Spheres of Existence That Definitely Exist


Palace of Tigers
Or the Palace of Palaces. Debate exists over the origin of the name. "Palace" understandably stems from the infinite expanse and multitude of palaces; you can travel for months through only richly stocked dining halls or pristine hedge mazes. Tigers could be a reference to the anointed semi-divine princes that squat in its halls like glorious warlords, battling across the solariums and through the chapels to assert their authority. Or it could be the suffusion of tigers.

Interesting fact: all tigers originate from the palace of tigers, you can tell the distance of its relation to that place by how verbal they are. The most remote examples hardly talk at all.

The Palace of Tigers is always very clean. Within hours of someone disturbing the decor it will be quietly tidied up by the discrete domestic staff that live in their own apartments across the sphere. These apartments are inaccessible because no one other than the servants can even see the entrances.

The servants themselves are very hard to notice. One could be politely standing against a wall to allow your party to pass unbothered by the burden of accidentally trampling them and you wouldn't even know. To see a servant takes a concerted effort (i.e. the player must state they want to look for servants) and a successful Second Sight or Awareness test.

SECRET: tipping a servant will cause them to die. They never refuse because they are so polite. The body will be swept away imminently.


Goblin Labyrinth
Goblins consider everything to be part of the labyrinth. Where we see a meadow they see a problem to be solved and navigated, just another part of the maze. To help future goblins avoid having trouble themselves with solving the same problem twice they will lay the foundations for a more traditional labyrinth. Goblins are often spied planting hedge rows or digging foundations and laying mortar.

Sometimes whole spheres are integrated into the labyrinth, other times it's just a dash of dungeon here and there. The construct might be very old and abandoned, occupied by ungoblin squatters. It's always a concern when entering what looks like your bog standard dungeon environment only to find out it's an entrance to the goblin labyrinth. Before you know it a week has gone by and you haven't seen the same junction twice and are walking beneath an alien sun through hedge mazes made of ivory.


The Shallow Sea
The World Sea! The Salty Shallows! An ocean which rarely goes past your knees. Natives live in elevated cities on stilts driven into the bedrock. Hazards include droughts followed by tsunamis, unexpected large waves, sink holes and rifts, sharks, poisonous coral, undines and ravenous flatfish. Best place in the cosmos to acquire black pearls, which can be used to pay for spells on a 1 pearl/1 stamina basis.


Empires of Flower & Foliage
The land of the Doles, who live in ignorance under the bountiful blossoms of their forests. The sedative effects of the forest are slow acting, but after a few days you'll be as dozy as the Doles. Luckily fruit is abundant and rain puddles linger and taste of sweetness and light. The place holds a dark secret but everyone is too blitzed to figure it out.


Primary Underworld
The most commonly encountered Underworld, being closest, geographically speaking, to the material spheres. The Underworlds are nested within (on top, beside, they're all innapropriate metaphors for something bordering on the divine) each other, with the climbing nestedness creating inhabitants of orders of magnitude more potent. To illustrate: Shazmazm, a tertiary underworld "prince" has spent recent millennia slowly transporting his essence through tiny gateways between the primary and tertiary underworlds with the intent to set himself up as a god. His mosquito demon servants have patiently drained and deposited him for all this time. In response the demons with minds to do so have been fleeing the primary in preparation for the conclusion of his metastasis and beginning of his Godzilla-esque reign of terror.

The Demon Sea
Physical adjunct to the Primary Underworld, simultaneously contained within like a lake and encircling it entirely, dependant on perspective. Whether it is a separate sphere is debatable, but it is suitably distinct.
The beaches of the demon sea are not sand, but the treasures of fallen empires and arrogant kings. Jewel's, crowns, paintings and statues as far as the eye can sea, buffeted by the waves. For each hour the party digs around the beach they may fill an inventory slot with "treasure". They may continue this as long as they like since the beaches are inexhaustible.

Make a giant list of random treasures for the party to pull out of their pockets later.




The Wall
A cliff which continues up forever. People live on huge "shelves" and clamber from one to the other on large ladders. Well maintained ladders between settlements can bring in a tidy income for the caretaker. Goats are a sign of great wealth since the only common edible wildlife are monkeys, and monkeys are all hair and gristle. Shepards are nobility and monkeymongers are dwellers of the bottom shelves, doomed to be deafened by monkeys for the rest of their days.

Religious authorities argue about the position of god and the direction one must proceed in order to approach them. Some say he is over the wall, with the wall seperating us from the afterlife. Others say his is out beyond the blue sky and built the walls to keep evil at bay. Others suspect he sits stop the wall judging us all, and some unusual sorts say he lounges at the bottom, indifferent to our suffering.

2 comments:

  1. Lovely. I especially enjoyed the idea of mosquito-like servants who "drain and deposit" their demon master. The first realm sounds like Borges doing Gormenghast.

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  2. "Discreet"

    God these are beautiful. I want to see them all!

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