively seeking for it. Many believe that it does not exist. This does not stop an occasional adventuring band from seeking the gem-encrusted caverns of the strange elves. No band that has ever gone looking has ever returned - proof, say some, that the rockseer elves exist. Others merely call this proof that adventurers are a gullible lot.
Atoh is not a planet of Icespace. The entire region of wildspace in which Atoh presently exists had been frozen solid during the Great Freeze, and even the Darkgate could not eliminate the full extend of so monstrous an expanse of magical ice. A planet-sized ball of ice remains unmelted. Some believe that Atoh contains deep within it the original artifact or spell which unleashed the Great Freeze. Others believe the sphere's ice had become semi-alive during the frozen centuries, and that Atoh is its refuge until the day it can recapture the planets for itself. In either case, Atoh is an extremely inhospitable place inhabited only by creatures native to the Para- Elemental Plane of Ice, and hiding many portals and vortices to the Para-Elemental Plane of Ice in its cold, deep glaciers.
It is in Atoh that the secret of the Freeze laid hidden. Toward the end of the interplanetary war which ended in the Great Freeze, one or more than one of the warring groups unleashed unknown weapons which tore the very fabric of the multiverse's reality asunder. A tear began to form, a tear which acted as a portal to the Far Realm which exists outside of the multiverse.
So large was this forming tear that it threatened the entire sphere with absorption into the elder, horrid timeless multidimensional insanity that is the Far Realm. Such a cataclysm would have threatened the integrity of nearby crystal spheres as well, creating the possibility of a disastrous dominoe effect with an uncertain end.
The four empires of Icespace acted swiftly, briefly united by their shared danger. Before the dimensional tear fully opened to the Far Realm, the four empires halted the onset of the reality-breach with a grav-built Gravity Manipulation Engine. But, while the reality-breach was halted, it could not be repaired, and the Engine's ability to hold the breach closed was limited.
The four empires then chose, with the complicity and assistance of the sphere's deities, to combine their power and that of the sphere's deities through the Engine and freeze the sphere, and with it, the reality-breach. Over time, the breach would heal, and then the sphere could be unfrozen.
In an unpararelled act of selfishness only partially excused by time pressure, the four empires protected themselves from icy death and left the remainder of the sphere to its fate.
Unfortunately, the sphere was unfrozen early. The reality-breach was only partially healed, and the Engine drained most of its remaining power maintaining the Atoh ice-body during the Darkgate's activation. It was only a matter of time until the breach broke through Atoh and unleashed the Far Realm on Icespace.
Icespace's salvation came in the form of the transcendent artifact known as the Black Machine, which adopted the failing grav Engine as one of its aspects. In early 1374 DR, the Machine (assisted by the Knights of the Sword Coast and by the guardian of Eidolon - who operated the grav Engine), focused power stolen from the destruction of the illithid 'Overmind' artifact-fortress through the grav Engine and repaired the partially-healed reality-breach. The grav Engine was destroyed in the process.
This ended the Far Realm's threat to Icespace, and through Icespace,
to the multiverse itself. Atoh survived unscathed, and only time will reveal
whether the ice body will survive, or eventually melt, without the grav
Engine's maintenance.