Editing Magical Realm Cyoa/Diaspora (section)

== '''The Realms''' == 

There are seven greater realms, and roughly two hundred lesser realms.  Each of these pocket realms has effectively the same cosmology as all the others, but differences in details result in wildly diverse conditions and biomes.  

[[File:Diaspora_Dyson_Internal.jpg]]

Each realm is effectively a Dyson Sphere - a shell of land, like a hollow planet, with a sun in the center and habitable land on the inner surface of the bubble.  However, not every realm is a perfect sphere - many of the realms are oblate spheroids (slightly squashed balls), pseudo-cylinders with different levels of curvature, or occasionally even hourglass or stranger shapes.  Just as importantly, different realms have different amounts of resources in them - some realms have larger 'suns' resulting in higher temperatures, some have more water or less earth, and some are even nearly-airless.  While it is possible to equalize most of these elements through the portals, the limitations on the use of portals makes it impractical to fix a wildly divergent realm's issues in any reasonable time frame (see portals, below).

The Seven Greater Realms are the largest, and each is roughly half the volume of the earth's sun.  The majority of that is open air, though each of these realms has a very thick 'outer' layer suitable for deep mining, and capable of supporting very extensive oceans.  The total surface area of any given greater realm is comparable to what Jupiter would have were it not a gas giant - many thousand times more than the paltry land area of Earth.  However, the vast majority of that area is trackless wilderness, uninhabited except by feral beasts and fearsome vegetation, pocked with deep caverns full of dangerous creatures and legendary lost treasures.  Only the area near the Portal within a Greater Realm has any significant population - though there are scattered outposts and 'lost' tribes in every greater realm.

The Seven Realms are each named after one of the ancient, pre-scattering gods.  It is unknown if those gods still live within the realms, if they have since left their broken domain, or if the wicked Xanatos slew them, but all that remains of those great beings are their names and a few legends.

[[File:Diaspora_Dagos-Ka.jpg]]

The most prosperous of the realms, with the fairest climate and the largest population, is called Dagos, after the god of gentle storms.  It is a nearly perfect sphere, with just the right level of light and heat to grow crops all year round, and enough rainfall to keep fields watered without extensive irrigation.  It rains lightly for eight hours out of every twenty four, like clockwork, giving the realm the closest equivalent to a normal day/night cycle as exists within the realms.  The farmers of Dagos are among the safest and best protected individuals in the realms, as their grain and produce provides the bulk of food to all seven of the great cities.  The greatest danger near Dagos-Ka, the great city of Dagos, are the Rain Drakes - great flying lizards who infest the enormous flying stone islands that wander through the skies of that realm.  Whenever one of these flying isles passes over the farmland around Dagos-Ka, hunting parties are called in from different realms to fend off Rain Drake attacks until it is past.

[[File:Diaspora_Vander-Ka.jpg]]

The next most prominent realm is Vander, named for the goddess of calm seas.  Though the seas of Vander are legendary for the storms they produce, the island-specked realm is little more than a single vast ocean with the occasional land mass.  The great city of Vander-Ka resides on the coast of the largest known land mass, with the city's portal actually residing in a shallow bay.  To use this portal, the weather-mages and engimancers use huge water pumps to lower the water level of the bay until the portal is uncovered.  Vander-Ka is famous for exporting their finely-built ships, seafood of all kinds, and water to those realms that need to import it.

[[File:Diaspora_Kloth-Ka.jpg]]

While it is the least populous of the Seven Realms, Kloth - named for the god of the tended fire - is probably the wealthiest per person.  This realm is nearly the mirror opposite of Vander, with little to no surface water anywhere in the realm.  The occasional oasis in the vast desert of Kloth is generally treated as an invaluable treasure, its location jealously guarded by the nomadic tribe that discovers it.  Despite its inhospitable climate, Kloth is home to the richest and most accessible veins of precious ores - gold, adamntium, silver, mythril, orichalcum and numerous rare earths.  These materials are refined by expert smiths and craftsmages and traded to the other realms by the expert merchants of Kloth-Ka for the numerous resources required for survival in the parched realm of Kloth.

[[File:Diaspora_Pergos-Ka.jpg]]

While not so harsh of climate as Kloth, the barren and frozen wastes of Pergos - named for the goddess of gentle breezes - are home to some of the hardiest souls in all the realms.  The entire realm seems to be covered in enormous mountain ranges, scrubby tundra, and endlessly blowing artic winds.  Despite the harshness of this environment, some of the largest and meanest fauna of the realms makes its home in this realm - providing excellent hunting and great challenges to any who would venture into its limitless wilds.  Numerous small flying islets which are common to the skies of the realm are used as the foundations for large flying sailing ships, harnessing the ever-howling winds of the realm for fast travel over the mostly-barren wilderness.  Not that this is a safe form of travel - the skies are full of Screaming Drakes, Furies and Rocs in addition to the larger flying landmasses pushed to great speeds by the blowing winds.  Despite the many dangers, there are few who are friendlier and none who are tougher than the warriors of Pergos-Ka.

[[File:Diaspora_Spenet-Ka.jpg]]

The most dangerous and secretive of the great realms is of course Spenet.  Named for the god of shadows and hidden places, Spenet is the realm with the smallest 'great' city.  Indeed, the entire city is housed within the branches of a single tree.  Of course, that tree's branches span a distance of forty miles in nearly every direction from the massive portal embedded in its central upper trunk, but very few of the surrounding trees - each just as large - are even fully explored, let alone inhabited.  None venture down to the floor of the world-forest of Spenet, as the ground of that plane is teeming with the most vicious critters in all the realms.  These creatures will invade the realm on a seasonal basis, with the occasional surprise attack thrown in just to keep things interesting.  The people who live there are ornery, territorial, and quick to resort to violence.  A common saying of the Seven Cities is, "Be wary of your purse with a Kloth-Ka merchant, but be polite for sake of your life with a Spenet-Ka toddler."

[[File:Diaspora_Kiroth-Ka.jpg]]

Paradoxically, the people of Kiroth - named for the goddess of healing balms - are both the kindest and most feared.  Because Kiroth has the mildest and least pleasant weather of all the realms - overcast skies with a continuous heavy misting which is not quite rain but which never stops - its people tend to be either very calm and collected, or else completely irrational and prone to sudden violence.  Some are both.  But that is not what makes the people of Kiroth feared - no, the weather on Kiroth has made the entire plane a single continuous swamp/rainforest, with the most diverse and intricate ecosystem of any realm.  It is speculated that there are more kinds of poison in a single acre of Kiroth jungle than exist naturally in all of the other realms combined.  Because of this, the average Kiroth-Ka citizen is better trained in medicine, chemistry, and general biology than most specialized healers from other realms.  And on top of that, Kiroth-Ka has the single largest guild hall of practising necromancers of any realm - and is the only realm to actively welcome the oft-disliked school of magic.  The healers and necromancers of Kiroth-Ka work closely together to manufacture the most potent drugs and medicines of any realm.

[[File:Diaspora_Tender-Ka.jpg]]

Lastly, there is the sunless realm of Tender, named for the god of peaceful death.  This realm is perhaps unique in all the realms for having no visible sun without becoming a frozen no-man's land.  It is speculated by scholars that Tender does have a sun, but that it is dark - like a lit coal covered in ash, generating heat but no light.  The lands of Tender are still and mostly parched, but certainly not devoid of life - indeed, many of the strangest and most fearsome looking creatures in the realms hail from the darkness of Tender.  Swarms of eyeless insects, numerous specialized fungi, enormous flying creatures that navigate by sound and many other strange things live there.  The city of Tender-Ka is also known as the City of the Damned, because its inhabitants are the outcasts and criminals of the other realms, exiled there as punishments for the most terrible crimes.  Doomed never to see the sun again, they must eke out lives in a place lit mostly by burning manure and bioluminescent fungi, though they will often purchase various types of magical illumination in trade for live samples of the plane's various strange creatures or bushels of the tastier kinds of mushrooms grown on the unlit farms.

[[File:Diaspora_Realms_External.jpg]]

Beyond the seven great realms are the numerous minor realms.  These vary greatly in size, shape and condition, from mostly-liveable spheres the size of a medium gas giant like Neptune, to smallish balls no larger than Mars.  The conditions within each realm is unique, and often quite extreme, and no two are entirely identical in disposition of climate and life.  No one has gotten a precise count of these as yet, but the number is at least one hundred and sixty, and new portal addresses are discovered each year.  Perhaps half of those are known to be inhabited, with the total populous of the realms last summed up as over two hundred and fifty million.  For the most part, despite the vast land areas involved, the realms can be considered as a collection of loosely aligned city-states, with the major cities always vying for power and dominance, and the smaller ones either trying to grow or struggling to survive.  Those towns and villages that do not have easy access to their realm's portal - which is most of them - tend to be the worst off, since those portals tend to attract strong guardian creatures who must be killed or driven off to get even a small number of people or goods through.  Overall, life in one of the minor realms is hard.