#look if you can't use the cosmology of your homebrew game world to riff on string theory

[c-is-for-circinate]

@acelania replied to your post: theworldbrewery: saturday D&D tip: write all your...

*waves hand excitedly* @c-is-for-circinate​, could you possibly share about your planar geography model? It sounds Super Interesting and I am ALWAYS up to hear about interesting worldbuilding!

@yfere replied to your post: theworldbrewery: saturday D&D tip: write all your...

@c-is-for-circinate every time I hear about your academia campaign I !!!!! Because I just want to live in that world,

Man, <3 to you both.  I need to post more about my worldbuilding on here.  I think it’s a pretty cool world to play in!  There’s some shit going down with the history of elves.  Also I feel like Tumblr would probably appreciate the folktale of the Hero Resolve.

The planar geography of this universe (geography?  theography?  thaumography?  what do you call it when it’s entirely different planes of existence?) is, by nature, beyond mortal comprehension and cannot be accurately modeled in three-dimensional space.  Also, because I was at an extremely impressionable age when I first learned about Planescape, it’s important to note that the various planes of existence are in fact infinite, and many of them exist outside of the local planar cluster inhabited by our world of Onde, its inhabitants and regular visitors, and their local gods.

Which means that for centuries, scholars have been trying to come up with some model to describe how the planes relate to each other, how they function, and how the fuck they even exist in the first place.

Various things they’ve tried over the ages:

The Great Wheel cosmology from classic D&D, with its Inner and Outer planes (fairly similar to what we seen in Exandria, actually!) is a very classic historical understanding of How Things Work.  Think, like...if Aristotle existed in this world, this would be his model.  Logical, influences all science and research for thousands of years to come, and actually entirely wrong.  (Mostly.  Except for how it’s not.)

The Gradient Model suggests that, rather than being defined by good/evil/law/chaos, all planes exist on a spectrum somewhere between Material and Magical (or Divine).  Material planes contain mostly physical objects which tend to follow specific laws of gravity and object permanence; aside from Onde itself, this includes elemental planes, the Feywild and the Shadowfell, and a handful of others.  Magical planes are made entirely of will and essence.  Death and existence gets weird on magical planes, because souls are as real as (or more real than!) bodies there, so dying doesn’t entirely matter (though it might when you try to go home).  Worth noting that while Onde is classified as mostly-Material, scholars have never actually found a fully material plane.  The theory is that one could exist, and you might be able to travel there, but you could never leave due to the lack of magic; current avenues in theory are still exploring methods of detecting a fully-material plane.

The frosted plum pudding model, which is absolutely a riff on the plum pudding model of the atom, was very much the thing every kid learned in school a hundred years ago.  The theory here is that the various material planes exist embedded, more or less stationary, within the ethereal plane.  The entire ethereal plane is then surrounded by the astral plane, like a whole lot of frosting.  All the various magical planes are embedded within that astral plane.  The planes have fixed positions and relationships to each other, and the ethereal and astral planes function more as a medium for holding everything else than as independent planes in their own right.

The inverted orbital model, which was ABSOLUTELY WILD when it was first proposed, suggests that actually, the more magical planes should be envisioned as sitting at the middle of the planar system, with pure will and magic and divine energy at the center of all existence and everything else spinning around it, since they’re generally all very close to each other, travel between them is relatively easy, and they intersect frequently.  Material planes, at the edge of the system, are far apart and move very slowly which is why they seem to have fixed positions relative to each other, but divine planes shift around each other constantly.  This is the model that is now generally taught in elementary schools.

Most high-level scholars generally agree that in actuality the planes all overlap each other, and the study of Cloth Theory (where each plane is envisioned as a piece of fabric, and various planes may be folded together in some places and far apart in others) is another main drive of modern research.  There isn’t a distinct model related with this field that’s easy for the general public to grasp, since nobody agrees quite how the planes overlay one another, so this is very much the thing that college kids learn that blows their minds, sends them into an existential crisis, and either cements them as arcanologists for life or turns them immediately into humanities majors.

If the science of this continent ever knew about the city of Sigil or the Outlands (because fuck yes there’s a city of Sigil, I met Planescape at an extremely impressionable age), they forgot about its existence centuries ago, and it would blow their little minds.