[Torg] Home Cosms

[Travis James Hall]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com 
> [mailto:torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com] On Behalf Of Steve Crow
> Sent: Sunday, 12 July 2009 3:56 PM
> To: torgmail
> Subject: RE: [Torg] Home Cosms
> 
> The other question, if they are entirely pure (how pure?), is 
> are they still pure? In places like Magna Verita, there were 
> suggestions that rebellions were starting to spring up and 
> (presumably) possibilities were starting to spread again.

Again, a lack of Possibility Energy amongst the population is a result of
invasion and drain by another reality, by a Possibility Raider. The High
Lords do not generally raid their home cosms, because they would need
another cosm to do it. Conquest at home is of the "mundane" type. The
population has not generally been drained of Possibility Energy in the first
place.

However, the amount of Possibility Energy already present in the cosm will
dictate the amount of Possibility Energy available to people living there.
(Remember, typical people even on Earth have far less than 1 Possibility.)

And cosms other than Earth naturally have relatively little Possibility
Energy. This is not the result of conquest or raiding from outside. (At
least, not that we know of - we could speculate that High Lords more ancient
than the Gaunt Man himself once roamed the multiverse, and that the uneven
distribution is a result of their activities. Heck, maybe Earth is so rich
because the greatest of the ancient raiders made it his stronghold, and
sapped the Possibility Energy from everywhere else before something took him
away. There could be an interesting campaign in that. But it certainly isn't
the canon.)

So the people of Magna Verita have a smaller amount of PE than the people of
Core Earth, but not so little as someone who has been drained by
transformation to an invading reality. Rebellion there doesn't enter into
it.

> Also, as noted Pure zones cost a Darkness Device energy to 
> maintain only when they border on other realities.

That's not exactly what was said. Stelae-bounded zones cost energy to
maintain. It doesn't matter what the reality is on the outside of the zone,
there's still that cost.

However, if the realities inside and outside the zone are the same, there's
not much point in maintaining the zone. The Magna Veritan Darkness Device
doesn't slap down three stelae in order to maintain a Magna Verita zone in
the middle of Magna Verita (at least, not unless it has some other good
reason to do so). Such a zone can be turned off, thus costing the Darkness
Device nothing at all.

And I think Darkness Devices do get a certain amount of energy from pure
zones for a while. It isn't really a function of whether the zone is pure or
dominant, not directly. As people (and things?) transform, the Darkness
Device gathers energy from the process. Pure zones tend to transform people
faster (IIRC), so for a little while they generate more PE, but because the
people are transformed quickly, soon nobody is left to transform, so the
flow stops. Dominate zones generate less PE, but do it for longer.

> But don't 
> some home cosms essentially "border" on the realms? Aysle, 
> for instance, has several maelstrom bridges that touch down 
> into dominant, not pure zones. If a maelstrom bridge extends 
> from a pure zone on Aysle to a dominant zone on Earth, 
> doesn't that tend to "cost" the Darkness Device energy to 
> maintain the pure zone or cause it to operate at a loss?

No. Maelstrom Bridges always drop into zones of the invading reality.
(Unless there are some dropping into mixed zones? Not sure, I'd have to
check Infiniverse Update maps.) Whether the zone is pure or dominant is
beside the point.

Pure and dominant zones exist naturally beside each other within a cosm.
They don't seem to generate freestanding reality storms. (I'm sure somebody
would have noticed by now if they did. I'm sure Haiti is rainy, but surely
the weather there isn't that bad.) I'm not sure why it would be particularly
bad for the Maelstrom Bridge to contact a dominant zone on the Earth side.

Of course, if the Maelstrom Bridge's zone was the only invaded zone, then
yes, perhaps the Darkness Device would lose energy by maintaining it. This
ties into why Possibility Raiders typically abandon cosms they have
conquered - not draining significant amounts of energy? We're done here,
time to move on.

But during the invasion of Earth, those pure zones near the Maelstrom
Bridges serve to connect the Maelstrom Bridge to the rest of the stelae
network. Without a bridge, all of the stelae zones would collapse, and then
the Darkness Device gets nothing. A pure zone is also helpful for purposes
of protecting the bridge. It's nice for your soldiers to be able to use the
weapons they have trained for while pesky Storm Knights lose all their fancy
toys.

> Or does the maelstrom bridge act as a super-buffer?

The Maelstrom Bridge may provide a certain amount of bufferage, but
obviously not that much given what happened to Tharkold. (The Tharkold
stelae were removed, and when the Maelstrom Bridge dropped, Earth's reality
just surged up it and destroyed a big chunk of Tharkold itself.)

> (I was never entirely clear how a maelstrom bridge's "landing 
> triangle" could generate a dominant zone anyway, though...)

A dominant zone is just a zone that is fairly rich in Possibility Energy.
Granted, zones touched directly by Maelstrom Bridges may well be drained
faster generally, but why couldn't such a zone be a dominant zone?

Travis