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I guess I need to reread some old stuff. Things actually haven’t changed.
At it’s simplest level (as the gods/demons know it)
The multiverse contains the Material Planes & their associated Etherial Planes, Elemental Planes, Demi-Elemental Planes, Outer Planes, Limbo, Purgatory, Abyss.
The “Planes of Man/Elf/Orc” aka Midgard, the Material Planes are a collection of material universes each with different laws of physics/magic/etc.
What Astlanian’s call the localverse is a single universe, same timeline. All the “planes” or “worlds” within the localverse are different planets in different (presumably) star systems (could be in the same one). Therefore the laws of magic/physics/etc are the same on all of the worlds, and while exact spells for doing stuff may differ, that’s because of history/culture, not any law of nature. Thus whatever works on one world will work on the other.
The people on individual worlds do not necessarily know this though. They do know that the spells to get there are a bit different, but not radically different from traveling to a world in a different universe.
You cannot however use world hopping spells to change your timeline from with your own universe. You would have to use a time travel sort of spell. It’s sort of a quantum frequency thing.
It is, however possible to go to other timelines in other “distant” universes. The more distant, the more timeline options are available, thus people from Astlan can get to multiple versions of Earth, as long as they are very stable/long lasting timelines. It is very hard to get get to the less stable timelines, and/or more accurately it’s not safe because if you enter an unstable timeline/alternate version and it collapses back onto its major timeline, you could get edited out. (unless you are a singular being–see below)
Ouch.
Can gods do this with relative impunity? Some can. Not all, but some.
Now Astlan and other worlds in it’s localverse are a bit perverse because they have a very strong history of interacting with beings from the Abyss and Outer Planes.
The more a universe’s main timeline interacts with “singular beings” the fewer alternate timelines there actually are. I.e. gods and demons, at least powerful ones, tend to collapse timelines.
In a sense, you could say that the arrival of singular beings within a universe acts as a “measurement” of that universe and thus the timeline becomes defined/known. All the ifs/ands/buts/might have beens get collapsed to the version the singular being goes to.
One of the things the appendices talks about a bit is how when an individual from one timeline visits say “the abyss” all versions of his/herself are temporarily collapsed to the one in the Abyss. When they leave and return to the material plane, they are reexpanded. This tends to explain near-death experiences and such in many cases.
So, when a singular being visits a plane, you tend to get the reverse effect.
Which is why I long ago swore off time travel as the “solution” to Rupert’s parentage. Nope, not going to happen.
Trig is from Gormegast, it’s a fairly mana rich technology universe and they get a fair number of dimensional hoppers, much like Astlan. Same with Visteroth.
So there are not that many “alternate timelines”
As a rule, the gods tend to be much more active on mana rich worlds where magic does function in some form or the other. Simply because it’s easier to screw with them. They have their pools, etc. But working in mana poor worlds is sort of like needing to have a mana spacesuit.
Note Sammael’s thoughts on his battle with the Demiurge.
So…long story short, the less mana rich worlds tend to have more alternate timelines as the gods show up less often.
Now, back “in the old days” Earth had fewer timelines as well. It used to have a much better mana supply (the Demiurge has been sort of hoovering it up) In those days, the Greek, Egyptian and other gods were far more active; but that basically started dying off post Ragnarok; levels started to decrease and gods sort of started losing active interest. Therefore more bifurcations happened and were able to stabilize.
That being said, it was never anywhere near as mana rich as full magic worlds, in large part due to the laws of physics for that universe. this is where the Lords of Law start coming into play. The higher tech worlds tend to be closer to “Law” where as the magical worlds are closer to “Chaos”
Actually, some healers (specifically animage healers and the priests of healing gods like Hendel–a healing god) would probably know about bacteria.
Not sure other clerics would, they have very straightforward rituals that they learn, much like wizards. So it’s very much a ‘canned’/’miracle’ approach. They would not need to know. But they might have different rituals for viral vs bacterial symptoms? Maybe? Depends on the god I suppose.
Druids? The animistic/animage like ones, probably do know because they would heal like an animage healer.
Priests of Healing gods, like Hendel, I assume study medicine and healing in great depth, so I would suspect they would understand the difference between viral and bacterial infections.
Trained/experienced animage Healers would know given the way they work. They would be able to scan the body for “foreign animus” and should be able to detect it. Think back to Maelen on the ship doing healing; that is how they work at a very microscopic level. Very much like Deryni healing in Katherine Kurtz’ books.
Most likely brain damage from being older than Tizzy.
Will investigate, will thank when addressed. If don’t see thanks before too long, scream.
[quote=Iume;4263]
This seems like Tom’s interpretation of what the D’Orcs told him about fighting on Nysegard, but did they really “worry” about things like politics, diplomacy, and peace when NOT on Nysegard? It implies they did.Also, wishy-washy not wishy washy.[/quote]
Yes, I think that is a very good point. It needs to be more clear cut. The orcs do not care about diplomacy, they hate it in fact. They do care about politics because as they see it, politics is a tool used by the other side to try to hem them in.
Let me look more into the timing of the Nysegard adventure. I believe this is after a couple oaths on Talarius’ part. At one point, Talarius has basically agreed to the rules of Hostage and in medieval sense, that means he won’t try to escape.
Tom, of course, knows that Talarius can’t escape on Nysegard, there is no where for him to go, there are no Tiernonites on the Isle of Doom; but as far as “contacting Tiernon” part–not sure that it didn’t just slip his mind. He really is not used to clerical types and their relationship to their gods. And even from what he does know, Talarius is a warrior, not a cleric, so he probably really didn’t put all the pieces together.
The thing to remember is that Tom is overwhelmed and quite frankly Talarius is as much a pain in the ass as anything else. Despite what others might think, he only abducted Talarius on the spur of the moment to “teach him a lesson”
However, this has been brought up a few times, so I should probably put more of Tom’s thinking in there.
Tactically, from the point of view of a true Demon Prince, allowing Talarius out into Nysegard would be a huge mistake. In theory, Talarius could call down an avatar right to the isle of Doom.
Now, in point of fact, he can’t, because if he could, Hilda etal would just pop up on the Isle of Doom, grab him and go. But Tom doesn’t know this.
The big thing is that Talarius is not a priest, he is not an illuminary, and they can’t get a good lock on him like they could a priest in Astlan or even one in the Citadel. They just know he is somewhere on Nysegard. Also his prayers are being routed through Astlanian saints and avatars, not anyone from Nysegard, and even if it was, none of the saints/avatars of Nysegard are that familiar with the Isle of Doom.
So basically, the avatars would be flying blind/taking pot shots trying to find Talarius on the Isle of Doom and its infested with D’Orcs and orcs and others, so it’s a bit risky.
I think i need to explain this some more in the scene where they locate him on Nysegard.
Does he say that someplace already?
This is why beta demons are so important…I have trouble remember what has “currently been said” and what “has not”
Yes….it was you!
It is your fault!!!!
Because of this the book will not come out until July 2017!!!!!
:d/
Just joking. Obviously. July 2017 is when I am supposed to get CoA:ITW out the door…
Might need some sentence editing there, it does look confusing now that you point it out.
He’s talking about a demon who took Tom up on his offer to flee to the Hinterlands/leave rather than swear allegiance. The cold spell was the big freeze that Tom did to kill the KoC.
He may very well have done that, you know special forces training and such. There is the problem of not being able to breath safely most places in the Abyss of course but…Vaselle is working on that with his cold amulets, presumably they could have had something like those in the past.
But one thing to remember is that “back in the day” the orcs were generally much tougher/more war like, at least than what we see in Astlan today. At various times on various worlds, the orcs were at perpetual war, like in Warcraft and WarHammer. Just not now, at least not in most of the localverse.
They actually are doing much better in the universe where Trig Bioblast lives. They have a large interstellar empire that they have to defend from various enemies, including the Alfar, and many other races. They have lots of nasty worlds.
this is really weird, starting with this post, the forum started showing my username rather than my DisplayName on everything.
I went in and turned “Use Displaynames” off, saved, turned it back on and saved.
Everywhere else seemed to go back to Displayname except this one post. or I think the one post.
Not that I mind showing my username, but I do The Author Guy to be clear that I am me….
Yeah, these guys are rather heartless bastards in that respect…
I think part of it is that for the D’Orcs at least, they are very accustomed to Orcus (and presumably) Tom having the answers/being in charge/the man with the plan. To them, he is a father figure, you don’t typically presume to counsel your father. Plus orcs and thus D’Orcs have never been that good with touchy feely shit.
Phaestus and Volund? they should no better, but one is a god and the other is an immortal curmudgeon…
For Tom, one big thing is that while “Ok, I’m running around with people from ADD ‘Deities and Demigods'” but “Hey, I’m actually a guy from the Monster Manual!” is very hard to swallow. Of course, we note that Asmodeus was so happy to be found in the ADD Monster Manual that he created a form to match the picture.
Something, sort of like that will happen…
Just not quite so easy breezy, not if the Dark Apostle has the last word (he’s long disintegrated but…his work will live on!)
I played with this a bit after your last comment…not working any better.
I might just go for pure white unadorned text if I have to, but even so not sure that will work everywhere.
I almost need to custom color the text as the background varies (i.e. have the text change color) That will give people a headache, but looks cool from my limited tests.
Yeah my text is from a rather funky program that is only barely still available.
It was Ulead PhotoImpact X3 which I’ve used for decades. Ulead got eaten by Corel who sold it for a while and then sort of discontinued it, but allowed another company to repackage and sell it, and it’s sold but no new work has happened on it for years.
For certain things I like it much better than Photoshop. In particular it’s funky text effects.
I wrote a reply to your post with the solidified background, and the server decided to do windows updates and reboot at that moment. I had not realized it had been set to do that….so lost the post.
So a solid background will be the last resort, given that I paid 60% more for the wrap around cover I’d love to use it….
However, the real reason for the wrap around cover is for Facebook ads/posts. Those have to be landscape and so portrait images all get cropped unless you do sidebars.
