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The Thousand Realms In the Beginning, the Rulers spoke, and the Realms of Being were shaped from the primordial Chaos, awaking the intelligences that dwelt in the Void. To them, Eil All-Father and his soul-sealed Ashyr offered the gift of power, covenanting with them that there would be a place made that they could grow one day to have power over the Chaos, and order it according to their will. Thus were born the beginnings of the Thousand Realms. In the uncounted eons since that event, innumerable stories have been told, and innumerable stories remain unsung. Here, the interested and curious can find information on the Thousand Realms, their structure, and the beings that inhabit them. This worldbuilding thread will serve as the repository for all publicly released information on the Thousand Realms, including Edassa, Starnet, Hatharin, and the City of Mortals settings. This information is under copyright - please do not use, modify, publish, or otherwise disseminate it without prior permission. Cosmology The cosmology of the Thousand Realms begins with the primordial Chaos. It appears to be a simple feature of the landscape, as it were, always existing and able to be influenced. From this Chaos is formed all of the Realms of Being. The oldest is the Realm of the Unmanifested (also called in various places the Spiritual Realm, the Traveler’s Realm, and the Gates of Heaven, among a whole host of other names). It most closely resembles the Chaos from which it was formed, but it has been stabilized such that even intelligences of the lowest ability can exist and experience safely within it. It is a far more benign place, connecting all of the other Realms, and serves as the base material of the other Realms - Chaos tamed so that other things may be formed. Realms so crafted are often called subsidiary realms or mindworlds. The second, and most important, of the Realms of Being is the Realm of the Manifested (also called the Material Realm or the Realm of Mortals, among other names). It is the most stable of the subsidiary realms - requiring no supporting maintenance, as far as can be discerned. It was created by the Rulers as a place for mortals, where the unembodied intelligences could gain experience in ordering brute matter to their will - the same techniques that enable one to impose their will upon Chaos. It is the only Realm inherently fit for long-term inhabitation by mortals, although a few of the Outer Realms have been crafted in such a way that mortals can live in them for some time. Because this realm seems to be permanent, unlike the others that fade away unless they are maintained, it has historically served as a baseline for measurement both in n-space and time. The remainder of the Realms are the Outer Realms. These are uncounted in number and vary wildly in their nature, based on the personality of their creator. A number were originally created by the Rulers themselves, but of those, many are now defunct, and some have wholly faded away into the fabric of the Realm of the Unmanifested. This is the eventual fate of all of the Outer Realms - they require periodic maintenance by their creator in order to remain, and without it, they begin to fail. Chaos Realm of the Unmanifested Realm of the Manifested The Outer Realms Intelligent Beings Among the Thousand Realms, uncountable numbers of beings work out their existences. Powerful gods manage planes of wonder and beauty, mortals are born, live, and die, and vast numbers of intelligences cycle through lives of non-sapience. But all of these beings are, at their core, of the same substance. In the primordial Chaos, ancient beyond the reckoning of the Creators, dwelt and still dwell intelligences, beings of will and spirit. All who inhabit the Thousand Realms were once as these, and all who will yet dwell there will come from the Chaos in the same manner. It is unknown what the origin of these intelligences is. Some believe that they are simply an artifact of the Chaos, and have existed eternally along with it. Others assert that these beings are created, either by some natural process within the Chaos or by some greater being, transcendent beyond detection or knowing. It is very likely that the question will remain forever open - however, the fact that no known process is capable of destroying the core of an intelligent being may lend weight to the hypothesis that they were not created. The Heynes-Laurel Scale Intelligent beings exist at a wide range of power levels. Over the eons, scholars studying the base nature of intelligence have developed a number of classification systems in order to organize them. One of the first popular systems was the Heynes classification, which ordered intelligent beings based on thresholds of capability. Widely adopted because of the clearly defined nature of its categories - an intelligence was either capable of achieving the referenced use of power or not - it eventually became clear that the the ability to perform certain feats, such as maintaining a mindworld, was a function of both skill and power. The Laurel Scale was proposed as a competing model, ranking beings by the amount of energy they could draw in and channel. This, too, had a number of flaws - not least the difficulty of actually performing tests on how much energy could be safely drawn. Several influential scholars adapted the Laurel Scale as an extension of the Heynes classification, and the resulting Heynes-Laurel Scale is the current standard of measurement. The Heynes-Laurel Scale sorts intelligent beings into classes by power level - a logarithmic scale from 0 to 8 (so far), and then assigns them a subclass, running from A-G, each associated with the ability to perform a particular use of power. An additional subclass - A` - was added after later study. The classes and their associated abilities are given below: Class G: Characterized by not being able to perform any of the tasks of higher classes Class F: Characterized by the ability to travel by imposing will on the Realm of the Unmanifested Class E: Characterized by the ability to maintain a mindworld in the Realm of the Unmanifested Class D: Characterized by the ability to maintain a region of spacetime in Chaos Class C: Characterized by the ability to create immortal bonded shells Class B: Characterized by the ability to initiate and guide the evolution of new biological life Class A: Characterized by the ability to initiate new species of mortals Class A`: Characterized by the ability to tame Chaos over a wide area, resulting in the formation of a region similar to the Realm of the Unmanifested. This class was added to the scale in order to extend it to include Eil and Ashyr. It remains controversial, because it is known that the process requires a paired soul-bonding, and is thus difficult to describe a single being as being of this class. Despite the controversy, it remains a useful shorthand to refer to beings of the class of the Rulers. In addition to the more exact classification scales, intelligent beings are also colloquially classified on the basis of other, less formally quantifiable traits. The most common distinctions are given below, with descriptions of what characterizes a being of that kind. Gods Mortals Ascended Immortals Manifested Unmanifested Nameless