sythyry | Answer the first

moosl asks: I am an off-worlder and view your world sporadically. Where can one learn of your world succintly?

IC: I must admit that I have never, myself, left the World Tree, and I am not as familiar as I might be with whatever books may appear in offworld bookstores.

For that matter, do offworlds even use proper books? On the Water-Tree, evidently, there are speaking icicles used instead of books ... though, in other stories, someone does talk about "peeling the hero's hide off and using it to bind some low-grade pornography." Perhaps speaking icicles are sold in leather sheaths, I suppose.

Still, I daresay that you live in a somewhat more real universe than the Water-Tree. What do books look like there?

OOC: You can buy the World Tree book. The first half of it is a travelogue or fictional ethnography of the World Tree. The second half is the actual RPG rules. We did intend that the first half stand on its own, as a work of fictional nonfiction, and many non-gamers have enjoyed it as that.

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From:

petersheil.livejournal.com

Well ... it is hard to explain because it is so different from yours.

In our world there are trees, but they are much smaller than your world tree - at least if I understand your world tree correctly.

Us monsters don't live in trees. we have homes built of bricks, wood and other stuff and live together in towns and cities.

In order to explain it I need to explain our units of measuring distance. If I take a step forward ... well a big step and stretch as I do so ... I move roughly a distance we call a yard. Now if I take 1760 of these big steps I travel a distance we call a mile. [dont worry about why it is 1760 since the number is one that has been decided in our history many years ago . the only thing you might like to play with, if you enjoy mathematics, is to see how may different ways the 1760 can be divided up into equal parts that are whole numbers of yards and that will give you a clue as to why it is as it is] Anyway, I am digressing, a thing we Mathematicians do :) Now do you still remember the mile I mentioned earlier? Well our world is a big ball of rock and if you could walk around the edge of it all the way it would be roughly 25000 of those miles! Because our world is this big it doesn't look like it is a ball when you are standoing on it ... indeed if you just see a little bit of it you would think it was flat ... actually the ground isn't flat but has lumps and dips. The water collects in the dips and we live on the higher drier bits :)

does that help explain it? I do hope so. i know it must seem very strange to you but then your world seems strange to us. our world is a ver beautiful place and I can show you some pictures of things on

From:

petersheil.livejournal.com

... oh ... there is a cut off on long comments :(
I am incomp ...

............ lete

From:

sythyry.livejournal.com

we have homes built of bricks, wood and other stuff and live together in towns and cities.

As do we. We live on a tree, but our homes are not built in small trees. Admittedly, most are wood; brick is not the cheapest material.

Well our world is a big ball of rock and if you could walk around the edge of it all the way it would be roughly 25000 of those miles!

Aha! You are trying to bewilder me and fill my eyes with lies, but I have discerned your approach! Earlier you said that you sent messages from one place to a far-separated one ... but now you claim that your world is a ball! This is clearly impossible. For, only the top of the ball would be civilizable, just as only the top of World Tree branches are civilizable. The sides of the ball would naturally be like our Verticals, tangles of horizontal forests and terrible monsters. The bottom, of course, would be entirely forbidding. So it is impossible that there are two civilized places separated by such a distance as you claim.

Now, then. What, actually, does your world look like?

From:

petersheil.livejournal.com

I see how you think I am trying to bewilder you, but all I say to you is in fact true. When you are on our ball world it always feels like you are on the top of it. Let me see if I can explain this to you.

When you are on your world, if you let go of something I presume that it tends to fall to the ground. The force that pulls it down is called, on our world at least, gravity. All things are pulled by this gravity and the centre of our ball is where the gravity pull seems to be centered. This means that whereever you stand on our ball world gravity is pulling you towards the centre of the ball and "up" seems to be away from the centre.

So you see we can in fact live all over our ball world. I live in a country called England and on the opposite side of the world is a country called Australia. People in both countries can stand on the ball and both think they are on the top!

If you look at http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev254/ev25415_UK.A2003108.1245.1km.jpg you will see a picture of the country where I live taken from high up in the sky and if you look at http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES/ you can see many pictures from little moons that are looking down to help us predict what the weather will be.

Does that help you understand our strange world? I hope so.

Peace
peter

From:

sythyry.livejournal.com

We have gravity as well. In some theories, it reflects the orientation of the goddess Virid when she created the tree. In other theories, it is a form of structuring which the space-god "Here" produces, either for general convenience or for structuring the universe. In still other theories, it is an agreement between Kvarse, Lenhirrik, Merklundum, and Tenmen -- the four gods whose elements are subject to gravity -- about how their materials will behave.

In any case, gravity on our world is entirely uniform, in strength and direction, throughout the explored and readily-observed universe. Of course a great deal cannot be seen through the world-foliage, but we have been able to cast excellent far-seeing spells and observe that far-distant world-leaves fall at the same way that nearby ones do, counting air resistance.

Of course we don't know what the bottom of the Tree is like (or if there is one); it's too far away. I suppose gravity could change down there. If there is a "there". Similarly, our observations about the heights of the sky are somewhat limited, though I vaguely remember something about Flokin dropping a star and having it fall at a normal pattern, counting air resistance.

In any case, non-uniform gravity must be hideously confusing. If gravity always goes towards the center of the ball, how is it that the sun and moons and star-serpent and whatnot don't fall to the ground? Our sun is supported by a track, but the track is horizontal and the sun can roll nicely along it. How do you manage yours? For that matter, do you even have a sun?

The first set of pictures is impressive. The second one is simply baffling -- if those are the leaves of your world, they seem singularly ratty; and if they are not, what are they?

I do like the idea of artificial moons... if I ever get exceedingly good at enchantment, perhaps I shall make one.

With wishes that you find ... um ... whatever creatures such as yourself find desirable,
I remain,
Sythyry

From:

redbird

Yes, we have a sun.

Instead of the sun going around our world, our world goes around its sun. So do several other worlds, but we are not aware of anyone living on them. This is, in fact, a matter that our people have argued about for many lifetimes: does anyone live on the other worlds, and if so, what are they like? Some people think that there may be plants or very small animals (do you have bacteria on the World Tree?) on the other worlds, but no intelligent beings or even large animals. Others think that the other worlds have very strange beings living in them, drifting through the air.

From:

sythyry.livejournal.com

Hmm... how, then, is it that everything falls towards the center of your world, but the sun does not? Does your World Ball roll on some sort of track, like our sun?

We do, indeed, have plants and very small animals. And strange beings who drift through the air; some of them are Khtsoyis [the aerial cephalopod prime species.]

For that matter, I have been known to drift through the air myself.

From: (Anonymous)

That might be the easiest way for you to picture it.
We also have a moon, which travels around our world in a similar fashion.

From:

sythyry.livejournal.com

And, I should imagine, a sub-moon which circles the moon, and then an infra-moon which circles -- not the sub-moon -- but spirals eccentrically around the sub-moon's track. And of course the infra-moon has its own accompaniment, twirling and tweedling with it all around the sky.

You don't live in a world. You live in a whirled.