Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Binder Fred" data-source="post: 4442013" data-attributes="member: 63746">Design philosophies will vary, of course. My feeling is that a setting should provide a general framework even (especially?) for its more chaotic building blocks -- and few can question the centrality of the Sea itself here. I do therefore think the Sea needs a firm coat of paint, even if all it encloses is chaos, so to speak. And, actually, the Floating Sea idea can provide all of the things you list above if we incorporate into it the idea of Ethereal Storms (which you just sparked (LOVE this sort of thing, by the way <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />):ETHEREAL STORMS : The interface between true ethereal "matter" and "ordinary" sea water is far from a quiet place. That assemblage is a state which should not exist, an unstable thing that must be perpetually enforced (hence the islands themselves)! The contact surface slowly roils, boils up, thins or thickens like a giant underwater sea.  At what depth does the interface begins here today? Is the shallow reef you explored last week there below your swimming feet or do you hover over infinite depths instead, ready to swallow you up if you should prove foolish enough to dive down? Or is the interface high today, the ethereal thin? Does it rise towards you as we speak, a world of teeth swimming right on the other side?The sunken cities have plenty of place to exist in the shallows that surround to varying extent the main isles (with the occasional change of height inherent in the Floating Sea concept, they'd pretty much *have* to be sunken cities under there somewhere <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />. "Shallow" for me means 200m or less, i.e. the photic zone where the light of the sun can still be seen. To compare, that's the average maximum depth of the continental shelves in our own world. If you want cities in the eternal dark, you can always add another, deeper, "ring" of land  around that island (i.e. widen/ bulge/overhang the column deeper down)...Did I forget anything?Anyway, in short I think with this you have a strong, self-consistant concept that still allows DMs to do pretty much everything they like. One rule though, for flavor : "Sea gates are not free standing portals but take instead the shape of progressive change over distance. Your character could, for example, sink into darker and ever murkier waters, penetrating the ethereal murk, after a single or a thousand stroke the taste of water could then return, except not salt this time (a lake?); then your head breaks the surface -- even though you're *sure* you've been swimming down all this time..."Binder Fred, hope I'm not holding you guys back from your lauch date.</blockquote>

Verification