The Worldspanner Universe is a web of tales and games where the heroes, villains, and events connect, where authors and designers weave into an even larger story. Readers and players enjoy that sense of, "Wait, do you know who that is? I remember her!" or "This must be the old battlefield from that other game!"
You can be part of it. Your tale or game will fit right in. Just ask. And best, the nature of the Worldspanner Universe allows seamless weaving between the ordinary that we know and the realms of fantasy and science fiction. Read on to discover why.
Our reality, which we call a universe, has seven sisters. These eight universes form a whole, for without all eight, none would exist. So say our finest knowledge hunters.
Each of the eight universes is unique, because each is composed of a mix of three basic universal "ingredients."
The first is the nature of the tiny particles of the universe. A universe is composed of either atoms or threads.
An atom is a hard, heavy, precise little thing, highly organized, separated from its brothers by vast space. A thread is the opposite, light and drifting and wavering in shape and size, but packed more densely than atoms.
Things and beings in atomic universes are more fixed, certain, and solid than those of threads, where shape and size and even one's own nature can shift.
Atomic realities are grounded in solid matter. Thread realities have a greater ability to organize energy. The certainty of atomics fosters science, while the less reliable but more flexible threads allow studies of dynamic magic.
The second is the nature of the universe as a whole. A material universe is a vast empty space of scattered galaxies. An ethereal universe is small, filled with giant worlds shaped like twisted torroids. Yet every ethereal world dances to a different harmonic, so that they pass like ghosts in their complex orbits, invisible to each other.
Material universes allow for a stable science. Worlds in an ethereal universe affect each other with an endless variety of ripples in their laws of reality. This makes efforts of stable science complex, and magic wildly varied.
Reaching other worlds in a material universe involves crossing the great voids of emptiness. In an ethereal universe, worlds are often nearby or even overlapping, but crossing between worlds that are out of phase with each other is also a challenge.
The third and most interesting is the nature of life. All living things contain within their bodies the instructions for life. In fleshly universes, this is stored in physical particles such as proteins chained together. In essence universes, the information for life is found in organized energy. These are surprisingly similar, but opposite. Flesh is physical matter bonded by energy, and essence is energy bonded by physical matter.
Creatures of flesh generally have fixed lives. They grow to adulthood, reach their expected size, and eventually die of old age. Creatures of essence are commonly immortal, living until violence or disease ends them. They grow in size and ability throughout their lives, so that those few whose lives span hundreds of years reach nearly god-like power.
These three pairs of basics create a mix of eight universes, each unique. And here in our great halls of study are those heroic souls who have traveled to all eight. This is what we know:
Archae is a universe of certainty and science, with the simplicity of vast material space, the hard predictability of atoms, and the stability of matter-based flesh.
Because of the constrained nature of the reality, few beings from other realities have established colonies there. And yet many of the older races originally came from Archae and spread throughout the other seven realities, including the orians, the graymen, the humans, and the ever-threatening plague of Ai.
Ethre is the opposing reality to Archae--a universe of creatures of essence swimming above ethereal worlds. Here the lack of definition is extreme, as are the lifespans of those who live there.
Creatures begin as insignificant, tiny motes, but some have survived for hundreds of years and have grown to immense beings with godlike power. It is home to the all-powerful Devourers, the equally ascendant Haesphar, and the billions of tiny, hungry entities that strive to survive long enough to gain power and dominance.
The living conditions and habits of those who exist in the realities is dependent on the balance between science and magic. Nova's material universe allows for a healthy science, while its particles of threads provides the chaotic energy necessary for magic.
Nova births creatures of flesh. It is the native home of the primal animals and a dizzying array of humans large and small, from tiny brownies to giants a hundred feet tall. Nova is considered a quiet, undeveloped reality full of uninhabited, pristine lands, for the beings there have not spread extensively. This is why Nova is considered "new."
As an ethereal, thread-based reality, magic reigns supreme in Vitus. Here live the great wizards and dragons of lore and a hundred thousand cultures. Combined with the stability of fleshly bodies, VITUS has always been most accessible for travel to and from other realities.
Vitus is teeming with creatures and peoples from all the realities and is considered the central realm of the eight universes.
Tora is the realm of complex science, where creatures of atoms and flesh contend with the complexities of the ethereal universe. Here the orbiting stars are fewer but the land luminous, creating beautiful twilight worlds.
Tora is an isolated reality populated with few races and vast stretches of untamed land. The glorious angelic tantyr live here, as do the leviathans of the many seas.
Sona is perhaps the most unusual reality--a stable material world further stabilized by atoms, yet fostering energetic life of essence rather than flesh. Sona is the birthplace of bonded or "knotted" life. All natural life forms in Sona are creatures known as "spawnlings"--tiny little things, yet intelligent and with a natural telepathic bond to those around them.
But most marvelous is their ability to bond with others of their kind to form an entirely new creature, reshaping themselves to play a function within the greater whole. In this way, great beasts composed of hundreds of thousands of tiny spawnlings are possible. Other life forms prey on the spawnlings in an unusual way. There are spectral beings that dominate the spawnlings and build creatures to their own purpose, essentially forming and inhabiting physical bodies with their spawnling slaves.
Within the stable material universe of Faerie are flighty and spectral creatures formed of thread and essence--intensely magical, immortal creatures with odd motivations generally known as faerie folk.
A faerie's whole being can readily change depending on the state of their soul, so that a noble unicorn may become a fiery dark nightmare if its soul turns dark, and a vicious harpy can transform into an angelic winged maid upon healing coming to her inner being. For this reason, the beings often separate into Faer (the faerie folk), and their more malevolent cousins, the Malfaer ("bad faeries").
And now we come to our own reality, most excellent Xanthrax, the pleasant universe of Pyrus, where the interaction of the ethereal worlds give us never-ending variations in our studies and our sturdy atomic bodies of essence bathe comfortably in lava and ice. While we as elemental beings are few in number, we are supreme among those who span the realities in search of knowledge.
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