Adrisar, by Tevish Szat

If accepted, will be Public

I liked this world when you were first working on it, and I like it now. I can't think of anything that stands out to me as problematic, and I think it will be a strong setting for stories, so I'm satisfied with this.

I'm going to be honest and say that I'm not a fan of the Highlanders. They just bother me, really, from an ascetic standpoint. It takes the whole hodge-podge feel of a conglomerate of separate races, turns it up to eleven, and then sort of doesn't do anything else with it. I love coalitions of differing ideals clashing and merging together to form something greater than the sum of their parts, but the Highlanders... blegh. It's trying too hard, in my opinion.

BUT EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT THIS PLACE IS AMAZING.

The Riftlands are so-so, but I love everything about the other three. Altrium just SCREAMS story development. There is so much there to explore. The Underworld is the same way. I love the Crater and the Raksashan Empire therein. you worked very hard on the history of this Plane, and it shows. (Which may be something that irks me about the Highlanders, because everything else seems so polished, and the Highlanders just sort of... exist.)

Anyway, the Highlanders aren't enough to get me to vote nay on this, considering how simply inspiring and ripe for story the rest of the plane is. Yea.

Finally finished reading through this, and I'll give it a big thumbs up. In particular, the Altrium and the Underworld immediately had me thinking about new characters.

Also, I'm hoping against hope that the Thirteen Days War is a sly Cuban Missile Crisis reference.

Power trippin' as I click the "yea" button!

Okay, I'm going to start off with my nit-picking first. I saw numerous typos throughout this, and I'll point out the ones I spotted and jotted down.



Okay, those are my small issues. Now my two big ones. I have to ask, ultimately, what including a "Church of Serra," with no definitive connection to the real MTG lore Church of Serra does for Adrisar. I found that extremely jarring. Now, I have not yet read your stories based on this plane, so if it comes into play, fine. But just going by what's presented here, that's a sort of big deal to me, because I think it's a bad idea if there isn't a connection there.

On a similar note, although this probably arose after you had written this, is the use of "Nyx", because this word now has specific meaning in MTG lore owing to Theros.

These are my two main concerns right now, and I will abstain from voting for a while until I hear your response.

On the plus side, I do like what's going on in this world in general, and I agree it's a plane that has some serious setting potential. There are certain things about it that do not catch my particular attention, but that hardly means they're bad, and the stuff that does catch my attention catches it well. I'm mostly just concerned about the names.

I thought I remembered talking about the Serra thing on the Wizards forums but it turns out that the conversation consisted of me remarking that probably Barinellos was gonna light things on fire but that I thought it was clever, and then Barinellos never lit things on fire, and that was that.

Might I suggest additional formatting (bold, etc.) to separate the sections like between the Lands and Devices descriptions? Would you mind if I added the formatting when I move it to the Archives?

Overall, you did another fine job, really. While I kind of dislike how each "layer" is forwardly a single color, I like how you don't solidly keep it that way -- like how Altrium has a streak of red and the Crater isn't the "blue place". Good enough for me to get behind.

There is one thing I have an issue with, though: you specifically outline what races live in some of the layers, but not all of them; it leaves me wondering, for instance, what races live in Altrium.

Okay, so without hearing a solid reason to use "Serra" and "Nyx," I'm going to have to go Not As Is for me. I like the plane, and you clearly put a lot of thought and work into it, so I sort of hate to vote Nay on it, because it does have a lot of potential. But I don't believe in the concepts of manufactured coincidences. To me, those two proper names have specific meaning in MTG, and should not be used in an MTG context while referring to something else unless there's a good reason. Without seeing the reason, I'm afraid I can't vote Yea on this one. Sorry.

Nyx should absolutely be changed. I put the Serra instance in because we had an established multiplanar sun/light focused goddess and because I felt someone else could use it as a hook.

All instances of "Nyx" have been replaced with "Ulal" As some people may remember, I have language files from which I draw naming conventions for Altrium, the Underworld, and the Crater, so that was easy

Underworlders have mechanical pendulum clocks -- in fact, most of the societies would (Altrium is advanced enough in artifice to have pocketwatches). Towns would usually have at least one clock, and affluent homes and certain businesses might also have one or more. More fanciful timekeeping devices, reliant upon magic, might also exist but would not be widespread.

While I'll need to go through fixing typos and addressing specific concerns, I'd like to address these two issues

The initial concept of the layers (before I even got the layer motif) was taking a different angle on the allied colored pairs than was typical: Altrium is primarily blue/white, but focuses on the elemental aspects (Light and Air) rather than the mental ones (particularly avoiding the legalism of the Azorius). The Underworld is blue/black: Water, darkness, and death without addressing deceit. The highlands are the most transparent: they're a non(majorly) violent red/black: Freedom and self-determination are their primary goods. The Children are Red/Green fascists (Red militarism and green "Parts of a greater whole" statism), and the crater is green/white (Natural order and manmade order combine into a social "food chain")

It used to be explicit, but on some copy paste the mana symbols were lost. Should I restore them?



As to the races... yeah, this totally slipped my mind that I hadn't said anything about the races of Altrium other than that they don't contain many fliers. Nor the Children, for that matter. Altrium is Human with only trace other (potentially Vedalken), the Children are primarily human with seconday populations of other races that have been culturally (but not biologically, as in the highlands) absorbed: Elves, Goblins, and Ogres spring to mind.

My formatting with this was really inconsistent, and got burned by the board transition... as did my illustration of Anatomy of a Solid Cloud, now that I think about it. Feel free to bold/underline/italic as you see fit.


Correct in each case. (And now corrected in the main thread)


If I did, I certainly didn't mean to: they have about the durability of rock crystal. -- they lose charge in the dark, but don't physically break too easily. If you tell me what line gave this impression, I can look over the wording and say "past self, what were you thinking?"


Not familiar with Gurren Lagann, but the newer gliders are a bit of a nod to Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.


"Anatomy of a Solid Cloud" image is now attached and back in its proper place.


A copy-paste artifact, that went to an "I'll have to change this if Wizards decides to use it for phyrexian mycosynth" footnote. Naturally, they didn't but gave "Nyx" a solid meaning.


Wow, I couldn't type when I did that writeup. Fixed (along with at least one other typo in the same paragraph)



Changed.


To Be Addressed:

As this work has been accepted by a majority of the votes cast, I have moved the original thread into the Archives. The thread still retains the same url, so the link works, but now it is located only within the M:EM Archive board.

I rather enjoy seeing the world without explicit color symbols tied to each entry. I mean, you don't have to try hard to connect them to the color combinations you say (though I still say Altrium seems to have a streak of red), and the only thing it really effects is what types of magic we may see come from each place. If you think it's that important, you can add them in, but I don't see any harm in leaving the mana symbols out.


The main issue I actually have with it is because you mention quite a number of races when describing the mixture of species in the Highlands. Several races -merfolk and ogres stand out to me in particular- aren't mentioned elsewhere and it doesn't feel as natural as, say, homarids being confined to just the Underworld does. I did get the feeling that Altrium was exclusively inhabited by humans, but that wasn't mentioned either.



Here you say:
"Before the Thirteen Days War, the people made vastly superior sunstones (or perhaps proper powerstones), relics that never give out no matter how long they’re kept in the dark. Since the secret of their creation has been lost, intact Ancient Sunstones are some of the most valuable items in modern Altrium"

{which is actually missing a period at the end, but:}
You specifically say intact Ancient Sunstones, which implies broken rather than lost. Since Ancient Sunstones were obviously more durable, that also implies that modern Sunstones are even more fragile.

I have changed the title of this thread to allow it to continue being used as a workshop, since changes are still being made to the main thread.

If it was not otherwise known, I have also moved the original thread into the Archives proper, and removed it from the main M:EM board.

Ooooooooh. yeah, I'll be changing that "intact" to "surviving", since the reason they'd be broken would be time, apocalypse, and rare accidents. It's been millennia after all.

The Archive thread has been edited, correcting numerous typos.

This is partially a bump to ensure all parties involved remember to complete the editing needed for the document.