Bards are widely regarded as excellent storytellers, but terrible cosmologists. There are expectations about what the distant planes are like, as widespread as they are erroneous, even among wizards that should strictly know better. Typically Bards take the blame for this misinformation, weaving fantasy tales of lakes of fire and infinite skies.

If the planes were so hospitable as to merely be an unending drop, the Warrior Mages would've conquered them long ago.

Particularly with the Elemental Planes, whose essences are infused with bloody single-mindedness, it is impossible to overstate the alien nature of the planes. The Elemental Plane of Fire is not a place where the land is on fire and the oceans are lava and the skies are very hot; it is fire in every symbolic and literal sense. The air is fire; gravity is fire; north is fire; the force that holds your atoms together is fire. It is deadly in its irrationality: anyone brave enough to venture across the planar void is likely to die of some bizarre cessation of their vital functions rather than being burnt.

Of particular hindrance to budding planar travelers is a lack of spatial dimensions. There is, to the best of the Warrior Mages' knowledge, no actual space in five out of the six Elemental Planes, at least in any sense that a man from the Plane of Abiding understands the term. The elemental inhabitants of the planes appear to spawn from and return to a single no-space. Familiars are notoriously unable to put into words how this is experienced, but don't seem to regard it as exceptional. To extraplanar life, three dimensional space is merely one of many ways which you can order the universe.

Despite this, Warrior Mages have been calling down the forces of the Elemental Planes since pre-history, and have a well established "map" of planar correspondences. This map is a product of magical experimentation and invocation: not a matter of true direction (you cannot point at the planar void), but permutations of magical patterns and summoning rituals rendered in graphic form.

The most common map depicts five elemental planes in a five-pointed star array, with the "base" elements (water, earth) together, the "energetic" elements (fire, air) at the next tier, and the "sublime" element (aether) alone. This is rendered as a pentagram during normal magical operations, with aether at its apex, and inverted to a penticle during summoning, references to the Voidspell, and other extraplanar operations.

Of course, this scheme has one glaring fault. Though to be fair to the cosmologists who invented it, so does the universe.

The Elemental Plane of Electricity is an odd plane out. The aesthetically pleasing, "symmetrical" changes in magical operations that allow the Warrior Mage to access the other five planes do not work with Electricity. Relative to the adjustments required to "aim" an invocation to the other five planes, the Elemental Plane of Electricity is entirely outside the "circle" of the other elements. Compounding this mystery, Electricity is also the one plane where there is reason to believe that spatial dimensions exist.

No one knows why, precisely, this is the case. The leading theory is that the Elemental Plane of Electricity is the first of a second "circle" of elements awaiting discovery, bringing the theoretical total number of elements to either 10 or 13, depending on which scheme you use to project the missing elements of a second array. The idea of discovering a new element has filled the dreams of Warrior Mages for thousands of years, since nothing short of the gods themselves could so assuredly immortalize the lucky scholar.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

Now that was just a fun read. Thanks Armifer.

Nikpack

Huh, interesting stuff. Glad to see some stuff being written for the guild.

I may be a little rusty on my WM lore, but it looks like you're taking a relatively significant departure from the old ideas. I suppose thats not a bad thing since a lot of the guild could probably use a reboot, although I have become somewhat accustomed to the lore thats been talked about previously.

If I'm not mistaken (and this may be contradicted by items or stories in game that I haven't read in a while), the way it has been talked about in the past placed the relationship more like a plus sign rather than a star.

Basically fire/water opposed each other, air/earth opposed each other, and aether/electricity opposed each other. The basic four had a relatively straightforward relationship in that their planes basically never touched except in what they did to the plane of abiding. Aether in this model pulled the elements together, and electricity was what pushed them apart. Basically, there was a balance of forces there that naturally resulted in an equilibrium of what we see in the plane of abiding. Without aether, the elements would somehow unravel based upon the expelling force of electricity.

Essentially, each of the four basic elements would represent one of the ends of the plus sign, while aether would likely represent the arms of the plus sign trying to pull the elements together, and electricity would be a ring around the outside that is trying to push them apart (or swap aether and electricity depending on which you feel better represents pulling and which pushing).

I guess I'm not overly attached to this model, but like I said it is more or less what I've gotten used to. It just seems to conflict with where this is going in that you now took away the aether/electricity opposition. I guess that is all taken up into the whole 'theres more models than mages and basically everyone is just speculating' portion you noted at the top though. I'm interested to see where all this goes.

The whole thing to me has somewhat of a string theory feel to it in that there are 'rolled up' dimensions/planes that have properties that impact the world we know but aren't necessarily fully developed spatial dimensions in the way the familiar three/four are. Even the speculation of having more dimensions/planes and the debate of how many there actually are seems to allude to the whole string theory/M-theory side of real life physics. It is an interesting way to take things.

I'm guessing that this will have an impact on the WM permanently learned sorceries? One of the themes of sorcery seems to be controlling things that you can't fully see and aren't fully natural. These 'higher elements' seem like they may fit that bill. I could very well see our new sorcery involving attempts to access these new elements through other inter-mana combinations. For instance, blackfire may just be a mix of fire, holy mana, and an electrical bridge to whatever 'higher level' contains the new element with blackfire attributes. Similarly electricity I would imagine could act as bridge for the other elements to access their higher elements (which just as blackfire consumes rather than burns, I would imagine these other higher elements would share thematic similarities to their basic elements but functionally be significantly different). Am I on track with where you're going with this, or am I way off base?

Will you be going back to rework some of the guild to fit this new idea? For instance fissure has some messaging that seems to conflict with the 'no spatial dimensions' aspect of this new lore. As an example, the water fissure indicates that there are sounds of rain against water, sounds of waves crashing, and water pouring out. I suppose there may be explanations for all of this. It could be explained away by saying that the spell itself provides a micro-space within which those aspects of water manifest as the nature of the water plane crashes up against the spell pattern. Theres also the thought that conjuring of any kind to some degree forces aspects of each plane to bleed into each other. In this case perhaps the spatial dimensions of the plane of abiding are bleeding into the water plane, while the mana and water itself to some degree is bleeding into the plane of abiding.

>The air is fire; gravity is fire; north is fire; the force that holds your atoms together is fire. It is deadly in its irrationality: anyone brave enough to venture across the planar void is likely to die of some bizarre cessation of their vital functions rather than being burnt.

A couple of nitpicks about this. I get what you're saying about the very nature of things changes in that they follow the rules/physics of the plane they're in rather than just being a firey version of the world we know. However, things like gravity to my understanding already have 'mana wavelengths' of their own and thus to me it would seem they'd have planes of their own. Basically, it would make more sense to me that on the huge Venn diagram of planes, there would be places where the gravity plane touches the fire plane, and places it doesn't; also there would be places that the plane of probability touches the fire plane and the gravity plane, as well as places it doesn't. Of course, without spatial dimensions some of that no longer really makes sense. I'm not sure what to make of that at the moment I suppose.

Second is more of a personal view on things that I don't think has ever realy been fleshed out. The concept of atoms. I personally don't really like the idea of there being atoms as we think about them in real life in the game. The nature of matter seems to not follow this given the way magic works. I've come up with some ideas regarding this, but I'm sure they'd probably end up falling into that same 'theres more models than mages and basically everyone is just speculating' part of your post again. However I think I'll throw it out there anyway:

For a while, I've basically had my character of the opinion that there are particles of sorts making up everything. However the nature of these particles were essentially the model I listed above, where every 'atom' has an aether base, the four elements orbiting that, and electricity pushing them apart. In this model, the balance of aether/electricity would determine which element is dominant. Thus in a river, you have a bunch of atoms where water has somehow taken control (somehow they're tied more to the plane of water) and thus the atom takes on those characteristics. When you burn a log, you're in actuality changing the balance of this battle from earth to fire.

In essence, each atom consists of six miniature fissures tied to their respective planes. In the same way that a normal fissure spell can be attuned to a particular plane, each atom takes on those aspects. In this model, the fissure spell doesnt actually create a hole so much as it changes the balance of the elements in one atom. Basically, by adjusting the aether in an atom the spell allows the balance to get WAY out of control and the miniature fissure that is the atom stretches to reveal a macro-sized hole with whatever element the aether/electricity balance was shifted in (as chosen by the mage when the spell was cast).

Also in this model the differences in materials would be explained away as either differences in the vibrations of the miniature earth fissure aspect of atoms (or possibly different gasses potentially being different wavelengths/vibrations of air) or the interaction between the 'pure earth' aspects of each element (ie the elements don't necessarily change but their interaction does). These are just two possible explanations of what seperates dirt from kertig.

Additionally, in this model the elemental planes wouldn't necessarily have atoms but rather just the blob of essence that they are (and all the micro-sized holes to whatever planes they are connected to; that is to say whatever planes do have 'atoms' such as the plane of abiding). Another implication of this is that going to these other planes would essentially make your atoms (the mini-fissures to the other planes) try to resort themselves. If you go to the plane of fire, the water fissure aspect of your atoms would try to leave (and really anything not firey). The fire aspects may or may not remain as it would essentially be a hole to itself. You could explain this away by saying it somehow gets 'snagged' on the plane of abiding and thus it loops space around. Any elemental plane traveler would then have to somehow 'snag' all of the aspects of the elements in the atoms that make up their body to the plane of abiding so that they don't get expelled (as would be the natural reaction of the plane).

Anyway, it was just a personal idea that I can't obviously expect anyone else to know or adhere to, but it was based on the old model that used to be talked about so I thought I'd share it.

For a while I had thought about writing a number of in game books regarding this since until now it was just a hodgepodge listing of things said by GMs and players over the years. I thought it might be fun to write some books from some 'research society' that explains the nature of things for initiates and some more higher level theories about matter and mana in general, but I guess I'll wait and see where you take this first.

Overall, I like what you're doing, but I think it will take some getting used to for some of us that have been with the guild for over a decade. I'm interested to see how this will get reflected in magic theory of Magic 3.0 and any changes to spells you make.


-Gandoloth

neat! thanks for that.

I also like blaming bards for writing bad history when we rewrite lore/magic/history.


_________________________________

An old cranky ogre with no legs says, "Naarg wives all this Naarg wives now."

>>I also like blaming bards for writing bad history when we rewrite lore/magic/history.

"Never let the Truth get in the way of a good story."

Killing you softly with his song,
- Stormsinger Shavay

---

Faerie tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know dragons exist. Faerie tales tell children that dragons can be killed.
- G.K. Chesterton

>>Particularly the idea of no-space planes and the Elemental Plane of Electricity being a screwball came from preliminary talks with Zeyurn about where we'd like to start laying out plot hooks.

>>Another thing that will come up soonish (during the M3.0 rewrite, if nothing else) is Aether got a more concrete definition of what it is and what it can do.

I can't wait to hear more about this.

>>the classical idea of atoms (bear in mind we've been using that term for over 2,000 years) is fine in DragonRealms.

Mostly it is just a thought I have when I hear the word with repect to the game. I wasn't so much at odds with the concept not being old enough, or that there are some sort of building blocks that make up matter (even I ended up working something like that into my character's understanding of the lore as described) but more with just the general layout of the elements fitting this model.

The very existence of aether throws things for a loop (if we're going to also admit to the existence of space and time and perhaps space-time). Also, if we're going to define the world in terms of a handful of elements as the fundemental foundation of matter instead of a periodic table worth of building blocks then we're essentially saying things are pretty drastically different than the real world. Something about these elements comes together to form a world relatively familiar to what we know in real life (with obviously whatever fantasy world spins it has). Essentially I think you got what I was saying with this statement:

>>Talking about strong and weak forces, electrons, etc. wouldn't fly, but the notion that there are invisible building-blocks of matter called atoms is entirely appropriate for the pesudo-time period.

I guess my aversion to the concept mostly comes from me envisioning most people not making this extra step to seperate the word from the real world (although admittedly, in the grand scheme of things it is a game and probably doesn't matter).

I would like at some point for you to flesh out the nature of matter (or at least the War Mage take on it) to basically describe what exactly it is that makes the building blocks and laws of nature come together to form the world we know. Honestly, if you don't end up doing this, I may end up trying to write an in game book on the topic (likely from the angle of "here are a bunch of theories based on what we know now but we don't have a really solid idea yet").

Fun stuff. I look forward to seeing where this all goes.


-Gandoloth

>>Also, if we're going to define the world in terms of a handful of elements as the fundemental foundation of matter instead of a periodic table worth of building blocks then we're essentially saying things are pretty drastically different than the real world. Something about these elements comes together to form a world relatively familiar to what we know in real life (with obviously whatever fantasy world spins it has). Essentially I think you got what I was saying with this statement:

>>>>Talking about strong and weak forces, electrons, etc. wouldn't fly, but the notion that there are invisible building-blocks of matter called atoms is entirely appropriate for the pesudo-time period.

Rather than working bottom-up and applying these mystical elements to create the entire world, I think if one takes a top-down approach where they define a world with the forces that we currently understand in real life (string-theory, strong and weak forces, electrons, etc.) and then use this magical lore to explain the things that certainly don't exist (magic, extraplanar dimensions, demons, armadillos of unusual size, things like that), everything fits logically.

We as players can imagine a world where electrons exist; we just can't talk about them IG because characters do not have that technology yet.

Then again, a character can believe anything they want.

Nikpack