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Author Topic: LOO musings of a Mad Hatter 1: Geography of the Multiverse  (Read 2606 times)

MadHatter3

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LOO musings of a Mad Hatter 1: Geography of the Multiverse
« on: August 18, 2021, 07:22:38 AM »
LOO musings of a Mad Hatter 1: Geography of the Multiverse

Just Joined this Forum, Longtime lover of Amber and GM, I also loves Logsas and LOO – just didn’t' get to run games with them yet.
However, I am planning a one on one LOO campaign for my Wife, and being doing a lot of thinking about the world. I have started to wright down stuff for myself mainly, and thought maybe I will share some of my thoughts, resources and extended lore decisions in this Forum.

I will mention that English is not my native language, so I have to rewrite my notes in English in order to share them with you (please be kind to my misspellings and other mistakes)

So First thing: Geography of the Multiverse
It was clear to me I wanted to able to understand how the multiverse is structured, broadly speaking, and also to try and understand the geography of things, I went through several different ideas but ended up with this version.
First Age:
The multiverse was split between three basic elements and power centers: Earth (Gaea) Uranus (Sky) and Pontus (Water).
Second Age:
Cronus restructured things so now there were 4 basic elements – he split the sky element to two: Air and Fire, thus diminishing what was the strongest Element.
He then had the multiverse ordered in 4 Axis: North (Air), South (earth and the land of the dead), East (Fire), and West (Water)*1. In the middle of the multiverse at the meeting of all Axis roads was Mount Othris – that drew power from its special position and had Authority over the 4 Axis.
 
*1: Japet Rules the West Axis but Oceanus Was giving control of the seas. To solve this for myself I decided Cronus was most afraid of Japet's potential as a usurper so it pleased him to weaken him a bit by making Oceanus his Vassal. Also he still controlled the Western Road. 

Thirs Age:
Zeus returned the Multiverse in to a 3 center structure (However he couldn't really return Fire and Air to become one they were already defined and Zeus never knew the Multiverse as it was before the Element of Sky was Split. Therefore, Olympus is associated Air and Fire, Atlatis with Water, and The Underworld with Earth*2. The Current order looks like a triangle With each Primal Realm at one end (you can look at it from any angle but for our discussion I'll assume Olympus is on top, Atlantis in the right corner and The Underworld in the left).
 *2: the meaning of the association of the elements to the worlds near them can be physical worlds near Atlantis have more Water, but also metaphorical in whatever Element Symbolism or personal associations the GM makes to each Element. The purpose is mainly to give inspiration when designing and especially improvising new worlds.

Now I was pleased with this basic idea of the triangle, I then wanted to start placing known worlds on this Triangle and since in this version the primal realms are very distant from each other it seemed reasonable to put Classical Earth at the Center. I then decided that in the previous order Classical Earth was an unimportant world (and that is why Zeus was hidden there) but since Zeus grew up there it became the center of the Multiverse.

Now the road system lends itself more to Geographical thinking an mapping of worlds and their distance from each other, so I wanted to have some reference points that the gods might use to describe certain areas. I started with Splitting the triangle in half, and decided that the worlds on the right side were more Air themed and on the left more Fire. I then thought creating zones divided by interaction of the 3 primal Worlds and how dominant they were. So I wrote nest to Olympus zone OA on one side and OH on the other (meaning it was influenced by a combination of Olympian themes with one of the other two is a lesser influence. In the end I split the Multiverse to 13 zones:
 
(I tried to add a basic drawing here of the triangle but couldn't - will add it as a jpg attachment. The triangle is supposed to be perfect and symmetrical more or less, although not all zones are the same size with the center zones supposing to be smaller.)

Now obviously there are no physical boundaries it's more a social references point between World walkers that evolved. It was clear I couldn’t' keep the ugly letter initials as names and so I named each zone so it would feel natural when NPC's talked about worlds:
O, A and H: are small areas with only the worlds that are directly connected to the Primal worlds.
O: Sky Worlds or Sky Zone
A: Water Worlds or Water Zone
H: Earth Worlds or Underearth Zone
OH, OA, AO, AH, Ho and HA: are the biggest zones that are always connected to two primal realms. (the third realm still has roads in that zone, but it will have less worlds conneted to it's Road relative to zones that are connected to it).
OH: Light Worlds or Light Zone
OA: Aire Worlds or Air Zone
AO:  Wind Worlds or Wind Zone
AH: Mud Worlds or Mud Zone
HO: Fire Worlds or Fire Zone
HA: Groundwater Worlds or Groundwater Zone
OHA, OAH, HAO, AHO: the smallest zones but with a lot of roads, in the center connecting these 4 zones and all roads is Classical Earth.
OHA: Mist Worlds or Mist Zone
OAH: Storm worlds or Storm Zone
HAO: Dark worlds or Dark Zone
AHO: Steam world or Steam Zone

Examples of placings I made: The Pillars of Heaven – Air Zone, True Delphi - Mist Zone, Arcadia – Storm zone.
I initially called the Storm zone the Wild zone (which sounds much better), I thought the gods probably named these zones after an important world in that area. so Wild Zone because of Arcadia and then maybe the Prophecy worlds after Delphi, but then it started to bother me that most of the names I came up with had a nature or Elemental theme and these names didn't. Therefore, I decided to change it to an all-elemental theme for now.

For me this basic order really helped to start invent new worlds and place them in different sections of the multiverse. Mind you this is just a working draft, so it might change.
Hope I managed to convey my ideas clearly enough, please feel free to ask questions I would love some feedback, and I'll be posting more soon.

Mad Hatter.



zircher

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Re: LOO musings of a Mad Hatter 1: Geography of the Multiverse
« Reply #1 on: August 18, 2021, 09:55:48 AM »
Sounds like a fun structure, thanks for sharing.
You can find my solo Tarot based rules for Amber on my home page.
http://www.tangent-zero.com