Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world, then a book’s worth of plot happens, then another portal opens, and you get to keep some of the powers and loot you earned from the plot. In each world, you’ll find allies among the locals, some power unique to the world, and sooner or later you’ll encounter another person who stepped out of a portal, just like you.
Except they’re not like you. If you believe in equality, they’ll think it’s acceptable to do the bidding of slavers and bigots. If you fancy yourself a free market entrepeneur, they’ll be a communist who wants to saddle your efforts with labor law and insidious union talk. If you see no issue with eating meat (if “in this world, they butcher and eat animals” doesn’t even occur to you as a observation to make), then you’ll meet a vegan willing to treat carnists with that same callous regard.
Even if the differences aren’t philosophical, you just won’t be able to stand them. They’ll be reckless if you’re careful, blathering if you’re quiet, and don’t even ask their opinion on pineapples on pizza.
You can — must — suppose there’s an intelligence behind the portals. (A guardian of the threshold, if you will). Of all the uncountable places in the multiverse, they’ll plop you down where there’s air to breathe and proteins that don’t prion-ize your biology. The people will speak your language, they’ll probably even be human.
If it can select for all that, of course it can select just the wrong person, whom you’ll have no choice but fight — kill, even. And if nothing else, they will have been through more portals than you, and it came to blows in every world. Why wouldn’t they expect you to be the same as all the monsters and wretches they’ve faced before? Why would they even give you the chance to explain? The portals can turn anyone into a thresholder.
After all, the next portal won’t open until one of you beats the other. If you find yourself in a world of post-nuclear desolation where acid rains from the sky, the only chance of seeing air conditioning again is to kick some ass.
What Is the Squiggleverse?
Thresholder is inspired by jumpchain stories. Jumpchain usually focus on established franchises. It’s an exercise in a particular kind of power fantasy — what if you could get Naruto ninja training and have a Star Wars lightsaber and team full of Pokémon beside you? How unstoppable could you become after five jumps?
Thesholder is all original worlds, though. (And quite creative ones, I’d say.) Still, it’s the sort of premise that invites you to imagine your own worlds, your own adventures — and I dare say it makes for more interesting hypotheticals to consider than your average jumpchain. Certainly the engine for ever-escalating conflict keeps things moving.
I’m not sure how far most get in those sort of daydreams, though I know of at least one Thresholder fanfic. Personally, coming up with weird and magical worlds is something I’ve spent a good fifth of my life seriously pursuing. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it, but if nothing else, I certainly have something to show for it.
So, I decided this could be an interesting exercise: how would my original settings stack up as thresholder arenas?
But first, a gesture at ground rules. The number of worlds I’ve “properly” “written” about is rather modest — half a dozen, or more depending on how you count. But there’s a plenty of settings I have detailed notes about it despite having never committed to final draft prose.
I’d be remiss to include the (frankly underbaked) setting of And the Darkling Reefs Abide yet neglect the much more mechanically interesting world of, say, Running Out of Skin & Time.
Will I be dedicating paragraphs to every figment I’ve had a fleeting thought about? No. The loose standard I’m operating off of is I’ll list a setting if I could (or better yet, have) given a thousand word-long rant about its lore purely off the dome. Not rigorous, but ultimately, who cares.
More importantly, if the idea is that I could talk at excessive length about any of these worlds, how do I stop this document from being exponentially excessive in its own length?
I’ll just have to cleave to the essentials of each world. A brief description of its look and feel, and then a rundown of what sort of powers you’ll gain and what sort of dangers you’ll contend with. (In the case of worlds that have changed substantially throughout their history, I might note when there’s distinct “eras” to consider.)
This page will mostly be protracted exposition about my own magic systems, intercut with occasional commentary on the worldbuilding implications of the grand spell. Let that be a warning or invitation according to taste.
Now, let’s get on with it.
...However, I think posting thousands upon thousands of worlds to tumblr is a questionable idea. I don't want to keep this post updated with typo fixes and further edits, and I have a cute little footnote system that tumblr can't support at all.
So you can read the rest on my site.
<p>Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world,
When I was interviewing him for the first time, for instance, we were in the middle of a conversation and suddenly he burst into tears. It was completely unexpected, because we were not talking about anything emotional or personal, as I would define those things. I was quite startled, and as he cried I sat there rewinding our conversation in my head, trying to figure out what had upset him. Later, I asked him about it. It turned out that what had made him cry was the idea of suffering. We had been talking about suffering in the abstract.
Alexander Wales, The Metropolitan Man:
“I can hear everything going on in the world right now,” said Superman. “No one thinks about what that means.” He pointed to the north. “Just there, six miles away, a house is on fire. The family has evacuated, but their possessions are burning. A little girl is crying because she left her doll behind, and I can see it melting. She’s calling out for me to do something. Over there, two miles down the road, a man just punched his wife in the mouth, and shouldn’t I be going to stop him from doing it again?” He pointed east. “There was a flash flood in China a handful of minutes ago. I can hear three women choking to death. If I left now, I might be able to save them.” He pointed to the south. “There was a car accident near Atlanta, eight seconds ago. When the windshield shattered it sliced a man across his neck. If I left now, I might be able to get him to the hospital before he bleeds out.”
Charles wore the red and white suit, which didn't fit his thin frame. The old man had told him that it would, with time, but Charles had always been as skinny as a stick. Still, if he grew fat in the coming weeks, it would be far down the list of miraculous things that needed solving. "I'm an industrial engineer," he'd said, when the old man had come to him. "I don't even have children."
