Main Page

Welcome to my fantasy worldbuilding project!
This Main Page will give a brief overview of the world and link to various pages.



Cosmology
The known world is radically different from Earth. There is no sun, but instead a blazing column, henceforth referred to as a sunspire, that sits at the center of the world. Lands close to it are irradiated and uninhabitable, while those too far away receive too little light and heat to support life. The sunspire never changes in its intensity, so there are no days, months, or years. In many cultures, there is not even the notion of time. Those which do measure it do so in unpredictable and inaccurate ways, such as sea levels, storms, and generations.

A great ocean suspends in the sky, held by some unknowable force. Just as fish swim the seas that surround land, they thrive in the sea above the sky. When animals die in the skysea, they drop down onto the ground and fester in open air.

The edges of the world are surrounded by a bleached wall, constructed out of some material which is highly resistant to the elements but not indestructible. The walls are irregular, leading some cultures to believe the world had been expanded in the distant past by excavators who sought to fill the seas. Rooms are dug into the wall in places. Some lead to cliffside windows that graze the skysea, while others open deep underground. Some rooms have anomalous properties, and they are marked and labeled as atria.

To the west side of the world, there is no wall - land, sea, and sky stretch beyond the light of the sunspire. At the edges of navigable ocean flows a waterfall to the bowels of the Earth, where a third bottomless abyss is found. There is nothing further west but a hadal wasteland, but some explorers claim to have seen sparks of light in the very distance, implicative of another world.

Biota
Many organisms familiar to us are conspicuously absent in the known world, replaced by unlikely contenders. With few exceptions, the known world lacks tetrapods, bony fish, microfaunal arthropods, seed-plants, and even bacteria. In their place are giant insects, vetulicolians, vendobionts, lichen, and archaea. For the sake of ease, the fauna of the known world will be referred to in Earth terms. (e.g., vetulicolians will be referred as fish)

Many organisms also exist in the known world which are unimaginable to us. Jetbirds shoot through the skies using a biomechanical ramjet while stars - colossal cnidarians - hang above in the skysea. Some scholars in the known world claim they are the result of tampering by ancient god-men, a belief as widely embraced as ridiculed.

Cultures
The known world is diverse in cultures. Some revere the sunspire and accept painful animal stings as worship. Some seek to bring down the very stars for abandoning the world. Some conduct human sacrifice to the blind moron god of mud. Some sacrifice themselves to join a sacred fungal hive mind. Some live in industrial states powered by telekinetic animals and fish-batteries. Some live as primitavist mendicants, zealously converting others to their lifestyle. The true diversity of the world is unknown, but snippets are recorded in this wiki.

Magic and Technology
The fundamental basis of magic in the known world is forsaking one's humanity, whether it is sacrificing organs for telekinetic symbionts, grafting electric skin from fish, or linking onself into a mycelial network. Magic is treated differently among different cultures, some desting users for succumbing to bestial temptations while others laud them for discarding the flawed human form.

The three main sects of magic are telekinesis, mycopathy (perceiving the world through a fungal network), and astrapy (unleashing electric shocks from one's skin), though many subsects and deviant types of magic exist.

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Nowhere is this more true than in the known world, where magic and technology blend and contort. The foundation of technology for the two great industrial powers have been astrapic electromagnets and mycopathic mass production plants.