#uneiverse

[eldritchamy]

Me, preparing to theoretically go to bed (it's 9am and I got up less than 6 hours ago): I need to talk to an astrophysicist immediately. it's for worldbuilding reasons.

[eldritchamy]

it turns out trying to come up with realistic scientific terminology for types of magic is kinda hard

[eldritchamy]

Hello darling. After that one post. May I ask what your solution to the Abundance Of Hypercarnivores problem in DND style fantasy settings is?

So the "Abundance of Hypercarnivores" problem exists for a specific reason: DND is a very combat-heavy game. Most of the mechanics of the entire system are dedicated to combat encounters.

And as such, DND type settings tend to focus on "things you can fight". Even more so "things that want to fight YOU." And the problem is made significantly worse by how POWERFUL player characters get, which requires more and more absurd encounters to give them a believable threat to overcome.

The worldbuilding for the natural world is a 'bestiary' of things that have 'challenge ratings' because you're playing the "I kill things and become a hero of the realm" simulator, not the "I'm wood elf David Attenborough and welcome to Mutual of Gnollmaha's Wild Kingdom" simulator. Exploration in DND is not very fleshed out.

If you can't fight it, they don't bother describing it.

Are there things like weird flies and beetles and harmless snakes and rodents and songbirds and fish and lizards and frogs and other animals in DND settings that just don't come up in a monster manual?

Well. Rules as written? No.

Because they're not written.

Realistically? There sure as hell would be. An ecosystem can't exist without having multiple trophic levels to it, but in DND you don't care about any trophic level that isn't a combat encounter. Which is .... FINE, I GUESS, it's what the system is built for, but it also means the worldbuilding is pretty limited in terms of fleshing out The Nature. There's less of an ecosystem and more of a hit list.

First point of fixing this problem is to just mention that there are other things in the world that don't exist to be fought. There's a balance to this for a book, because you're not writing a wilderness survival guide; you still have a story that you need to get to. There's also a balance to doing it for a TTRPG setting, because you gotta pay for the pages you want published, and it's expensive to waste pages on anything not relevant to the game mechanics.

For Issliss, we do have things in the world that you can't fight, and the best example of it is something I came up with called Boneflies. They're swarming insects that feed on the undigested bits of other creatures' prey (including bones). They have a symbiotic relationship with large stationary predators (like carnivorous plants, of which we have several) in that they clean up the evidence of other dead things. Issliss has a lot more wilderness survival type mechanics than DND, so boneflies actually do serve a game function: someone trained in certain skills would notice them, and know oh, we have to be careful around here, because if there are boneflies, there's remains to feed on, which means there's a large predator nearby.

As a DM or a writer, you can help make the world feel more fleshed out with some minor scene building. Mention things like bird sounds or movement in the corner of your eye that turns out to be a lizard catching a beetle or a snake darting through the underbrush. And don't make everything VISUAL. Sounds and smells can build a more believable environment too.

BUT, that's the boring half of the answer that you could have figured out on your own. You asked for MY solution.

There are definitely some details here that I have to skip over, but in the most general terms? Dragons, as high fantasy tends to depict them, do not exist in the Uneiverse.

High fantasy dragons are GARBAGE worldbuilding.

An intelligent, aggressive, territorial creature that lives for hundreds or thousands of years and reaches kaiju size and has a huge range cannot reasonably exist in the world. It just can't. That's not a naturally occurring species with a breeding population.

So how do you have a legendary creature in your fantasy world?

Well, it's a magic setting.

A very ambitious wizard who sets out to become immortal will probably, either by intention or by accident, end up becoming a lich, a monstrous zombie wizard that lives forever but loses a large sense of self in the process. Instead of giving a prolonged life to THEMSELVES, they instead end up creating something NEW that goes on in their place. The LICH, of course, feels no remorse over this. Who they used to be is irrelevant.

Necromancy is only one flavor of magic.

What happens if BIG magic goes wrong (or tragically right) in some other direction? What if creatures on the scale of dragons only exist because Somebody Fucked Up?

You would end up with rare occurrences of super apex predators that allow for a legendary narrative encounter, but these things are isolated. They don't take hundreds of years to grow into small kaiju only to be taken down by a group of adventurers at the first sign of a dragon taking up roost a bit too close to a kingdom. There's no breeding population of them. There's no unexplained centuries-long gap in their existence until they just suddenly become a problem.

You can have a huge magical monster suddenly appear, but their SUDDEN appearance suddenly has an EXPLANATION. It has a start point that doesn't break the suspension of disbelief of the world.

For the Uneiverse, with my very "magic is the energy of creation redirected through the power and intent of the caster" style magic system, I have a classification system for large scale magical anomalies like this, but I can't talk about it in any meaningful detail (and it needs a lot of work and refinement anyway).

But the tl;dr is I have a couple acronyms that basically mean "somebody fucked up real bad" and "a massive dangerous organism just exists in the world now, congrats" and "this entire landscape or ecosystem has been irreparably magically altered and is now unnatural in some way, possibly affecting plant and animal life and creating new species in a localized area."

These events can vary a lot in scale, severity, and flavor.

I was actually just looking up different kinds of birds earlier to try to decide which ones would be cool if they were somehow turned into living stained glass. For instance.

There might be a place like that in the world. It's either relevant or not relevant. You don't know. (It's not relevant to the story.)

Kelp bed mirage in the middle of a desert, ghost fish, haunted coral, go nuts. Why not? It's magic, be creative with it.

Enormous magical monster that's causing problems? Well, that's one less unethical wizard in the world experimenting with scary magic. Better hire some adventurers to go kill it.

So the short answer is to do a bit more scene building to make it feel like there's a lot more LIFE in the world, and in the case of big monsters, have a good explanation for how they GOT there. At least often enough to fool your audience into thinking you've put in that level of work for everything. They WANT to buy into that illusion. Give them enough reason to believe you HAVE an explanation, and they'll believe you even when you don't.

Winged squirrels. Raccoon pigeon griffins. Feathered dragon lizards instead of hawks or vultures. Songbirds made of glass. An origami salamander that came to life when some magic ink got spilled on a scroll. Colonial organisms that float around in the low atmosphere feeding on the ambient debris of magical pollution.

A big fuckin flamethrower dinosaur that happened because a pyromancer REALLY should have double-checked that arcane symbol before doing a ritual that required a level of power they didn't have any real control over. A tarantulaceratops, I don't know. It's not BAD for there to be predators in the world. An ecosystem needs them to exist TO SOME DEGREE. Just make sure you're putting herd animals and herbivores and birds and insectivores and harmless things in the world too, the predators need a food source.

And maybe not that tarantulaceratops thing, the horns would really get in the way. That's stupid. Don't do that. Make it a giant crab and put it underwater instead, the horns could be coral.

There, it fits in an ecosystem now. Look how much happier it is. It's smiling! I think. Let's not go in the ocean.

Remember that magical monsters can have magical origins. And in some cases, they SHOULD. Hundred foot long highly territorial dragons that live for a thousand years just don't goddamn work. Too many carnivores in once place also doesn't work.

Put some magic ungulates in there for god's sake. Make your fantasy setting touch grass. Give it antlers and a weird mating call.

And look! A little bird that eats parasites off its skin. Three whole trophic levels just like that.

[eldritchamy]

What the shit. Fighting a god in hand to hand combat as a gold dragon using immovable rods goes so fucking hard and it’s the backstory for a character that’s just in the main backstory???????? AMY???

You know how a lot of people, when making DND characters, make the mistake of having their level 1 PC have an elaborate backstory where they're super badass and already recognized as a hero?

When I made Ash I did the opposite. Her backstory is elaborate, yes, but in very mundane ways that inform her personality and how she perceives the world around her, and build up the logic of how she makes decisions.

I made everyone AROUND my PC a super powerful character who had done incredible things, and I gave Ash anxiety about it.

She feels, constantly, that she is inadequate by comparison. Her entire frame of reference is shaped by a bunch of women in her life that are outstandingly powerful, and she's just a quiet girl who makes leather goods and sells them for a living. She thinks of herself as the NPC in other people's more impressive lives.

Her mother, Lailah, is a nearly seven foot tall divine warrior created in Elysium to destroy Pit Fiends. She's an angel of lightning built like an MMA fighter, and she wields a weapon like piece of a lightning bolt (not stylized, I mean a real, glowing crackling arc of electricity that she holds like a staff and can be used like anything from a polearm to a spear to a whip, and when thrown it acts like a Lightning Bolt spell). She is built, both narratively and in game stats, to be an unkillable holy destroyer, capable of fighting MULTIPLE PIT FIENDS simultaneously, and winning. She's a CR 10+ magical creature (she's a homebrewed mix of Deva and Erinyes stat blocks with some unique flavor) with eighteen class levels, 16 in Zealot Barbarian and 2 in Fighter. She has a strength of 27 and a constitution of 25. She's designed to deal HUGE amounts of damage, tank unfathomable amounts in turn, NOT DROP WHEN SHE HITS ZERO HITPOINTS, and keep swinging until every devil in her way is a pile of dust, then use bonus action Second Wind to bring herself back above 0 so she doesn't incur the auto-death caveat on Zealot Barbarian's Rage Beyond Death ability. One of her attuned items is also the very simple uncommon item "Periapt of Wound Closure" which automatically stabilizes you at the start of your turn, thereby resetting the death saving throws she would theoretically have to make each time she gets hit below 0. Also, as an angel, she's innately immune to auto-death effects like Power Word Kill, which closes almost all loopholes that get around her build. She is UNSPEAKABLY badass. I ran a simulated round of combat with her once, and she could potentially one-shot a CR 15 Skittering Horror (228 HP) in a single turn. Her theoretical maximum damage output is like, 456 damage in a turn (granted this assumes all crits and rolling max damage).

So that's Ash's mom.

Aria is interesting. She was always strongly attuned to the forces of nature, and her magic grew quickly. Where Ash grew up with someone she knew would always be there to protect her from anything, Aria did NOT have that safety net, and spent her formative years learning to be more self-sufficient in terms of relying on her own power. So eventually she got sucked into an adventuring party consisting of herself (a tiefling Witch subclass with very strong druid flavor), a tiefling zealot barbarian, and a couple of elf twins who were an Arcana cleric and a Celestial Warlock. Sometime after they had made a name for themselves, they were tasked with stopping a suspected fledgling vampire who had been kidnapping girls and killing a bunch of people. When they arrived, they met Cass, who was very much NOT a new vampire. She was almost 150 years old and had been protecting women from abusers and overzealous debt collectors, and things had gotten a little messy with one or two of them, leading to a lot more attention than she normally got. They start off fighting Cass (Aria polymorphs herself into a dire wolf and lunges directly for the throat, which Cass found amusing and impressive) but realize in the banter that Cass wasn't the real problem, and she ends up being a sort of a lesson for the group in terms of whose word they trust and who they take jobs from (YES THE BACKSTORY'S BACKSTORY HAS NARRATIVE ARCS AND MORAL LESSONS THAT LEAD TO LONG TERM CHARACTER GROWTH OKAY I CAN'T HELP MYSELF). Cass, having a particular rapport with Aria, ends up joining their party as a dhampir Soulknife Rogue/Shadow Monk.

Yes, that's all backstory that I made up for an imaginary campaign that exists entirely as a set piece for Aria as one of Ash's story NPCs. This doesn't even touch on the fact that I liked Cass so much as a character that I gave HER an entire backstory of her own. I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM.

Anyway the team only makes a bigger name for themselves for handling things that other groups can't. Eventually, they just happen to be in the Tenth District when the War of the Spark happens (major established event in the MTG canon), and I basically added some extra "scenes" to it that didn't violate existing canon so I could have that be the climax of their imaginary campaign. One of Aria's partners was a new planeswalker at the time and her spark got harvested by the Dreadhorde, specifically by the god eternal Bontu.

Gods in Magic The Gathering aren't honestly that special? They don't seem to have THAT much power, all things considered. Ravnica's gods are mostly powerful magical animals, and in the most recent Magic Story one of their gods (Anzrag the Quake Mole) was captured in an "evidence capsule" (basically Magic's version of a Pokeball). The most powerful god in MTG is probably the Ur Dragon honestly, unless you count the Eldrazi, but that's a whole other conversation since neither of those actually have the "God" creature type.

Anyway, Bontu was one of the gods of Amonket (basically a plane based on ancient Egypt), which had been conquered by an Elder Dragon planeswalker named Nichol Bolas. HE was the one who actually killed all but one of Amonket's gods, and then another planeswalker named Liliana Vess (extremely powerful necromancer) raised them as zombies for his army, because Bolas had a ton of complicated leverage over her (magical contract that he could invoke to kill her if she betrayed him). So Bontu was a god zombie.

Here's a reference:

Well, Aria was a level 18 Witch at this point since this was the climax of their campaign, so she had access to the Shapechange spell, a 9th level transmutation that lets you become any creature with a challenge rating equal or lower than your character level. And the best candidate for that was an Adult Gold Dragon (CR 17). So Aria goes full berserk and stands up on her dragon hind legs and picks a fight with a dead god that she's determined to make deader, and has a Godzilla vs King Ghidorah standoff with her.

So how do you fight a god that can suck your soul out and instantly kill you with a single touch? You don't let it touch you.

What Aria did was basically inspired by this gif of a Wildebeest trying to charge at a lion:

Or this:

And to be clear, yes, I'm saying Aria was the lion in that situation. She basically did a big dragon threat display to get Bontu's attention, and used the Gold Dragon's weakening breath to give Bontu disadvantage on Strength checks and saves. Bontu charged at her, and at the last second Aria dropped to the ground and then shot back up, clamped her teeth around the god's throat, and used her weight to throw Bontu around and knock her off balance, and her superior strength to grab her by the wrists and wrestled her to the ground so she couldn't get a grip on Aria. She had every part of the god that could have killed her pinned, and used the claws of her wings to pull Bontu's armor apart and tear at everything she could reach while thrashing her around. It was Fen, the Arcana cleric, who thought to use Immovable rods to pin Bontu down so that even if Aria lost her grip, Bontu wouldn't be able to immediately one-shot any of them. So Athena (barbarian) and Cass (rogue/monk) as the two martial classes were the ones who got close enough to handle that while Fen and her sister (Gwen) used whatever holy magic they could to help from a distance.

Now CASS had a problem, because she's a DEX based martial class, not a strength based one. She needed a boost to be able to get this job done. So she drank some of Bontu's blood from one of the wounds Aria had left on her arm to give herself a burst of strength. Except. She had to get real close to do that. And Bontu managed to get a loose grip on her, and tried to suck out her soul.

The magic that makes Cass what she is is very old and very powerful. It binds her soul to her body in a much stronger way than any living creature, fusing the two together to prevent her from dying (i.e. by having her soul separated from her body; Cass can recover from almost any conceivable physical injury as long as there's life energy, in the form of blood, for the magic that keeps her alive to feed on and maintain the seal between her body and her soul). BECAUSE SHE WAS FEEDING ON THE BLOOD OF A GOD AT THE TIME, the magic holding her together basically fought against the magic that was trying to rip her soul out, and it had enough fuel to hold on until Aria's thrashing forced Bontu to let go. So Cass survived the Elderspell thanks to a very weird and unrepeatable set of circumstances (which allows something narratively impressive and legendary to happen without being gamebreakingly overpowered and violating the established rules of the world).

Because of how her magic draws energy from other things, though, there was a side effect: she also accidentally took in one of the planeswalker sparks that Bontu had harvested. So when Cass had healed enough for her soul to no longer be dislocated, her spark activated and she became a Planeswalker. (I imagine a soul is connected to a body mostly through the nervous system, because that's how a brain holds consciousness in it, so a "dislocated" soul is like something glued to every nerve ending in your body being pulled on with an enormous amount of force, trying to sever that connection; imagine trying to pull yourself off the ground when every nerve ending in your body is superglued to the floor by something akin to the Strong Nuclear Force. It SUCKED.)

The team ended up being forced to retreat because of Cass' injuries, so Aria didn't actually manage to kill Bontu personally (or die trying, which in her grief-rage she was fully open to). Right about this time, my bottle scene ends and Magic canon comes back into play: Liliana betrays Bolas and turns the Dreadhorde against him, and Bontu ends up being the one who bites him and rips out HIS spark. Due to the enormous rush of energy of consuming all of Bolas' stolen Planeswalker sparks (tl;dr he was trying to become a god), and with the added bit of lore that it was Aria's team that heavily injured Bontu just prior to this, Bontu exploded in the process.

This resulted in Ravnica playing a game of telephone in the chaotic aftermath of the War. Aria fought a god. She's still alive and that god is dead. Rumors spread and now Aria is misremembered as the one who killed Bontu. Half the plane thinks of her as the "god killer." All she wanted was to avenge her lover or die trying.

Neither outcome happened, and now she's credited with the very thing she sees as her greatest failure. And that trauma has haunted her ever since.

[eldritchamy]

A question for Uneiverse (to give you an excuse to talk about it, only if you wanna. Since I also just really hearing about it). What's a detail about it that you really enjoy but haven't gotten a chance to use anywhere story related or otherwise just don't get to play with much (silly or serious)

This ask has been sitting in my inbox for over 5 months.

It's time.

And so, we begin with a question of my own.

What IS time?

We're off the map now. Come with me. Take my hand as we walk through the valley of the shadow of time. We're going to uncharted waters, and I'm going to put the fear of god into you. I'm going to make you ask yourself (and me) Amy, how the fuck does you brain WORK like that?

Let me tell you about time and fate, and about what it means to "predict" the future.

And you will begin to understand the scale of what lives within me, eternally gnawing at the inside of my skull, begging for release.

If I asked you to conceptualize time, what would you say? Is it the neat and rigid tick-tick-ticking of regular intervals on the clock? Is is the fluid, indivisible space between?

Is is all just an illusion conceived by the animal brain to account for the changing shape of the universe as one dimension passes through another, which our three-dimensional eyes are too flat to see all at once, and our souls have concocted for us a comforting lie, that we may pretend to know the universe in its whole, by knowing it piece by infinitesimal, grinding piece, seeing the pan-dimensional amalgam of existence as an endless, continuous sequence of cross-sections in a number of dimensions our meat-circuitry can pretend to process?

Time is shadows.

Imagine, if you will, a sphere.

You hold it up against the light. Suspend it in the air, perhaps, for simplicity's sake. And the sphere casts a shadow.

Is the shadow still a sphere?

Far more importantly, is it even a circle?

At even the tiniest fraction of an angle, the sphere casts a shadow that no longer perfectly represents a cross section of the sphere. It has ceased to perfectly capture the nature of the object that cast the shadow, even accounting for the wrong number of dimensions. It's skewed. You can never unskew it. The distortion is irreversible.

And the floor isn't flat.

The sphere casts a shadow at an angle at a surface that ranges in distance and direction from the object casting the shadow. Is the shadow still an oval? Has it become a shape you can't name?

But the shadow isn't cast upon a floor, even an uneven one.

What shape is the shadow of a sphere cast at an angle upon a field of grass blowing in the wind? By now there's no pretending you know the answer. And even if you could snapshot a single instant of a single shape, the very next instant that shape would change in the breeze as the grass shifts.

The world is not a field of grass upon the ground. The world is endless variation of leaves upon trees, forests upon mountains, birds in the sky, hunting for the bugs that crawl on the branches of the trees. Massive floating pools of water churning in the low atmosphere as humans decide whether that one looks like a mouse or a sheep. So many humans walking, their clothes flowing behind them as they talk, eat, buy goods, shed tiny particles of skin and hair into the wind, their breath adding chaos to that same wind and a hundred miles away a leaf turns slightly more to the left than if that human had said nothing.

What is the shadow of a sphere cast upon that world? Twisted by its unfathomable complexity of shapes and movement?

And now, to make things worse, imagine if that shadow were a tangible thing that you could pick up. That could cast its own shadow not on the floor but up against the wall.

And all of that is if the shadow is cast by a perfect sphere.

Imagine you are a being that can see the shape of time. Could you look at the echo of a shadow of a shadow of a reflection in a fun house mirror, and recreate what it once was?

Could you look at a crooked set of lines upon the wall and know the meaning of cause and consequence? Could you predict what consequences of which actions would lead to favorable outcomes when realization dawns on you that

𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖕𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖊 𝖍𝖆𝖘 𝖙𝖊𝖊𝖙𝖍, 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖎𝖙 𝖎𝖘 𝖘𝖔. 𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞. 𝖍𝖚𝖓𝖌𝖗𝖞.

Time is an ocean of possibility. Each possibility has consequences. Each consequence a sea of new possibilities. How can you hope to understand the shadow of a shadow of a shadow, and not only know what's coming, but how to stop it?

Nothing is fated. But I said something important that bears repeating. Time is an OCEAN. We'll come back to that.

Time MOVES, at least the way we perceive it. I don't like the phrase "everything happens for a reason." I prefer something of my own creation: for every effect, a cause. To achieve a desired effect - a desired outcome - you must change the circumstances of cause that lead to that effect. But there are limits to your influence.

The time to change the course of a river is when the river is still small. The longer that river runs its course, the deeper it shapes and erodes the ground around it. The larger and faster a river the harder it is to redirect it. It will go where it's going, and there's nothing you can do about it. There is an element of momentum that must be accounted for. An element of inevitability.

The path of one person's life, one set of choices available to them in one specific context, may feel perhaps like the current of a river, when you look back on it. But if different changes were made during its formation, it could have taken a completely different path. Ended in a completely different place. And influenced the formation of completely different paths in the future as a result.

But I'll say it again, and you'll know its significance now: time is an OCEAN. It is not a river, but an IMMENSE network of currents with no clearly defined borders, flowing with or against or around each other in an unimaginably complex churning of possibility and consequence and cause and effect. A shift in one current may brush up against another. The second current may shift with it, or crash violently into it, or ignore it entirely.

For every effect, a cause. But for every CAUSE, many POSSIBLE effects.

So time becomes a series of choices beyond number. Each choice leading to fathomless changes in the flow. As the earth turns, some currents flow inevitably in certain directions. If not here, then somewhere else. SOME CHANGES ARE INESCAPABLE.

The universe must be dynamic. If nothing changed, the universe would not need to exist at all. Change is the point. Variance is the point. Choice is the point. The universe exists to know itself, and it knows itself through change.

There is an endless sea of currents flowing in various ways with, beside, against, around each other. Some directions of flow are strongly influenced by the shape of the seafloor and the rotation of the earth. There are changes in the world that are virtually guaranteed to exist, whether because the nature of the universe has made them inevitable, or because changes long past have created the currents that are now too old and too deep to change.

Picture a river again. What happens when you throw a stick into it? The stick is swept up in the current and carried along the river.

Throw in more sticks. Same thing, right? You can make small changes without affecting the overall outcome. Within one large shadow of a sphere, the details of a hundred blades of grass whose shadows are lost within the larger shape.

Anchor a large stick to the riverbed so it can't get swept away. Now, it's just one stick. The water will flow around it. There are small ripples. Tiny changes in the river, micro-currents that will affect a localized area. But on the whole? The river still flows. You changed something. But you didn't change the course of the river.

Add stick after stick after stick until the river is obstructed completely, and the current is forced to change shape.

Which stick built the dam?

Which straw should the camel's back blame?

Back to the ocean. Can you dam the sea? Can you build that dam one stick at a time, by throwing sticks into separate currents, hoping the currents bring them where they need to be in time?

There are patterns borne out from the endless flow of possibility as the ocean of time churns. With all those ancient currents running together, what difference does the wake of a boat make on the shape of the waves? How many breaches from how many whales would it take to turn a current south instead of north?

What if you could make a bigger change? What if an avalanche altered the shape of the seafloor, so the rotation of the earth forces new waters to resist the old currents? So the inevitability of the dynamic universe drags forth a new set of possibilities?

There are a LOT of currents. They've been turning for a long, long time, ebbing and flowing with a billion tides and ten thousand quintillion waves. Choices can make new currents. BIG choices, with a lot of consequences, may even change existing ones.

But the ocean still has a geography to it. There are places where water is forced through the gaps between landmasses, or forced into the shallows, or freed to dive into the black beyond a continental shelf. There are places where, no matter how many changes you make, many currents are still guaranteed to meet.

There are fixed points in time.

What if one of those points is a whirlpool, threatening to swallow everything drawn into the place those currents meet?

What about a whirlpool on the scale of worlds and gods?

How do you keep from drowning?

How do you give yourself the best chance, not of AVOIDING the whirlpool of inevitability, but of entering it at the farthest possible edge, where the right momentum, the right decisions made in the moment you are caught in its gravity, may carry you through to the other side, so you still remain when time marches on?

Is it better to see things coming at all? Or is the ability to see time, to speak a language of the universe that no one else can speak, one of the greatest cosmic horrors you can imagine?

Imagine the burden of time on those who can see it.

Imagine the WEIGHT of being able to see those currents. Of knowing which threads of fate to pull. Of knowing which ripples to make, which waves to break, which currents to shift. Of knowing.

Imagine the complexity of figuring out WHICH changes to make. And the great leviathan of guilt left on your shoulders when the decisions you made - even in pursuit of the best possible outcome - bring harm to the ones you love most, the ones you're most desperate to protect.

Even if you're right.

Even if you played 17-dimensional chess with the wizard-addled corpse of god and knew, with certainty, that if a single problem you had a hand in creating had been resolved more neatly by even minutes, the sticks would not have fallen into place within the dam, and the entirety of creation could have been swallowed piece by piece by the horror you were trying to stop.

Imagine the horror. Imagine the responsibility. Imagine the unending, agonizing pain of the burden of Knowing.

Because what time is, most of all, is a nightmare.

And there's no waking up.

[eldritchamy]

How it started: I need to flesh out this cool concept I've had for a while so it has specific categories that mean specific things

How it's going: I created an entire system of classifying anomalous events similar to the SCP Foundation's K-Class Scenarios but with better internal logic and clarity (instead of random letters meaning random things), the notation for which doubles as a full on anomaly classification system that expands on an important organization in the world, and doing so may have ALSO formed some really critical connective tissue between some of the early story points that I've been struggling to string together coherently (which makes actually starting to WRITE much closer to reality). The existence of this classification system ALSO expands on one of the major aspects of my magic system and runic notation for ritual casting. And in the process I've fleshed out ANOTHER really cool and related part of the way magic works that will play a major role in the lore and story.

[eldritchamy]

I think your trademark (TM) is your posts about your very detailed worldbuilding, especially when you get into things like time and magic and reality! It’s very impressive and the amount of depth in everything is just amazing :D

Also vampires.

Have I talked about the magic system? The huge visual differences in how the same ritual/runic magic can be represented by different groups? (not only did I invent a runic system that translates effectively the process of creation into a kind of magic circle that you can literally LOOK AT AND HAVE A LOOSE IDEA OF WHAT IT DOES, I basically invented the equivalent of different LANGUAGES for it, because the same information can be represented in radically different visual ways while still showing the same critical information to anyone who knows how to read it, and it's definitely set up in a way that a person who has learned this type of arcana can look at it and understand it while a person who doesn't know how to read it will not have a CLUE what they're looking at, which seems like a pretty good and realistic way to HAVE a runic representation of god magic that basically rewrites the universe.)

Have I talked about the relationship between power and control? The soul as a flexible window to the raw energy of creation, and the effects of exercise and injury? Have I mentioned the Consequences of Really Big Magic Fuckups? My solution to the Abundance Of Hypercarnivores problem in DND style fantasy settings?

God have I even mentioned the COLORS of creation? Soul Mass and the scales of existence? The hierarchy of angels and the Divine Ladder? Evocations vs Emanations vs Empyreans? Immortals and the Outer Realms? The fact that Celestials, Devils, Demons, and others are all just labels applied to different color archetypes of Immortals/Angels? The complete absence of a "moral" correlation to their existence?

Have I talked about the House of Cards? The plot? The backstory? The main city? The Understars and Entropolis and the fraying edges between worlds? The pinnacle of wizardry and arcane knowledge and the greatest library in the universe being nothing more than the crumbling ruin of a legacy broken by hubris and the folly of elitism and isolationism?

The nature of precognition and what it means for time and fate and choice and causality and circumstance and consequences, and what it means for something to be a "fixed point" in time?

What exactly vampires ARE in this setting and how you normally become one? And why Cass is so different? (This is absolutely not the focus of the first book.)

Orders of Magnitude of existence and the gravitational lensing of the fabric of reality in proximity to the unfathomable SCALE of what an Outer God is? Their role in creation? The name of their grandmother? The Medium and the Method? What it means for god to have a blind spot? The importance of kittens?

No seriously HAVE I talked about any of that? Cause I went on a 3.5 hour, 4900+ word infodump to my dnd server last month and now I no longer have any idea what I have and haven't talked about, or where, when it comes to the Uneiverse.

I know which things I definitely HAVEN'T talked about. But there's a lot I no longer remember for sure. Have I even mentioned the sources of inspiration? I don't think I have.

Also yeah Fangs Sexy.

[eldritchamy]

I’m like 77% sure that Ash is the protagonist of Uneiverse so I’m here to ask — why her? What makes her a good protagonist? Like why does the story follow her instead of someone else?

This is an EXCELLENT question. Thank you so much for asking it.

One of these days I'm gonna have to think of a working title for the first book set IN the Uneiverse so it's easier to talk about. I've had a few working titles but one of them might actually get used so I can't really drop those. For now let's call it Story Mode.

Story Mode, in the strictest sense, has a bit of an ensemble cast. There are four characters in sort of a Major Protagonist role, and around 3-4 other Supporting Protagonists, depending on how you define them based on the amount of influence they have on wherever the finalized version of the plot ends up. I have strong ideas in terms of narrative structure and general Major Events, but there's a lot of connecting tissue yet to be decided.

You're not wrong to think of Ash as the most central protagonist, though. The narrative does basically frame her as such.

There are several ways I could answer why.

She's based on my first (and by far favorite and most heavily emotionally invested) DND character. The entire concept of the story sprawled out from basically alternate versions of her story as I imagined it without the limitations of tabletop rules. The story exists because Ash is the character I imagined the story for.

Ash has some ... complicated connections to the plot that are hard to explain without saying more than I want to. The tl;dr is that there are things happening in the Uneiverse, and Ash has the most reason of all of the characters to be drawn into those events, based on both her personality and her personal connections to the world around her.

If the story WASN'T following her, it wouldn't be the same story.

Whether she's a "good" protagonist is really more up to reader interpretation. I think she is, and I want her to be, but there's whatever work I put into the story, and there's how any potential readers will respond to it.

I think she's got potential because of how deep the brainworms have been digging for the last two plus years. I think about her CONSTANTLY. Different situations she could find herself in, how she might react to them based on changing circumstances, different ways SPECIFIC CONVERSATIONS could go based on how she relates to other characters and information, etc.

I've never had a more complete sense of who a character is than I have with Ash. I know her whole brain. How she sees and interacts with the world is just innate to me at this point.

That helps a lot with figuring out how a character moves through a story. She's easy to write because I know exactly how she'll behave.

Additionally, she's COMPLICATED. She has two things she wants very much, and those things are contradictory, which is good for driving character growth and conflict.

about 15 years ago, her mother (an extraordinarily powerful angel who was a very devoted and loving parent that Ash had a good relationship with) just didn't come home one day. And Ash is desperate to know both HOW and WHY. Her mother wouldn't have just left. And the thought of what could have KEPT her from coming home is a point of both intense curiosity, and fear.

Ash wants, more than ALMOST anything else, to just have a quiet and peaceful life with her wife. And other partners.

That ALMOST does a lot of heavy lifting. But there is a straw for this camel's back, and that straw is curiosity. She can be drawn OUT of her safe zone if you dangle the right thread in front of her. And that is critical to ... basically everything that happens.

Why does Ash have such an intense need to feel safe and stay out of danger? She spent her whole life with people she thinks are more capable and powerful than her (honestly, she's not wrong). First with her mother, then with Aria, an enormously powerful witch (specifically nature-based magic, so functionally similar to a high level druid) who became her girlfriend and eventually wife. Her most significant partner OTHER than her wife is their mutual girlfriend Cass, who is a very powerful vampire assassin that used to be in a bit of an adventuring party with Aria a few years ago. Lailah, Aria, and Cass are three people that NOBODY fucks with.

And therein lies the problem.

Ash has always felt PROTECTED. And that had the consequence of making her feel exposed without it. She feels like she NEEDS protection, because she never learned how to be the strong one. She has a lot more going on with her magic than she really acknowledges, but she's never felt like she was capable of protecting herself. There's always been someone there for her. One of her most important traumas/personality flaws wasn't formed by BAD relationships, it was formed because of GOOD ones. She does have some pretty rare and potent magical abilities, but because her social circle consists of ridiculously overpowered women, she doesn't really notice as much how she compares to the average person, especially given how she uses those talents.

She has this weird, almost paradoxical thing where she definitely feels like she's cleverer than most people (she is), so trying to call her out for being more capable than she thinks (she is) doesn't really WORK because she partly DOES feel that way, but she has a blind spot that's really hard to point out to her, and she just insists that she's not as powerful as other people she knows (which is hard to correct her on because she's not really WRONG, she's just comparing herself to the wrong people, because her wife is Superpowers Georg and her girlfriend is the most powerful vampire in the world, and her mom was a LOT more powerful than any angels she's ever heard of or been able to find books about).

There are reasons Aria is that powerful. Secret reasons.

(It's trauma.)

Cass is another DEEP point of interest for me (and may get her own book that's a much lower stakes young adult vampire romance novel, set in her backstory, nearly 130 years ago).

Her tl;dr is that she got super duper murdered by noble/mob family drama (basically, her dad sucked), and someone close to her who found out about the plot not-soon-enough had a naughty naughty ancestor who dabbled in some naughty naughty magic, and that person used a spell she didn't fully understand to "not let Cassandra die". What was meant to be a protection spell ended up being a LOT more powerful than she knew (for several reasons), and it created a kind of loophole in the universe that protected Cass from death, and raised her as an unusually powerful vampire.

Basic elevator pitch lore? She died. Her body no longer has life energy of its own, but she can survive by feeding off the energy of others. That energy is best transferred to her through blood, which is basically a magical substance that binds a soul to a body. The spell used to save Cass basically FUSED her soul to her body, (trapping that body in a state of immortality) and separating the two would be EXTRAORDINARILY difficult. The spell requires energy to maintain the link, which is why she needs blood. If she takes in more energy than she needs, she can basically store a reserve of magic energy that will be used as needed to fuel various powers she has. If she keeps well ahead of her needs (she does), hunger isn't an issue unless she REALLY pushes herself and spends a ton of energy.

Her body is more or less unchanged from the day she turned, including the basic needs of a human body. She still eats and sleeps and breathes like everyone else. If she forces herself to go without those things, she can do it, but that causes her to burn through energy a lot faster, which would make her need to feed a lot more. There are limits to how much she can feed AT ONCE, because there's only so much blood you can put in a human stomach before you're gonna throw up, so burning through way too much energy too fast is not a good idea. In practice all it means is she can hold her breath for a really long time if someone tries to, like, use a gas grenade on her.

There are other things about the kind of magic used that influence the exact mechanics of it, but that's the basics. She also doesn't burn in the sun, there's no holy water or crucifixes in this world but if there were they'd have no effect, a stake to the heart is just a stab wound that itches a bit longer (and only because of splinters), etc. If there's a hard limit to what her body can't survive, she hasn't found it yet. Decapitation would probably do it, but she hasn't been eager to try that. The biggest threat to her so far has been starvation, and she only got close once, under very unusual circumstances.

After 5 paragraphs of Cass you'd probably assume she was one of the Major Protagonists, but she's actually one of the minor ones.

Central cast:

Ash

Aria

"Maze" [pending finalization]

"Nat" [pending finalization]

Ash is really the first to get pulled into the Main Quest. Aria gets involved by association, then gets pulled into the Main Quest a lot harder around what you'd probably think of as Act 2. Maze and Nat get a similar invitation to the Intro Quest Sequence soon after Ash (Ash and Aria are probably chapters 1 & 2, chapter 3 & 4 are most likely Nat and Maze).

Cass is kind of a recurring support character who shows up to help at a few critical moments.

Ally, same thing.

Ella, a character tied to Cass' backstory, will likely make the fewest appearances as a supporting character.

There's more going on that I cannot be specific about.

Structurally, I expect chapter 1 should be an introduction to Ash as a person and her place in the world, as well as some insight into what kind of story this might be. Chapter 2 connects her to the world and establishes her conflicting interests (comfortable home life vs. curiosity and pulling threads). Chapter 3 introduces Nat and some interesting bits about the setting, which hopefully drives reader curiosity. Chapter 4 should be an introduction to Maze and the relationship between these two characters. I expect chapter 5 will probably be the four coming together for the first time and getting the plot moving more significantly. Cass might be introduced around chapter 6 or 7, and then some real interesting shit is gonna start happening, and everyone is gonna realize how much Bigger the Main Quest really is. The introduction to the first "god" character (a vast understatement) is likely what really kicks off act 2, and suddenly the stakes are a LOT crazier.

You will NOT be hearing much, if anything, about Act 3. The last quarter of the story lives in my head rent free. I'm very excited about the central ANtagonists.

Thank you so much for this question!

Please ask me more.