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05-27-2019, 12:30 PM | #1 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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[GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
The mind yearns to explore new setting ideas before the previous one fades from memory, so let us step through the shimmering portal to execute the genesis of a new multiverse and an associated campaign framework!
This is a collaborative setting construction forum game. The objective is to use our shared talents to put together a setting that combines fantasy, travel between exotic worlds, magical planes and wondrous dimensions, unique and awe-inspiring geographic wonders at every stop, and swashbuckling mercantile adventure. To be clear, the goal is to make a campaign framework with 3 criteria: - It's a cross-dimensional fantasy, where there is some means of moving between different worlds and planes of existence. - It involves extraordinary geographical gimmicks, such as a settlement built on the walls of a bottomless pit or islands in a sea of lava. - The campaign revolves around trade between these worlds and dimensions. How exactly these elements will combine is yet to be seen. ---- The method is to answer a posted question about the setting, then post a question of your own. Build bit-by-bit on what the other posters have written, and try not to contradict anything that's been established. Questions can be anything from the very general to extremely specific, complex or simple, and can follow on from what's gone before or start off a new direction. ---- To make it easier to read through, clearly mark questions and answers in bold, and quote the question you're answering, in the below format. Also try to use line breaks to break up wall-of-text answers. Example of post format: Quote:
Somewhere between a multitude and a myriad. The Company has catalogued 68 of them. Question 43 Which is the Moorcockiest of the dimensions? --- Here's a list of previous collaborations:
Spoiler:
---- I'll kick off with the first real question in the next post.
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Collaborative Settings: Cyberpunk: Duopoly Nation Space Opera: Behind the King's Eclipse And heaps of forum collabs, 30+ and counting! |
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05-27-2019, 12:35 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
Question 1 - Travel
What is the means of travelling between worlds and dimensions?
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Collaborative Settings: Cyberpunk: Duopoly Nation Space Opera: Behind the King's Eclipse And heaps of forum collabs, 30+ and counting! |
05-27-2019, 08:30 PM | #3 | |
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: New Zealand.
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
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Travel to other worlds, dimensions and realms is through a limited number of quite variable portals that predate written records. No one really understands how the portals work though many theories exist. Each of the portals is seen to have a personality for want of a better term, the realm is centered on a portal know as "Mother Plains" which is the most reliable portal and also the one with the most gentle transition. It provides transport from right beside the seat of governance to a vast impossibly flat plain covered in a grass best described as giant wheat. Another portal is known simply as "The Kidnapper" which appears at random and can send the unwary almost anywhere. It sometimes even returns them at a later time, though as often it brings a new resident(s). The distorted lands are different again and surround the [area] here an adventurous sort may climb an almost impossibly tall cliff and arrive in the heaven of a deity of life, or cross a river of poison and find themselves in the land of the dead. Tens or scores of portals exist and each is unique. Question 2 How big is the central realm? (And whats a better name than "central realm"?)
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Waiting for inspiration to strike...... And spending too much time thinking about farming for RPGs Contributor to Citadel at Nordvörn |
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05-28-2019, 02:52 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
I will not spoil the fun by joining in the enumerated questions and answers, but the existence of something like this in the GURPS system was precisely my purpose behind writing up my "Tomos, the Divided Land" setting for crossplanar GURPS fantasy. It was article number 6203 in Pyramid #2, December 2006.
The basics of crossworld travel in the setting are as follows. Writers in this thread are welcome to take them and run with them. 1.) Posit that any naturally maniferous world has natural gates to the elemental planes, particularly at least one stable, human-transitable gate to the Plane (or Decan, etc.) of Elemental Earth. The key is that such a plane is likely to be understood and known to almost every magical world. 2.) Posit that this Plane can be traveled between portals in a reasonable time and level of safety, that it is susceptible to the creation of permanent gates with the Create Gate spell, and that gates here can be found to and from new worlds (either unknown but associated to some token item or person, or simply seeking new gates to explore) with various divinations. (They may be very hard to find, or unusably one-way, such as the portal to Yrth.) Voila, a system for mages to travel from one fantasy world to another. ----- The "home culture" of the setting was Tomos, a Greek-style democratic civilization featuring orichalcum and alchemy, on a world full of island archipelagos with no major continents. The central hub for crossplanar travel was Katakoptron, the Mirror City, sitting in the glassy border elemental region between Earth and Air (and hence featuring solid ground and breathable air). The City is the usual central site for the creation of double-wide permanent gates between worlds formally allied in the trade system, putting trade routes more convenient to one another than the haphazard placement of the natural gates. Worlds that could be reached included a few mentioned in Banestorm, namely Loren'dil, Gabrook, and Olokun, with the full complement of GURPS fantasy creatures, along with a few others of my own devising. The elemental planes could also feature an array of interesting, useful, and competition-inspiring resources. I have long thought about proposing to SJGames that I expand this setting into a longer pdf. I have plenty of material. I know, however, that "my homebrew setting" is not an item high on their wish list. |
06-01-2019, 10:56 PM | #5 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
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Did you have any background justification for the existence of the planes?
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Collaborative Settings: Cyberpunk: Duopoly Nation Space Opera: Behind the King's Eclipse And heaps of forum collabs, 30+ and counting! |
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05-28-2019, 04:39 AM | #6 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
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The central realm is called Fragment, and the realm's major world and portal nexus is Calledron. Calledron is a smallish world set in the basin formed by the hollow of the brain pan and top jaw of the upturned skull of a titan-sized crocodile-like beast. The basin is roughly 4000 miles long and 1500 wide and it floats at a steady angle to the sun. The sun rotates like a beacon, bringing cycles of day and night, and other colossal fragments of the beast are visible in the sky- a claw, floating nearby like a large moon, the thorax further away, and many more, most of them similarly inhabited. The realm, therefore, is a sphere of space about 100,000 miles in diameter, with the surface area of the fragments equivalent to half that of Earth. Question 3 - The Capital Where then are the Mother Plains Portal and the seat of governance on Calledron? Question 4 - Climate and Geography What are the climate(s) and geography of Calledron like?
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Collaborative Settings: Cyberpunk: Duopoly Nation Space Opera: Behind the King's Eclipse And heaps of forum collabs, 30+ and counting! |
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05-28-2019, 09:59 AM | #7 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
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The largest body of water is a long thin lake running down the center of the basin, about 1,000 miles long. The cavity that once contained the brain is dark, and is known as the great cavern. This is as opposed to the myriad smaller caverns found throughout the former titan's bones. The Bone has a tendency to condense water on it, making the cavern, as well as the back on bones on fragment, cold, dark, and somewhere between icy and wet. Question 5: How does gravity work on Calledron? (and by extension Fragment) Question 6: What kind of flora and fauna can you find on Calledron? Feel free to include crops and domestic animals
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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05-28-2019, 12:52 PM | #8 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
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Gravity is a repulsive force acting radially away from the sun, with a strength proportional to proximity to it. The material of titanic Bone appears to have some countering force attracting it to other Bone and perhaps to the sun, as suggested by the arrangement of fragments. Thus, if flight between fragments is considered, flying through an outward-curving trajectory would be easier. And if it's possible to mine or work Bone, it might be used for anchors or ballast. For inhabitants of Calledron and similar fragments, gravity is experienced as a fairly uniform 1G, and the sun is always directly above. (Does this cause too much weirdness?) ---- Like with the Megacorp thread, how about we considered separate tagged streams of questions, one focusing on Fragment [FRG], the other on portals and the multiverse [MV]? We have a couple standing for the realm of Fragment, so I'll just add: Question 7 - [MV] Problem species What species traveling the portals of the multiverse causes trouble for other wayfarers?
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Collaborative Settings: Cyberpunk: Duopoly Nation Space Opera: Behind the King's Eclipse And heaps of forum collabs, 30+ and counting! |
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05-31-2019, 12:42 PM | #9 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
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Question 17 [FRG] Which end (or side) of Calledron gets sunlight first and darkness last? How gradual or sudden is that event?
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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05-31-2019, 09:49 PM | #10 |
Join Date: Oct 2011
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Re: [GAME] Conceive a Cross Dimensional Fantasy Milieu
Answer 11 Fragment has a hard boundary and is shaped like a sphere; matter that "falls" away from the sun eventually pancakes against it. Light apparently passes through it, and it has slowly moving striations and whorls of predominantly blue with bits of green and violet. Lacking stars, Calledronians have a system of predictive uranology based on them. This has lead some to imagine Fragment as a sort of bubble floating in a volatile fluid, but with control of the Mother Plains portal, Calledronians have been far more interested in the polycosm next door than exploring the edge of the sky. There is no observed accumulation of debris on the inside of the sky, leading most to suspect that matter is eventually broken down and absorbed by either the boundary itself or the volatile fluid beyond.
Question 18 What entity or agency makes governing decisions in Calledron? Question 19 What entity or agency controls access to the Mother Plains portal? |
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collaborative setting, game, setting, world building |
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