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Grinner
2013-07-28, 06:46 PM
In RPGs, I sometimes wonder what's up above. If my character flies high enough, what will he find? Vacuum? Infinite sky? Pelor?

What do you all put up there? Do you even bother to figure it out?

Kornaki
2013-07-28, 06:50 PM
The whole world is held aloft by a dragon.

That dragon? Held aloft by a bigger dragon.

It's dragons all the way up

QuintonBeck
2013-07-28, 07:05 PM
The whole world is held aloft by a dragon.

That dragon? Held aloft by a bigger dragon.

It's dragons all the way up

Can I quote this in a sig? Hahaha

I myself have space, the final frontier, you know the thing with stars in it. Depending on the setting there may be other planets (though getting to them is the tough part, needing O2 and all) or it may be yours is the only planet in existence and so it'd be the infinite void.

JusticeZero
2013-07-28, 07:20 PM
It varies by campaign. The one i'm running right now, the monks would interpret theology to suspect is probably an infinite void or barrier - the Academy mostly notes that it lacks reference points to navigate by and is hard to travel to as a result.

The setting before that was floating rocks; it wraps around.

The setting before that was theoretically Spelljammer-compatible.

Another has a limited range of space that can be reached. Leaving that area puts you into glitch space, which is a bad idea in general that the gods avoid doing.

Kornaki
2013-07-28, 07:23 PM
Can I quote this in a sig? Hahaha


Yeah, go for it

The Rose Dragon
2013-07-28, 07:33 PM
Atmosphere. At some point you can leave that atmosphere, and if you can survive the hundreds of thousands of kilometers of airless near vacuum, you can reach the moon. Reaching the other planets or stellar systems is far more difficult, but not nearly impossible if you have superluminal flight or teleportation, or just a lot of patience.

ellindsey
2013-07-28, 07:41 PM
The indestructible crystal sphere which the stars are attached to. Look out for the sun and moon, you might end up having to dodge them on the way up. You will however be able to see the entirety of the world's flat disk once you're up there.

Morcleon
2013-07-28, 08:24 PM
Depending on the nature of the game, it ranges from RL space, with the Prime Material being the universe, to a Greek-mythology-esque sun-matter moon-matter aether sort of thing.

Although I do tend to lean toward RL space. I've had many the secret fortress located in the Epsilon Eridani system. :smallcool:

jindra34
2013-07-28, 08:31 PM
Definitely agrees with varies. But I think my personal favorite was one where if you flew high enough you ended up on the other side of the world.

TheCountAlucard
2013-07-28, 08:37 PM
Again, varies by game.

In Exalted, the top of the sky is the Firmament, on which the stars hang, and the gods smite anything with enough hubris to touch it. The stars and planets move according to the vagaries of Fate, and below the Daystar and the Silver Chair proceed in their endless journeys.

In Shadowrun, which is ostensibly set in the near future of our world, some time after the awakening of magic, space there is like space here, with the note that Mages who proceed into it inevitably go mad or die (or both), usually within minutes. And also there may be Cthulhoid horrors lurking out there. But we're not sure.

Mastikator
2013-07-28, 09:15 PM
Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.

Mando Knight
2013-07-28, 09:16 PM
Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.

Then you know you've only got another 100m to go before you save the princess! :smalltongue:

kieza
2013-07-28, 09:19 PM
If you fly high enough in my setting, the air starts getting thin. Eventually, you reach vacuum.

If you work out a way of surviving a vacuum, and you keep going until you're outside the orbit of the inner of the planet's three moons, you may be lucky enough to spot the golden city of the gods, located on the back side of the moon. Unfortunately, it's been abandoned for millennia, but spend enough time exploring it and you may find a hibernating divine servitor, or the gateway to the Heavenly Realm.

If you manage to escape the planet's gravity, and then start randomly surveying the solar system, you might get lucky and stumble across one of the other facilities left over from when the gods were building this world: observation platforms, habitation facilities, terraforming devices, and so on. The holy grail, of course, would be one of the anti-aberrance emplacements: satellite weapons designed to protect against spaceborne incursions from the ancient enemy of the gods: the Outsiders.

If, somehow, you manage to get enough delta-v to leave the solar system...well, it's a long, cold, hungry trip, but you could conceivably make it to another solar system. There might even be another inhabited world, where the gods have continued their Great Experiment. Or you might find yourself in orbit around one of the Cold Stars, where the Outsiders rule and the laws of physics are strange and unfamiliar. Of course, there's an easier way--at least, a shorter way--to travel between stars; you could find the Celestial Ark, the last of the ships that brought the gods and their servants to your world before the terraforming; or you could reactivate the gateway to the Heavenly Realm and seek the Path of the Gods, wherein one can cross lightyears in a few hours. Of course, the Celestial Ark is actually a dimension-shifted prison hulk, ever since an Outsider got on board at a previous port of call and infested the Hanging Gardens. And the Path of the Gods is full of twists and turns and sentient mathematical concepts that make mortals' heads explode.

Beleriphon
2013-07-29, 10:54 AM
Atmosphere. At some point you can leave that atmosphere, and if you can survive the hundreds of thousands of kilometers of airless near vacuum, you can reach the moon. Reaching the other planets or stellar systems is far more difficult, but not nearly impossible if you have superluminal flight or teleportation, or just a lot of patience.

Warforged rockets maybe? I'd recommend bringing a good book.

The Rose Dragon
2013-07-29, 11:29 AM
I was more thinking something like a Green Lantern Ring, but sure, rocket boots on a self-repairing robot also work.

Khedrac
2013-07-29, 04:23 PM
In Glorantha you eventually pass through the Middle Air and emerge into the Sky. I think there's breathable air up there, but it's probably a fairly hostile environment, even for the Solar cults. Still the chances are you will die before you get there, going the other way if you jump into the Hellcrack you usually starve to death before you hit the bottom - and that's only half way...

Big Fau
2013-07-29, 04:37 PM
In Eberron, flying high enough takes you to the Ring of Siberys, then eventually another plane (usually their analogue of the Elemental Plane of Air).

In other settings, flying high enough takes you to Atropus. You don't want to go to Atropus.

Eldan
2013-07-29, 05:20 PM
Well, that depends. Inside a world, you just hit the ceiling at some point. Beyond the worldwall is the Aether.

And the Aether is complicated. Probably five-dimensional. The directions are: Up, down, north, south, east, west, prime, elemental, deep and light. The first six are probably infinite, as far as anyone can tell. Prime brings you to the border ethereal and then you probably get eaten by Azathoth. Elemental brings you to the elemental planes. If you dive deep, you land in the deep ways and probably never come back. No one has found a way to move lightwards, yet.

Grinner
2013-07-29, 05:33 PM
Well, that depends. Inside a world, you just hit the ceiling at some point. Beyond the worldwall is the Aether.

And the Aether is complicated. Probably five-dimensional. The directions are: Up, down, north, south, east, west, prime, elemental, deep and light. The first six are probably infinite, as far as anyone can tell. Prime brings you to the border ethereal and then you probably get eaten by Azathoth. Elemental brings you to the elemental planes. If you dive deep, you land in the deep ways and probably never come back. No one has found a way to move lightwards, yet.

This...I love this. Do you mind if I use it in one of my settings?

Eldan
2013-07-29, 05:36 PM
Sure, go ahead. Bits and pieces of it are on the forum in the various Etherworld threads, but most of it is just in my notes that I never bothered to copy to the forum.

Kane0
2013-07-29, 05:42 PM
It's like minecraft. Keep going up and you hit clouds. After the clouds there is pretty much nothing. It gets hotter (or colder, DMs option) as you go further up and you eventually are able to see if the place you are on is flat or round.

Just don't try to build or anything up there.

holywhippet
2013-07-29, 08:16 PM
I played in one home brewed game where the world was the cross over point for the different elemental planes. Fly off into the air and you go further into the elemental plane of air. Dig into the ground and you go further into the elemental plane of earth.

If you go by the Dragonlance novels though, the worlds are regular planets in space. One of the gods (Takhisis) used some naturally occuring magical portals to transport the entire planet to a different region of space so that she would be the only god (the others having no idea where she'd moved it to).

Legend
2013-07-29, 09:37 PM
The whole world is held aloft by a dragon.

That dragon? Held aloft by a bigger dragon.

It's dragons all the way upNice.

My D&D games are invariably (and often secretly) set in Spelljammer-compatible universes. That includes non-2e versions for some reason.

Scow2
2013-07-29, 10:28 PM
In my campaign settings, you can see the Astral Plane at night. The day is clouded by the Power of the Sun Deity. (And now that I mention it... a world that always seems to be "night", but with all objects on the surfae illuminated properly would be pretty badass).

The sky is infinite, but the planes you see appear to have fininte size against the astral backdrop. However, no matter how far you fly, without SOME way to breach the aether, it all seems infinitely far away.

Joe the Rat
2013-07-29, 11:03 PM
Ether. You go out far enough, you're in ether. On the moon it's but a short, shadowy step into ethereal space. Those shadowy potentials can get distracting. Raw elements are condensed out of the Ether to create all of the wandering bodies (Sun, moon, planets). Get beyond the Spheres, and you're in Astral Space, and the things lurking between the stars.


Or whatever the specific game's cosmology assumes. But I kind of like building my own.

Geostationary
2013-07-30, 12:43 AM
Well, once you pass the top of the World Tree and Heaven, you'll go a bit further and pass the edge of the Weirding Wall and enter the Lands Beyond Creation, more commonly known as "that primordial void from which Creation was made". You could theoretically reach the stars, but no one knows what they actually are or do.

DigoDragon
2013-07-30, 06:49 AM
There was this one campaign where we hit a solid ceiling when the party flew upwards... tried to break through it, but then the director yelled "Cut!"

Yes, we were adventuring in a world based on The Truman Show.

hicegetraenk
2013-07-30, 07:28 AM
In my world, you'll first reach the end of the atmosphere as you would in real life. You'd get a solar system quite like ours. There'd be various planets, many of them resembling the planes. Outside all of that there'd be the uber god Ao, not giving a damn, encapsulating everything there is.

Big Fau
2013-07-30, 09:27 AM
There was this one campaign where we hit a solid ceiling when the party flew upwards... tried to break through it, but then the director yelled "Cut!"

Yes, we were adventuring in a world based on The Truman Show.

Hehehe, references...

Jay R
2013-07-30, 09:34 AM
In the last game I ran, I deliberately used a standard medieval cosmology. The earth in the center, surrounded by the seven planets, all within the fixed sphere of the stars.

Then the PCs were given temporary custody of seven artifacts, the Staves of the Wanderers, whose powers were based on changeability, speed, love, light & heat, war, power & leadership, and time & cold - the attributes of the planets, in order (the moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

Seharvepernfan
2013-07-31, 01:37 PM
Regular, real-life space. I try to keep my setting realistic.

Alejandro
2013-07-31, 01:48 PM
Well, if you are a D&D character and you start flying up, eventually you find someone else's Star Wars Saga Edition game. And if you start digging down, you eventually find someone's World of Darkness game.

Jay R
2013-07-31, 04:48 PM
The whole world is held aloft by a dragon.

That dragon? Held aloft by a bigger dragon.

It's dragons all the way up

There is one sect that holds that the 479th one up is not a dragon; it's a chipmunk. This group is having a religious war with a splinter group who believes that it's a woodchuck.

Both groups agree that the gods will not allow any scrying method to actually see the 479th one directly.

Grinner
2013-07-31, 05:11 PM
In the last game I ran, I deliberately used a standard medieval cosmology. The earth in the center, surrounded by the seven planets, all within the fixed sphere of the stars.

Then the PCs were given temporary custody of seven artifacts, the Staves of the Wanderers, whose powers were based on changeability, speed, love, light & heat, war, power & leadership, and time & cold - the attributes of the planets, in order (the moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

Hey, I remember that. You posted about it here, right? How did that work out?

Jay R
2013-07-31, 05:31 PM
Hey, I remember that. You posted about it here, right? How did that work out?

Quite well. The clues got slowly more obvious, until they determined that the powers were those of the planets right before completing the quest and returning the staves to the ruins of Menel-Corda (Elvish for temple of the planets).

Your Nemesis
2013-08-01, 10:09 AM
Everyone knows that the sky varies as great A'tuin traverses the infinite void.

Jay R
2013-08-01, 11:50 AM
"Up" does not mean merely "in the opposite direction from gravity" when you are talking about the true boundaries of the universe.

But if you go "true celestial up" long enough, through the planes, past the demons and the gods and all others of that ilk, you will eventually rise to where you can see a great trans-universal table, around which sit a half dozen Entities with books and dice and papers and pencils, all playing with what appear to be small miniature versions of people you know, but upon careful examination, will be revealed as their actual souls. One of them indicates the figure that looks like you. He rolls a die, and ...