Kralori otherworld(s).

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 01:07:53 +0100

Olli Kantola wondered aloud about Kralori sorcerors:
> Lunars cheat their way out of this. The moon is a part of all the
> otherworlds and/or something that is foreign to all of them. The kralori
> don't have this luxury, neither do the Teshnans. Still, they have wizards
> and therefore I suppose that they must have essence planes as well. How
> could the node of the schools founder be near the Imperial City or whatever
> and still be in a different otherworld?

I think the Kralori have 'cheats' available to them too: dragons are in effect 'mixed' entities also, to put it in terms of that cosmology. The petty dragons might just correspond to the sort of bog-standard common religions of elsewhere, but with a 'draconic gloss'. (Not that I don't think Kralorela is remotely short of CM of an entirely 'Never mind the dragons, I have a paddy to plant' sort.) At the extreme end of this is the Cosmic Dragon, which certainly transcends the otherworldly divisions, but also transcends feasible accessibility, much less gameability -- i.e., anyone for whom any contact with the CD is even a meaningful question is an Unplayable Mystic(TM).

In between these two extremes it's possible you may see something analogous to the Lunar 'cheat', with the object being a True Dragon or Ancestral Dragon. I doubt this is especially common, if it exists at all, and I'm entirely vague how it'd work, but I throw the idea out for yucks.

What, however, most Kralori sorcerors are exactly that: they don't bother with and/or give up 'other' types of magic. I reckon you have (at least) Metsylan sorceror/alchemists who're happily embedded in the sorcery planes without troubling with any draconic rationale at all, and Thalurznist who do have a draconic gloss, but it amounts to much the same thing: in HW/HQ (or even RQ) terms, they're sorcerors, plain and simple.

In terms of the otherworldly topology, I don't think there's a problem

• these things aren't exactly Euclidian 3-space at the best of times, much less in the East, where we're explicitly told that the 'mystic otherworld'-that-might-have-been became/was seen to be equivalent to the other three, so the exact arrangement of that is bound to be a little on the 'mixed up' side, though I reckon the Kralori themselves perceive it to be seamless -- nothwithstanding that some magic works better in parts of 'their' other side than in others.

Cheers,
Alex.

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