What should be the name of our "setting"?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I have a nice ponderable imponderable for you. In fiction, everything has a name. The Sword Coast is a region on the continent of Faerûn on the planet Toril orbiting the sun (okay, maybe that one is an exception) on the prime material plane in the Forgotten Realms. In the real world as things get bigger and more universal the names tend to get worse. planet Earth. Yeah, very descriptive. Like other planets aren't made up of the stuff. The Milky Way galaxy has a cool name, but the reason for that name is the way it looks from one particular point on the inside. Most galaxies could be called the Milky Way, because most of them would look like that when viewed from a similar point. But then we get to the real big stuff. The universe doesn't have a name other than the universe, at least not a commonly used one. A potential multiverse doesn't have a proper name either.

Now imagine zooming out to the highest of the highest level. You can see everything there is in our reality. The universe, the multiverse, the everything. It is complete and there is nothing left to discover. If there were any extradimensional aliens still waiting in the wings you've seen them too as well as their extra dimensions. Now imagine the whole thing was a fictional setting, maybe like a cheap third party setting for a discontinued RPG or something. What would be our name? Where are we from? What is the one name that unites every last particle that exists, has existed or ever will exist? How do we even come up with a good name or that? What is the name based on? What makes us who we are? hydrogen? Protons. neutrons and electrons? Many of the best names are a reference to stuff that sets the thing being named apart form the rest of the world it sits in, but how do you name the everything when there is nothing bigger it sits in?

Any clever ideas? :smallbiggrin:

[Seppl]

"Universe", "reality", or "cosmos" already describe our setting quite well (and Known Universe is a nice contrast to Forgotten Realms). The words just seem mundane to you because they are used so often when we talk about these things. It does not make them any less exciting if you think about them:
Universe: This is probably the weakest of the three, the concept that there is one thing, that is all things. Or in other definitions, just the totality of spacetime. The latter is actually more interesting, as it implies that spacetime is the defining property of the universe. That is what you were looking for, was it not?
Reality: This is quite a big concept, separating that what is from that which is not. This is the concept that separates our setting from all fictional settings.
Cosmos: Like the Universe but with the additional connotation that the universe is orderly and follows rules, which is neither obvious nor true for all fictional settings, but appears to be true for ours.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

"The Darkest Timeline". Wait. No. "The Dark Chocolate Timeline".

Nailed it.

[Rodin]

"Universe", "reality", or "cosmos" already describe our setting quite well (and Known Universe is a nice contrast to Forgotten Realms). The words just seem mundane to you because they are used so often when we talk about these things. It does not make them any less exciting if you think about them:
Universe: This is probably the weakest of the three, the concept that there is one thing, that is all things. Or in other definitions, just the totality of spacetime. The latter is actually more interesting, as it implies that spacetime is the defining property of the universe. That is what you were looking for, was it not?
Reality: This is quite a big concept, separating that what is from that which is not. This is the concept that separates our setting from all fictional settings.
Cosmos: Like the Universe but with the additional connotation that the universe is orderly and follows rules, which is neither obvious nor true for all fictional settings, but appears to be true for ours.

Pretty much.

To take the example in the OP:

The Ivory Coast is a region on the continent of Africa on the planet Earth (or Terra, or Gaia) orbiting the sun Sol on the prime material plane of the Cosmos. Earth/Terra/Gaia is orbited by its moon Luna.

The words are no less fanciful, we're just more familiar with them. Even genuinely boring ones like the Milky Way can be fixed by picking from other languages and mythology - just call our galaxy The River of Heaven instead.

[Eldan]

The thing to remember is that we are on the Earth, around the sun, in the galaxy, in the universe.

All of those were names first, then categories later when we realized there could possibly be more than one.

[Kitten Champion]

The answer is simple, it's the Greg-verse.

The universe and its many splendors and horrors exists for the sake of telling the story of Greg and his many adventures, of which the players will create characters to roleplay around. Though they won't play Greg himself because that's kind of a gauche thing to do in an established setting. Who's Greg? I don't know. He presumably exists, has existed, or will exist at some point.

[Rodin]

The answer is simple, it's the Greg-verse.

The universe and its many splendors and horrors exists for the sake of telling the story of Greg and his many adventures, of which the players will create characters to roleplay around. Though they won't play Greg himself because that's kind of a gauche thing to do in an established setting. Who's Greg? I don't know. He presumably exists, has existed, or will exist at some point.

Presumably Greg is the name of the Professor of Anthropics at Unseen University.

[Manga Shoggoth]

Aleph-Aleph? That would seem to cover everything (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number)...

[KillianHawkeye]

Many fictional universes are named after the story or the main character, such as the Buffyverse or the Arrowverse.

Personally, I suggest that the name of our universe is "Reality".

However, comic books show that if we were to ever discover other universes, we would probably just start numbering them (counting up from 1). Which number our own universe gets assigned would then depend on who does the discovering.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Stuff. Because it's where all the stuff happens. Alternatively....

Names for settings point to categories or concepts that exist outside those settings, hence a name for all of our reality would be a pointer that indicates something outside our reality. Thus a name for our setting doesn't need to actually correspond to any notion or thing that has ever actually existed within it, or possibly ever could exist within it. In that case, any attempt to place that name into a form that exists in our reality would need to create new pointers to things that exist in our universe and would require a translator to create it.

My proposed name (and one given translation) for our setting is thus...

"Three infinitely thin spheroids bundled together. Vacuum inside and out. Clicking immutability echoes between them, crescendos and nadirs, but without variation."

The name is not a series or letters, or sounds, or even images, but an incomprehensible mess that is always translated to our various languages as senseless gibberish. Sometimes the gibberish is translated similarly to other gibberish, but it almost never is translated to exist within our setting in completely the same way twice.

More ambitious translations fill tomes or endless libraries. Somewhere, there are hollow planets with ceaselessly generated tomes full of dynamically changing madness. The best translations just cut out all that extraneous detail and all attempts to re-translate prior incomplete partial translations and just go with "Stuff".

In the real world as things get bigger and more universal the names tend to get worse.
Come on. You said this, but forgot to mention the Local Group? For shame.

For the really large stuff, the only people who can even comprehend them enough to give them a proper definition for a name to mean anything are scholars who have little reason to call them anything other than "the self-descriptive, obvious category for what this object is".

[Devils_Advocate]

Well, first off, do you want to be maximally inclusive, or do you only want to refer to everything that exists, while excluding everything that doesn't exist? Those seem like opposed goals.

And if the latter, what do you mean by "exist"? If you do want to limit yourself to "our reality", then how exactly do you decide what makes the cut, hmm? If it's defined relative to us, who are "we" in this context? Who does that include?

I feel like the best name would give a good sense of what it covers.

Are you talking about everything, or the set containing everything? Or are you assuming that everything exists in a common medium, like spacetime? What if it doesn't?

[akma]

Between The Emptiness.

A defining feature of our universe seems to be an abundance of space between things, and that space is pretty empty. Since our world is filled with emptiness, it is logical to name it by its emptiness, and non empty things in space are between the empty non things in space.


Many fictional universes are named after the story or the main character, such as the Buffyverse or the Arrowverse.


Akmaverse?

[Dargaron]

Obviously we're in the Prime Universe setting, since our universe is the first one to be observed as far as we know, and everything important happens here.

[Tyndmyr]

Obviously, our setting was created by a DM with a love for gritty realism, and a deep distrust of wonder and magic, given the lack of such systems and available magic and magic items for the players.

Therefore, I vote we call it the Snyderverse.