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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8812960" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The cosmology of Jewel of the Desert is specifically an area of mystery, one which the players are slowly learning the truths of. (I left much of this open to start with, and began figuring it out as the players established things and as it made sense for the ways the fronts were developing.)[SPOILER="Generally-accepted cosmology (among NPCs)"]Mortal-kind lives in many regions of the planet, which in the local tongue (close enough to "common" though not actually a global common language) is called Al-Duniyyah, "that which is near" or "the place of examination." It contains at least two continent-sized land masses and at least one roughly-Pacific-sized ocean, the Sapphire Sea, though it has a lot more livable islands than the Pacific does (think the profusion of islands in The Seven Voyages of Sinbad.) On the eastern shore of the Sapphire Sea, you find the Tarrakhuna, the main region where the game is set, a semi-arid, arid, and desert land, but also a land of great magic and great opportunity for those willing to seek it. There are jungles to the north and temperate forests to the south, each with their own culture and history. On the far western shore of the Sapphire Sea, you find Yuxia, the Jade Home, a distant land of mystery and profit, though advancements in sailing technology and other things have only recently allowed truly regular trade between the two continents.Overlaid on top of Al-Duniyyah--really, more of a "simultaneous" world rather than a parallel one--you have Al-Barzahk, the "Spirit World," which people properly trained can view via rituals of various kinds. The Spirit World retains a memory of past events, especially anything that has lasted a really long time or major, sudden upheavals, including large numbers of deaths. There are some differences between the types of spirits that tend to frequent the Spirit World and those that tend to frequent the material world. The former tend to be associated with the dead, or with abstract ideals and concepts (e.g. Owl, a sapient spirit representing the idea of being an owl and what skills and powers owls have, but much more intelligent and interactive.) The latter tend to be called "elementals" or arise naturally out of physical things and formations. There is some overlap between the two but generally those categories are pretty solid.Parallel to Al-Duniyyah, there is Al-Akirah (which the people of Yuxia simply call "Akira," a curious and not yet explained similarity), the "other world." Al-Akirah has far denser, more potent elemental energies than Al-Duniyyah, to the degree that native life there can have active elemental manifestations (e.g. trees with leaves of fire or ice or smoke), and even relatively mundane plants grown there have significantly increased potency and magical utility. The equivalent of the Tarrakhuna is the genie "country" called Jinnistan, but it's really more a loose collection of city-states that all mutually recognize one another's authority and act as something of a cartel protecting Jinnistani export values. (The City of Brass is one of the many city-states of Jinnistan.) Yuxia also has a parallel, called Fusang, but few in the Tarrakhuna know anything about it."Beneath" Al-Duniyyah, in a physical sense, you find Al-Jahim, the "underworld," which should be taken very literally in this case, it's all the places that exist (sometimes somewhat tenuously) deep below the surface of the world. Natural laws sometimes become...less firm in these places, and strange Things from Outside can sometimes leak in. Fortunately, that sort of thing only happens very deep down, so even if you delve into the earth exploring a temple or whatever you rarely find issues of this type. The party has only once dealt with this stuff, delving into the deepest parts of the catacombs in their main city."Beneath" it in a more metaphysical sense, you find Ja'Hannam, "Hell" or "the Abyss." It's where fiends come from, and is generally a very unpleasant place. It's also very difficult to reach, and its residents are generally very unwelcoming of guests. Little is known in a verified academic sense about Hell, though somewhat more is known about its denizens (such research must be conducted carefully to avoid raising the ire of the Safiqi priesthood, but is not totally forbidden.)The atmosphere and space above Al-Duniyyah are called Al-Jana, "the heavens." They are believed to be empty and devoid of life, as no magical or scientific examination has yet revealed evidence of any life outside of Al-Duniyyah. Likewise, no planes are even remotely accessible to magical effects other than Al-Akirah and Ja'Hannam, so this is where the official academic cosmology ends.According to the Safiqi priesthood, there is one more plane: Jannah, "True Heaven," a place which is outside reality entirely. It's where souls go when they truly, permanently die, to meet with the One, the Great Architect, creator of all things and monotheistic deity of the Safiqi religion. Once a soul journeys to Jannah, it cannot come back; this explains why some souls cannot be resurrected and others can. No evidence has ever been found by Waziri mages that Jannah exists, but if it really is a one-way trip, no such evidence should exist, so this isn't necessarily much of a criticism.[/SPOILER]However...the party has learned things which contradict the above story.[SPOILER="The Party's Discoveries"]The players have conclusive proof (having physically been there) that there is at least one plane completely unrelated to any of the aforementioned planes--specifically, an artificially-constructed perpendicular plane, known as "Zerzura," or the "White City," "Garden-City," or "City of Birds." They cleansed this plane of the spirit corruption that had been destroying it, and have set up some of their allies to help rebuild it. Due to Timey-Wimey Shenanigans as a result of their adventure in Zerzura, they have seen what the future they built could be like, and it's pretty cool. But that won't happen for a very long time.While adventuring in Zerzura, the party also discovered a "Polyplanetarium," which had some...very weird projectors. That is, these projectors did not have lenses and overlays to show a single, static night sky. Instead, they were magically capable of showing either the sky or surface of many other worlds--dozens, perhaps hundreds, all of them very clearly different. This implies the existence of not just one other plane, but possibly hundreds or even thousands of other planes that are, somehow, completely inaccessible to Al-Duniyyah at present. How or why this happened, and what might be done about it, remains a mystery.Well...mostly a mystery. The party has learned, from several sources, that several major changes occurred on their world about two millennia ago. Firstly, the First Sultan (whom they have learned was a real, flesh-and-blood man) rose up, gathering together the power of all the extant free people of the Tarrakhuna, uniting them as a rebel army against the tyranny of the Genie Rajahs. Secondly, the Genie-Rajahs chose to abandon the mortal world entirely, departing for Jinnistan en masse, leaving their cities behind. Some cities were simply abandoned, such as the one the player characters come from, Al-Rakkah. Others were hidden, booby-trapped, or otherwise protected. Third, there used to be an extremely advanced civilization of magic-using, elf-like beings called the El-Adrin who lived in the temperate forests south of the Tarrakhuna. However, their prophets became aware of a future cataclysm that would affect the whole world, fundamentally changing the way magic works in a way that would lead to the collapse of their civilization. Rather than accept this fate, they attempted to evade it, casting their entire civilization into a pocket-plane to wait out the troubles; the party Battlemaster is a descendant through his mother of those El-Adrin who remained behind, who were changed by the alterations to the world into "merely" being elves. Finally, they have found records of some being, "Azimech al-Saqqit," "The Uplifted and Fallen One," who apparently was imprisoned on their world. Who, or what, Azimech al-Saqqit is, the party does not yet know, but they are drawing closer to real answers.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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