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Author Topic: Tell me of dead worlds  (Read 986 times)

Egan_BW

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Tell me of dead worlds
« on: September 09, 2020, 11:57:40 pm »

I have long thought on bringing back a readjusted version of my Survival God Game, Death Plane. And I've come to a point that I'd like to tap into the internet's creativity.

So the scene is this. What lay before you is the ruined remains of a multiverse. A section of the eternal void cared for and ruled by a pantheon of deities. Those gods either fled or died, leaving their corpses and their untended planes as all that remains.

What might us, omniscient beings, find within these planes? How could these places have evolved over the untold millennia? What remains are there of the greater multiverse's mechanisms, what cosmic plans have been left unfinished and forever broken?
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Egan_BW

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #1 on: September 10, 2020, 12:20:09 am »

Oh, also, I'd love to hear ideas for powers used by angels, demons, primordials etc. Powerful beings with a large impact on the world. Some of these might have the ability to share their power with Living Things, as well.
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Devastator

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #2 on: September 10, 2020, 12:21:32 am »

An old wooden tavern sign, for the Tavern of the Rising Sun.
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Egan_BW

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #3 on: September 10, 2020, 12:22:33 am »

What, floating alone in an empty void?
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Devastator

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #4 on: September 10, 2020, 12:25:10 am »

Of course.
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BoujeeTheAlan

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #5 on: September 10, 2020, 12:33:39 am »

The heat death of memes where the bumblings of the crazy frog melt into the dulcet tones of Rick Astley
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Maximum Spin

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #6 on: September 10, 2020, 12:36:35 am »

Interesting, I've been pulling together a "dead world" setting myself. Here's a piece of it for you.

For the Corn Grandmother, leaving her mortal fosterlings alone and unguided is too much to bear. When even she must depart a world, she leaves behind a part of herself, the Lesser Reflection of Fiyania — a guardian angel for the left-behind, ensuring that the cycle of the soil continues to turn for as long as it may. Though the Reflection's powers are weak, it carries great stores of wisdom by which it teaches and protects Fiyania's wayward grandchildren so they can keep themselves warm and fed during whatever cataclysm befalls.
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Devastator

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #7 on: September 10, 2020, 12:51:43 am »

The Eternium vault.  What was originally supposed to be a beautiful storage of the universal knowledge left by a dying offshoot of some long-forgotten race has been destroyed.. not through some kind of damage, but lonely quantum fluctuations indicating an immense amount of time.

So what was once a complicated orbital facility, full of computers, terminals, engravings, and complicated mechanisms is now a lump of extremely hard metal that has, ever so slowly, gained extremely minute imperfections in every surface and every mechanism failed.
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Egan_BW

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #8 on: September 10, 2020, 01:04:58 am »


And yet, when all the gods flee their crumbling homes, when the machinery keeping the world grinding forwards sticks and jams, and when the world grows cold and the crops no longer grow, and when even the angel cannot find the energy to persist, as the sources run dry...
And when that dead world floats empty and cold for eons, before by chance entering a place with a semblance of life...
What legacy will remain?

(Sorry if that's too bleak, but that's what I get plugging that into my setting~
I dunno your setting, but that blurb feels a bit more pre-apocalyptic as opposed to my "you stumble upon several very dead multiverses smushed together" and wanting inspiration for what that terrain looks like. Angels,  sadly, are a defined thing and very likely wouldn't survive forever unattended. But who knows, maybe a lower level one remains. Hmm.
Though the idea with the angel is pretty spot-on to my own mechanics. I don't think that having and sharing knowledge is a specific power you would have to give them, but it's a pretty good order to give one.)
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helmacon

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #9 on: September 10, 2020, 02:34:02 am »

Imagine a cell, the membrane is composed of pine trees, a bi-layer, and the nucleus is a star. This is our solar system, yes *our* solar system. The old wood protects us, the roots of the oort.

If one were to stand on the surface of a planet left within that husk, you would think you saw stars shifting and flickering in the night. They would seem to dance around, across the skies. There are no stars. A thousand tiny wildfires are burning at the neglected systems edge, the worm tunnles choked in smoke. And oh, the worms. Worms in countless numbers, withing in the roots of the world, the rotting trunks of celestial trees.

At the surface of the membrane you can find what looks like lumber camps sometime. They were not for gathering wood. The last few, when they finally realized what was happening, when it was too late, hacking apart the corpses of their own protectors, desperate to get out, their loving guardians who died coiled around them in protection, suffocating them with their bones. Did any make it? It's hard to say. You could wonder for eons in the labyrinth catacombs of their roots, between worm husk and star rot.

What else is there to tell? The light in the woods has all but gone out, only the liminal flicker of a white dwarf. The star itself is long gone, a senescent God mind fractured into a thousand competing personas, warring over the last memories of life and fire, locked away is ruined catacombs of thought. Sun flair, suicide, the girm surreal reality of a senseless mind.

Is there anything left on the planets? Is there anything that cares?
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NJW2000

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #10 on: September 10, 2020, 03:59:57 am »

The heavens of a mineral deity long dead or absent. A smooth sphere of divine metal the size of a planet, made up of nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dormant angels.

The outer layer is composed of nine hundred billion of the lowest order of angels, angelos if you like. These are simple machines, albeit extremely durable in order to withstand meteor impacts, and equipped with a wide variety of tools. These performed the basic tasks for the deity, conveying messages, giving signs, destroying what needed to be destroyed and carrying gifts. God's drones. The next layer down is made from ninety billion of the the second-from-lowest order, AIs with the intelligence of a human, incredible data repositories, capable of changing shape within certain limits. These angels conversed with mortals, anything from conversing with prophets in divine regalia to taking the shape of beasts or slaves at the will of their god. The third layer down is composed of nine billion similarly sophisticated AIs, but larger and equipped to do battle with unchosen peoples or even other angels.

The pattern continues for twelve layers, with the nine Thrones at the centre of the sphere, surrounding a hollow space that the god used to reside in. The thrones are beings of unthinkable power, capable of anything the lower orders can accomplish, and able to bend the laws of space and matter. They are composed of metals that cannot be found anywhere else in the universe.

The entire structure is dormant. In the absence of a command node, a deity at the centre of the sphere, the angels wait. Forever.
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coalboat

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #11 on: September 10, 2020, 08:41:00 am »

Millions of ten feet long, dead, half-decomposed Wels catfish floating in liquid nitrogen, evenly distributed, you look up, down, left, right, front, and back, and see no end. Dim and ubiquitous luminous light saturates the whole dimension.
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Parisbre56

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #12 on: September 10, 2020, 12:04:06 pm »

Just cats. Cats everywhere. Even trying to perceive them makes the mind of the unprepared grind to a halt.

More seriously, scavengers. Sure, the universe is dead, but there might still be something worth eating there. And since life does it's dangest to survive, it's highly likely that some of whatever life existed in that world when it was still alive has changed into something that can continue surviving. Like a decomposing body consumed by the bacteria inside it, the life of that universe does it best to consume its environment.

Look at the ecosystems of energy poor or downright hostile environments. Mollusks and crustaceans on the ocean floor, in places where no light reaches, lying in wait for days, greedily consuming whatever falls from above. Radiotrophic fungi growing out of the remains of an exploded nuclear reactor. Entire ecosystems arising around geothermal vents.

So life in an almost-dead universe could be similar. Something that lies in wait for a morsel of energy that will drift by so that it can consume it and sustain itself for an eternity longer. Something that clings to whatever sources of power are left, greedily sucking them dry. An opportunistic ambush predator that waits for unsuspecting would-be gods to approach said sources of power only to be made into a tasty meal by the ancient horror that knows only patience and hunger.

Or perhaps simpler things. Things that wait by the fringes of the frayed remains of spacetime for something to be brought in by the waves of inter-universal space so that they can consume it. Beings that can speak to other intelligent beings where the walls of reality are thinnest, that share the secrets they have accumulated during their long life and use promises of power and rewards to convince those on the other side to perform some sort of ritual that will allow them to break through the wall and consume those on the other side.

You could go even further and say time itself is ruined at some parts of the universe. Maybe there are places where you can see the past. Maybe there are doorways leading to the past, but so many have taken them while looking for an escape that the past has also been destroyed, along with the illusion of causality. Maybe these places with broken spacetime are themselves are alive. Maybe time-loops of important past events act as beacons for creatures looking for power or a return to better times. But once you enter the time loop you are trapped forever, your soul or future potential or whatever drained of whatever energy to sustain the living-loop. Think something like "The Shining".

Egan_BW

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #13 on: September 10, 2020, 02:50:05 pm »

I'm a bit reticent to poke time at all, even in a setting such as this. The whole premise is that Death is a Multiversal Constant, but does that makes sense if time isn't absolute? What does entropy mean, deprived of that constant? If the death can flow backwards, back to the start, than death is absolute and there can be no life, therefore death becomes meaningless. How can death be inevitable if there never was life to begin with?
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Maximum Spin

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Re: Tell me of dead worlds
« Reply #14 on: September 10, 2020, 02:52:54 pm »

I'm a bit reticent to poke time at all, even in a setting such as this. The whole premise is that Death is a Multiversal Constant, but does that makes sense if time isn't absolute? What does entropy mean, deprived of that constant? If the death can flow backwards, back to the start, than death is absolute and there can be no life, therefore death becomes meaningless. How can death be inevitable if there never was life to begin with?
There had been life, but now there wasn't. Perhaps one day there will have been again, for a little while.
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