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#1 saaj Sep 24, 2009 12:38:56

The Beryl universe is a cosmology that can easily be adopted for use with D&D, Pathfinder, and virtually any other game world with minor alterations, since it details the composition of the world on a level not addressed by most of these systems. MANA CYCLES To understand the different 'layers' into which the universe of Beryl is divided, we must first understand how it functions in terms of energy consumption. When a creature dies in the Middle Lands, which are the equivalent of Earth, its life energies (but not necessarily its soul) pass into the Upper Lands. This life energy is converted into mana which fuels the natural processes of the Upper Lands. In this way, the Middle Lands 'feed' the Upper Lands and are in turn 'fed' by the Lower Lands. The Lower Lands feed the Middle Lands and are in turn fed by the Upper Lands. This is simply the way the Material Plane functions; for the sake of D&D and other systems that rely on the existence of the Ethereal Plane and other such layers of existence, those are still in place as normal. ALLIANCES In ancient times, most creatures had no idea there were worlds beyond their own; the closest any mortals came to an understanding of the worlds' structure was an acknowledgement of the afterlife. Nature ebbed and flowed, sometimes generous, sometimes unforgiving. Beyond the level of curiosity normal for sentient beings, mortals did not question these fundamental functions of their worlds. As civilizations rose and fell, however, great mystics and scholars began to piece together an understanding of the world beyond their perception. In time, through a combination of luck, miracles, and methods lost to us, mortals bridged the gap between the worlds and came to understand the nature of the mana cycles. Naturally, all mortals want to live forever in beautiful worlds. So it came to be that whenever a world experienced a famine, natural disaster, or other irregular flow of mana, its inhabitants embarked on crusades against the creatures of the world that fed theirs, claiming their lives to bring prosperity back to their own homelands. These vicious cycles continued for eons, but slowly, steadily, alliances were forming. No one can say for sure why these pacts formed the way they did, as it could have just as easily gone the other way, but as it so happened, large groups of influential mortals from the Middle and Upper Lands came to a mutually-beneficial truce. The premise was simple: the Middle Lands woulds support the prosperity of the Upper Lands to the greatest degree possible, through sacrifices both material and spiritual. This would increase the lifespans of the Upper Lands' creatures, who had already declared an internal cease-fire and developed into a peaceful super-civilization. The significant decrease in death rates in the Upper Lands would starve the Lower Lands of mana, weakening their armies and making it easy for the Middle Lands' defenders to fight them off. Often, the creatures of the Upper Lands would invest some of their bounty back into the Middle Lands, to bolster their defenses against the ever-desperate armies of the Lower Lands and sometimes just as a token of good will. In time, the creatures of the Middle Lands came to see the Upper Lands' dwellers as powerful beings of goodness and prosperity, and the Lower Lands' invading armies as evil, destructive agents of chaos and ruin. Physically weaker than the inhabitants of the Middle Lands, and virtually insignificant in comparison to the well-nourished beings of the Upper Lands, the Lower Lands' denizens survive largely through cunning, exceptional violence, and a general disregard for personal safety. If they were not twisted and evil initially, they certainly are now; starvation, desperation, and the loss of everything once loved and lived for will do that to just about any creature, now matter how 'good'. PHYSICAL DESCRIPTIONS The Middle Lands Standing on the ground, the Middle Lands look and feel exactly like Earth. Looks can be deceiving. The Middle Lands are not a sphere, but rather two slightly concave discs of land whose edges you can literally fall off. When you look up, you aren't seeing a sky; you're looking up at the ocean of the other disc. Each disc is so massive, and so great is the distance between them, that even the largest of continents are imperceptible specs against the vast ocean that forms the sky. At the center of each disc is a gaping hole, which focuses scattered starlight from the underside of the disc into one massive beam. This is the 'sun'; each disc's sun shines onto the other disc's surface as they slowly move past each other. This is the day cycle. When they are fully past each other, they move past each other in the opposite direction, with their backs facing each other this time and their surfaces facing out toward the stars. This is the night cycle. Each disc has its own cloud layer; these layers cling to the surface of each world and replenish the oceans as they empty out into the void at the edges of the discs. During the day, the cloud layers interact, while at night, each layer follows its own disc out to face the stars. Each disc also has its own moon; the two moons alternate cycles (while one is full, the other is new, etc.). The moons sometimes follow the surface briefly into the day, but generally stay on the star side of each disc regardless of which way its surface is facing. The cloud layers are a spirit world of sorts; mastery of the clouds is what originally led the mortals of the Middle Lands to bridge the gap. Each moon is a spiritual portal of sorts, allowing travel between the Lands. Gravity always pulls toward the discs, so the underside of the discs are generally not inhabited by animals. Plants and creatures which can cling to the underside thrive here, seeming bizarre and unearthly compared to the creatures of the surface. Many spirits and other supernatural beings not bound by the effects of gravity also seek refuge on the undersides. The underside of each disc houses a massive 'lens' of unknown material that focuses the starlight behind it into the beam perceived by surface dwellers as the sun. The hole in the center of each disc, and the lens itself, is incalculably hot, and water turns to steam near it. It is theoretically possible for adventurers with proper methods of resisting the heat to approach it at 'sunset', climb down through the hole, and emerge on the underside of the disc before being instantly disintegrated by 'sunrise', but no one is that crazy. The edges of the discs end in waterfalls that plunge over into the starry skies below, but layers of multicolored mists form a deadly illusion. The sea seems to stretch on endlessly to the horizon, but these are merely vapors. Beautiful hues of blue, purple, red, and orange constitute these mists; they are what cause the sky to change color as it slowly yields to the night sky. The night sky itself is merely a canvas stretched across the burning light of Eternity, encasing the world. Think of the discs floating around each other inside a tennis ball filled with small holes. The holes are stars; light from the 'outside' (Eternity) shines in through these holes, and is focused into sunlight by the lenses on the discs (the light of the moons is of a different nature, and not directly related to the suns'). Any creatures unfortunate enough to fall off the surface of a disc into the night sky land on this 'canvas' and slide along it into one of the star-holes, instantly reduced to nothing by the light of Eternity. There are rumors of lost civilizations that have somehow anchored themselves to the canvas and draw sustenance from the light of Eternity itself, but that's absolutely ridiculous. Scholars agree that the moons somehow resupply the clouds with water, as it would otherwise fall off the edges of the discs and empty into Eternity. No one can say for certain how this occurs, even after having bridged the gap between the worlds. The Upper Lands The Upper Lands have no land mass; they are comprised of a massive, infinitely deep ocean and a massive, infinitely high sky. All creatures of the Upper Lands are marine (this does not necessarily mean they breathe water or can't leave it), while their spirits reside in the skies above their ocean. At the center of the ocean is an ever-churning whirlpool that somehow pushes all sea water outward instead of pulling it in. Overhead, an ever-howling hurricane rages, its eye aligned with the eye of the whirlpool. The light of Eternity shines in a brilliant shaft from the eye of the storm down onto the world; the portal to the other Lands lies within the eye of the whirlpool. At the edges of the ocean, gravity reverses and pours in waterfalls up into the sky; this reversal transcends the infinite depths in the form of a mighty current. There, it slowly, steadily vaporizes and falls back to the ocean via rain from the hurricane. Most of the creatures the inhabitants of the Middle Lands interact with dwell near or on the surface of the ocean. Very few mortals regularly venture into the upper cloud cover or beyond, and even fewer stray into the unending depths far below. This is not to say there aren't vast underwater civilizations, just that they are all buoyant to some degree, and there is no ocean floor to speak of. Generally, the mortals of the sea are devoted to an understanding of 'how?' and pursue the sciences with great zeal. Their knowledge of ocean currents, weather patterns, and various beautiful phenomena that characterize the Upper Lands is a point of pride for these mortals. The spirits in the clouds above tend to concern themselves more with 'why?', focusing on religious studies. Though they don't have much tangible progress to show for their pursuits, you'd be hard-pressed to find a mortal scholar who wouldn't give up all his worldly possessions for a brief conversation with one of these beings. There is no way to penetrate the powerful, fast-moving curtain of waterfalls surrounding the Upper Lands; the water falls infinitely upward, and there is no way to discern where it actually vaporizes and falls back to the ocean. It is a subject of heated debate among the scholars of the Upper Lands whether there is any proof that it ever turns into the clouds above, or if these two elements are not directly related, much like the clouds and oceans of the Middle Lands. There are no 'stars' in the Upper Lands per se, but whenever it rains, the entire world goes dark and the eye of the hurricane casts its light through cloud patterns in beautiful arrays that appear to the creatures of the Middle Lands as some surreal combination of rainbows and aurorae. The Lower Lands The Lower Lands were once breathtaking, but eons of mana starvation have left this world barren and brittle. The Lower Lands are unique in that their portals and source of Eternity's light are both living things. Scarab-like creatures known as Holy Norths and Holy Souths are the lifeblood of the Lower Lands. Holy Norths are similar to fireflies, and emit the light of Eternity. Holy Souths are similar to butterflies, reflecting the light off their prominent wings. There are no day/night cycles in the Lower Lands, simply migrating swarms of Holy scarabs that travel in regular cycles around the world. The world itself is something like a ring with a single continuous surface (imagine looping a strip of paper to form a ring, but twisting it once so that instead of an inner and outer surface, there is one continuous surface). Gravity functions very oddly in the Lower Lands, with the ring always pulling inward toward itself, no matter which 'side' of it a creature is standing on. Once, a massive central river-ocean ran through the core of the ring, but it has since dried up almost entirely. Dense forests used to cover the ring's surface as well, the tallest trees on the 'inside' surfaces reaching past each other (this world is no smaller than the others, meaning these trees were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of MILES tall). Looking at it from a distance, it was impossible to tell the Lower Lands weren't a spherical world, due to the thick vegetation that entwined to create a biomass more dense than the world itself. Sadly, large skeletal husks of petrified trees and the indestructible carcasses of the Holy scarabs are all that remain of the world's former glory. Without the Holy Norths and Holy Souths to create and refract the light of Eternity, the Lower Lands are plunged in perpetual darkness. If mortals from the Middle Lands could see the skies of the Lower Lands, they would be thoroughly bewildered. Like the set of infinite reflections created by a pair of mirrors facing each other, those looking out from the ring see an infinite number of rings stretching into the distance. Oddly enough, those aren't different rings; they are actually looking at the other side of their own world. If a creature were to somehow jump off the surface of the ring and fly/fall towards another ring in the sky, all the creatures of the world would see him falling toward all the rings in all directions, and he would simply find himself on the other side of the ring. To put it in perspective, imagine blasting off in a shuttle from America, flying straight away from the Earth, and running nose-first into China on the same Earth. This bizarre property of the Lower Lands is the subject of much speculation among scholars of all worlds. The Outer Lands The mortals of the Middle Lands can, through death or other, less natural means, visit the Upper Lands or the Lower Lands. This should logically mean that mortals of the Upper Lands and Lower Lands can visit both other worlds as well, but this is not the case. There is something beyond both of them that mortals of the Middle Lands can not set foot in, the Outer Lands. This world does not seem to feed, or be fed by, any of the other worlds, but it stands between the Upper and Lower Lands. Mortals from both the Upper and Lower Lands can visit the Middle and Outer, but not each others' homelands. This world and the creatures that inhabit it are unlike anything else in the Beryl universe. Dragons hail from this far-flung world, and are somehow able to cross into any other world. Though little is known of these majestic and powerful beings, it seems that they are in fact refugees, fleeing from terrors so unyielding that even they are powerless in comparison. Though dragons are as varied as any other mortal creature, even the most righteous and benevolent of dragons knows it must retain an aura of power and respect to prosper among lesser mortals, and so none of them speak of the horrors that hunt them and drive them from their homelands. The Outer Lands are perhaps the most beautiful in the Beryl universe; at their core is a living 'star' that exudes a dim, moon-like light and rains life-giving water outward; all the dragons that pass into other worlds make some sort of pilgrimage to this star, leading scholars to believe it contains a portal like the moons of the Middle Lands. The entire star system is cloaked in an atmosphere created by the interaction of the star's rain and various 'moons'. Orbiting the star are 'planets', large solid masses sculpted by the winds into aerodynamic shapes like wings and corkscrews. Each of these planets is gigantic, most of them easily as large as the discs in the Middle Lands. Orbiting the planets are 'moons', which are actually small stars that emit the light of Eternity. The misty atmosphere pervading the star system is created when rain hits these moons and turns to steam. Day/night cycles on the planets are a thing of truly unearthly splendor; each planet's unique shape, combined with the trajectory of its moon(s), creates distinct patterns of light and darkness unevenly splayed across its surface(s). Like comets, the orbiting moons leave tails of flame as they meet resistance from the system's weather patterns, so sunsets are often marked by trails of fiery residue illuminating the surface long after the actual moon has 'set'. Little is known about any other inhabitants of the Outer Worlds, but it is clear enough that most of them are aerial creatures. Beyond the edges of atmosphere (dictated by the furthest reaches to which the star can propel its rain), there is an unending void. Peppering this void are stars (real stars, not the star-holes of the Middle Lands). For ages, dragons would stare longingly out into the sea of stars and wonder what lay beyond their own. It is believed that they had begun to venture forth with armor that would let them survive in the absolutely cold, airless void, but before they could make any real progress, something from that infinite darkness found them first. This is, in a nutshell, the Beryl universe. Personally, I feel unsatisfied with the Upper Worlds, and will probably be making some changes to make them more dynamic and varied. Please let me know what you think of Beryl; any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.