Topic: Questions and Musings: Shadow-World Cosmology (long)

[Implementor]

Alrighties so I'm pretty sure this post is going to expose some sort of embarrassing failure of imagination or conceptualization...and I'm maybe overthinking things? Or maybe underthinking them. But then I guess that's sorta the point, to get different minds to highlight such....sooooo here we go:

-Are the Pales independent dimensions or do they exist purely because the Essaence interacts with Kulthea and they are 'pale' reflections of Kulthea?
-If an essaence-breach occurred around a Spacemaster planet hundreds of lightyears away would anyone contacting said Pales be contacting the same pales?
 I throw this out there as a possibility but I consider them independent places regardless of Kulthea/Essaence breach.

  The Void predates creation/ is outside creation (I guess 'creation' is all and every non-void universe/plane right? in an infinite multiverse?) so it seems that they exist independent of anything in our universe(s). I think this brings up some conundrums concerning space-time and alternate-(history) universes....but first some questions about the pales.


The Pales

-What are they?  Are they worlds like we would know a planet?
                         Are they worlds like a 'planet' but a messed up 'shape'? (torus, dodechedron etc)
-Do they even have boundaries? Are they literally a plane? For example if you got in your grav-vehicle and flew in a direction for a week/month/year/decade would you end where you began? would you just go in that direction forever? would you come across some sort of edge/barrier?
-Is there an outside the environment of the plane? If you flew up would you hit an 'atmospheric barrier' and fly into the void equivalent of space?
-They have gravity, but so far as we know gravity is space-time being warped by a mass. What's causing gravity? Is there even a space-time affiliated with the void/pales? If there's no space-time how does anything happen?
-But Time seems to run there, at a different rate I think it's mentioned somewhere, but there's still time so there some sort of 'physics' at work
-There's light but is it light like we understand it? (photons etc)
-There seems to be varying levels of 'air' and plant-life etc, and ecology of sorts. What's the air content, is it oxygen/nitrogen mix? Methane? something else? Can people from Kulthea even breath on these worlds, or hear properly (soundwaves through air) or see properly (light)? There's plenty of examples of Kultheans travelling to and from them so I guess they can survive there, but why? (magic =p)
-What's generating the oxygen? Is there plant-life and photosynthesis?
-There's a lot of denizens on these planes and they seem to be able to mate/procreate with peoples from our universe or at the very least have enough similarity to use science-magic to manipulate things to that end.
-So what are demons physical structure? Do they have cells? Blood? some sort of genetic code?
-Where do new demons come from? Do they procreate with one another? It's not like they are intangible spirits they seem to have their own ecological setups and niches.
-What's the source of their magic power? Isn't the void 'not of the essaence'? But they have powers and magic like abilities and game-mechanics power points etc. What's their power source? If you had a drain power point spell and cast it on a void creature would it drain PP?

If the Pales are part of The Void, and The Void pre-dates/is outside of creation (whether that referring to our universe or all possible non-void uinverses I dunno) wouldn't the denizens 'looking at' (uggg for language have to use) at our universe 'see' all of our time in one go? They'd see the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe as one total event. Any particular time in our universe would be just as good as any other to them. A demon of the 5th pale may be interacting with our universe a billion years ago or now or a trillion years in the future. All the same to them, no?
Informational Spells (demonic contacts etc) would be wildly problematic if the entity gives proper information but the information is 10000 years out of date.

Alternate-History Variants
(alt history variants: you know, like the shopworn 'what if the nazi won or survived intact after WWII' 'what if the south won the American civil war' 'what if Rome won that battle or lost that one' etc etc etc)

  The above is further exacerbated if Alternate History Variants are thing in Shadow World. (Interestingly this was actually mentioned in Atlas II, but Atlas II cosmology was a mishmash of generic rolemaster/companion I, and Shadow World. By Atlas ed.3 and especially 4 Shadow World became much more it's own thing and dispensed with many D&D/Merp/Tolkien/generic rolemaster influences/ideas. But they also never mentioned alterate history kultheas in these versions.)

Alright so we have a potential infinite number of alternate history Kultheas, probably as hard to get to as Ondoval had going back in time, at least. But if they exist thennnnn I think there's some questions that come up.

First off if the Void planes and entities are outside these Space-Times then they can 'see' them all and potentially access any of them (one would be as good as the next), this is especially relevant to Agoth/Agothu since they are all aspects of one entity, therefore it has access to an infinite number of universes (Kultheas in this specific case), and knowledge and understanding of events etc from any of them an Agothu visits.

So there's a Shrek on Kulthea-0 (Canon game-setting) but there's also a Shrek on Kulthea-1 and Kulthea-2 and Kulthea-78 and Kulthea-1204000866....meanwhile Agoth is getting feedback from all of these. At the very least this provides a data-set of cause and effects that can be gleaned for 'best practices' (example: Shrek is found and and defeated on Kulthea-800)
Couldn't that information be collated and or transmitted to the other Shreks in all the other universes? Being able to access Agoth (or rather Agoth access you) would be the ultimate predictive tool with a virtually infinite number of data-sets to use.

Which brings me back to the problem of individual space-times and the void being out of it, I mean if you can 'see' the Big Bang to Heat-Death then you sorta can know how things turn out OR what about just our Kulthea, and an Agothu dimensionally travels to Kulthea, in the 4th age, 2000 years from now....Agoth could know whatever it knows, and since it's outside of time can impart that knowledge to any of it's 'appendages' no matter what time they are relative to that, no?
So an Agothu who happens to pop onto kulthea 3 years from the current time, can impart it's knowledge so those on the planet earlier can 'make adjustments' ("hey um Shrek-Progeny you seem to be dead 3 years from now")

The same things happens with The Unlife, there isn't a separate Unlife for every variant (is there?), so any tool of the Unlife in any of these versions are all connected to the same force. In some of these universes the Unlife has accomplished it's goal so it has experience in what works and what doesn't as well as large predictive modelling datasets (fine maybe it doesn't engage with reason in that way). Of course it's outside time too so same as above

What about the Lords of Orhan, they come from outside our 'quantum' (ugg I don't want to get into such) universe sooooo there should be one set. But there'll be a set of Lords of Orhan on many of these variants (If there's an infinite amount of variants then an infinite amount with these beings), does that mean that in turn there's an infinite amount of Essaence-Universe variants? They're outside our space-time too. What if the Lords of Orhan in Kulthea-1, 15, 200000, and 1 trillion all find a way to get home? what happens? Do they all potentially meet doppelgangers of themselves in their home universe? do they go into each of their own versions of their universe? Merge into singular entities/disappear?

Because the pales are independent of our space-time/Kulthea, that means any variant Kulthea will contact the same Pales so the problem with informational/demonic contact spells appears again. How would you know your a) getting information relevant to the Kulthea variant you are part of and not from Kulthea-X and b)that it was relevant to the same time you are in.

And what about if X (a super-powerful high level npc) steps through a portal to explore the first pale and X from Kulthea-88 does the same? could they meet themselves from a different universe?
And what if Agoth has Shrek from Kulthea-0, 6, 17, 128, 2159, all 'pop into a pale' at the same time, meet up, and pop back somewhere all together to accomplish a task in once of these specific variants?


(I thought about splitting this into two posts but they're connected so apologies for the huge post. Although I really like the long forum posts/threads here hehe)

[jdale]

-What are they?  Are they worlds like we would know a planet?
                         Are they worlds like a 'planet' but a messed up 'shape'? (torus, dodechedron etc)

I think the answer varies depending on which of the Pales you are in. The Last Planes are explicitly incomprehensible, that suggests to me at least that the underlying physics is violently different. Meanwhile, the 5th Pale is industrial, that doesn't necessarily mean our physics but it does imply at least that the local physics are comprehensible and stable. The 1st Pale is simple, but light is directionless and sourceless, so something is already off. The 4th Pale has no gravity (or at least no perceptible gravity).

I'm not sure it's desirable to answer all of those questions. I think players should be disoriented, and the inability to comprehend the environment can play into that. You do want to avoid easy outs, so for example it's at least implied that lines of sight are limited so you can't just fly up and easily see. There shouldn't be any safety achieved in that direction. Whether that's because things dwell in the upper atmosphere, or magic weakens with altitude, or no matter how high you go the ground (that you can't see) is the same distance, not really important, and it doesn't need to be the same answer all the time (and certainly not from pale to pale).

-What's the source of their magic power? Isn't the void 'not of the essaence'? But they have powers and magic like abilities and game-mechanics power points etc. What's their power source? If you had a drain power point spell and cast it on a void creature would it drain PP?

The easy answer is to look at the game mechanics, what is the realm of their magic? There you go. Likewise, nothing says normal magic doesn't work there (as far as I know), so even if the essence is different, it seems it can be manipulated.

If the Pales are part of The Void, and The Void pre-dates/is outside of creation (whether that referring to our universe or all possible non-void uinverses I dunno) wouldn't the denizens 'looking at' (uggg for language have to use) at our universe 'see' all of our time in one go? They'd see the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe as one total event. Any particular time in our universe would be just as good as any other to them. A demon of the 5th pale may be interacting with our universe a billion years ago or now or a trillion years in the future. All the same to them, no?
Informational Spells (demonic contacts etc) would be wildly problematic if the entity gives proper information but the information is 10000 years out of date.

I think that assumes they are not just outside of space but also outside of time and indeed have no time. It's possible to conceptualize an entity like that (perhaps Agothu), but I don't think that's the intent for the Pales.

First off if the Void planes and entities are outside these Space-Times then they can 'see' them all and potentially access any of them (one would be as good as the next), this is especially relevant to Agoth/Agothu since they are all aspects of one entity, therefore it has access to an infinite number of universes (Kultheas in this specific case), and knowledge and understanding of events etc from any of them an Agothu visits.

So there's a Shrek on Kulthea-0 (Canon game-setting) but there's also a Shrek on Kulthea-1 and Kulthea-2 and Kulthea-78 and Kulthea-1204000866....meanwhile Agoth is getting feedback from all of these. At the very least this provides a data-set of cause and effects that can be gleaned for 'best practices' (example: Shrek is found and and defeated on Kulthea-800)
Couldn't that information be collated and or transmitted to the other Shreks in all the other universes? Being able to access Agoth (or rather Agoth access you) would be the ultimate predictive tool with a virtually infinite number of data-sets to use.

Sure. Here I am, an all-encompassing being. A vast and endless crowd of people who happen to share one identity-label come to me and ask me about the nature of a different vast and endless crowd of people who happen to share a different identity-label. "What color hat is this person wearing?" Can I even comprehend the question? Can I give an answer that is meaningful, much less comprehensible? Every instance of the people-crowd asking the question is asking about a specific instance of their enemy people-crowd, but how many details do you pick out about an individual when you look at a crowd? They get lost.

Now the Agothu might comprehend the answer, but if you attack it, it's probably fighting off a simultaneous multitude of you, so are you the most important you that merits all of its attention?


That said, alternate realities are a tangled thicket. Does the idea contribute to the stories you want to tell? Personally, I might use it at most as an explanation of the madness of the Agothu but not make it accessible to anyone else.

[terefang]

First off if the Void planes and entities are outside these Space-Times then they can 'see' them all and potentially access any of them (one would be as good as the next), this is especially relevant to Agoth/Agothu since they are all aspects of one entity, therefore it has access to an infinite number of universes (Kultheas in this specific case), and knowledge and understanding of events etc from any of them an Agothu visits.

So there's a Shrek on Kulthea-0 (Canon game-setting) but there's also a Shrek on Kulthea-1 and Kulthea-2 and Kulthea-78 and Kulthea-1204000866....meanwhile Agoth is getting feedback from all of these. At the very least this provides a data-set of cause and effects that can be gleaned for 'best practices' (example: Shrek is found and and defeated on Kulthea-800)
Couldn't that information be collated and or transmitted to the other Shreks in all the other universes? Being able to access Agoth (or rather Agoth access you) would be the ultimate predictive tool with a virtually infinite number of data-sets to use.

i have followed such a discussion some decades ago for another sci-fi universe and the conclusions were rather simple.

• imagine that agothu (as entity) operates on such a cosmological level as possible 7 dimensions
• agothu sends shrek-0 to kulthea-0 for exploration
• in order for shrek-0 to interact with kulthea-0 on a meaningful level it has to reduce its perception to 4 dimensions
• if agothu looks at that 4 dimensional information it probably does not understand it right away, like us 4-d entities looking at a point or line (graph?) on a sheet of paper without a proper description
• so shrek-0 basically has to travel back to agothu to report back his 4d impressions in 7d language, another feat i would analogue to like describing a dream of colors under the influence of LSD

this would boil down to the fact that although agothu has all this broad information available, it does only have limited understanding of the details.

[terefang]

this would boil down to the fact that although agothu has all this broad information available, it does only have limited understanding of the details.

or simply said: agothu and minions are suffering from CTDS (Cosmological Transformation Deficiency Syndrome)

[Implementor]

great posts, I've read them a number of times and they definitely spurred things I didn't think about or not all the way through.

Messed up interdimensional-understanding/incomprehension....mmmm plenty there to use, I like it.

"not sure it's desireable to answer all those questions". I agree especially after musing on these posts. Flexible mutation of the alien environment would facilitate the unusual, incomprehensible aspect AND facilitate the imagining of such because not bound by knowledge of "x is caused by y" (photons, gravity, oxygen molecules etc)

Does the idea contribute to stories want to tell?
 No and yes, common plane hopping/let's-adventure-in-Hell is a little too D&D for me. But I find that thinking about and or knowing 'how things work' facilitates story ideas. It could be that a story/adventure's impetus/derivation is from some entity in a Pale/Void/Plane but the effects/adventure/story playout on Kulthea with the characters who may or may not ever find out that the 'plot/adversary/task' was instigated from <insert Planar-entity>

[Implementor]

The posts above gave me some food for thought AND by actually posting my thoughts facilitated breaking past these and adding new ones.

  So I was musing on the Pales and some of what was posted and came up with two Pales conceptualizations I like.

I) Each Pale is an independent 'universe'/plane, with the characteristics provided....but each Pale is huge. First I thought Solar System sized, then went with well what if they are Galaxy-sized or Galaxy-cluster sized. Demon-populated areas with vast areas of partially-or non-inhabited areas in between. The terrain and physics could vary to some degree as move about with the sort of weird stuff mentioned.

II) Then I moved from that to there is one single Meta-Pale, also galaxy/sector/universe-sized, and all the specific pale environments can be found there. Not a 'container' like our universe with stuff in it, but one giant I guess literal plane (ground/water/terrestrial component, above-ground and below-ground) that goes on 'forever' (light years).
    So you have a galaxy-sized area that conforms to what we call the first pale; outside this area the terrain is varied and or chaotic with weirdo anomalies and slowly changes over vast distance until there's an large area that conforms to the second pale, etc.
    Then I thought, there could be multiple areas that conform to a specific Pale but aren't contiguous or connected to each other. Or they are connected to each other even though they are spatially distant (portals, void distortions, folded space)
    Allows all sorts of weird terrain, environments, effects, especially in the connective-terrain in between the 'pales-areas', and even demonic-politics (I was imagining in a first-pale slice a Demon Beyond the Pale, endlessly amassing an army of undead-demons in preparation for the day it can access Kulthea again and take revenge for previous indignities, heh)


  I think the concept of timelessness is a non-starter for anything that takes action. Action (even thought) is necessarily temporal. So even Agoth experience some sort of time/temporal progression or it would be static and unmoving and unchangeable nor could ever take any action.

[jdale]

Yeah, if you imagine the Pales are really big, there's a lot of room for diversity in their contents. From the limited perspective of people in the regular world, they just peer through a tiny window into a tiny part of each Pale and imagine it is endless sameness. But from the perspective on the opposite side, there's just this weird local anomaly where their world abuts against some other world. In the grand scheme of things that anomaly might not even be very important to most of them (except maybe someone makes a hobby of it from time to time).

Of course it's also possible these anomalies are typical of the Pales, and they are just dotted with such anomalies that connect to myriad numbers of different worlds. There are a dozen that go to this one parochial world but thousands that go elsewhere.

Not the only possible interpretation but a perfectly viable one.

[terefang]

Messed up interdimensional-understanding/incomprehension....mmmm plenty there to use, I like it.

...

 No and yes, common plane hopping/let's-adventure-in-Hell is a little too D&D for me. But I find that thinking about and or knowing 'how things work' facilitates story ideas.

ok ... comming from the other side.

lets pretend the following:

• the pales are part of a higher dimensional realm, to take a D&D analogue the "Far Realm" perhaps?
• the far realms are basically the inifinite trashcan of the multiverse, made up of a chaotic mess of (non-)stuff that "never were" and "never will be".
• the pales represent a kind of "islands of stability" where the inhabitant minds agreed on a particular common outlook.

travellers coming from lesser dimensional origins (plane prime/kulthea), would have difficulty perceiving the higher dimensional trashcan and they are also subject to the realizations of the majority, lest they go insane in the chaos.

so over the times of the universe,  beings (their minds) agreed (or made up) the physical characteristics of the pales, so they simply happened and now look like they are supposed to -- at least from the perspective of a lower dimensional being from plane prime, this follows also magic and spells ...

it may be the probability that a higher being(s) set(s) up shop in some of the mess between the pales, creating another island of stability, shaping it according to its/theirs will.

the possibilities are endless
--
T

[chook]

The Void came into ICE via MERP I am fairly confident.  It was the area that existed outside of Arda to which Melkor/Morgoth was banished at the end of the First Age.  TKA was involved in a lot of MERP projects at ICE and there are a lot of derivative things in Shadow World that can be easily traced back to those origins.

Here is a link to the real world historical Pale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale

That is where we get the saying, "beyond the pale," which means that the behaviour/thing is totally uncivilised and/or bad.  I think that this is the basis for The Pales being places of strange and bad creatures/standards.

[jdale]

That page cites the Oxford English Dictionary as saying:
"The theory that the origin of the phrase relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale (see sense 4b) or the Pale of Settlement in Russia (see sense 4c), is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization."

But more generally, it's beyond the border of our fence, whatever area that happens to be. Still quite interesting etymology.

Regarding the Void, the basic idea predates MERP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_(philosophy)

[chook]

That page cites the Oxford English Dictionary as saying:
"The theory that the origin of the phrase relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale (see sense 4b) or the Pale of Settlement in Russia (see sense 4c), is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization."

But more generally, it's beyond the border of our fence, whatever area that happens to be. Still quite interesting etymology.

Regarding the Void, the basic idea predates MERP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_(philosophy)

I don't think ICE invented the concept of the Void.  My supposition is that the ICE of the time was very focused on the ME content as it would have represented a significant revenue stream for the business.  The style, look and feel of MERP flowed through into the RM line more broadly.  As the later RM products, i.e. RCI, RCII, etc. came out there was an expansion out of those central concepts.

Just to be up front this is all supposition as I was but a player in those days and have no inside knowledge of how business decisions for products were made.

[jdale]

Likewise, I am only speculating about such matters.