A Perfect Defense!

[Kardwill]

Also, the gates arent the seals.

The gates reinforce the seals, but the seals didn't survive the gates blowing up, so I don't see how that distinction is important at that point. They both blow up together when something unfortunate happens, leaving the rift wide open.

[Peelee]

The gates reinforce the seals, but the seals didn't survive the gates blowing up, so I don't see how that distinction is important at that point. They both blow up together when something unfortunate happens, leaving the rift wide open.

The car's steel frame reinforces my skull and if the car is crushed my skull is crushed but there's still a pretty big difference between the car and my skull.

[Kardwill]

The car's steel frame reinforces my skull and if the car is crushed my skull is crushed but there's still a pretty big difference between the car and my skull.

Yeah, sure, but in practice, in this story? It's a point of the background that do exist, but is the distinction between them that important? They work in tandem, and the role of both is "keep the rift closed".
I don't understand the point of saying "the gate isn't the seal" when arguing about the gates durability?

[Provengreil]

We know that every world has failed after a few thousand years. They all fell to the Snarl, some of them so unexpectedly that the gods couldn't save the souls of the inhabitants.
There has been several millions, berhaps billions, of attempts. None of them survived.

So we have to assume that the Gates won't hold the snarl for all eternity. The gates delay the inevitable, but this world too will fall. The Snarl is more "real" than anything in existence, including the gates.

And seriously, they're not that sturdy. Girard's and Soon's gates blew up after a few solid swings from ordinary humans. Lirian's blew up because of a forest fire.
At one moment or another, for whatever reason (freak accident, decaying magic, "internal pressure" from the Snarl, deliberate attack...), the Astral gate will blow up, ripping open a rift in the middle of the Gods' backyard. If the Snarl gets out at that moment, the gods won't be able to contain it in the PMP. It will be over. Everything will be over, forever.

That's... kinda scary.

I suspect that it's less that gates will fail on their own, and more that new and undiscovered, unpatched tears appear and let the snarl out that way.

That said, I've always held to the theory that their brittleness was a feature, not a bug. Of the 5 gate defenses we've seen:

-Dorukan's had a literal self destruct button.
-Soon's had a Paladin choose to destroy it, a fallen paladin follow through, and Soon personally called it a fulfillment of her oath.
-Lirian's was shackled to ents that weren't warded against fires. My theory on this one is that if a druid of her level cannot deal with a fire, the gate is in that much immediate danger of being captured.

Leading on from these, I theorize but cannot prove that Girard's clan had orders to break their own gate if the trap and spell storm failed to stop an invader. Sure they may be casters but a big hammer should be enough.

Serini may actually be the only one who didn't plan for something like this(haven't seen everything), and even she didn't really fight hard against the notion that such a thing might be necessary in a general sense. Just that her gate, now the last one left, must not be touched.

[Peelee]

Yeah, sure, but in practice, in this story? It's a point of the background that do exist, but is the distinction between them that important? They work in tandem, and the role of both is "keep the rift closed".
I don't understand the point of saying "the gate isn't the seal" when arguing about the gates durability?

The point is you hypothesized that the pressure, presumably from the rifts builds up being the Gates. Going back to my analogy, how overworked the driver is doesn't matter one whit to how brittle the car's frame is. The crusher is entirely external. No sword hitting the Gate or trees physically tearing it apart, no boom.

If you want to make the argument that Gates can be damaged or destroyed and that's bad, well, everything can be damaged or destroyed.

[Kardwill]

If you want to make the argument that Gates can be damaged or destroyed and that's bad, well, everything can be damaged or destroyed.

That was indeed my main point : Gates can be damaged or destroyed. Putting one in a "safe" place that you really, really, REALLY don't want to get snarled sounds reckless.

[Peelee]

That was indeed my main point : Gates can be damaged or destroyed. Putting one in a "safe" place that you really, really, REALLY don't want to get snarled sounds reckless.

Depends, really. Is that "safe" place also much more difficult to get to? Would putting it in an "unsafe" place necessarily be better, given their susceptibility to damage (which, again, everything is anyway)? People found the rifts without even looking for them on at least two occasions, in less than a couple thousand years. Did anyone, even outsiders, ever find the graveyard, despite the billions of years it's been there? We don't know, but I'd put my money on "no".

[Precure]

The snarl won't be imprisoned forever, it will be free once again, just like Calder, and Serini/Gods will need to face the consequences.

[KorvinStarmast]

The snarl won't be imprisoned forever, it will be free once again, just like Calder, and Serini/Gods will need to face the consequences.

We will get the Michael Palin voice over from A Fish Called Wanda.

Spoiler: This one

Show

Revenge!

[Metastachydium]

We know that every world has failed after a few thousand years. They all fell to the Snarl, some of them so unexpectedly that the gods couldn't save the souls of the inhabitants.

If we are assuming things like "growing pressure under the Gates", we might as well assume things like "sometimes the gods were just too jaded or torn among themselves to cash in the odd world". So, meh.

There has been several millions, berhaps billions, of attempts. None of them survived.

So we have to assume that the Gates won't hold the snarl for all eternity. The gates delay the inevitable, but this world too will fall. The Snarl is more "real" than anything in existence, including the gates.

This is apparently the first time this actual method was used. Right before it was employed, the gods already almost gave up and held a vote. Its long term efficacy has never been tested.

Prediction: the gates will hold, more rifts will open up, they will be patched up, millions of gates, nothing but gates all around, a gate world

UNLESS you start storing them off-plane!

And even if they don't decay nor overload, given enough time, the probability of a freak accident happening at least once tends to approach 1:1

So, putting them in your living room doesn't sound safe.

It's not their living room, though. It's a sealed basement in that abandoned industrial area kilometers away from the last actual place of residence that was never even demolished because nobody cares enough to do so. Heck, the most used bits of the Astral (which is not the remote corner behind a barrier we are talking here) is more like the street outside.

What kind of freak accident happens in a place in an unused and hidden bit of an infinite place only the gods know about and can visit?

That was indeed my main point : Gates can be damaged or destroyed. Putting one in a "safe" place that you really, really, REALLY don't want to get snarled sounds reckless.

I wonder, though, all of a sudden. If the Astral is the space between the planes; and the Material plane is the Snarl's prison (as it is usually assumed, if I'm not mistaken)… Doesn't the Snarl always end up with access to a less remote and more poorly defended part of the Astral when a world is unmade? Serious question.

[brian 333]

...I wonder, though, all of a sudden. If the Astral is the space between the planes; and the Material plane is the Snarl's prison (as it is usually assumed, if I'm not mistaken)… Doesn't the Snarl always end up with access to a less remote and more poorly defended part of the Astral when a world is unmade? Serious question.

[Theory] The Prime Material Plane is located at the point where all of the Elemental Planes intersect. The Ethereal Plane is contiguous on a point-to-point reference with the Prime and Elemental Planes, existing slightly out of phase with them. Shadow is also contiguous with the Prime on a point-to-point reference, again, existing out of phase with the Prime. (Not certain if Shadow extends to the Elemental Planes.)

Example: an Ethereal Filcher can go to a point on the Ethereal Plane and look across the boundary to the Prime and see a corresponding point. If it moves twelve feet in any direction and looks again, it sees a corresponding point twelve feet away from the first point it viewed. (Shadow is warped, and while the point-to-point reference exists, distance and time can radically depart from the Prime, so that ten feet on one side can be ten miles on the other, but every point on Shadow corresponds to a point on Material, and vice versa.)

The Astral Plane does not have any correspondence to the Material Plane. Crossing the barrier sends the Astral traveler to a random point. Even aiming for a specific point is difficult, and requires knowledge of the target location. The Astral does not 'border' the Material in any meaningful way. While it is described as filling the gaps between the other planes, this can be better imagined as an Oort Cloud within which a Solar System resides. Sure, no matter where you are in a solar system, you are also within the Oort Cloud, but which way do you go to get there? [/Theory]

[gbaji]

[Theory] The Prime Material Plane is located at the point where all of the Elemental Planes intersect. The Ethereal Plane is contiguous on a point-to-point reference with the Prime and Elemental Planes, existing slightly out of phase with them. Shadow is also contiguous with the Prime on a point-to-point reference, again, existing out of phase with the Prime. (Not certain if Shadow extends to the Elemental Planes.)[/Theory]

Yeah. That's pretty much how I see it as well. There is an actual planar intersection aspect to this, and a "location" where the PMP sits. Presuambly, when the threads of creation are woven into something useful, that space takes the form of a world, with all of the elements in the surrounding planes formed into various useful forms, including living mortal beings. When the world is unmade those threads go back to being just an unformed unordered region of potential, waiting to be made into something. The snarl is also made up of those things, but the gods can't unmake it, like they can make and unmake the world. It was made with four quiddities, and presuambly persists in one form or another through the entire process. But it gets bored and when there's nothing around it, it kinda just sits there, allowing the gods to come back at some later point in time, and weave those threads back into another world around the snarl, and making another prison (well, until it gives out again).

The actual PMP exists, whether it's currently in the form of something or not. And it does not overlap the astral plane (it's adjacent, whatever that means for planes). That's presumably why transfering the snarl (or part of it maybe) to any of the outer planes, or the astral plane, would be "a really bad idea". Just as mortals can travel to those planes via magic, presuambly so can the snarl. It just doesn't seem to have that ability by itself (or doesn't know how, or have any way to perceive it, or concieve of it, to think to do so in the first place). But, once it's there, just like with any other being made up of PMP "stuff", it can presumably move around and do things. And for the snarl "doing things" means unmaking things.

I don't personally think it can actually destroy the planes themselves, nor things that are purely made up of whatever "stuff" makes up the things in those planes (outsiders and whatever naturally forming astral beings there may be). But anything made up of threads of creation (mortals and the world), or primarily sustained by them (the gods) is subject to the snarls power. Oh. It can probably destroy the souls of mortal beings as well, since they haven't yet been absorbed by the plane they are in.

At least, that's how I see it working.

[brian 333]

The previous post pushed an idea that has been fermenting in my mind up from the bottom of the pickle jar:

The world is made from the Snarl!

The threads with which the gods weave the world are The Snarl, and what happens is, as the world comes undone, it frays and flaps everywhere, like a ball made out of rubber bands bouncing on broken glass. After a while it just becomes a pile of limp rubber bands, and the gods can once again weave it back, tie off the loose ends, and if they all play nice, they end up with a world they can farm for a while, untill the tension in the rubber bands starts to fray loose ends.

Reinterpret what Thor said through that lens for a while.

[gbaji]

Yeah. I've considered that as well. And it might even suggest that the gods themselves are a bit wrong about what the snarl really is. It could be, not a single sentient "thing" in the middle of the threads, but the threads themselves, which innately want to unform themselves, and this is just how we percieve that process. The problem with that theory is that it does not explain the world within the rifts, and it does require that we discount large amounts of what the gods have said about it. Still possible, but would require some significant explanation. It's the sentience bit that is problematic. If the snarl is sentient, and the entire set of threads is the snarl, it should immediately react once the gods start trying to manipulat it. But... it doesn't.

Wheras, the current explanation from the gods/shojo does fit things. If we imagine that there's a massive amount of threads, which naturally lie loose and capable of being woven into some form of reality, but the gods pulled too much back in the day, and there's this one portion of the mass of threads that is hopelessly tangled (snarled, if you will), and it has become sentient, then the model works just fine to explain everything, without having to add anything more. If we assume that the snarl is only one small portion of the whole, then it's easier to imagine it not noticing when the other threads are woven around it.

Think of it as a tangle in your hair, that actively resists being combed or brushed out (and will attack you for trying to do so). You absolutely might style the rest of your hair over/around it, to conceal it, and keep it in check, but it would always still be there, underneath, perhaps poking through a bit, requiring you to undo the rest of your hair and redo things to continue keeping it hidden/buried.

Though, the whole 'world in the rift' thing is still somewhat unexplained in that model as well. But at least if we do assume sentience, we could speculate that it could choose to form something "orderly" within its own self if it chooses. Dunno. There's a number of different variations we could examine on this. I'm sure we'll find out eventually.

[Tubercular Ox]

Think of it as a tangle in your hair, that actively resists being combed or brushed out (and will attack you for trying to do so). You absolutely might style the rest of your hair over/around it, to conceal it, and keep it in check, but it would always still be there, underneath, perhaps poking through a bit, requiring you to undo the rest of your hair and redo things to continue keeping it hidden/buried.

gbaji, please. Children read this forum. Let's tone down the horror a little.

[Peelee]

gbaji, please. Children read this forum. Let's tone down the horror a little.

Spoiler: Eh, we can balance it by terrifying old people too.

Show