[Tizzy]

I think it’s really a question of how recent the splinter reality happened, and how different the alternate being was.

There are minimum resolution levels in splinter universes to which one can connect.

So you can’t connect to too close a splinter cell from the one in which you have an affinity. I.e. once you find a version of a plane, you nearly always end up going back to that plane since your splinter gets aligned to that splinter.

So, my guess would be that if you had two Earths, and a person born in 1990. Then 9/11/2011 had escalated to a nuclear war, changing things dramatically, after a period of time, say 10 years the divergence would be greater the resolution limit and you could could fetch someone from boths splinters.

This is just speculation on my part. I am not an expert. It’s a guess/theory.

[Tizzy]

Hi,

I was away for the last several days, a few of my friends had managed to overcome the bonds of their Accursed Masters and were throwing a Demon Free 4 All in Astlan, and they invited me to come help feast on the entrails, rip a few limbs, disembowel some servants and relatives, you know, standard party games.

So, I wasn’t responding properly to forum posts, I’ll get to them all but I’m still busy, getting through the leftovers from this last weekend, by which I mean a couple sons and daughters escaped and I’m tracking them down between forum posting sessions.

So, sorry for any delays, but Dutee calls…(Dutee is the name of one of my demon friends that threw the party)

Tizzy

[Tizzy]

Well, really only an Astlanian can “see” demons on the astral plane.

And then you’d probably need to be a wizard demon (not sure if there are priestly demons)

And any demon enslaving more demon’s would be something of a jerk. Further they’d just make them slaves/stooges.

Finally, I wouldn’t assume that some demons, like Exador haven’t actually done just that.

[Tizzy]

I suppose it depends on what you mean by anarchic.

Oorstemoth provides a fairly plebian/democractic sort of hell. Meaning, the crap you have to put up with is pretty similar regardless of your social rank, class, wealth, power. The bureaucracy effects everyone one fairly evenly.

In the Abyss, I wouldn’t call things that stable. There are a lot of stalemates though. Lots of Mutual Assured Destruction. Paranoia, and the strong really take the vast majority of the cake, so to speak. It sucks to not be powerful in the Abyss.

However, to be powerful requires constant vigilance and paranoia because there is always someone out there waiting to take you out if you slip up even a hair. So I guess that’s not truly paranoia…

One of the reasons Boggy and I recommend newbies hang out in caves is so they can get their bearings before being thrust into full demon on demon politics and machinations. Personally, I have no patience for the crazy games these demons in the courts play.

[Tizzy]

They give me a headache.

[Tizzy]

Not completely sure I get the full gist of the question.

But, you find about every possible combination.

Most planes have a relatively flat ambient magic level. It may be high or low. Basically determing how powerfull and effect is, or how much work/effort it takes to produce the affect.

The lower level the plane, the more wizardry is required.

Some planes do have regions of magic concentractions, such as ley lines or other accumulator objects or races. Typically such concentrations or sparse regions seem to be caused by something (e.g. sentient actions in the past, or concentrations/formations of elemental presences etc)

[Tizzy]

=;
OMC: Oh My Concordenax.

Does someone have a god complex or what? Author Guy, you make Tiernon seem like a humble beggar on the street when it comes to ego.

Come off it! [-x

Tom has clearly established that he is experiencing reality, not a dream, not a book, none of that sort of thing.

And people think I’m crazy! TAG: You are the crazy one.

[Tizzy]

Yes, that is exactly true.

However, there are some gotcha’s. I think I mentioned this somewhere else, but finding it on the forum is painful.

The infinite worlds of maybe theory does apply, however, most alternate choices that people make turn out to be insignificant, and so while there might be a temporary alternate universe created, it quickly fades/collapses back into the dominant timestream.

For example: If on one day you decide to eat grapefruit for breakfast instead of your normal oatmeal, you might end up with two short timestreams where in one universe you had grapefruit but in the other you had your normal oatmeal.

In the long run, what you ate one time some time ago doesn’t really effect your destiny (unless it’s poisoned) so the alternate universes that were created merge. And even for more significant things events, most of smaller things get smoothed out, merged back into the main time stream.
(this is why, I mentioned somewhere else, memories are hazy and two different people can have two different memories of the same event sometimes it’s bad memory, sometimes it’s merged timestreams where one person’s preference was for the other timestream).

And these minor alternate timelines aren’t really accessible to people of other time streams, e.g. someone coming from Astlan. They can’t focus tight enough to “pick a time stream” they just get the largest/most major/primary stream).

Thus only major events that change a world’s destiny create true, long lasting branches in reality.

It’s only after two tightly related time streams have diverged sufficiently can an outsider truly see them as different planes.

So anyway, you note that early on, Boggy says “Oh, so you come from one of the Earth’s” by this he means one of several different variations of a world like ours. So in short, there are not an infinite number of alternate universes that are similar, but there are quite a few.

There are also lots of planes where the world we see isn’t an Earth. It’s an Astlan, or a Westeros, or Midgard or some Galaxy Far Far Away…

And in fact one confusing thing is that sometimes a traveler can think there are two different planes, but they are really just different planets in the same universe.

Inter dimensional travel is very tricky and hard to understand and figure out. And while the Astlanian’s are good at it, they have real limits, hence their myopic view of people from the Earths.

A large number of the demons in the Abyss are from an Earth. This is because it’s the Astlan like planes that tend to summon most of the demons, and these worlds are all just out of sync enough that they see people from Earths as demons.

All that being said…time does seem to be somewhat linear.

Almost all Earths are right about the same point in time. The more advanced Earths are generally the result of prior branches where technology leaped forward rapidly for some reason. E.g. the Alexander the Great’s dynasty lasted, or the Roman Empire continued or something similar.

So for example, a demon who came to Astlan from, I don’t know, say Ancient Egypt, has been here (The Abyss/Astlan) for about 3000+ years…depending on when in ancient Egypt they left.

[Tizzy]

This Monkey Paw guy sounds like a great Dungeon Master, or maybe a Djinn.

Either way, I’d like to meet him. Sounds like my sort of fellow.

Which book do you think is owned by Mr Monkey Paw? The book in the book, or the book this forum is about.

Of course, what if they are the same thing?

What if Lenamare’s book is actually: Demons of Astlan (The Complete Works, all 83 volumes)?

And thus by opening it, they will be able to read their own future and the future of their world, and that of the Abyss etc etc.

[Tizzy]

A short story?

You mean like less than 100,000 words right?

o:)

The Author Guy says he remembers the story. I of course, have never read it. I don’t even speak British, let alone read it. Boggy does though, maybe I should get him to read the story to me.

I thought monkey’s had little hands though? Not paws? Perhaps a wish gone wrong for the monkey turned his hands into paws?

Hmm…

:-k

[Tizzy]

Oh, I am very positive you have to fill out a LOT of forms in order to have a coupe, and call me paranoid, but I suspect it’s very hard to get all the paperwork done in order to mount an actually successful coupe.

I’m betting you’d think you’d fill out the forms then have the uprising, kill the current leaders and then…when it’s all done, discover that the paperwork was wrong, you were missing some approvals, probably the approval of someone you just killed.

So then you’d have to find a priest or necromancer and start resurrecting people to unwind the coupe, refill out the paperwork along with paperwork documented the failure of the first coupe, if you got that done, and you could get the approval of the officials you need to kill, so you could kill them, you could then start over.

However, my bet is that you’d then find some new flaw and have to re-unwind the second coupe, and what is the rule about time between failed coupe attempts? You need to make sure you abide by any legally valid “cooling off periods” etc.

Really, not sure it would be worth the effort.

[Tizzy]

I would have to completely disagree with rationalized away.

It is all a very intentional and when factoring in economics, quite logical and realistic.

First though: I want to point out that you are also failing to integrate the other races, some of which are very old, and who do trade with the humans.

Gnomes, Elves and Dwarves in particular. Very highly skilled craftsmen, with fairly stable cultures for long periods of time. Different races develop different things, some they sell, some secrets they reveal, others they keep for themselves. It’s a question of production capacity, time and money.
In particular fine metal work, glass work, jewelry etc. These guys produce lots of really great stuff, but they live in relative isolation from most humans, or at least their production facilities are. They produce this stuff for themselves, and their excess they trade/sell. The rich in the rest of the world get access to these high quality products, the poor do not. Acquisition and distribution of said merchandise is a huge issue on top of production capacity and excess stock.

Inconsistencies with who has what/old and new are easily understood in terms of trade. Astlan is not a utopia, there is a very real level of income/power inequality, and because travel and transportation is not democratized, the geographical scale on which this inequality persists is much shorter.

Those who have magic, have a lot of luxuries and “high magic tech” those without, can lead relatively primitive lives, very similar to medieval Europe.
Thus you see some huge differences like the ones you describe. There are very high tech things, but production and distribution are not democratized.

Most of Astlan is still feudal. In many ways it is an Ayn Rand paradise.

If you must compare to Earth, a better example might be the third world today. People in many countries don’t have indoor plumbing, but they can tweet and use twitter/facebook via cell phone, while squatting over a hole in the ground, and they don’t have TV in their homes but can go to a bar in town to watch the world cup on satellite TV.

Book making, book binding ehh…all comes down to making and reproducing books. Very easy to do with Sorcery and Alchemy. The actual hardest part is paper production, but that as you recall has been done on Earth for a couple thousand years. Some people do have movable type printing presses but it’s not that critical when you have mimeograph/xerox like capabilities.

Plate armor, chainmail etc are pretty good when you have magic to back them up and your primary weapons are swords etc. And I point out that Talarius’s plate armor is basically a space suit. It works very well against flame weapons and lots of other attacks (and is currently keeping him alive in the Abyss)

I don’t quite get your argument there, though, I have to admit. Have you looked at how modern soldiers dress? They wear a ton of armor, plate armor with Kevlar (similar purpose to chainmail) they just put clothes on the outside of the plates and the plates aren’t usually metal. Look at modern SWAT teams in large cities.

And yes, I can compare magical healing to surgical stitches. I did in my last post. Here’s the thing, if you have something that works very well (magical healing) traditional surgical techniques will be very primitive because there is no need to improve them. Stitching and normal medicine are only used when there is no priestly or magical healing around. Only poor people in backwaters need it etc. So therefore there won’t be a lot of advances in the science/techniques.

This is actually true for a lot of things in Astlan. Many things still seem backwater to you, because due to the existence of magic, those with access to it can use magic to do what they need done, there is no real incentive to advance more mundane things that the poor/magic poor people could use since the rich have a better solution at hand.

And when stuff trickles down to the poorer people? Why build land line phone infrastructure, just give people cheap cell phones to keep them happy. Sure 2G/3G Internet on a cell phone isn’t good, particularly for a computer, but without the land line structure for towers, it takes time to ramp 4G up. And even then those people aren’t going to get fiber optic speed ever. However, for now, they can marginally interact with the rest of the world.

The economic logic above is what leads to what you term as inconsistencies. Poor/selfish trade policies, no democratized transportation, isolated mass production centers/culture centers and a way for the oligarchs to get what they want with magic that they control and only “trickling down” some magic to others

I also think I did say that the cars really only function in the courts where the temperatures about half that of the rest of the Abyss? So alcohol is not a problem

You are hitting it on the head with the demons though. Think Mad Max, they don’t have the structure to make things, they steal, fix, jerry-rig etc. So it’s all a hodge podge. And they don’t share without getting something in return.

[Tizzy]

Yes, and they always remember what a great time they had, after that miserable experience was over.

I think humans, twisted creatures that they are, thrive on adversity.

Ever notice how many die very soon after retiring from their professions? They die of boredom. (Actually this is statistically true)

[Tizzy]

Yes, the only option is to move to the Abyss, take a job as a Demon and work hard to give humans what they want: strife, uncertainty, war.

I.e. Happiness.

I have to say it’s been very fulfilling for me.

[Tizzy]

That’s actually an interesting point, for some reason everyone is always interested in having Seers peer into the future.

I think this is because they “think” they know history. I also sincerely believe that humans like to forget history, so they can repeat it…like watching reruns.

Maelen would recognize him, primarily because he’s an official member and agent of the Society of Learned Fellows which was founded after the fall of the Anilords basically to make sure they never come back. Of course, by this point most people don’t even think the Society still exists. No one in Norelon has ran into anyone claiming to be a member for some time (remember animages are secretive by default, particularly after the Anilords–the Society is even more circumspect–and their membership is way down)

The Society is really only openly active in Etonia, they sort of hold it together and keep it from being overwhelmed by New Etonia (which is dominated by the Etonian Churches (Tiernon and his fellow Etonian Deities) and the Holy Etonian Emperor…HEE for short…”HEE is displeased with your actions.” etc.

And from devolving into chaos like Eastern Free Eton…

So, in short, it’s part of his job to be on the lookout for returning Anilords and such.

[Author]

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