Feb 14

Happy Valentines day!

On a completely unrelated note, here's the much postponed update:

Physics




Continental sized land masses are free floating in the sky, orbiting around the Core. The only real 'night' would be when the continents orbits would line up. As you get farther away from the core, it would get damper and damper, until fog gave way to the Deeps, the waters beyond the skies.

Gravity is a function of the fifth dimensions (the other four are left/right, up/down, forward/backward, less entropy/more entropy (time)). The various land masses create a fold in the space-time fabric, which gives us gravity. The shape of the gravity well is different than a planet's, and thus a different shaped land mass. This gravity well is strong for about a hundred miles, depending on the size of the layer, and acts to pull objects toward the layer that made it. So if you were traveling fast enough to break out of the gravity well, theoretically you could 'fall' into the deeps, if you missed all of the other continents.

You also could, in theory, walk all the way around a land mass. Practically, it's a good way to commit suicide because of the crosswinds at the edges of each continent that would blow you around and smash you onto the nightside. Also, even if you managed to get yourself onto the other side, you'd probably freeze to death. That said, four expeditions on different continents tried. Only one made it back with anyone alive. They told tales of an endless waste, snow, blocks of mercury, and cold. It took them a year to transverse it.

Orrery Spirits cheat their way around the escape velocity issue. They move by oscillating the fifth dimension around them, basically creating their own gravity well, and thus why skycraft based around Orrery Spirits (read: all of them) have their own gravity. However, their maneuverability and top speed are limited in a gravity well.



Most magic in the setting could be broken down into ritual, alchemy, runic, and harmonic. Harmonic relies on using sound waves to manipulate the space-time continuum by way of making the individual strings alter their vibration (fantastically applied string theory). Runic manipulation uses electromagnetic energy (light, usually in the visible spectrum) that's bent a specific shape (the runic symbol) to alter reality. Alchemy uses chemical energy to bend the strings of a substance to do things that can seriously warp the laws of physics. Ritual Magic uses a mixture of all three other disciplines to attract beings from dimensions far beyond ours to be contracted for services that aren't necessarily covered by the other thaumaturgies.

Here are the four Major cultures I've thought up so far:

The Khund: These pirates hail from a nightworld, a continent that's so close to the Core (the sun) the the lightside is utterly uninhabitable. Their civilization grew in the harshest wasteland populated by the most vicious and monstrous creatures, and now these not quite human creatures have been unleashed into the sky. They take the both the living and the dead, suck the water out of them, and drop them into a vat of alchemical rubber. This rubber makes the joints of the dessicated corpses usable for their foul necromancy to reanimate and control.

Bel Sara: The Bel Sarans are floraphibians- half plant, half ambphibian. They've taken to their verdant rain forest world and built a civilization out of the very trees themselves. The one thing Bel Sara has is a massive biodiversity, and the natives have certainly taken advantage of that. They use their alchemy to modify and create new organisms to fulfill their needs. They live in Giant Acacia trees, grow lampposts, and even modify their own bodies to further specialize in what they do.

Dalengard: Dalengard was once a large number of fairytale kingdoms, stuck in a conflict between the 'goodly' races and 'evil'. Then the Khund came in their burial ships. Millions died to Khundi blades and thaumaturgy. It took all of the races, goodly or not, standing unified to drive of the piratical scourge, and even then at a high cost. Now years later, Dalengard has united under the banner of the Concordat, a senate that runs their fledgling nation, trying to integrate the racial issues and still play on the international scale.

Pax Phaethusa: Pax Phaethusa stands for many things. Most people, when asked, would mention their capital, their moon that they've turned into a floating palace, city, university, and military base all rolled into one. They would also mention the legions of tortoise warriors with their great shields, the clans of eagle warriors who ride on the backs of the multicolored feathered snakes, the wolf clans who hunt through the night as though it were the light of day. They speak of crystal deathrays, and cities grown from jade. They would speak of the centers of learning and culture. But mostly they speak of a civilization at its peak.