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[TheFlame52]

write down your rules

I'm making a good 50% of the rules up as I go along. Leveling and skill leveling work by me deciding they've practiced enough. My notes are to remind me, not to teach someone else.

I'll try.

That reminds me. The Land of Omen is actually one side of a cube, something that the players don't know. This would be spoiled if I wrote it down. The cube world is actually a cosmic die, with the Land of Omen being the 4-spot side. 4 is a holy number in the Land of Omen and shows up a lot. That would also be spoiled.

[NW_Kohaku]

That reminds me. The Land of Omen is actually one side of a cube, something that the players don't know. This would be spoiled if I wrote it down. The cube world is actually a cosmic die, with the Land of Omen being the 4-spot side. 4 is a holy number in the Land of Omen and shows up a lot. That would also be spoiled.

There would be many problems with a cuboid planet, not the least of which being that the oceans would pool into the center (being as that's where the gravity is strongest), and the corners would be super-mountains stretching hundreds of miles above the atmosphere. The livable space would be a green circle around a giant ocean surrounded by airless rock.

Something more like a giant icosahedron would make a bit more sense, as a larger number of faces mitigates these problems. (Of course, that extends onwards towards an infinite-faced sphere, but an icosahedron has some special merits in a D&D world.)

Also, just keep in mind that Dwarf Fortress lets you have "outsiders" - the "world" is not a world, it's just a continent or an island. (The largest map size is roughly the size of Ireland.) This is personally why I take out the demand for poles on the world map, and generally let it be either all-tropical or all-temperate, because it's really only meant to be a small slice of a bigger world.

[TheFlame52]

1. It's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit.
2. There's a border around each side where gravity changes 90 degrees. You can only pass though each border once. The sun has a squarish orbit.
3. There are reports of strange people washing up on shore in the past.
4. The top and bottom faces are frozen wastelands. The top face contains a hole into the center of the cube, where the Creator lives.
5. The cube is Armok's lucky die.

There is no long distance ocean travel. The sail was never invented, most boats are hollowed-out giant horseshoe crab shells. Also, the ocean is full of sea serpents and giant sperm whales and is generally a Bad Place.

[TheBiggerFish]

@TheFlame:So world travellers might get stuck on a face that isn't the one they started off on, or did I misunderstand?

[TheFlame52]

Yep. Which is why nobody's ever returned to tell about falling off the edge of the world. Also, the whole Land of Omen only takes about two weeks (8 days) to cross from one end to the other.

[TheBiggerFish]

Okay, but what about at the corners?

[TheFlame52]

Yeah, you can go around a whole corner and end up on the same face you started out on. Just nobody's done it. There haven't been very many polar explorers.

[TheBiggerFish]

I mean, what if you cross the border at a corner?

[TheFlame52]

Fuck if I know. You get stuck and die since your blood can't flow back through the barrier, your body decays and falls apart into three pieces? You just end up on one face, having passed through all three borders? Anyway, even if you survive, I wouldn't recommend going through any of those barriers again. Imagine getting halfway through a barrier, then discovering your other half wasn't allowed to pass.

Don't try to pull "if you go back later you have different molecules and you can pass through" because it works on souls and I, the DM, am telling you you can't do that.

[NW_Kohaku]

2. There's a border around each side where gravity changes 90 degrees. You can only pass though each border once. The sun has a squarish orbit.

I'm sorry, but that makes negative sense to me...

Aside from the fact that you might as well just make them alternate dimensions that are flat planes, and it would solve far more scientific problems, what kind of border can "you only pass through once"?

Like, it's tied to a single person?  How? WHY?

I mean, if someone punches you, knocks out a tooth, and throws that tooth across the border, does that count against your trip across, or just the tooth's trip across that edge? Or does a tooth get infinite trips across? What if you tie the tooth to a rope and throw it across then drag it back then throw it again?

For that matter, what if the carbon in your body was also once within a dead seabird you ate for lunch a few years back that had flown across the border.  Would that bar you from crossing back because a part of you had been across the border before?  Or does it not count once the matter in your body has undergone a chemical reaction, and it's only checking your molecules? In that case, if you get old enough that a large enough proportion of your cells have since divided can you then "fool" the transition?

(And yes, my line of thinking is far more in line with how DF works than simply saying "It's magic I don't gotta explain shit!")

[TheFlame52]

It works on souls, so the fact that your molecules have been changed doesn't matter. Also, just like in DF, there is virtually no way to return from the dead. I say virtually because a Keeper of Sacrifice can sacrifice their life to bring back someone who recently died. This also passes on the Secret. There are no mummies because I can't really justify them with the Secret magic system.

I made it so that a person can only pass through each barrier once because I want to force my players to go on a magical journey around the world with a salty Keeper of Oceans and his goblin crew, where they meet all kinds of exotic people and discover that each side of the world is number-themed, leading them to conclude the world is a giant die, after which I will laugh maniacally at them and tell them their characters are insignificant.

[NW_Kohaku]

Reminds me of the DM of the Rings.  Nice to know this game is railroaded before the players even roll up their characters.  (Do they at least get to make "choo-choo" noises when control of their characters is taken away from them in your game narrative they happen to get to spectate?)

Anyway, if you go purely by souls, you're forgetting how souls are immortal and hang around in DF. I.E. ghosts, possessions, and strange moods brought on by long-dead legendary craftsdwarves. Plus that whole thing Toady wants to do where you can walk into the dwarven version of Heaven and meet your dead grandparents in person because you can interact with immortal souls physically in DF.

I also have to ask exactly what the soul tracking mechanism would be.  You're assuming there's something in a soul that is always uniquely, easily and unambiguously identifiable that a field running the whole length of the world could scan and arbitrarily permit or deny permeation through at an instantaneous scan.  (I'm reminded of Wild Arms 1's "monster scanner" where the villains put xenomorph-style parasites inside people so that the people would run through the refuge gates, pop out monsters, and they could shut down the defenses since the scanner couldn't detect the "monster" through the layer of "human"...) I guess there's an arbitrary Creature_ID token on souls in DF's purely technical gamey side, but even that could hypothetically be gotten around through a clever enough interaction. 

[TheFlame52]

Well, that's one of the few things I might make my players do, but that's end-game and how they get there is up to them. I fully expect them to be kings by that point, because two of them have expressed they want to rule the world.

As for ghosts, I was going to have them be only for dwarves. Ghosts can only interact with sentient beings, which really pisses off the dead dwarven nation that got turned into dragon lairs. Why would mummies only be a thing for a few select law-givers and generals? Maybe it's a side effect of the Secret of Rulership?

Strange moods only show up in Keepers of Crafts, and they have moods every few months. That almost all Keepers of Crafts are dwarves is a symptom of dwarven values.

The reason why I can't change some of these rules is because I told my players "the world is square" and they ran with it and figured out "the world is a cube and there are gravity borders on the sides and we are totally going to conquer the whole fucking thing".

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, if you really want to screw with them, why not have them walk off and find themselves on a seventh "face" of this "cube"?

When I was really little, playing on my Father's Commodore 64, I remember there was an "adventure creator" game where you could build your own dungeons that were 1 room = 1 screen that could have up to four doors out of the room (one for each of the four edges of the screen) that you had to manually link to other existing rooms. 

There was no sanity check on this - exit room 1 to the right, and you might turn up in room 2, and if you then exit this room back to the left, you could end up in room 12. If you're going with "It's magic, I don't gotta explain shit," have each exit to a newly generated plane, and the "you can't go back" effect a result of taking the trip back actually sending them somewhere else. (Hypothetically useful for "mysterious dungeons", but it was really user unfriendly since I had to write up paper maps just to lay out the dungeon, and manually ensure proper connectivity - the default was a door not going anywhere.)

Then, the kingdoms they conquer would just naturally "lose contact" with them as they left their plane, and never hear from them again, rendering any form of rulership beyond their current square moot.

For extra mindscrewery, you could have different faces be different sizes before they realize this... because non-Euclidian geometry.

[TheFlame52]

Because you can look over the edge of a face and see things on that face, that's why. Though I am planning to use different size world maps for each side (surrounded by sea serpent-filled ocean), including two different smaller-size maps on the two-spot side. The Land of Omen is a medium-size map.

The arrangement of sides places the one- and six-spot sides on the north and south faces of the cube, respectively. The two- to five-spot sides are arranged around the cube in order. Did I already mention the Land of Omen is the four-spot side?

What do you guys want to know about the Land of Omen?