Back when I was just getting into D&D in the early 80's I was fascinated with just drawing maps of places. I was then struck upon an idea of somehow linking every single map I drew into the same world. The problem being that this would have ended up being larger than a reasonable planet. Much larger. I also started placing various fantasy books I was fond of here and there. So I came started brainstorming and thought. "Why not have it stretch infinitely to the horizons." So I did. I believe one of my inspirations was having picked up the AD&D Manual of the Planes which described many Outer Planes as just such places.
Of course, this was not an "Outer Plane." This would be home. All sorts of other problems presented themselves, such as climate and weather patterns on an infintely horizontal world. Since I wanted this to be "Earth-like" in its climate and weather, I felt I needed to come up with something that mimiced convection of the atmosphere. I decided that there was a "pattern" (but not regular) of alternately hot spots and cold spots, thousands of miles apart though. To make it randomized, the energy in the "hot" spot rotated out in a spiral, the energy in the "cold" spot were drawn in in a manner like a magnetic field (it's not electrical, just that the pattern is arranged as such). Occasionally, over the course of tens of thousands of years, the cold spots change orientation, causing the glacial sheets that have developed within the set pattern to melt in places and form in new places. Instant Ice Ages in new places... of sorts... There are deserts where the interaction of the heat and cold concentrations don't mix.
Anyway, I was having fun with the idea, not trying to have it make too much sense, were talking fantasy here, I imagined that thousands of years before the rise of humanity, the Giants were an advanced race who had discovered how to harness the energy in these concentrations of heat and cold. I imagined that the Giants ended up causing the heat concentration they harnessed to cataclysmically implode, unleashing an elemental storm that wiped their civilization from history. The storm is permanent, and it is the size of a continent. This caused the Immortals to curse the Giants into degeneracy for the havoc wrought upon the world... it forced the Immortals to have to "resuffle the pattern" of heat and cold so as to keep a climactic "balance".
The
elemental storm, now having lasted for tens of thousands of years has created a unique landscape underneath it. Imagine an "elemental" Far Realms.
The cosmology I was playing with was different as well, but this was manifested in distinct was upon the landscape. I was a little bothered by the "'infinite" horizontal idea, that there should have to be some sort of question of "what about the verticle"? I came up with a sort of sandwich concept of 5 elemental "dominant" (but not pure) planes. The layer that mimiced "Earth" was the
water dominant layer, and it was placed in the middle. Go high enough and you can locate where the water dominant layer intersects with the
air dominant layer. A certain clique of dwarven spellcasters had discovered that they could cause an object to "float" exactly on the plane where the two layers met. Thus, at the same elevation across the world, dwarves have established colonies of "
mountain ports" where their air fleets would harbor. The culture of the dwarves of the mountains is the same across the world, but the culture of the dwarves of the "lowlands" is affected by other local cultures. Of course, once high enough in elevation, via magical means, it is possible to cross into the air dominant layer from the lower layer, where different "laws of physics" applied. Life is also a little different as it evolved according to the different elemental dominance. Won't bother going into specifics here what it is like, as it effectively is a different plane, not a weird land.
Thousands of miles higher in the air dominant layer, one would come to the horizontal plane where one could magically cross into the
void dominant layer. I had no idea what this would be, until Spelljammer came out.
In the middle layer, if one traveled beneath the earth far enough one could come upon the horizontal plane where one could cross into the
earth dominant layer. Basically, the UnderDark, thousands of miles deep, infinitely horizontal. Caverns the size of continents. Again, the "laws" of physics changed here as well. I borrowed a little from the descriptions of Ysgard, where hovering earthbergs regularly collided with each other. Of coarse, take out the sun. And take out the flaming heat on the undersides. too much detail to go into the other oddities I put in there. It's a different plane in effect, not a weird land, really. Again, native life here is also different, as it evolved in a plane with a different elemental dominance.
Go deep enough in the earth dominant layer, and you can cross into the
fire dominant layer. The inferno. Hell. Etc. The bottom of the world.
In each of the five "elementally dominant" layers, there are links to planes of the "pure" element associated with the layer. So in the middle layer (the water dominant), that "looked" like Earth, to go deep enough in any ocean would be to cross over into the plane of pure water. Each of the other elementally dominant layers had their own way to mix with the elementally pure plane.
Just some wide-eyed imaginings of a bizarre cosmology I wanted to make work, and make interesting. Sorry I went on so long, I just wanted to explain exactly why some wierd lands in my worlds are the way they are.
Regards,
Eric Anondson
