Cosmology
Cosmology is a useful subject for a delver. All spellcasters are attuned to some part of the world’s undercarriage, but even a salt-of-the-earth equine fighter needs to know the way home if they’re dumped in the Astral Sea. Here’s a quick summary of everything that exists.
Willful Creatures
What’s the difference between an Allemagnian wolf selling crusty bread in the market square and a quiet-minded animal wolf wandering Oria for food and a mate? Intelligence is an explanation, but anyone who’s used magic to speak with animals knows that some quiet-minded animals have far more going on in their heads than the dumbest guest at any house party.
Willful creature describes a living thing with a unique spark of awareness. This extra layer of consciousness changes how they perceive the world around them.
Willful Creatures
A willful creature is aware of its own identity. It distinguishes itself from others for no other reason than to exercise its uniqueness. Non-willful creatures, also called quiet-minded, often understand their separateness from other creatures. However, only a willful creature considers what that distinction represents. Kobolds, the Beast World’s newest willful species, are a tidy example of this. Only a few kobolds “awaken,” and a kobold who gives themselves a name has become a willful creature.
Synthesis
Whenever a willful creature observes something new, it sparks a change in them. It might be miniscule or it might be an earthquake that totally reshapes their worldview. They can reach beyond what they’ve seen to consider implication, motivation, and other unseen factors. Over time, willful creatures build a moral framework around these observations. The quiet-minded creature certainly learns from stimuli, but only a willful one can determine meaning from broader context, then make that meaning part of themselves. Incorporating one’s experience into their whole self is called synthesis, a hallmark of the willful creature. Put simply, willful creatures transform with experience. Three Powers
Material worlds have three ingredients. They’re the symbiotic forces that allow for the birth, growth, and flourishing of willful creatures. A world without any one of the three loses the capacity to create that spark.
Nature
Nature is the foundation of a world. It’s the physical matter and the rules governing changes to it. By definition, worlds can’t exist without Nature. Rather than an observant force or an inscrutable creature-like consciousness, Nature makes every decision automatically and according to perfectly rigorous definitions. Paradoxically, it also embodies the purest form of chaos. Deep down, everyone knows this fundamental rule of nature: shit happens. Some mages know Nature as one of the three main sources of magic. Natural magic is a brief flash of a world left to its own devices. An overgrowth of vines from a druid’s entangle spell is an invitation for nature to express itself, created by the druid’s powers of discernment.
Arcana
The Arcana is a force somewhere between Nature and Divinity. It’s a single entity that bonds permanently with a world. If Nature is a world’s physical body, then the Arcana is its mind. The Arcana makes decisions based on what it observes, while Nature handles the automatic functions of physics. An Arcana binds itself to its world’s Nature so tightly that its actions are expressed as extraordinary phenomena within Nature. Anything unexplainable by Nature’s laws is attributed to the Arcana. This is magic.
Most arcane spellcasters blur the line between Nature’s laws and Arcana’s action by reciting one of Nature’s loopholes. Essentially, they debate the Arcana itself, positing that there’s no way there isn’t already a fireball where they want one. If they’re smart enough to win, the Arcana “corrects the discrepancy.”
Bards take a more direct approach to appealing to the Arcana. To a bard, the Arcana is the audience of the Universal Symphony. Every willful creature takes part in this grand performance with their heartbeat and emotion and communication. By performing along with the Symphony, bards evoke an emotional response from the Arcana. A twitch of a smile makes flowers bloom. A twinge of anger makes a stone wall explode.
Divinity
Gods are personifications of any concept that drives a willful creature’s decisions. They’re immensely powerful beings who can act to change a world, but are absolutely bound to their own portfolio. “Pirhoua is the goddess of Good” doesn’t mean “Pirhoua does good things”. Pirhoua is a willful creature’s idea of Good, and nothing else. She can’t take action towards any end but those furthering her portfolio. Deities are the only fundamental power that can speak, but they’re tricky conversation partners. Gods aren’t willful creatures and can’t transform themselves. They see the world in terms of their portfolio and what opposes it. Secret plots and ambition aren’t on the menu, unless one is chatting with the god of secret plots and ambition.
Worlds
The word world is defined by all the space traversable without magic, with its own physical laws and natural order. The Beast World, Ancestral Homeland, and Broken World are all material worlds. Some worlds don’t meet a material world’s qualifications, but are still discrete spaces with their own rules.
“Plane” and “world” are interchangeable. “Plane” more often describes a pocket world in the Astral Sea created by a magic user, while “world” is more commonly used to describe naturally occurring infinite places like the Beast World.
Material
The most fully realized and complex of the planes are material worlds. Unsolved material worlds are the only ones capable of nurturing willful creatures, and the three sources of magic are all represented at some point in any material world’s lifespan. Rebirth and reinvention are constant in the material worlds. The symbiosis of Divinity, Arcana, and Nature allows willful creatures to shape their destiny. They shimmer in the Astral Sea as a precious coalescence of unknowable powers. Some believe material worlds to be the purpose of existence itself.
Solved
In a solved world, transformative decisions are no longer made by its willful creatures. These material worlds have settled into a final state. Divinity languishes from malnourishment in a solved world. Without the conflict and resolution that sustains a deity’s portfolio, they eventually leave to observe a new world. When that happens, the balance of fundamental forces is indefinitely disrupted. Native willful creatures lose the ability to procreate, as Nature won’t manifest willful young who go unobserved by Divinity.
Worlds are only solved through the actions of willful creatures, and it’s usually by accident. A solved world may meet a grisly fate in which willful creatures exterminate themselves completely. Without anyone to behave deliberately, there’s no reason for gods to stay.
However, there are other ways a world can reach a solved state. In some worlds, every willful creature is isolated from every other one. Their decisions are never challenged enough to spark the gods’ portfolios. Conflict ends. The world is solved. This was the Ancestral Homeland’s fate.
Meddling with fundamental forces is the rarest way to solve a world. A few willful creatures can disrupt the synergy that sustains their world and send it into a death spiral. The result is a desolate existence whose maimed Nature undergoes a cascading failure to enforce its own rules. This is believed to be what began the Broken World’s unraveling.
Manifested
Some worlds are byproducts of others. These manifested worlds are often tiny, closet-sized planes created in the Astral Sea by cunning magicians. Larger manifested worlds are the handiwork of gods. The Dreaming is such a world—its space is manifested by thoughts gleaned from sleeping beasts and used as a resting place for the Seelie. Manifested worlds can also be created by natural side effects. The Netherworld was created by a quirk of existence and is outside any power’s direct influence.
Coterminous
The Netherworld is coterminous with the Beast World. This means there’s a 1-to-1 relationship between space in the Beast World and the Netherworld. There is nowhere in the Beast World without a Netherworld counterpart, and vice versa. This makes the Netherworld useful for hiding or moving through solid objects, but using it to teleport is impossible. The Absolute Veil
The Absolute Veil is the foundation of the Beast World’s cosmology, acting as a boundary separating worlds. The analogy of a veil is used because this boundary’s size and shape are flexible. With a localized stretch of the Absolute Veil, travelers pass through gaps in woven fabric to access other worlds.
The Veil also serves other purposes. At the edge of the universe, it keeps the nebulous stuff of the Astral separated from whatever exists beyond that barrier. It also traps nonexistence within its layers and thus separates everything real from everything else. Paladins call this nonexistence Unnature.
Afterlife
There’s no evidence proving that a person’s soul goes to an inaccessible afterlife when they die. The few beasts and brethren resurrected after death haven’t remembered anything after their demise. Some Pirhouans find comfort in the belief in an afterlife they call Pirhoua’s Court, where the dead congregate with her. However, death is an impenetrable unknown that’s the subject of philosophical discussions in universities and taverns alike.
For Player's. If a creature is resurrected from death, they have no memory of being dead. Speaking with a creature who is dead can only glean information from their living memory. Deities and others who may know the answer themselves are unwilling to share it with mortals, and using magic to search their minds yields no relevant information.
Elemental Source
The four elements of fire, air, earth, and water are building blocks of a world’s natural material. Rather than pulling these elements from separate planes, each material world is a collection of them expressed by Nature, Divinity, and the Arcana. When one casts a spell to create fire from thin air, they’re using magic to “express” the fire already present throughout the world. This elemental expression is balanced by the sheer volume of each element. A spellcaster will never miss the miniscule glint of sunlight borrowed by the Arcana to create their fireball.