>When a sorcerer opens a portal of power and casts his mind onto the
>essense planes he will find himself in a dreamland of shapes and forms.
I would avoid dreamland analogies as the sorcery planes are concerned with mind and logic. Dreamland is more appropriate for the spirit world.
>The sorcerer let's his mind wonder, walking around and getting his
>bearings. Often when he turns around what is behind him isn't what was
>there the last time.
Again this doesn't fit well with the intentional feel of the sorcery plane. Things that go missing are more properly a function of the heroplanes and other less logical realities.
>Eventually he sees something interesting, a small
>town at the edge of sight, many miles away.
A chance comment that Greg made some time to me was that the sorcery planes are not a "landscape", in other words they are not the place you can wander around in.
This doesn't mean that its impossible to have the sorcery planes as more refined reality with sorcerous cities surrounded by forests that contain such marvellous creatures such as the firebear of very little brain. It just means that ordinary people can't travel through them.
IMO this is because the sorcery planes are timeless places and that mortals being blighted by the Great Error are unable to comprehend this. There are two ways around this - the first is to cure yourself of the Great Error, which involves a difficult magical transformation against a resistance of something like 1w6.
The second and more useful way is to conceive of the timeless path between two places on the sorcery plane (say Sog City and Talarwal) as being the sum total of several temporal paths. Through centuries of research into the Temporal Sciences, the Malkioni have identified these paths as the Golden Path, the Flood Path, the Path of Iron Darkness etc. Each Path has its own good points and hazards.
That these paths correspond to successive heroquesting epochs is no coincidence as the God Learners would term them as dipping out into the Storm Age Hero Plane and the like. But the orthodox Malkioni would not see themselves as heroquesting nor would they admit to the Heroplanes as being separate regions of existance. What they believe the Heroplanes to be are the results of limited ways of looking at the sorcery planes in order to travel within it. Bits that are non-sorcerous are believed to be the effects of the Great Error that first manifested itself during this age.
>The town,
>which he knew to be an illusion all along, is replaced by the true vision
>of complex essense forms swirling around him.
While some parts of the sorcery planes are illusions, I don't
believe that most of it is. There are parts of the sorcery plane
that look just like home but the patterns of essence and
energy flows is so much more prominent that to study these
places through symbolic sight is like looking at a TV picture
through a magnifying glass.
looking at them through symbolic
sight is like looking
> The nexus is truly a
>formiddable one. Before him, where the central well seemed to be is a
>point in space, just an atom really through which all the energy of the
>town flows. The font of power looks magnificent, vibrant and powerful.
I really think of nexuses as being pretty much obvious places of power. If he's going to a nexus for water magics, then the nexus appears as a well, fountain, spring or the like. If the nexus is in a place that is frequently visited, then there's a community of sorcery plane inhabitants (mostly human) that take it on themselves to police access to the nexus to allow the pure of heart to visit with little discomfort and to keep the God Learners, Arkati and other riff-raff away.
>The town on the essense plane continues it's existance, the
>inhabitants having no idea of the significanse of what has transpired. The
>sorcerer can now tap the essense nexus freely and easily, and as he does
>so the formerly prosperous town withers and becomes a more and more
>miserable place, eventually to disappear if the sorcerer draws enough on
>the nexus.
Learning a spell from a nexus is not the same thing as tapping. The sorcerers do not generally get their power from tapping the essence planes but from learning how to harness their energies in the world below. One could try to tap part of the sorcery plane but one would be in very big trouble if caught and the sorcery plane inhabitants are likely to hire somebody to break some legs.
>The other side of the coin of the tapping of nexi is of course the
>creation or at least shaping one. A powerful sorcerer or wizard can walk
>the essense planes and form a place of power into a permanent area,
>classically a study or a laboratory, but also something like a castle when
>founding a martial order.
Nexuses are provided by God or are naturally abundant (if the sorceror is atheist in inclination). If you can find a nexus that only has potential, you can build around it on the sorcery plane (which involves dealing with your sorcery plane neighbors who might complain to the local magistrate) before pumping the nexus up to be a full blown source of power.
> Since the founder in the node is actually just a memory of him, he can't
>be tought anything new by any normal means. Adding new knowledge to the
>node requires a heroquest. The person who is attempting this has to know
>all the secrets of the node and heroform the founder.
Heroforming is not a Malkioni practice. The requirements for adding a new spell to a node (technically the spell is being added to the grimoire) is more likely to be trying to convince the founder that the spell you have is worthy of inclusion.
--Peter Metcalfe
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