User:ProphetPX/Xal'Anim (3.5e Campaign Setting)/About
Xal'Anim[edit]
"Life and death, energy and peace. If I stop today, it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if I could. The pains that have burned me and scarred my soul, it was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I've walked, which was to hell on earth, heaven on earth, back again, into, under, far in between, through it, in it, and above." -- Gia Carangi (narrating from beyond the grave)
In A Nutshell...[edit]
The warped-reality of wild magic gone mad, the weird of the rift-ring which rotates the entire world. Elemental primordialism with a flipped food-chain, oddball-physics, truly dangerous weather, and strangely animated landscapes. An insane Mystic-Theurge Wizard once sought to become a god, but the world which he aspired to create, became only the eternal prison for his very soul. Deep in sorrow for eons, the suffering of the haunting deity provoked such profound energies to erupt within this new alien planet, that new alien life finally crept forth upon the face of the world, and started to conquer and master it.
Elaboration[edit]
The strange unique system of Xal'Anim is not so much your typical type of normative solar system (as is present in many galactic bodies), where a star or two may be routinely orbited by one or more satellite stars or planets (with or without moons of their own). No, it is far more than this! And yet, at the same time, far less...
UNIQUE CONCEPT[edit]
What we have here, is more of a unique, nebulous, mysteriously-created collection of statically-placed rings and "chains" (some might even call it a bizarre form of Moebius-strip like system of interdimensional honeycombs) of elemental energy, thrumming with godlike, portal-capacitant, extraplanar power.
Xal'Anim, the title or name more properly defined, comes from the otherworldly nature of the typical INVERSION of societal archetypes as is present in MANY of the worlds therein, and is the name for the entire encapsulated system. A musically rhythmic oscillation of elementally-formed structures which run, not so much in typical spherical or cubic fashion of "top to bottom" or "centerpoint via radius to surface", but more, rather "along a route" from source to destination. Somewhat in linear fashion at times, and at other times, spreading out geometrically in all directions, with various bearings of starting vectors and endpoints, all at once. This world does not have just 1 beginning, nor only 1 ending. It's FULL of possibilities. The only possible means of describing how to circumnavigate the various worlds within Xal'Anim via terms of 3D NAVIGATION, is only to throw out the entire preconception of anything "3D" altogether. Xal-Anim is NEVER merely a 5-D creature with only 4-D (height, width, length, time) realities, so much as it is a means of THOUGHT-EXISTENCE and the guaranteed interplay of many different dimensions, all completely in-play at any given time. Various outlines of dimensional structures of this system will follow in a later section or chapter.
Origins[edit]
Sister "planetoids", whether spherical (OR NOT), here, are entirely deduced from ancient divine plans, and are, what one might call, "artificially" contrived by "strange, foreign" gods ... of the Far Realm. Forged entirely by praeternatural dominions of WILD MAGIC, or better said: a not-quite "accident" of long-lost proportions, which those gods allowed to take place in order to form a system which was to exist ACCORDING TO THEIR NEEDS at the time. Neither this system, nor any world in it, is ever going to appear like any other world, anywhere else in the galaxy. Much less, the Universe.
