Theorycrafting: Even More on Planes

Recently, I have recruited the help of a pair of contributors to help with construction of this site, to act as editors for the content, and to help with research! If you actually read this blog you’ve seen their work actually! Once we add proper author tags, they may take some time to either introduce themselves, but maybe just introduce themselves via their work, so look forward to it!

I have been kind of letting the games run without expanding more on the underlying cosmology of Thera, because frankly, D&D games just run without having to deal with the metaphysical machinery that underpins it all. Table makes jokes, stories get told, bosses get beat, and the game goes on. Players too would, inevitably, reach for the standard D&D mechanics and tropes that have persisted over decades. Stopping that would mean I’d be stopping everyone at the table every 5 minutes just to basically say “stop having fun!”, and they wouldn’t even be wrong!

But of course, I just can’t help myself from trying to go back and re-explore the deep mysteries of Thera, and the cosmos around it. This time I have help! Ran and Yomi instrumental in finding some elements that either needed some additional context, clarification, or things that seemed to just be missing at all! So they went back and read the past two theorycrafting posts I made and gave me some very insightful feedback:

• What I called the Glacial Model, which maybe more of a “Hydrological” model, doesn’t yet address the first post’s periodic cycles
• Where exactly do places like the Far Realm fit, how about the Elemental Planes?
• Do these two posts describe opposing models? Are they refinements? How do they fit together?
• Where does the magic ultimately flow?

In this and the next couple of articles, I plan to expand upon my previous work, and address these issues and others that we’ve discovered during our lengthy, fruitful and enjoyable discussions. Note that these aren’t settled canon until I’ve actually demonstrated these in game, and until then, these are a work in progress.

As I write this, I still haven’t decided how the periodicity works, and if I’m even still inclined to add it.

Chaos

Now, the concept that a chaotic soup of magic was already present in the Glacial Model. Even though I think it works as is, I think considering the other updates to the greater model, this still has to be changed, especially since this is the ultimate source of all magic in this cosmological model.

Previously, I wrote that there are these Chaotic Planes where matter cannot exist. They are a place of raw enegry. It wasn’t explicit in my post describing the Glacial Model, but I still intended these to be the source of raw magical energy–the snowpack at the top of the analogical mountain. In the updated conceptualization, I don’t think it makes sense anymore. The reason that I think it doesn’t will be more clear as we continue, but even before that, there is something more fundamentally wrong conceptually if we model magic from snowmelt.

Snowpack is not chaotic

Any analogy that fits best with a glacial analog seems, at least to me, like we’re describing potential energy. Something that somehow stores densely packed energy, ready to be released, supplying the processes downstream. This doesn’t feel chaotic to me. Maybe in can be, I’m not really a physicist or a chaos theorist, but instinctively it doesn’t work.

Primordial Medium

The initial state of the cosmos is a very highly energetic soup of raw magical energy. Very chaotic interactions, creations and destructions happen randomly in almost every direction. If one were to “see” into this distant past, one would mainly see bright lights flashing as energetic collisions constantly annihilate anything that starts to resemble matter. Eventually though, some nucleation points persist longer. Then some form more stable structures. After long enough, these miniscule precursors become self-organizing in some way, expanding into a network of material that capture even more of this raw energy instead of wholly destroying it. I call these Proto-Vivial structures. They are what will become the scaffolding that will support the cycles that underpin how the cosmos would evolve into its present state.

Maybe this proto-Vivial structure might allow some entities that could satisfy the narrowest definitions of life: persistent matter that consumes material to sustain or grow itself, have some limited motility, then replicate copies of itself, before it can no longer sustain the necessary reactions to do so. Then the material produced by these self-sustaining entities grow the structure even more, that would then evolve to the topography that supports the present state of the cosmos.

Chaotic Planes

This doesn’t mean there aren’t any Chaotic Planes at all anymore. To scholars that discover planar travel and obervation, they would see these planes and maybe create a model based on our previous Glacial one.