...for my car to get repaired.
It's a bit incomplete--and not up to the standards of the illustration my posts usually have--but it summarizes what I've discovered so far about the multiverse of the Strange New World.
For instance, the Positive Energy Plane is just the beginning of the Prime Material--or the etheric echo of that beginning. The Negative Energy Plane is the other bookend.
The highest Heaven is the domain of the Creator(s). Most dead don't make it to the highest Heaven but maybe some lesser "heavenly" realm--like maybe the Elysian Fields (also called Summerland or the Fiddler's Green). It's the counter-plane to the Wasteland, embodying "hope." There are more of these heavenly realms.
At the "bottom" of reality is the Pit, the Abyss. It's the place that fell the farthest in the Fall. The place of beings with no place in creation who want nothing more than to tear it all down--the demons. "Circling the drain" of the Pit, falling into it at different velocities, are hellish realms of various sorts. Hell (appropriately) where the fallen angels hope to stage a coup in creation and then forestall its slide into the Pit. Closer to the ultimate nullity are the Wasteland and the grim Black Iron Prison (which I left off the my map!) where the odious Deodands (named, interestingly, for an archaic legal term for a thing "forfeit onto God for causing a death") imprison, punish, and re-educate souls caged in their Escher maze prison hell.
Between Heaven and the Pit are planes more neutral to "good" and "evil"--or more accurately, they're places where the struggle between angels and demons is seen as beside the point. The denizens of Machina (polyhedral nanomachines, forming the distributive conscious of their Singular god(dess), and other worshippers like the Mantid Warrior-Nuns) believe that only absolute order can restore creation to an unfallen state. In constrast the formless, fluid intelligences of the Gyre (who often send technicolor clowns as their emissaries) believe that endless change is the only hope to recreate the conditions of the original Singularity of All and lead to the multiverse's reunion with the Godhead--or at least that's one of their myriad ideas.
7 comments:
Are you leaning towards spelljamming or is there only a magical way to get between the planes?
I really dig the arrow of time Postivie/Negative Material Plane idea. And the drawing is pretty nifty too! Dig the clown. :)
captcha: vesse (which makes me think of Charles Vess and Stardust)
Creepy clowns of chaos! I dig it
@Greg - No spelljamming, mostly astral travel/projection with occasional bodily travel (not recommended) via gates or some such. Drawing like these are just schematics really--the "real" planar arrangements are conceptual rather than literal. In other words it works a little more like real world occultic ideas than The Manual of Planes.
@Risus - Thanks. I've never claimed to be an artist, and certainly not sitting at Goodyear. :)
@Pierce - Thanks!
Greg - They come in a variety of colors, too. ;)
Sounds like a night mare! Very cool!
Interesting polarities--this has a lot of potential for mayhem and mischief, especially with those lower realms sliding inexorably downwards and farther out of sync/out of touch with creation while the demons there try to claw their way back to reality to wage war on it. There could be Titans wading in that sinking morass, not quite holding their positions as the erosion and flow of the whole arrangement slowly reduces their connection to the universe and they slide down in blind folly and stubborn ignorance. Perhaps demons might use the Titans' forms as handholds...but not without some risk, of course.
Nice how you brought more than one flavor of Singularity into this as well.
Could a sorcerer/shaman-type in The City construct some sort of boat akin to Harner's 'spirit-canoe' and use that to boost their astral travelling options a bit?
That would give you a sort of spelljamming aspect without going whole hog. And of course those polyhedral nanomachines might be sending out probes that are akin to UFOs from time to time...
You've definitely left the door open to some intriguing possibilities in all the best possible ways.
Good thoughts!
You've caught my drift perfectly, but suggested some interesting angles to it I hadn't thought of. Harner's spirit boat, or similar might well open a door for spell-jamming sort of travel.
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