Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7369532" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have had the conception of 'what lies outside the universe' for as long as I can remember.  I honestly don't remember if I've always called it the 'Far Realms' or if I had some very similar notion ('Furthest Realm'?), but I certainly call it the 'Far Realms' now.   The requirement to have such a place was inherent in doing away with the infinite multiverse, because I still wanted to retain the notion of 'unnatural' in some cases.  As in, "Things that were not meant to be."   The inhabitants of my universe - even the gods - don't understand the 'Far Realms'.   The standard model is that the 'Far Realms' are the domain of potentialities, the place where everything that could happen but didn't happen exists, at least in potential.   Some believe that it is a realm of ideas that were abandoned by the unknown creator before he created the universe.   Some believe that it is actually other creations of the unknown creator (which would mean it was an infinite number of multiverses).  The earliest I can remember thinking about it was sometime in the 1980's when I heard of a Greyhawk deity named something like 'Celestine' which I knew nothing about, but from his name I conceived him of a god of outer space wandering far away from the world, a remote god of stars and astronomy little concerned with the world but rather with things that lay beyond it.   As I said, I steal things shamelessly, so in he went.  Along with that came the question of where what would become known as aberrations came from.   For example, how did mindflayers get in the universe?  The idea that they weren't actually the creation of any god, and were in fact somehow alien to the universe (as outlined in some Dragon magazine articles) appealed to me.  From what became known as 'the Far Realm' they came.  Eventually, most things now called aberrations became explained through the Iconoclasm - that time when mad wizards of lost power were making weapons to fight the gods.On a personal note, since you seem so interested in my thinking process, the actual deepest reason is that I'm a monotheist myself and that like Tolkien, behind everything, I have a monotheistic view of everything.  If the analogue of God is not obviously within the universe, then it must be that there are things outside the universe.  Fundamentally the deities of my homebrew universe are too small to be the cause of it, so it must have some external unknowable cause.  While no one in my universe can learn the nature of it, I myself know the nature of my universe and what lays outside it.  I know things that the gods can only guess at, such as whether the Creator actually exists.  This is actually alluded to in the Slaad thread.  The Slaad are one of the few things in the universe that have actually penetrated outside of it (Usurl, who precipitated the God's War, is one of the others, and it's possible Primus communicated with the creator at the beginning of time but I've never made up my mind about that), but because the Slaad can't coherently communicate period, they are unable to communicate what they know.</blockquote>

Verification