Manifold Sky
Iknemi, Ikirsten 5, 10,000 AR (Fifth Day of the First Month, Year 10,000, Age of Reclaimation)
Scene
The Laws of Manifold Sky
- Gravity points down towards the nearest cube face, with places equidistant between cube faces experiencing microgravity.
- Extra spatial dimensions exist, with at least five known to exist with certainty, though most physical objects and processes only interact in three dimensions.
- Magic does not exist; there are unexplained phenomena, but they all obey a set of rules which follow from first principles.
- Technology exists in an amplified version of what it was on pre-1940's Earth. Semi-conductor technology is primitive where it exists at all. This is a function of both a lack of easily accessible resources for them and entrenched industrial investment in already-existing dieseltech.
Cosmology
The residents of the Manifold believe that the Celestial System was formed at some point before The Curved Time, a time where all sentient beings resided on round 'planets' where the horizon curved away in all directions. In this view, the Manifold became a prison for the residents when, in response to some sort of forgotten sin, some greater power placed them within the Manifold with no means of escape. Different religions have different interpretations of this event, but all share some example of it in their oldest myths and legendry.
Show spoiler
The true origin of the Manfold is more complicated, but essentially involved the actions of extra-universal beings who constructed the universe wholesale in response to a need for a sort of purgatory for wayward souls from their other creations. All prior events within the Manifold were a creative fiction designed to dissuade the residents from questioning their reality too much; all ancestal memories of The Curved Time were mistakenly left unredacted in the minds of the first residents.
Principal Geography & Features
The Manifold itself is a five-dimensional region of space roughly similar (though not perfectly so) to a 5-plex or penteract. The tesseracts are the ten 4-plexes which are the unfolded net of the Manifold penteract. Each tesseract can, in turn, be unfolded into eight cubes. Because living beings are three-dimensional in the Manifold Sky setting (though the Garbage Man has some ability to move through to higer dimensions), they percive the world as existing on the internal surfaces of these cubes.
The cubes within a tesseract are connected to one another through commissures - fissures - located in the centers of each cube face, though not all of these are easily accessible. In the sky above, each cube has another 'layer' to it, with the space dividing these layers known as an inflection layer. Having two layers allows a given cube to connect to more than one tesseract via the commissures located on the opposing layers. Each tesseract has a certain quality to it (i.e. the aridity of the Eastern Tesseract) which is bestowed to all cube layers associated with that tesseract; the degree of this quality varies based on how close a layer is to a given tesseract.
by BCGR_Wurth
by BCGR_Wurth
by BCGR_Wurth
Initial Active Setting
The world of the Manifold Sky setting is mostly confined to the Manifold but may also deal with questions involving the region of the universe immediately surrounding it (known as the Celestial Realms). The Manifold Sky setting would be ideal for a "west marches" style of campaign, though individual adventures centered around exploration, political intrigue, or warfare are also viable.
by BCGR_Wurth
by BCGR_Wurth