So now, the long-awaited, overly verbose, and not really addressing the question, answer to Question 15.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered
Question 15 [MV] Per answer #1, Many Portals have names, and each is unique. How may a wayfarer or sage distinguish between two portals?
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Answer 15 [MV]- Portal Identification
(TLDR: It depends.)
To understand where portals might go, it helps to understand something of the deep history of the realms.
The consensus of Calledronian scholarship is that there are eighteen ages of crossworld portal building. The Sky Alchemists disagree with this theory, as do the Historians of Halm Monast, naturally, but it serves as a useful starting point.
There is the Age of the Divinities (actually the First through Fourth, as per the Monasts), where godlike beings summoned realities from the primordium on a whim, to fight tremendous battles with by slamming them one into another, to imprison their foes, as playthings or as battle machines. They tore rents and refts between dimensions, cast ferocious energies across the polycosm, and sent hosts of daeva, serafrim, efereet and aungel into war. This Age is said to have closed with the Divinities retreating into their own heavenly planes, binding them shut and warding them from intrusion, although the Alchemists and others contend that this Age continues now.
Later comes the Age of the Behemophaunts, when great beasts wielding wild magic roamed the planes at will. In places, a remnant of their passing persists as a faint echo that wayfarers may, knowing the right sorcery, locate and follow, or being in the wrong place, inadvertently stumble through.
The bulk of scholarship goes into enumerating the various Ages of Civilisation and the intervening interregna. One civilisation will discover the means to making portals, spread out across the realms, insert aspects of their culture, language and architecture into them, then pass away due to war, disease, infighting, senescence or to succumbing to the next great empire, much as any civilisation does. They will leave behind a network of useful and conveniently placed portals connecting hospitable realms which sometimes persist to this day.
This is the theory, at least. In practice, the magics that the portals operate under corrupt or decay, they get damaged or subverted, or their original environments change dramatically. An army might sabotage one portal, while another portal is caught in an eruption. Portals may be dispelled in a religious purge or in imprudent experimentation. Otherwise, the magical charge in a portal might diminish so that it only opens intermittently, or the connection with its counterpart might be severed, leaving the dimensional threads to whiptail around until they latch on to a different portal. In short, portals are not the most reliable of machines.
Thus, over the scores of millennia that saw the rise and fall of eighteen classified Ages, there have been eighteen times when a civilisation discovered a particular method of creating dimensional portals, then gone on to build a network with its own rules, architectural flairs, magical character and security measures. Intervening ages saw these civilisations conquered and fallen and their portals commandeered by opportunistic tribes and monsters, kings and empires.
Identifying a portal therefore needs a fair amount of knowledge of portal lore- a combination of history, archaeology, planar geography, dead languages, some musical ability in the case of the Madrigal Network, and so on. It will tell you, for instance, the difference between a Highdoor of the Stone Syndics, which connects to a part of their sturdy, paved Grand Roads network laid out across fortified mountain passes and hidden tunnels, and a Fiend Gate, which would dump you on a random tract of the miasmic Curselands.
As hinted at earlier, portals on well-travelled routes are often labelled with plaques and marked with a mass of calledronite that can be located with a matching compass.
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Plot Seed 1: Network Access
One of the major trading house of Calledron has managed to gain exclusive use to a particular network of portals, either by discovering the secret magical passphrases, the network's astrological opening times, making the right offerings, wearing the right pennant, or whatever. However, agents from a rival company have discovered the secret to using those portals and are starting to move in on the first group's turf. Trouble and misadventure ensue.
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Question 66 [FRG][Name 5]- Merchant Houses
Describe 5 of the major or minor merchant houses, trading companies or caravans that traverse the polycosm.
Think about
: Where do they go? Which portals do they use? Where in Calledron are they based? What goods do they specialise in? What resources do they have? Which are the ones embroiled in Plot Seed 1?
Question 67 [ALC]- Alchemic Power
Is the Alchemists' knowledge purely empirical or are they able to perform their own enchantments and arcane rituals? How do they handle mana?