Avianmosquito
2016-04-16, 04:04 PM
So, since I realised my rulebook doesn't explain much and I'm still writing the (separate) lore book for the only setting currently available for my new system, I figured I'd write a quick primer here, just on key concepts of this world. The world is called "Limbo", and if you're going to make it there you'll need to understand it. And it may also help to understand some other, less immediately dangerous concepts as well.
Limbo general:
Limbo is an afterlife. It's not really punitive in its intent, but it ends up one in practice due to a combination of mismanagement, neglect and incompetence on the part of its almost non-existent management and the kinds of people sent there.
Limbo is really less of an afterlife and more of an after-afterlife. This is where spirits whose minds are decaying from the psychological effects of their quasi-immortality are sent when they're deemed too far gone to remain in the better afterlives. Instead of being brought back in their normal afterlives following the failure of their bodies, they are brought back in Limbo instead. This is easier on the gods, saves space in the better after-lives and helps keep the sane/insane ratio in the better after-lives at a more manageable level. Limbo is generally seen as the last step for hollows, before the gods simply stop bringing them back. This is usually the case, but Limbo is also their last chance to regain some of their sanity, and while they will never return to their proper afterlives their time in Limbo is better than ceasing to exist.
Limbo also serves another purpose. It's a dumping ground for people the gods don't want to deal with. Every god differs in who they send here, for example war gods tend to send followers who believe them to be peaceful, but as a general rule if your god doesn't want to punish you but also doesn't want to accept you, they send you here and wash their hands of you entirely. Out of sight, out of mind and all that jazz.
Limbo environmental data:
Limbo has gravity just slightly less than earth and a 20-hour day. Its year is roughly 441 days at the closest reckoning people seem able to muster in the most advanced societies there, and the seasons are both very long and extremely mild, causing no noticeable shift to the people living there. The planet's surface is uninhabitable, as though the sunlight's strength appears to only be moderately painful it causes illness that be life-threatening after hours of exposure in addition to its obvious potential for painful sunburns. The inhabitants refer to this as a curse and though nobody there has a definitive answer as to why the sunlight makes them sick, those of us looking at it from an advanced society might be able to figure it out if we try. Limbo's average temperature is very high, but this is because half of the planet's surface is always baking in the sun. Most people live underground and only travel to the surface at night, and between that and Limbo's notoriously thin air, the planet will almost always be uncomfortably cold in practice.
Limbo has six small moons, sized 4km, 6km, 11km, 13km and 77km. Most of the tidal influence comes from the last one, but it still isn't large enough to have a large effect on a planet that (despite its low gravity) is actually much larger than Earth. It experiences frequent meteor impacts, and mostly ferric meteorites, leaving quite a bit of meteoric iron on the planet's surface. However, meteoric iron is absolute rubbish and is usually partially oxidised by the time it can be recovered.
Limbo's curse:
The cursed rays of Limbo's sun are known only by their effect in Limbo. These rays do not cause immediate death, instead causing a devastating sickness dependent on the length and intensity of exposure. A single full day outdoors near the equator will kill even the healthiest of humans by the time it's over, and while little bits of exposure can be handled with no serious ill effects (over an hour can be withstood with nothing but sunburn), the effects become dangerous quickly as the magnitude increases.
Illness does not set in until exposure is prolonged for several hours, in the brightest hours of the day still generally more than one hour, and some people can withstand more than others. Beyond this, effects begin with malaise, paranoia, disorientation, confusion, headache, lethargy, fever, diahhrea, nausea, vomiting, incontinence and increased susceptibility to infection and disease. This usually kills through dehydration, starvation or infection, but in sufficiently intense doses it can kill through fever, which kill quickly (less than 48 hours) and the victim is unconscious and irrecoverable for most of this time. For that to happen, however, one would need nearly a full day of exposure near the equator.
Do NOT be fooled, the surface is lethal during the day even if you cannot see the sun. The curse will merrily penetrate clouds and even heavy precipitation only mutes it somewhat. Unless you are rather far from the equator, a rainy day does not make it safe to go outside. Stay nocturnal or stay underground for your own safety.
As a result, most people in Limbo live underground, and Limbo is a "swiss cheese" world, filled with natural tunnels throughout its crust, some fairly deep. The deepest is called "The Long Black", and it's the deepest part of a series of tunnels that reaches all the way around the planet. This is the site of a significantly sized settlement of sane inhabitants, who named it due to its characteristic darkness and the tunnel's long, thin shape, with the deep "valley" being only 400m across at its widest point but over 30km long, ranging from 3km to 5km underground from the settlement's highest point to the lowest point. The entire "valley" is underwater, so its inhabitants are strictly the sea-dwelling type.
The level of the water table varies throughout the planet, but its average depth is just in excess of 2km underground, so the average depth of "deep" settlements (settlements that do not travel to the surface and primarily rely on groundwater) is just a little less than 2km. "Shallow" settlements, settlements that rely on travel to the surface to survive (universally at night for safety's sake) are generally less than 500m underground. The ~1.5km difference is called the "nomadic zone", where almost no settlements can be found, but most of the population of the world lives, and as the name implies the inhabitants of this zone are almost entirely nomads.
Limbo's ecosystem:
Limbo does not appear to support much native life. There are some species of fungus and surface plants found exclusively here, and if we could look unique microbes are also probably present, but there is no unique animal life on the planet that we know of. There are no animals on the planet except for the spirits of dead mortal beings, meaning anything you find here derived from animals was made from a person of some form or another. That includes any meat you happen to eat, or hide you happen to wear. Additionally, many make a living off of hunting here, but the game they hunt is generally hollows of the farther-gone variety, and as this is the best way to survive nomadically and extremely useful even in settlements that use agriculture, it is almost a universal part of life in Limbo and everybody either hunts hollows or knows somebody who does. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, just remember how little choice you actually have in this matter and the feeling should eventually subside.
Those who sustain themselves mostly off of non-animal matter generally live closer to the surface, using agriculture (but maintaining and harvesting at night) in order to survive, primarily using non-native plants that have, somehow, been introduced over the years. Almost none of the native fungi are edible, and the native plant life often has too little in the way of edible parts to be very useful.
Limbo's culture:
Defining an entire planet's culture is an exercise in futility, but there are some uniting characteristics. Almost all of Limbo's inhabitants hollowing, varying from being almost completely functional to almost completely non-functional. While most in the settlements only show moderate symptoms, most commonly depression and memory loss, the latter being universal, most of the population as a whole suffers from dissociation, flashbacks, extreme depression and dementia. Everything in Limbo from the darkness, to the lethal sunlight, to the varying air quality, the noises in the tunnels and the legitimate danger posed by the mental state of many of the world's residents fuels the paranoia the people are already prone to. As a result, settlements tend to be militaristic and hostile, staunchly xenophobic and terrified of the outside world. They also tend not to last very long, as this leads to them taking in new members slower than their own members go hollow.
Technologically, Limbo varies wildly. The most advanced settlements on Limbo have basic metallurgy, nothing sophisticated, but they can create tools out of native copper and meteoric iron, even if they cannot effectively separate these metals from their ores. Most of the inhabitants, however, use primitive tools of wood, bone and stone. Similarly, the most advanced settlements can produce wine from surface-growing berries and medicines from some plant-life, giving surprisingly less terrible than expected medical care, but most people have zero access to medicine and alcohol. The deep settlements also tend to be much more primitive than shallow settlements, due to a lack of access to the resources (metal, plantlife, etcetera) that the surface has.
Limbo's settlements have a large child population, but there is a very low child population outside of them. This is because children tend to take longer to progress through the early stages of hollowing, but less time to progress through the later stages. The reason for this is likely related to their relative lack of memories from their lifetime, or something in their psychology that makes them initially less prone to the depression that speeds the hollowing process along. For example, the Root Garden at the planet's south pole is the largest settlement on the planet with a population of 8,000, and one of the few surface settlements in the world as its position at the very south, location in a canyon with great stone "roots" stretching across it and constant extreme precipitation protects it fairly well from the cursed light, and the average age in the city is eleven years old. There are adults, but usually young ones and children are more common. This has lead to a variety of very silly nicknames, including "Cutesville" and "The City of Cuddles", a rare and appreciated bit of levity to relieve a bit of Limbo's bleak atmosphere.
Hollow details:
Hollows are just spirits whose minds are degrading as a result of their immortality. The reasons for this are five-fold. They are excessive amounts of memories, the mind attempting to adjust to its new (ridiculously long) lifespan, cumulative mental trauma, the psychological shock of death (especially repeated death) and depression. Their minds do not handle any of these things well, and each leads to their own set of symptoms in their own way, but the most common ones are memory loss and poor retention, forgetfulness, pessimism, defeatism and depression.
As it progresses, these get worse and we start seeing confusion, flashbacks and dementia, self-destructive behaviour, violence and suicidal tendencies as these issues become especially pronounced. Hollows in the later stages often cannot separate very old and very new memories, and may think that things that happened lifetimes ago just happened or are even ongoing, the source of their flashbacks, and in later stages this sensation becomes so intense it is indistinguishable from hallucinations.
Hollows in the last stage almost universally can do nothing but replay and relive old memories, over and over again, and almost invariably those of the negative variety. These memories often meld together and seem to be happening at once, and the physical decay caused by them being incapable of taking care of themselves does not help their mental state either. Eventually, they die and the gods will usually have noticed they are beyond the point of no return by then and do not bring them back. Some hollows occasionally recover from this state, however, having reached some greater understanding or perspective from their final days doing nothing but exploring their own memories. When this occurs, the resulting "refilled" spirits seem to become immune to hollowing in the future, but in truth they do still hollow and just take much longer to do so, and it is unlikely they will "refill" twice. Though according to legend, the child king and queen of the Root Garden have "refilled" as many as twelve times, though only two refills for the king and three for the queen are on record, as the Root Garden only has records for the last 900 years. Their repeated "refills" and the extremely long hollowing cycles have been attributed to many things, but is most likely the result of the unwavering support they receive from one another.
Magic:
Limbo is dying, mostly dead already and largely devoid of animal life. The vitae required for magic simply does not exist in Limbo, so there is no magic there, at least in any form that can be used by the inhabitants. Sorry, you will not be casting spells.
Escape:
While people from other realms may be able to plane-shift in, there are very few connections to Limbo and very few people wish to make any. And as the inhabitants are incapable of using magic, they can't make any connections of their own and escaping Limbo can only be done through the connections others make, when they're open. This is extraordinarily rare, almost always a single-digit figure each year, and usually a very small one, many years actually being zero escapes worldwide and the average being two. You can forget about it.
Additional information:
If you have any questions, ask and I will answer. You may be surprised how many details I have worked out.
Limbo general:
Limbo is an afterlife. It's not really punitive in its intent, but it ends up one in practice due to a combination of mismanagement, neglect and incompetence on the part of its almost non-existent management and the kinds of people sent there.
Limbo is really less of an afterlife and more of an after-afterlife. This is where spirits whose minds are decaying from the psychological effects of their quasi-immortality are sent when they're deemed too far gone to remain in the better afterlives. Instead of being brought back in their normal afterlives following the failure of their bodies, they are brought back in Limbo instead. This is easier on the gods, saves space in the better after-lives and helps keep the sane/insane ratio in the better after-lives at a more manageable level. Limbo is generally seen as the last step for hollows, before the gods simply stop bringing them back. This is usually the case, but Limbo is also their last chance to regain some of their sanity, and while they will never return to their proper afterlives their time in Limbo is better than ceasing to exist.
Limbo also serves another purpose. It's a dumping ground for people the gods don't want to deal with. Every god differs in who they send here, for example war gods tend to send followers who believe them to be peaceful, but as a general rule if your god doesn't want to punish you but also doesn't want to accept you, they send you here and wash their hands of you entirely. Out of sight, out of mind and all that jazz.
Limbo environmental data:
Limbo has gravity just slightly less than earth and a 20-hour day. Its year is roughly 441 days at the closest reckoning people seem able to muster in the most advanced societies there, and the seasons are both very long and extremely mild, causing no noticeable shift to the people living there. The planet's surface is uninhabitable, as though the sunlight's strength appears to only be moderately painful it causes illness that be life-threatening after hours of exposure in addition to its obvious potential for painful sunburns. The inhabitants refer to this as a curse and though nobody there has a definitive answer as to why the sunlight makes them sick, those of us looking at it from an advanced society might be able to figure it out if we try. Limbo's average temperature is very high, but this is because half of the planet's surface is always baking in the sun. Most people live underground and only travel to the surface at night, and between that and Limbo's notoriously thin air, the planet will almost always be uncomfortably cold in practice.
Limbo has six small moons, sized 4km, 6km, 11km, 13km and 77km. Most of the tidal influence comes from the last one, but it still isn't large enough to have a large effect on a planet that (despite its low gravity) is actually much larger than Earth. It experiences frequent meteor impacts, and mostly ferric meteorites, leaving quite a bit of meteoric iron on the planet's surface. However, meteoric iron is absolute rubbish and is usually partially oxidised by the time it can be recovered.
Limbo's curse:
The cursed rays of Limbo's sun are known only by their effect in Limbo. These rays do not cause immediate death, instead causing a devastating sickness dependent on the length and intensity of exposure. A single full day outdoors near the equator will kill even the healthiest of humans by the time it's over, and while little bits of exposure can be handled with no serious ill effects (over an hour can be withstood with nothing but sunburn), the effects become dangerous quickly as the magnitude increases.
Illness does not set in until exposure is prolonged for several hours, in the brightest hours of the day still generally more than one hour, and some people can withstand more than others. Beyond this, effects begin with malaise, paranoia, disorientation, confusion, headache, lethargy, fever, diahhrea, nausea, vomiting, incontinence and increased susceptibility to infection and disease. This usually kills through dehydration, starvation or infection, but in sufficiently intense doses it can kill through fever, which kill quickly (less than 48 hours) and the victim is unconscious and irrecoverable for most of this time. For that to happen, however, one would need nearly a full day of exposure near the equator.
Do NOT be fooled, the surface is lethal during the day even if you cannot see the sun. The curse will merrily penetrate clouds and even heavy precipitation only mutes it somewhat. Unless you are rather far from the equator, a rainy day does not make it safe to go outside. Stay nocturnal or stay underground for your own safety.
As a result, most people in Limbo live underground, and Limbo is a "swiss cheese" world, filled with natural tunnels throughout its crust, some fairly deep. The deepest is called "The Long Black", and it's the deepest part of a series of tunnels that reaches all the way around the planet. This is the site of a significantly sized settlement of sane inhabitants, who named it due to its characteristic darkness and the tunnel's long, thin shape, with the deep "valley" being only 400m across at its widest point but over 30km long, ranging from 3km to 5km underground from the settlement's highest point to the lowest point. The entire "valley" is underwater, so its inhabitants are strictly the sea-dwelling type.
The level of the water table varies throughout the planet, but its average depth is just in excess of 2km underground, so the average depth of "deep" settlements (settlements that do not travel to the surface and primarily rely on groundwater) is just a little less than 2km. "Shallow" settlements, settlements that rely on travel to the surface to survive (universally at night for safety's sake) are generally less than 500m underground. The ~1.5km difference is called the "nomadic zone", where almost no settlements can be found, but most of the population of the world lives, and as the name implies the inhabitants of this zone are almost entirely nomads.
Limbo's ecosystem:
Limbo does not appear to support much native life. There are some species of fungus and surface plants found exclusively here, and if we could look unique microbes are also probably present, but there is no unique animal life on the planet that we know of. There are no animals on the planet except for the spirits of dead mortal beings, meaning anything you find here derived from animals was made from a person of some form or another. That includes any meat you happen to eat, or hide you happen to wear. Additionally, many make a living off of hunting here, but the game they hunt is generally hollows of the farther-gone variety, and as this is the best way to survive nomadically and extremely useful even in settlements that use agriculture, it is almost a universal part of life in Limbo and everybody either hunts hollows or knows somebody who does. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, just remember how little choice you actually have in this matter and the feeling should eventually subside.
Those who sustain themselves mostly off of non-animal matter generally live closer to the surface, using agriculture (but maintaining and harvesting at night) in order to survive, primarily using non-native plants that have, somehow, been introduced over the years. Almost none of the native fungi are edible, and the native plant life often has too little in the way of edible parts to be very useful.
Limbo's culture:
Defining an entire planet's culture is an exercise in futility, but there are some uniting characteristics. Almost all of Limbo's inhabitants hollowing, varying from being almost completely functional to almost completely non-functional. While most in the settlements only show moderate symptoms, most commonly depression and memory loss, the latter being universal, most of the population as a whole suffers from dissociation, flashbacks, extreme depression and dementia. Everything in Limbo from the darkness, to the lethal sunlight, to the varying air quality, the noises in the tunnels and the legitimate danger posed by the mental state of many of the world's residents fuels the paranoia the people are already prone to. As a result, settlements tend to be militaristic and hostile, staunchly xenophobic and terrified of the outside world. They also tend not to last very long, as this leads to them taking in new members slower than their own members go hollow.
Technologically, Limbo varies wildly. The most advanced settlements on Limbo have basic metallurgy, nothing sophisticated, but they can create tools out of native copper and meteoric iron, even if they cannot effectively separate these metals from their ores. Most of the inhabitants, however, use primitive tools of wood, bone and stone. Similarly, the most advanced settlements can produce wine from surface-growing berries and medicines from some plant-life, giving surprisingly less terrible than expected medical care, but most people have zero access to medicine and alcohol. The deep settlements also tend to be much more primitive than shallow settlements, due to a lack of access to the resources (metal, plantlife, etcetera) that the surface has.
Limbo's settlements have a large child population, but there is a very low child population outside of them. This is because children tend to take longer to progress through the early stages of hollowing, but less time to progress through the later stages. The reason for this is likely related to their relative lack of memories from their lifetime, or something in their psychology that makes them initially less prone to the depression that speeds the hollowing process along. For example, the Root Garden at the planet's south pole is the largest settlement on the planet with a population of 8,000, and one of the few surface settlements in the world as its position at the very south, location in a canyon with great stone "roots" stretching across it and constant extreme precipitation protects it fairly well from the cursed light, and the average age in the city is eleven years old. There are adults, but usually young ones and children are more common. This has lead to a variety of very silly nicknames, including "Cutesville" and "The City of Cuddles", a rare and appreciated bit of levity to relieve a bit of Limbo's bleak atmosphere.
Hollow details:
Hollows are just spirits whose minds are degrading as a result of their immortality. The reasons for this are five-fold. They are excessive amounts of memories, the mind attempting to adjust to its new (ridiculously long) lifespan, cumulative mental trauma, the psychological shock of death (especially repeated death) and depression. Their minds do not handle any of these things well, and each leads to their own set of symptoms in their own way, but the most common ones are memory loss and poor retention, forgetfulness, pessimism, defeatism and depression.
As it progresses, these get worse and we start seeing confusion, flashbacks and dementia, self-destructive behaviour, violence and suicidal tendencies as these issues become especially pronounced. Hollows in the later stages often cannot separate very old and very new memories, and may think that things that happened lifetimes ago just happened or are even ongoing, the source of their flashbacks, and in later stages this sensation becomes so intense it is indistinguishable from hallucinations.
Hollows in the last stage almost universally can do nothing but replay and relive old memories, over and over again, and almost invariably those of the negative variety. These memories often meld together and seem to be happening at once, and the physical decay caused by them being incapable of taking care of themselves does not help their mental state either. Eventually, they die and the gods will usually have noticed they are beyond the point of no return by then and do not bring them back. Some hollows occasionally recover from this state, however, having reached some greater understanding or perspective from their final days doing nothing but exploring their own memories. When this occurs, the resulting "refilled" spirits seem to become immune to hollowing in the future, but in truth they do still hollow and just take much longer to do so, and it is unlikely they will "refill" twice. Though according to legend, the child king and queen of the Root Garden have "refilled" as many as twelve times, though only two refills for the king and three for the queen are on record, as the Root Garden only has records for the last 900 years. Their repeated "refills" and the extremely long hollowing cycles have been attributed to many things, but is most likely the result of the unwavering support they receive from one another.
Magic:
Limbo is dying, mostly dead already and largely devoid of animal life. The vitae required for magic simply does not exist in Limbo, so there is no magic there, at least in any form that can be used by the inhabitants. Sorry, you will not be casting spells.
Escape:
While people from other realms may be able to plane-shift in, there are very few connections to Limbo and very few people wish to make any. And as the inhabitants are incapable of using magic, they can't make any connections of their own and escaping Limbo can only be done through the connections others make, when they're open. This is extraordinarily rare, almost always a single-digit figure each year, and usually a very small one, many years actually being zero escapes worldwide and the average being two. You can forget about it.
Additional information:
If you have any questions, ask and I will answer. You may be surprised how many details I have worked out.