[GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu

[Daigoro]

<brushes some dust off the thread... mutters "Ah, I knew I had some half-finished answer lying around here somewhere...">

Originally Posted by ericthered

Question 133
What world of the concordat is closest to Fragment?

Originally Posted by patchwork

Question 134
What else lives on the expansive world of the Neckerlings, that isn't part of the Concordat?

Question 43 [MV][Name 5]- Imperial Realms 4/5
The fourth (?) realm of the Calledron Empire is Eggshell, and it is set to become the front line for a clash between Calledron and the Concordat, with each holding territory at opposite ends of the realm.

Eggshell is a hollow world-style cosm, but egg-shaped instead of spheroid. The shell of the world is rent through with cracks and rifts, like someone had started cracking a boiled egg for their breakfast. The equatorial bulge of the world is circumscribed by a wide belt of cracking that breaks the surface up into thousands of platelets and suspended islands, while the north and south caps of the world only have a few long, deeply penetrating chasms. The cracks and platelets of the world's crust move no more quickly than on a tectonic timescale, but occasional quakes and collisions are noticed.

There is no sun in the centre of the hollow world. Instead, light comes in through the cracks, apparently emitted by a sun-like light source orbiting around the shell's exterior in a polar orbit. This means that there are four phases to each day on Eggshell- as the sun passes up the eastern hemisphere, it illuminates the opposite face through the cracks of the equatorial belt, then nightfall as the sun traverses the exterior of the unbroken north cap, another daylight phase as the sun passes down the western exterior and illuminates the eastern inner face, then another night as the sun passes under the southern cap. However, as there's a major crevice crossing near the southern pole, there is a brief "midnight sun" effect across the northern hemisphere.

The shattered equatorial belt has a hot and rocky climate. The southern cap is arid to semi-arid warm desert and steppe, while the northern cap goes from light scrub and farmland in the lower latitudes to dense, dark forest towards the pole.

The northern cap is the territory of the Nickerling Freholds, a collection of arboreal and pastural, semi-biopunk micropolities.

The southern cap was, until Calledron occupation, a land of dozens of competing warlords and squabbling princelings of human, sand ogre and iguanid races. Under Archmage rule, however, these provinces are united and their attention is turning towards the north.

The Nickerlings are unreceptive to the Calledron brand of order, however, explaining their motivation to join the Five Banners.

For now, they are protected by the hostile nature of the shattered lands. Passage through them involves massive bridges across depthless chasms, and there are only a handful of such routes, which should be easily able to be destroyed if invasion threatens.


Answer 133 - Closest Concordat Realm to Fragment

Therefore, Eggshell is the closest Concordat world to Fragment, barring those times when cloud portals from Pit are exiting onto other Calledronian cosms.

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Question 137 [MV] - Cosm Sizes
Are all the known cosms roughly world-sized or smaller, or are there full universes too? (I believe Gnomon is on the magnitude of a solar system.)

Question 138 [FRG] - Callous Harbour
The city of Callous Harbour is the centre of a powerful trans-cosmic empire. What does it look like?

Question 139 [GM][Open] - Adventure Seeds and Campaign Frames
- Describe some campaign frameworks for a group of PCs in this setting.
- What are some adventure seeds that you can suggest?

[patchwork]

Answer 94 The Tetral Skerry

In addition to the Impossible Sea and the Eternal Slopes, two other realms of the Tetral skerry are known as the Four Auroras and the Juncture.

The Four Auroras is a realm comparable in size to the other two, with gravity attracting out to each of the four faces like the Impossible Sea. It has a constant, powerful "storm" of magnetic flux centered on one of the vertices, changing every twelve hours. There is no sun-analogue, but the intensity of the magnetic disturbance creats curtains of light in the central atmosphere (which a modern physicist would thus speculate is a high-energy vacuum) similar to a very intense aurora borealis or australis that are bright enough to see by. The magnetism also causes headaches in sensitive people and will pull apart any delicate clockwork device with iron or copper in it. The minerals found in the dirt covering all four faces include large amounts of iron and copper, so that sand shifts and reshapes itself and rocks sometimes break and drift in accord with the violent magnetosphere (magnetotetroid?). The ambient temperature centers on an uncomfortable 40 C without a lot of variation, there are pools and streams but most of the water is in the atmosphere as vapor. People here tend to keep to the center of the four faces, where the magnetism is less intense on average and the aurora is never directly overhead. There are succulents, sagebrush and moss and small animals among them, but like so many "strange" worlds, this isn't an environment that easily supports large, complex life.

Juncture is smaller than the others, only about 250 miles along an edge, and as its name implies, is conceptually in the "middle" of the skerry. The four stained-glass scenes from the Impossible Sea's "sun" are here placed in the center of each face, and all four shine dimly but continuously, so that one can climb on them and study them if so inclined. Each vertice is a permanent portal to one other world in the skerry, albeit to shifting locations within those cosmi. Juncture has no meaningful gravity, which is actually its greatest danger; someone unprepared for this state affairs could find themselves drifting towards the middle, a hundred miles from any useful fixed point and with limited means of propulsion (depending on who they are and what they brought). There is a great deal of dust, sand, debris, slime and dirt which mostly sticks to walls, cohering around small fixtures near the portals and the "windows". Most theorists believe Juncture was once a large city built as a webwork in zero gravity; what destroyed it so utterly is unknown.

Question 140 How does the Temple of One in All know or determine who is a member and who isn't? Or from their point of view, who has more or less enlightenment than others?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by patchwork

Question 120 How is the head of the Temple determined?

On the third ridge of the chalk ripples are a number of grand structures known as Seraph altars. Once every five years, the best and the brightest of the orthodox and catholic gather around an altar, each hoping to be the next host of the Seraph who tends this altar. The Seraph (if currently embodied) interviews, observes, and tests the candidates for mental and physical prowess before finally choosing one as host. The consciousness and souls of the host and the Seraph merge. The hosts body glows with power, and the consumed shell of the former host is left behind. The Host can said to be ruling the orthodox and catholic at this time, as his or her personality remains quite present... but it is truly the Seraph who rules, and each Seraph retains much of the memory and personality of its long line of hosts.

The Seraphs seem to decide among themselves who is most suited to rule, or perhaps they consult their God directly. Transitions of power are most often associated with the current ruling Seraph taking a new host.

Originally Posted by patchwork

Question 124 Who or what occupied the plains of Sepulchre before the advent of the ogres and formation of the Concordat?

Before the knights of the first and final, the bonekeepers of Sepulchre ruled themselves, defending their lands with the animated skeletons of great beasts important from far off cosmi. Or so the story goes. It seems the ruling class was not derived from the bonekeepers, but were a band of foreign sorcerers who had adopted bonekeeper manners and customs.

Question 141:
How are Seraph's useful in war?

[patchwork]

Answer 100 The widely acknowledged expert and greatest explorer of the lands of the divine and the dead in Calledron was Gaius Aulus Rabogans. Sixteen at the time of the arrival of the Turtle Fleet on Calledron, he had been consecrated but not yet ordained to one of the Clever Three, and as a result he was one of the first to successfully contact the old Oppuhan gods, only to find that the old patron deities were mostly very cool towards the lost fleet. Rabogans would spend the next fifty years of his life pushing through the jungles of Calledron, encountering new tribes, and learning as much as possible as quickly as possible about their gods, recording as much detail as he could and sending copies back to the colony. Over the course of his life he would meet and converse with 435 self-identified divinities and provide surprisingly useful profiles of all of them for the inquiring dabbler. Rabogans' relations with the early Warlords of Calledron ranged from cool to hostile; he regarded the military organization of society as a failed model and the old Oppuhan deities as having rejected them. He imagined his purpose was to allow the Oppuhan refugees to make informed choices as to which Calledron tribe to join and embrace, abandoning their old culture entirely. Not many agreed with this proposition. Calledron was still establishing itself during his lifetime, and he had nothing to do with the earliest forays into portals, nor did he ever leave the skull. In his later days, he descended into madness, and rumours persist that several deities he contacted in old age were not reported to the public but his notes remain in the custody of his descendants. The Order of Rabogans was chartered by the Warlord upon his death, providing a steady stream of income to his family while making a mockery of his initial intentions; members of the Order mostly contact the hundreds of deities he encountered on behalf of the Empire but occasionally make original inquiries off the skull. His descriptions of 435 gods of the tribes of Calledron is compiled as the Codex Rabogansis, and most Calledronians own a copy even if they seldom actually read it (and are even less likely to perform the rituals within to contact a particular god).

Question 142 What is the social organization of a Nickerling Freehold like?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by patchwork

Over the course of his life he would meet and converse with 435 self-identified divinities and provide surprisingly useful profiles of all of them for the inquiring dabbler.
...
Calledron was still establishing itself during his lifetime, and he had nothing to do with the earliest forays into portals, nor did he ever leave the skull.

Sorry, I'm not clear on what method he was using to contact the deities then. Wouldn't that involve crossing the Distorted Lands?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Sorry, I'm not clear on what method he was using to contact the deities then. Wouldn't that involve crossing the Distorted Lands?

Rabogans would have spent an extensive amount of time in the distorted lands. One can get to the distorted lands by "requesting" to be summoned there. The method for this requires 'Exotic Materials', with multiple materials available, each taking one to a different part of the distorted realm. Its never been stated and thus is not cannon, but I've always assumed Calledronite was one such material, keyed to the area corresponding to Calledron. See post 54, answer 31.

Of course, that method limits its user to 24 hours, and I'd have thought that one would need other methods to contact the Opphaun Gods (like portals directly into the distorted realm), but its possible that some items brought with the turtle fleet allow access to that portion of the distorted realm. Or that Rabogans was just exceptionally good at crossing the distorted realm at high speed and others weren't.

He's certainly a colorful character. I think I like him.

[patchwork]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Sorry, I'm not clear on what method he was using to contact the deities then. Wouldn't that involve crossing the Distorted Lands?

Walk up to a tribe, ask to talk to their shaman about their deity, when you understand the ritual well enough and have the materials, give it a whirl. Yes, he documented new ways to enter the Distorted Lands and confer with specific gods at the rate of nearly one a month over a lifetime.

[ericthered]

Question 99:
What is Calledron's currency like? Is it backed by anything, in a polycosm where nearly anything could be found behind the next portal? Who makes it - mints, banks? Is it widely accepted beyond Calledron? If not, is there any currency that is used, or is it strictly barter between different polities?

While some substances rare and valued in a cosmi many be common place in others, some useful substances remain stubbornly rare across the polycosm, especially those with alchemical properties. Most empires have a currency unique to them and their satellite states, usually based on a rare and useful substance.

Calledron uses gold, a rare alchemical substance useful in housing souls, as its currency. Various archmages have made various coins over the years, with various symbols on them, from religious icons to their own faces. These coins aren't really official currency though: they're just a convenient way to move gold.

The Chanovat of the stone-etched alliance use a variety of paper currencies backed by physical goods, usually either ingredients for communion fluid or a given weight of grain. These currencies are issued by the order of enlightenment(for those backed with communion fluid) or by a local branch
of the Order of Bounty (for those backed with food).

[patchwork]

Answer 103 The age of the nine rebel daevae

Creation myths are notoriously unreliable, but the creation myth of the nine rebel daevae has nevertheless survived and been recorded. There was once a vast being that occupied an entire cosm itself, every atom of matter incorporated into its body, every mote of energy used to fire its bodily processes. When it became aware of the existence of other cosmi full of sapient beings it was horrified, and began calving off daughter-processes through portals to annihilate all that was not-it. Having a childish liking for a little rhetoric, we shall call it Ialdabaoth. The advent of Ialdabaoth is very likely what ended the portal-building civilization prior to it, as its daevae scoured worlds clean. The daevae it emanated from itself, were a bit contradictory in nature; as they understood they were incomplete parts of a whole, they knew that there were sapient things that were not-them that were nevertheless valued parts of "themself". This knowledge that there were not-them that must be valued and not destroyed eventually corrupted a few of them, and instead of scourging, fled and hid in secure minor cosmi referred to as their Citadels. In time, they found a way to take a cosm full of light and heat and merge it into Ialdabaoth's, burning their creator away and making them truly independent individuals at last. Despite Ialdabaoth being by conventional understanding, a physical being and not a deity, this was the act that created their portal network (according to the story). They count themselves as only a third of the daevae, with nine that perished with their creator and nine more that fled and hid within Labyrinths; there is not one subsequent mention of these "nine loyalist daevae".

The daevae sometimes stayed in their Citadels and entertained guests, and sometimes wandered the polycosm, fascinated by the existence of not-them which was totally okay with being merely one mind among many. They were their parent's children, however, and the proximity of other sapients tended to agitate them, so that remote viewing and correspondence were preferable for them. There was no exception for each other; after the murder of their creator, two rebel daevae were never found in the same cosm again.

Under their watchful eye, three polycosmic empires sprang up, each of them substantially larger than the current ones, with about 15 major cosmi and many minor cosmi apiece. These could be distinguished by their relation to the daevae, as roughly 1) worship them as gods and make propitiatory sacrifices to them, 2) treat them as sapients who can be bargained with like any other, and 3) regard them as an existential threat. They may be presently on holiday, but they were created to destroy worlds and their nature has not changed. At least the educated class of all three empires spoke Daevic, however. It was the language of knowledge and power no matter your beliefs, and much alchemy and technology was at least apparently learned directly from the daevae (cynics suggest that the daevae never revealed a technique that people weren't on the verge of discovering for themselves anyway, so that their real contribution was minor). All three empires were united under a single Emperor with theoretically absolute power, as that's the organizational structure that made sense to the daevae. The worshippers and bargainers were hereditary, the paranoids somewhat meritocratic.

All things come to an end, and this stable state of affairs ended with the daevae again splitting into three (historians quarrel over whether the repetition of thirds and threes among the daevae is confirmation bias or some sort of motif of destiny inherited from Ialdabaoth). Three of them concluded that they had nothing more to learn from the cosmi of conventional materium and it was time to translate into the Distorted Lands to become at least partially ideas, further blurring their concepts of identity. Three rebelled at this and launched into apocalyptic violence, which the paranoid empire was at least somewhat ready for. Three closed their Citadels and withdrew completely from contact with other beings without, apparently, altering their natures. The resulting wars saw the destruction of the three reactionary daevae, but not before laying waste to all three empires. The entire process, from destruction of Ialdabaoth to war between the rebels, took only three centuries.

Question 143 We've spoken of portal drakes. Name 5 other things that are not people that nevertheless manage to use one or more portal networks.

[ericthered]

Question 126 Let's make it official, Name 5: name and briefly describe the five monocosm polities besides Ton regarded as important to the setting.

Answer 126b

On a cosmi called quarry, the Triple Princedom of Bilthany is built on the foundation of a mineral called animite. Or at least its foundations were laid by animite. When carved into the shape of a being, animite begins to move as though it were that being. Recent techniques have greatly improved the intelligence of the animatons, but this has been a mixed blessing: animatons are being used to replace skilled labor, which has previously been safe, and the smarter animatons are beginning to wonder why they should serve their frail masters.

Question 144:
Are Nickerlings Humans or something else?
Which of the three daevic empires was Ton Associated with?