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)