The Realm

From Stormravengaming

The Realm is a world of fantastic magic, of danger and adventure, and of tenuous connection to the mundane Earth. Its history has been shaped by the actions of the gods and other powerful actors, as well as by the humble notions of the lowest of its citizens and by outsiders such as the Princes of the Universe. This is an overall guide to the nature of the Realm and to its description in other articles.

Cosmology

The Realm is a large world, the principal continent of which is mapped (known as the Realm, or the Realm proper, when distinguishing it from other senses of the term, such as the whole of the world or plane in which it is located); at least three such large landmasses are known to exist.

The world has two suns, marking out days and seasons in the usual manner, and any number of moons. The two largest moons are known by various names, the largest most commonly as Lea. The Nanduin of the Great Desert, at least, know the second largest as Masad. The generally accepted model is one of a spherical world surrounded by successively larger transparent celestial spheres through which travel the moons, the suns, the planets and stars, some of them in their own celestial spheres suspended in and traveling along the major ones.

The Realm's plane seems significantly permeable to interplanar connection, allowing the spiritual and physical summoning of beings from other planes as well as the existence of stable and unstable physical portals to the mundane Earth (and perhaps other places). Additionally, it seems to attract connections to various demiplanes and extradimensional realities.

Timekeeping

In the Realm proper, dates are reckoned in synchrony with the mundane plane of existence. This does not necessarily mean that subjective time passes at the same rate or that interplanar effects happen at the same time, or even in the same epoch.

Language Conventions

In this guide, several conventions are used to approximate the sound, nature and relationships of languages. For example, English is generally assumed to correspond to the Common tongue, and Latin or Greek is often used in place of its ancient, related progenitor. Thus a Latin term like miles (soldier) could be used to represent the word in an archaic language of which Common is a derivative.

Similarly, the language of the Nanduin is represented by a mixture of Arabic-sounding words (many proper nouns) and O'odham (or Papago), a native language of the Sonoran desert in the American southwest. Where it is used, Sylvan often draws from the Lapine language created by Richard Adams for Watership Down and expanded by many others.