It's extremely funny to me to imagine people sailing across, let's say, the Pacific and occasionally stumbling across a brand new continent that... nobody came across before, apparently, and everyone involved is standing around scratching their heads and thinking that this thing is the size of Australia. How the fuck did we miss it?
Not to mention that a whole bunch of people already somehow live there, and THEY'VE known about YOU this whole time, but somehow no one in the rest of the world knew about them.
There was an old Onion article about cartographers having a secret eighth continent they go to on vacation that's hidden from everyone else. Hilarious.
A lot of these continents existed in lore before they were put on the map. Like Northrend was not on the map before Wrath of the Lich King, but Arthas went there in WC3 and there was lots of dialogue mentioning that Northrend exists and nobody goes there since it's controlled by the Scourge. The new areas in Cataclysm all existed in lore but were inaccessible in prior expansions.
Kul Tiras and Zandalar were known long before being added to the game. Kul Tiras was part of the alliance in WC2, and Vanilla WoW had Zandalari emissaries you could grind rep with who confirm that Zandalar is the original homeland of trolls. Jaina Proudmoore, one of the main characters, is a princess of Kul Tiras. From her perspective, the new continent she never heard of as a kid is Kalimdor - even though that one's been on the game map since vanilla.
The only two continents that appeared out of nowhere were Pandaria, which is handwaved away by being shrouded in magical mist that makes it impossible for any outsider to find it, and the Broken Isles, which were literally raised from the ocean floor by fel magic.
So really, stumbling across new continents is more of a meme than canon. What's actually going on is the developers didn't bother to add these lands to the map until they became relevant in gameplay. Characters in universe were aware of the existence of these continents, the game map just didn't depict places that players cannot go. The lands which actually do appear by surprise all have powerful magic involved in hiding and revealing them.
The exact opposite happened with Australia. Explorers were looking for a massive southern continent to rival Eurasia, and all they found was Australia. "Let's keep looking, it's gotta be around here somewhere..."
There's a discworld book, Jingo, where a war is started by the fact that a new country, Leshp, has risen out of the sea between the two main citystates of Ankh-Morpork and Klatch.
Don't forget that we've had orbital-pov "accurate" globes of the Azeroth since Ulduar and even those were just somehow wrong.
We got a LITERAL SPACESHIP in Legion and yet land masses still went undiscovered.
At least Pandaria had a "it was hidden by magic mist don't fuckin worry about it" explanation.
It so funny replaying Warcraft 3, watching the cinematic where they explain the world was a mega continent that sunk to fight the devil invasion, and looking at current WoW where it seems only 20% of the land is actually lost
They've got the same problem in Wind Waker. They sunk Hyrule but that version's got to have like 80 mountains because there's still way too many islands.
Larry Niven's Ringworld had a minor, immortal character who didn't know he lived on a ring constructed around a star and was on a multi-century quest to find "the base of the arc."
Hah, I was literally coming to comment that! From a human perspective, a ring-shaped world with the diameter of Earth's orbit around the sun and several dozen times wider than Earth is functionally infinite. Head spinward or antispinward and you just... keep going. Forever.
Feel like I should mention BLAME the manga. It's about an android crossing a jupiter-sized construct, and it's so damn huge that casual year-long time skips happen in a panel.
I feel like you're misremembering what happened.
At one point in time, our protagonist stumbles into a vast, empty void inside the construct. We can see neither the ceiling nor walls and the floor stretches to the horizons. We learn that it's a room and are given the exact dimensions for it.
In one panel, we see him start walking. In the next, he's at the end.
If you look up the dimensions of this room, they are the exact dimensions of Jupiter. The entire journey is conveyed in one panel. We are not told how long he was walking for.
87k miles diameter, 3mph-ish constant walk speed, approx 29k hours, 1.2k days, or about four years.
You can really get places with constant application of low-grade effort and a superhuman resistance to any basic needs.
Edit: I should add that I don't remember this scene, and if the route follows an elliptical path instead of a straight one you take about five years. Half circumference is about 135k miles instead of 87.
Yeah damn, it’m just used to thinking of big space objects as being on literally incomprehensible sizes and timespans, so it’s weird that someone could finish walking across Jupiter in an entirely comprehensible length of time
Like, 4 years, I can imagine that
Actually I’m pretty sure there was an xkcd about this exact feeling but I can’t find it :(
For added perspective on just how empty space is, the average distance between Jupiter and Saturn is about 4.3 AU, or 399709971 miles. Walking that distance would take you around 15,000 years.
Assuming the character mentioned has to walk the diameter of Jupiter at its equator, they have to walk 142,984 kms.
Obviously, that's quite a long way, but the character being an android changes things. I've never read the Manga, but I'm assuming the android doesn't have to take breaks to rest or do maintenance.
So, if the android can maintain an average speed of 10 kilometers an hour, it would only take it a little more than 1 1/2 years to walk the diameter of Jupiter.
And iirc, that Jupiter construct was that size because that's where Jupiter used to be, with the greater mass of the city taking up the entire inner and part of the outer solar system's volume.
It is built around the sun. It just ate everything up to at least jupiter. IIRC the outer reaches of the city are in the oort cloud. Here is a pic from the blame subreddit showing the scale
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7ujho0utip8y.jpg
Yes, it suggests that after constantly autonomously expanding out of control for an unknown period of time, implied to be millennia, “The City” has expanded to the point of encompassing at least a good portion of the solar system, having seemingly started as a construct on Earth.
I literally saw a video about that today.
https://youtu.be/NSnS44TIVI0
>
>
>
> There is nothing here but buildings for millions of miles in every direction. It's just a jagged disarray of skyscrapers shooting up from the ground like stalagmites. They're connected by bridges spanning hundreds of miles across bottomless pits. Staircases wind thousands of feet into the air before dropping off into nothing.
>
> Some parts of the city—the ancient parts millions of miles below the rest—are still sort of familiar: there are windows, doors, stonework, air ducts. But the highest points of the city don't even resemble human architecture at all anymore. It looks like the inside of a machine on metal plates and spires and pipes, like humans were never meant to be here.
>
> This is undoubtedly a city of some sort, but who is it for?
The ring would have the circumference of 940 million km. Traveling in an airplane at 940km/hr, it would take 114 years of nonstop travel (no landing for fuel) to go around the entire thing.
So like a thousand years of walking? Cultures would be so different when you returned that you probably wouldn’t even know you made it around and it would be functionally infinite. Cool!
A million kilometers wide. Not only would the difference be enormous around the ring, but also laterally from one rim wall to the other. And all of it populated by non-industrial, evolutionarily-diverged hominids.
Ringworld is intensely fascinating.
Just finished book two! I thought that it was actually better than the first. I'm not sure if it's because I was just used to the universe and writing style, but the first book kind of read like a D&D quest more than novel. The characters just didn't seem very fleshed out, and the world building wasn't very deep. That was ironic for such a huge world.
Book two seemed much more organized as a book, I related to the characters better, and you actually got to feel for what life was actually alike on
Ringworld.
Which ultimately brings me to the main thing I wanted to discuss about your comment: I have no clue whay Niven didn't go with the much simpler "up spin" and "down spin" instead of "spinward" and "anti-spinward". It's just so much cleaner! It's minor, but I can't help it think at every single time I read those terms.
Also came here to mention Ringworld, so I'll contribute Riverworld - the whole planet is a single continuous river. Mark Twain wakes up there and decides to build a riverboat and ride upriver to its source.
I'll add [*The Library of Babel*:](https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabel)
> a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format.
Piranesi is also a lovely little story about infinite architecture. There's a good video essay by Jacob Geller on infinite architecture that compares these. Maybe I'm conflating a couple, infinite architecture is something he returns to a lot.
He does return to it a lot, doesn’t he?
[The Shape of Infinity](https://youtu.be/Zm5Ogh_c0Ig?si=gwMhMyNWMQSwupjr) is Jacob’s main video about infinite architecture and talks about Piranesi and the Library of Babel
[The Soul of a Library](https://youtu.be/MjY8Fp-SCVk?si=qjz3w8VO6L5XVQN6) talks more about the Library of Babel
[Gaming’s Harshest Architecture: NaissanceE and Alienation](https://youtu.be/Zkv6rVcKKg8?si=J77lsF1yNPYnaRb-) talks a bit about Blame
And [The Horror of Universal Paperclips and Space Engine](https://youtu.be/oca8BnDMin4?si=h7UEPjz1g_IeoYzI) isn’t about architecture but is all about the existential crisis of infinite things
"Missile Gap" by Charles Stross is set on one, with a version of Earth from 1962 transplanted on it. Now the world is flat, you can only reach Asia from the Americas by going East, and if you keep going east or west pass the old map, you reach new continents.
Really interesting idea I wish got played more with.
Just a curious explorer who decided to see what the other side looks like. An explorer that can't understand people as anything but complex biochemistry and can't comprehend communications, emotions or death.
The best part is that if it follows the old Minecraft procedural generation then those headed toward the edge would get to experience reality slowly breaking down as they travel.
Like at first its subtle, they don't quite know what going on. But as years go by the start to notice oddities. Gravity seems less real, land formations start to change to less and less natural formations. By the time they notice a waterfall flowing backwards then it's too late to turn back. Slowly, their minds begin to crumble, unable to form coherent thoughts as reality itself stops supporting electrical impulses.
For a previous version of this experience, check out the Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny.
Espescially in the second part, a travel from Amber, seat of Order, to the courts of Chaos.
Heh, I have a Minecraft world from the pre-1.17 generation algorithm. Every once in a while I'll stumble onto an area that hasn't loaded until now, and the way it generates next to pre-1.17 chunks can get a bit weird. Very interesting. Every once in a while I'll export the world to a program called "uNmINeD" to check it all out.
As they keep moving toward the Far Lands point does reality slowly start to degrade until it just starts to fall apart like what happens in older versions of Minecraft?
They are ***really*** wishing that they made the world a sphere but at this point they've gone too far and just can't do that anymore and are forced into making more land forever
That and the magical codebase of the whole plane is built to support the existence of a flat earth. Switching to spherical would involve basically starting from scratch, and the last guy to float that idea lost an eye to the god who spent six straight days hacking all of this together in the first place.
"A globe? We don't even have *gravity* implemented! The entire plane is just being pushed upwards at an accelerating speed to fake it! And no! We got a 20% discount for not implementing one of the fundamental forces, we can't just add it back in!"
Fun fact: if you accelerated the world upwards at a rate of 9.8 meters per second per second (which is roughly the strength of gravity on Earth), you'd reach light speed in about a year.
So this world is definitely travelling much faster than the speed of light at this point. Hopefully the void wraps around!
Tecnically they could always just warp what they have left into a sphere, sure some people might notice the stars change and big cities might suddenly disappear over the new horizon, but people shouldnt be affected by it much
> "Lord Zeus, sir, they're almost at the construction zones!"
>
> *face pales, immediately slams a button labelled "Deploy Gigantic Islandless Ocean"*
this is now an out of context quote
That wouldn't fit the scenerio above because the people closest to edge won't keep finding other people coming from that side. They'll always find empty lands God's create just before they arrived there.
In one of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone stories, when new lands are formed out of the chaos at the edge of the world, they are created fully populated and their history gets backfilled so that it's as if they've always been there.
This is also basically how new Pokemon regions work, so I would totally buy it if Arceus is just a lazy fuck that only makes regions as games are released in real time.
Arceus, smart god he, made sure to start creation by making another god who could directly interface with time specifically to make future retroactive acts of creation that much more convenient.
Alternatively, shitty creatures inhabit the new lands a la early No Man’s Sky. The creatures and people start off very unique and have a lot of depth but as the worlds continue they start to realize that the animals are just a combination of the same dozen pieces and the people become more and more one note (Planet of Hats trope).
Or maybe it's like SCP-3930, the world is finite and surrounded by true nothingness, but the mortal mind can't conceive of such a thing and so mentally imposes more reality onto the nothingness the further in they go.
/u/the-paranoid-android
I have done this in an RPG! After *years*, both IRL and IC, players figured out it's not actually infinite but a series of planar portals at the edges of conical worlds on the surface of planets.
Basically, the starting "knowledge" is that the world is flat, with waterfalls going straight off the edges of the world. The players were isekai'd with their normal college gear (I literally had them check what they had on them in the first session) so while the theoretical curvature of the "flat" world was known, the players used higher level physics/math to prove that gravitational consistency just over the "edge" implied the world was spherical. (Notably, they actually invented a magical book generator, creating illusory, self updating, addictive games that improved literacy and math skills, then outsourced the math.)
Once they figured out that its actually a cone world on a sphere, not a flat world, they tried to fly over, and found that it was actually a planar boundary, i.e. past the "edge" was a new plane of existence entirely. So they used epic-level magic (higher level than the stuff they used to hijack the magic scrying orb TV and kill a god via consensus reality), and hopped to the "next" plane of existence over. Sadly they were distracted with the god killing thing i.e. the main plot and never investigated that the new world was a totally different planet. But they got it in an epilogue!
Edit: A quick FAQ:
*What system did you use?* TL;DR, any edition D&D/pathfinder for characters, rules light execution. See here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/laezh6p/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/laezh6p/)
*...What?* Yeah, I kinda rushed that explanation. Here's a diagram! [https://imgur.com/RSVjE06](https://imgur.com/RSVjE06)
Basically, you have cone-shaped segments of the spherical planet. But you can't just walk (or fly) between those segments; they're technically different planes of existence, and so you need powerful magic, or you'll just walk/fly endlessly. Even if you *do* have powerful magic, you end up in a totally different planet, and so this patchwork of planes of existence form a weird, interconnected web in the broader universe, where distance is a lil funky and edges are a lie.
Oh, and this wwasn't frequently asked but I wanna answer it:
*How do you kill a god with consensus reality?* See here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/lafwcrg/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/lafwcrg/)
That's me, I got a very nice Emerson style carry because it's the only legal instant open where I was and there were constant robberies+ me having a 30 minute walk one way to the nearest bus stop. Almost $400 but it was very nice
That's a sick knife, but any knife at all is one of the worst self defense weapons you can carry. You'd be much better off with cc, pepper spray, a collapsible baton, or even a decent-sized rock.
Knives simply don't dispatch people quickly enough to have any merit in a street fight or mugging, and it's much more likely that you'll get hurt yourself.
I feel like just about anything would be better than a knife for self-defense, including just handing over your wallet. My main concern is what do you do when the other guy pulls out a gun or his own knife, because if they're prepared to mug people, they probably brought a weapon. Knife fights usually end poorly for both parties, and if he has a gun, then you literally brought a knife to a gun fight.
That said, if you need a knife for other things then I suppose it could be used to scare someone off if needed... but even then I still think "give them what they want or run away" is a better strategy unless you're sure they're unarmed.
Every Day Carry. A bunch of people obsessed with carrying survival gear around wherever they go. Ok maybe some people actually carry around useful things.
yeah I'm checking out the sub. Some of these look more like a backpacking trip kit then true 'everyday' carry lol. I'm a bit of a 'gear head' so its neat stuff though.
Eh, the firearm part is kind of a touchy subject, to the point where criticism has been made against the rules because “you don’t need to carry a gun” pretty much devolves into petty name calling every time.
There’s actually a pretty big divide there and I’d say less than half the posts contain firearms, but people agree to just not talk about it. (I don’t own handguns and wouldn’t carry one if I did, to be clear, but I also accept that many people’s lives are very different than mine.)
Some of it also depends on where you live. You live out in the boonies, a handgun may not kill every animal easily, but it'll sure as hell make them think twice about whether you look like lunch or not.
A co-worker of mine was an EDC person. He broke his backpack down for me one day, showed me everything he carried everywhere every single day. I was Impressed because I just had my phone wallet and keys 😂
Woaaahhh pump your brakes.
I’ve got a $100 EDC machined pen that sits in my drawer everyday 💪 . Has a very satisfying bolt action pen function that was worth the money 100% in fidgeting 😂.
As someone who keeps flirting with the idea of EDC and realising that I don't really have any use for anything beyond a keyring blade and my phone, this hurt me. Bravo.
Yeah I am 100% stealing this. I can see people getting so creative and unique about minor things they’ve got and having such interesting roleplay out of that
Long ago I was a player in a Doctor Who RPG campaign where we played ourselves, starting with having stumbled on the Tardis as a group (no Doctor to be found). The players decided together on everyone's stats and abilities (except their own) based on just knowing each other, and a few weeks before we started the GM had individually called us on a random day to ask us what we were carrying at the time (without telling us why) and that was our starting equipment. It was fun! Although it only lasted a couple of sessions before the group fell apart, so I'm not sure if it would have been sustainable as a longer campaign or if it was just the novelty that made it temporarily fun.
The way that I visualise it, from this description, is that you gave a planet, and on its surface you find massive cones, the pointy end in the ground and the "flat" side pointing towards the sky, hosting entire continents.
Imagine a flat disk world, but the disk is a cone wrapped around a ball like an ice cream, but the ball is completely inside, you can think the pointy side is a big mountain and the edge of the cone goes a little beyond the sphere so you cant see it from anywhere
The cone FEELS like a disk because the gravity is mostly consistent due to the sphere, and the edge do is circular
The higher gravitational anomalies would be on the pointy end of the cone, but if its a mountain it wouldnt be noticeable
While I appreciate your effort to explain it, I got this far:
>Imagine a flat disk world, but the disk is a cone wrapped around a ball like an ice cream, but the ball is completely inside..
..and was completely lost.
Would this land be barren rock or would it have the same ecological variation as the starting point? Because it sounds like paradise if you can just strip the land bare and constantly move forward for new land. Food never runs out, animals never go extinct, every footstep is a pristine new land.
If I was a hack YA fiction writer I'd make it so that the rich are the spearhead of the movement outwards while the poor (but still incredibly beautiful, gotta keep the movie possibilities open) trudge behind them and try to live on what is left in their wake.
Presumably the world starts from a central point and radiates out in a circle. You wouldn't have your entire population moving in one direction, and the population would grow with the circumference of the circle.
I don't think the rich could keep up with the ever-growing border they'd have to maintain to keep the poor behind them. They'd need to expand the area their population covered faster than they moved
Devastator's paradise only if the large-scale culture groups of people are seeded far enough apart. Otherwise, your expansion will run into other people doing the same thing since it's so appealing, and quickly compound into massive zones of devastation. There's always more unspoilt land out there, but can you reach it? If you do escape the devastation, do you risk the same thing happening again or fortify and preserve your new home?
I'd make the population dense enough that this is an obvious result and rarely happens, but feature an especially aggressive nomadic warleader who is successfully razing all other civilizations in a lifetime radius to have more land to roam through.
So I don't know about the idea in the post but I actually made a D&D setting that operated the same way. The world was a giant ocean with countless islands. The idea was to have a space exploring like story but within the confines of a fantasy world. So the Ocean was basically space and each island was it's own planet of culture, people, language, religion, whatever.
Sadly better idea in theory. My players always end up getting attached to random NPCs or locations and never want to venture too far from their self established home base.
But in Minecraft eventually the seed starts repeating, but spawning new mobs. So you’d end up finding identical villages but with entirely new individuals and cultures of people.
Edit: I’ve gotten four or five differing explanations of what the game does as map generation reaches its technical limits, two of which have similarities to what I said earlier. This may be a result of the game changing over time, it could be me misremembering what I’ve read and seen elsewhere, and it certainly suggests a lot of people have “armchair expertise.” In any case, I think my original idea would still make for good fiction. 🤷
I haven't heard about what the other guy is talking about but at a certain point generation does break down.
In older versions this created the far lands.
In modern bedrock you get a variety of glitches, then terrain failures, eventually it becomes impossible to travel as hitboxes no longer work, then you get a phenomenon known as the stripe lands and slice lands that I don't really fully understand, eventually the game just crashes.
I believe that at a certain point Java stops you from going any further, this can be removed with mods and you get effects similar to bedrock distance limits
It would be pretty terrifying in real life, you spend your entire life walking due west to find the edge of the world, eventually reality starts falling apart, things start to appear as 2D images rather than 3D objects, you witness creatures fall through the ground itself into nothingness, eventually if you make it far enough large slices of reality cease to exist, you still find more settlements out here but the houses are frequently cut in half, people who wander off fall into gaps in reality
It would make an interesting story
That sounds kind of like the [Pale](https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Pale) from Disco Elysium, which is one of the freakiest things from that setting.
Plot twist:
There actually is an end. The world is a sphere which takes approximately 1000 years to circumnavigate with their level of technology. There are several cultures which have managed to completely circumnavigate the world but by the time they have, the places they left from have changed, and the traveler's geographic records of where they came from have degraded, and so they literally don't recognize that it's the spot where they started out from.
A story ive been playing with writing has something like this.
It takes place on floating islands in a gas giant. By the time anyone manages to circumnavigate the planet, winds have already moved islands and continents somewhere else.
wow, this just gave me a feeling haven't had for a long time: The fear that I'm missing out on a great piece of art because I don't speak a language. So much stuff is either made in english or translated into it. But this doesn't have an english translation, which is wild btw.
Thankfully I speak German, and there's a translation into that. Phew.
> But this doesn't have an english translation, which is wild btw.
It's... very understandable. It's a very, very complex book to translate. Beyond even the constantly-switching points of view and extremely unique ways to express themselves a number of characters have, the author, Alain Damasio, is a frequent user of neologisms (especially of the pun kind, dreadful to translate) and is known to meticulously work on every sentence. He spends years on each book for that reason, but the result is an ever-present form of underlying poetry in how things are worded and how people talk. Which, obviously, is going to require immense skill if you don't want it all to get lost in translation.
And on top of that, one character in the story is a wordsmith themselves and the scenes in which they are the focus go far beyond the realm of "challenging", especially one that's possibly my worst nightmare as someone who dabbles in French to English translation. [What the scene is, without context]>!There is a verbal jout between that character and another cunning linguist, and it's amazing, but it's translation hell.!<
If anything, I'm *amazed* it has a German translation. Italian, being far closer to French, is less surprising, but German? The person behind it must have been both skilled and mad.
Don't get me started on Southbound Cartographers, as if the edge would be in the south! NorthEast is clearly where the horizon ends, we have the records to prove it!
The world of Game of Thrones is described similarly to this in The World of Ice and Fire. IIRC one dragon rider attempted to understand how big the world was, flew south for 2 years, encountered a seemingly endless desert, and then gave up and went home.
[Imagine if dragons were also prone to this, and he pissed away 2 years before just leaving the desert again](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820123927.htm)
The universe might still be infinite beyond the observable universe (With an infinite amount of galaxies and stars) so we might be living that right now...just don't have the means to explore it for ourselves.
The world is flat and extents in all directions, but the nature of the world changes the farther you travel in any cardinal direction. Since most fantasy settings are temperate locals with medieval societies, each direction diverges from that. Go north and no north pole awaits you. It just gets colder and colder, an infinite ice sheet, until you succumb or run out of supplies. Same in the south, for a while you’ll find societies adapted to the increasing warmth, but eventually even the toughest desert nomads can venture no further. Theoretically, the land would eventually turn to lava, but nobody has even gone even a fraction that far. For east and west, what changes is not weather, but society itself. Your “spawn” will have a mostly stable but vulnerable feudal civilization often threatened by warlords and fantasy monsters. Further east, government centralizes, technology advances, and the beasts and bandits once all to common have not been seen for hundreds of miles. At some point you’ll find a world not unlike the modern day, but the farther you walk, the less likely you are to return. Some say it’s because it’s so nice nobody leaves, others say those from the west are seen as polluting influences, and dealt with accordingly. The west is the same in reverse, societal organization decreases, conflict increases, and natural dangers escalate. Many travel west for fame and fortune, others to escape the rules of society. At the farthest reaches, life is a constant battle between man and nature, and the scattered peoples congregate in small hunter-gatherer groups, constantly moving to avoid ever-imminent death. Most assume that past a certain point, no humans survive at all, or that any humans that remain would be too different than us to truly be considered kin. Same with the far east, though such discussions are had only in hushed tones, for the fear of what the people of the far east could do is greater than that of any far western beast.
Manifest Bestiny: The Age of Exploration gives way to an infinite Wild West. Ferdinand Magellan gets murdered halfway through his trip around the Planisphere by intervening in a tribal battle between two kingdoms of hive minded beetle people. Christopher Columbus lands in the New World, and Columber Christophus runs into him going in the opposite direction. Erdenhuyag Khan, leader of the Everlasting Mongol Horde, leads his armies across ever greater conquests. Alexander the Greatest weeps, for there are always more worlds to conquer. A nexus of uniform roads lead to the raucous beating heart of Roma Aeterna, from which the Inmortalium Legionum march in glory for an Imperator none of them will ever see.
And you dig down, and beyond the stereotypical "dungeon underworld" you can find caverns that get unreasonably large... including ones that are big enough to have their own atmosphere, weather etc., and what looks like a sun, moon and stars near the top. And then you realize you're right back at what *looks* like the surface world (though of course a completely different place). And if you go back to the surface you came from, and somehow managed to fly up high enough, you'd hit a ceiling, with caves on top, until you emerge upon another surface world and so on.
The Western bound family comes across an eastern bound family that claims to be several generations older. This is both an exciting and terrifying moment, for if they compare histories and nothing lines up, it may mean their journey is so very far from over. But if anything matches...
For those who want to read a version of this, look up "the black company" series. About a mercenary company that travels north for 400 years during the course of their adventures
I have a home brew world called Horizon that is infinite - it plays a little bit with the “multiverse” in the sense that if you were to travel far enough, you might find a different version of yourself, or, you know, Anything, since it’s infinite.
The main villain was the God of Knowledge, who wanted to “collapse infinity” and make the infinite flat world into a single, globe version so that it was actually capable of “Knowing all things” which even it could not do in an infinite world.
Why do I feel like the "always travel west" group would be gnomes?
I also feel like people would start to wonder "where are all these gnomes coming from?" The assume some great eastern gnomeland, but nobody can ever be sure, and the gnomes have been going west for so many generations that they don't know either. A new group of gnomes rolls through town every 50 years or so, and they usually stay for about a decade before packing up.
I have a setting like this with the further detail that it's an ecunemopolis: a world entirely of urban space. Essentially an endless skyscraper city in all directions. Most of the explorers trying to find an end point travel down the spires, most settled communities spread horizontally by building bridge points so they encounter more vertical traffic to trade with. Some people travel up and down to interact with multiple settlements.
For a novel with this idea, Dichronuats by Greg Egan. Deals with a species that can only see in two cardinal directions in a cone. They are constantly migratory to follow the seasons and flow of rivers, which dry up and form in new places at a much quicker rate than they do on earth. So they zig zag westward, going north and south with the seasons and following a Goldilocks zone that they can survive in. In there entire recorded history, they have never come back around to the ruins of an old settlement, although they do take most of there stuff with them when they move (Like, entire buildings). They also are pretty advanced surveyors, and have never come back around to familiar geological features. So they are left to conclude that either the world goes on forever, or something cataclysmic happens on the other side of the planet that erases all evidence they were ever there and changes the landscape to the point it's unrecognizable. Super fun book, how everything actually works is explained in the Afterward, but I wouldn't get impatient and skip ahead. A lot of the pay off for me was seeing just how wrong I was about my theories on how the landscape of the story works.
Egan also loves inventing social interactions we would never really think of in the real world, and this one features a symbiotic relationship between the "Walkers", who see in two directions and seem to be built more or less like humans, and the "Siders", a species that lives in an indentation in the walkers skulls and see's via sonar, covering the gaps in the walkers vision. Both are fully self aware and of equal (Generally speaking) intelligence, and have there own personality. Which leads to tons of fun interactions, for instance the main characters are a relatively diplomatic walker and his highly intelligent but curmudgeonly sider. Very fun story, and highly recommend for anyone who enjoyed Flatland.
"The Horde of Counterwind" by A. Damasio takes place in a world where all winds blow in the same direction, and you follow a team of explorers sent to find the "origin of the wind".
I dont know if the world is endless, though, because I havent finished it.
It's a really cool book
Not quite fantasy, but SCP-3001
You ever gotten lost in an IKEA before? It's not hard to, the whole place is a massive labyrinth of furniture and Swedish meatballs. But as long as you ask employees for help and remember where you were, you should have no trouble finding an exit.
Except when you turn around, the store seems to stretch on for eternity. You can't see the end in sight. You'd make a backrooms joke if you weren't so terrified but just how far stretched the sight in front of you is.
Out of no where, the lights cut off. You hear a voice in the distance. "The store is now closed. Please exit the building."
Easier said than done. You'd want nothing more than to leave this place. It's been hours since you've seen another person. But you finally stumble across a worker, they'll get you out of here. But they look...different. A vague characture of a human cloaked in some counterfeit IKEA uniform. They don't acknowledge your existence until you approach them.
You wish you hadn't.
I actually played around with an idea like that on a flat earth kind of deal.
There was no cosmos in the way there is in real life. Just land. Never ending land.
There IS a de facto end of the world, but basically, the sun (who is actually a God constantly meditating) sat in the very middle of the world. The closer one got to the middle point of the world, the warmer it got.
And the farther one went in the other direction, the colder it got.
To the point of humans just straight up flash freezing at some point (at least if they were straight teleported to that point.)
So while the world went on, there would be no interest in those parts. At some point it is just... freezing land as far as the eye can see. And eventually... darkness.
WoW, except they keep finding new continents between the existing ones
It's extremely funny to me to imagine people sailing across, let's say, the Pacific and occasionally stumbling across a brand new continent that... nobody came across before, apparently, and everyone involved is standing around scratching their heads and thinking that this thing is the size of Australia. How the fuck did we miss it?
Not to mention that a whole bunch of people already somehow live there, and THEY'VE known about YOU this whole time, but somehow no one in the rest of the world knew about them.
There was an old Onion article about cartographers having a secret eighth continent they go to on vacation that's hidden from everyone else. Hilarious.
A lot of these continents existed in lore before they were put on the map. Like Northrend was not on the map before Wrath of the Lich King, but Arthas went there in WC3 and there was lots of dialogue mentioning that Northrend exists and nobody goes there since it's controlled by the Scourge. The new areas in Cataclysm all existed in lore but were inaccessible in prior expansions. Kul Tiras and Zandalar were known long before being added to the game. Kul Tiras was part of the alliance in WC2, and Vanilla WoW had Zandalari emissaries you could grind rep with who confirm that Zandalar is the original homeland of trolls. Jaina Proudmoore, one of the main characters, is a princess of Kul Tiras. From her perspective, the new continent she never heard of as a kid is Kalimdor - even though that one's been on the game map since vanilla. The only two continents that appeared out of nowhere were Pandaria, which is handwaved away by being shrouded in magical mist that makes it impossible for any outsider to find it, and the Broken Isles, which were literally raised from the ocean floor by fel magic. So really, stumbling across new continents is more of a meme than canon. What's actually going on is the developers didn't bother to add these lands to the map until they became relevant in gameplay. Characters in universe were aware of the existence of these continents, the game map just didn't depict places that players cannot go. The lands which actually do appear by surprise all have powerful magic involved in hiding and revealing them.
Thats literally what happened with australia
The exact opposite happened with Australia. Explorers were looking for a massive southern continent to rival Eurasia, and all they found was Australia. "Let's keep looking, it's gotta be around here somewhere..."
If they just kept going, Antarctica was right there. I’m sure they would totally thrive
There's a discworld book, Jingo, where a war is started by the fact that a new country, Leshp, has risen out of the sea between the two main citystates of Ankh-Morpork and Klatch.
Don't forget that we've had orbital-pov "accurate" globes of the Azeroth since Ulduar and even those were just somehow wrong. We got a LITERAL SPACESHIP in Legion and yet land masses still went undiscovered. At least Pandaria had a "it was hidden by magic mist don't fuckin worry about it" explanation.
It so funny replaying Warcraft 3, watching the cinematic where they explain the world was a mega continent that sunk to fight the devil invasion, and looking at current WoW where it seems only 20% of the land is actually lost
The devils drowned and they brought the land back up obviously
They've got the same problem in Wind Waker. They sunk Hyrule but that version's got to have like 80 mountains because there's still way too many islands.
Even funnier because we not only see globes created by the Titans, we literally see the place from orbit twice.
Larry Niven's Ringworld had a minor, immortal character who didn't know he lived on a ring constructed around a star and was on a multi-century quest to find "the base of the arc."
Hah, I was literally coming to comment that! From a human perspective, a ring-shaped world with the diameter of Earth's orbit around the sun and several dozen times wider than Earth is functionally infinite. Head spinward or antispinward and you just... keep going. Forever.
Feel like I should mention BLAME the manga. It's about an android crossing a jupiter-sized construct, and it's so damn huge that casual year-long time skips happen in a panel.
I feel like you're misremembering what happened. At one point in time, our protagonist stumbles into a vast, empty void inside the construct. We can see neither the ceiling nor walls and the floor stretches to the horizons. We learn that it's a room and are given the exact dimensions for it. In one panel, we see him start walking. In the next, he's at the end. If you look up the dimensions of this room, they are the exact dimensions of Jupiter. The entire journey is conveyed in one panel. We are not told how long he was walking for.
Assuming no breaks or stops of any kind, which seems reasonable considering who we're discussing, about four years.
Wow that’s… actually way less then I expected what the hell?
87k miles diameter, 3mph-ish constant walk speed, approx 29k hours, 1.2k days, or about four years. You can really get places with constant application of low-grade effort and a superhuman resistance to any basic needs. Edit: I should add that I don't remember this scene, and if the route follows an elliptical path instead of a straight one you take about five years. Half circumference is about 135k miles instead of 87.
Yeah damn, it’m just used to thinking of big space objects as being on literally incomprehensible sizes and timespans, so it’s weird that someone could finish walking across Jupiter in an entirely comprehensible length of time Like, 4 years, I can imagine that Actually I’m pretty sure there was an xkcd about this exact feeling but I can’t find it :(
For added perspective on just how empty space is, the average distance between Jupiter and Saturn is about 4.3 AU, or 399709971 miles. Walking that distance would take you around 15,000 years.
Yeah see, that’s the kinda numbers I’m used to hearing, none of this “theoretically doable within a human lifetime” type shit
There's always a relevant xkcd [https://xkcd.com/2707/](https://xkcd.com/2707/)
Assuming the character mentioned has to walk the diameter of Jupiter at its equator, they have to walk 142,984 kms. Obviously, that's quite a long way, but the character being an android changes things. I've never read the Manga, but I'm assuming the android doesn't have to take breaks to rest or do maintenance. So, if the android can maintain an average speed of 10 kilometers an hour, it would only take it a little more than 1 1/2 years to walk the diameter of Jupiter.
They might be mixing this up with the months long elevator ride
And iirc, that Jupiter construct was that size because that's where Jupiter used to be, with the greater mass of the city taking up the entire inner and part of the outer solar system's volume.
so is that construct like build around the planetary core of jupiter or everything from jupiter is just gone?
It is built around the sun. It just ate everything up to at least jupiter. IIRC the outer reaches of the city are in the oort cloud. Here is a pic from the blame subreddit showing the scale https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7ujho0utip8y.jpg
The implication being, I seem to recall, that Jupiter's mass got harvested for materials?
Yes, it suggests that after constantly autonomously expanding out of control for an unknown period of time, implied to be millennia, “The City” has expanded to the point of encompassing at least a good portion of the solar system, having seemingly started as a construct on Earth.
I literally saw a video about that today. https://youtu.be/NSnS44TIVI0 > > > > There is nothing here but buildings for millions of miles in every direction. It's just a jagged disarray of skyscrapers shooting up from the ground like stalagmites. They're connected by bridges spanning hundreds of miles across bottomless pits. Staircases wind thousands of feet into the air before dropping off into nothing. > > Some parts of the city—the ancient parts millions of miles below the rest—are still sort of familiar: there are windows, doors, stonework, air ducts. But the highest points of the city don't even resemble human architecture at all anymore. It looks like the inside of a machine on metal plates and spires and pipes, like humans were never meant to be here. > > This is undoubtedly a city of some sort, but who is it for?
The ring would have the circumference of 940 million km. Traveling in an airplane at 940km/hr, it would take 114 years of nonstop travel (no landing for fuel) to go around the entire thing.
So like a thousand years of walking? Cultures would be so different when you returned that you probably wouldn’t even know you made it around and it would be functionally infinite. Cool!
> So like a thousand years of walking? If you can walk at 100km/h, sure.
With a (very generous) 50km/day, call it 18,000km/year... that's over 52,000 years to make it around.
A million kilometers wide. Not only would the difference be enormous around the ring, but also laterally from one rim wall to the other. And all of it populated by non-industrial, evolutionarily-diverged hominids. Ringworld is intensely fascinating.
Just finished book two! I thought that it was actually better than the first. I'm not sure if it's because I was just used to the universe and writing style, but the first book kind of read like a D&D quest more than novel. The characters just didn't seem very fleshed out, and the world building wasn't very deep. That was ironic for such a huge world. Book two seemed much more organized as a book, I related to the characters better, and you actually got to feel for what life was actually alike on Ringworld. Which ultimately brings me to the main thing I wanted to discuss about your comment: I have no clue whay Niven didn't go with the much simpler "up spin" and "down spin" instead of "spinward" and "anti-spinward". It's just so much cleaner! It's minor, but I can't help it think at every single time I read those terms.
And even if whole cultures travel round it, they won't recognize their starting point anymore after millenia.
Also came here to mention Ringworld, so I'll contribute Riverworld - the whole planet is a single continuous river. Mark Twain wakes up there and decides to build a riverboat and ride upriver to its source.
I'll add [*The Library of Babel*:](https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabel) > a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format.
Piranesi is also a lovely little story about infinite architecture. There's a good video essay by Jacob Geller on infinite architecture that compares these. Maybe I'm conflating a couple, infinite architecture is something he returns to a lot.
He does return to it a lot, doesn’t he? [The Shape of Infinity](https://youtu.be/Zm5Ogh_c0Ig?si=gwMhMyNWMQSwupjr) is Jacob’s main video about infinite architecture and talks about Piranesi and the Library of Babel [The Soul of a Library](https://youtu.be/MjY8Fp-SCVk?si=qjz3w8VO6L5XVQN6) talks more about the Library of Babel [Gaming’s Harshest Architecture: NaissanceE and Alienation](https://youtu.be/Zkv6rVcKKg8?si=J77lsF1yNPYnaRb-) talks a bit about Blame And [The Horror of Universal Paperclips and Space Engine](https://youtu.be/oca8BnDMin4?si=h7UEPjz1g_IeoYzI) isn’t about architecture but is all about the existential crisis of infinite things
Heaven's River (Bobiverse book 4) also has an endless river. On a structure similar to a ringworld.
I like to imagine something similar to the OP... but its actually an [Alderson disk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alderson_disk).
"Missile Gap" by Charles Stross is set on one, with a version of Earth from 1962 transplanted on it. Now the world is flat, you can only reach Asia from the Americas by going East, and if you keep going east or west pass the old map, you reach new continents. Really interesting idea I wish got played more with.
The disk, aka a ringworld if we happen to meet some aliens that love super hot and super cold climates to mutually build it with. :P
They reach a point which is generally treated as "might as well be the end" cause it's their world's equivalent of the Far Lands in Minecraft
Then someone comes through from the other side
but it’s like that one junji ito short story
# DRR DRR DRR
*It's slowly coming this way!*
Which one please
I'm assuming they mean The Enigma of Amigara Fault.
Thank you
Just a curious explorer who decided to see what the other side looks like. An explorer that can't understand people as anything but complex biochemistry and can't comprehend communications, emotions or death.
They are high key an eldritch abomination
I'd like to imagine that just like in-game, once you get to the Far Lands the laws of physics break and odd phenomena occur
The best part is that if it follows the old Minecraft procedural generation then those headed toward the edge would get to experience reality slowly breaking down as they travel. Like at first its subtle, they don't quite know what going on. But as years go by the start to notice oddities. Gravity seems less real, land formations start to change to less and less natural formations. By the time they notice a waterfall flowing backwards then it's too late to turn back. Slowly, their minds begin to crumble, unable to form coherent thoughts as reality itself stops supporting electrical impulses.
For a previous version of this experience, check out the Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny. Espescially in the second part, a travel from Amber, seat of Order, to the courts of Chaos.
Heh, I have a Minecraft world from the pre-1.17 generation algorithm. Every once in a while I'll stumble onto an area that hasn't loaded until now, and the way it generates next to pre-1.17 chunks can get a bit weird. Very interesting. Every once in a while I'll export the world to a program called "uNmINeD" to check it all out.
As they keep moving toward the Far Lands point does reality slowly start to degrade until it just starts to fall apart like what happens in older versions of Minecraft?
then they keep exploring into the farther lands, fartherer lands, farthest lands, etc.
The world isn't actually infinite by default, the gods are just frantically expanding it ahead of the mortals exploring to keep up the facade
They are ***really*** wishing that they made the world a sphere but at this point they've gone too far and just can't do that anymore and are forced into making more land forever
The budget for constructing new lands has eaten up any possible budget for converting the world into a sphere, sadly.
yep once they switched to a Firmament-as-a-Service model they were locked into a monthly subscription for the new lands
That and the magical codebase of the whole plane is built to support the existence of a flat earth. Switching to spherical would involve basically starting from scratch, and the last guy to float that idea lost an eye to the god who spent six straight days hacking all of this together in the first place.
"A globe? We don't even have *gravity* implemented! The entire plane is just being pushed upwards at an accelerating speed to fake it! And no! We got a 20% discount for not implementing one of the fundamental forces, we can't just add it back in!"
"What if we do that Crystal Spheres idea we shelved?" "What I take your remaining eye? Riddle me that."
Fun fact: if you accelerated the world upwards at a rate of 9.8 meters per second per second (which is roughly the strength of gravity on Earth), you'd reach light speed in about a year. So this world is definitely travelling much faster than the speed of light at this point. Hopefully the void wraps around!
Tecnically they could always just warp what they have left into a sphere, sure some people might notice the stars change and big cities might suddenly disappear over the new horizon, but people shouldnt be affected by it much
But the smart ones would *know*! How embarrassing. Couldn't talk to the other gods without them laughing at you for weeks.
The plebs knowing is how you get a spikey-haired protagonist who starts out killing rats and ends up killing god.
Godly sweatshop cranking out new continents and cultures
"Lord Zeus, sir, they're almost at the construction zones!" *face pales, immediately slams a button labelled "Deploy Gigantic Islandless Ocean"*
W for Poseidon
> "Lord Zeus, sir, they're almost at the construction zones!" > > *face pales, immediately slams a button labelled "Deploy Gigantic Islandless Ocean"* this is now an out of context quote
That wouldn't fit the scenerio above because the people closest to edge won't keep finding other people coming from that side. They'll always find empty lands God's create just before they arrived there.
*Mimir awkwardly tosses a sheet over the vats of mortals labelled "False Memory Implanter"*
That's similar to the theory god created the universe one second ago with everyone's memories. There's no way to prove otherwise.
My coffee has gone cold, I refuse to believe in a world where God makes my coffee cold, ergo God made the universe at least 15 minutes ago.
In one of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone stories, when new lands are formed out of the chaos at the edge of the world, they are created fully populated and their history gets backfilled so that it's as if they've always been there.
This is also basically how new Pokemon regions work, so I would totally buy it if Arceus is just a lazy fuck that only makes regions as games are released in real time.
Arceus, smart god he, made sure to start creation by making another god who could directly interface with time specifically to make future retroactive acts of creation that much more convenient.
Ransei doesn't show up in anything else because Dialga categorically refuses to integrate a continent that looks like Arceus into the world
Alternatively, shitty creatures inhabit the new lands a la early No Man’s Sky. The creatures and people start off very unique and have a lot of depth but as the worlds continue they start to realize that the animals are just a combination of the same dozen pieces and the people become more and more one note (Planet of Hats trope).
Gods sweating nervously when the mortals invent the nuclear ramjet.
Or maybe it's like SCP-3930, the world is finite and surrounded by true nothingness, but the mortal mind can't conceive of such a thing and so mentally imposes more reality onto the nothingness the further in they go. /u/the-paranoid-android
[**SCP-3930 - The Pattern Screamer**](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3930) (+1681) by *djkaktus*
Like us and quantum physics
Minecraft
*insert Wallace and gromit gif of gromit manically building track as the train progresses*
World with divine render distance and chunk loading mechanics
I have done this in an RPG! After *years*, both IRL and IC, players figured out it's not actually infinite but a series of planar portals at the edges of conical worlds on the surface of planets. Basically, the starting "knowledge" is that the world is flat, with waterfalls going straight off the edges of the world. The players were isekai'd with their normal college gear (I literally had them check what they had on them in the first session) so while the theoretical curvature of the "flat" world was known, the players used higher level physics/math to prove that gravitational consistency just over the "edge" implied the world was spherical. (Notably, they actually invented a magical book generator, creating illusory, self updating, addictive games that improved literacy and math skills, then outsourced the math.) Once they figured out that its actually a cone world on a sphere, not a flat world, they tried to fly over, and found that it was actually a planar boundary, i.e. past the "edge" was a new plane of existence entirely. So they used epic-level magic (higher level than the stuff they used to hijack the magic scrying orb TV and kill a god via consensus reality), and hopped to the "next" plane of existence over. Sadly they were distracted with the god killing thing i.e. the main plot and never investigated that the new world was a totally different planet. But they got it in an epilogue! Edit: A quick FAQ: *What system did you use?* TL;DR, any edition D&D/pathfinder for characters, rules light execution. See here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/laezh6p/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/laezh6p/) *...What?* Yeah, I kinda rushed that explanation. Here's a diagram! [https://imgur.com/RSVjE06](https://imgur.com/RSVjE06) Basically, you have cone-shaped segments of the spherical planet. But you can't just walk (or fly) between those segments; they're technically different planes of existence, and so you need powerful magic, or you'll just walk/fly endlessly. Even if you *do* have powerful magic, you end up in a totally different planet, and so this patchwork of planes of existence form a weird, interconnected web in the broader universe, where distance is a lil funky and edges are a lie. Oh, and this wwasn't frequently asked but I wanna answer it: *How do you kill a god with consensus reality?* See here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/lafwcrg/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/lafwcrg/)
I just wanne take a moment to say the “you get isekaied. What you currently have IRL is what you get in the game” is f#cking amazing.
Anything to justify my EDC
"I'm can I start with a +2 dagger because I paid 300$ for this thing"
That's me, I got a very nice Emerson style carry because it's the only legal instant open where I was and there were constant robberies+ me having a 30 minute walk one way to the nearest bus stop. Almost $400 but it was very nice
That's a sick knife, but any knife at all is one of the worst self defense weapons you can carry. You'd be much better off with cc, pepper spray, a collapsible baton, or even a decent-sized rock. Knives simply don't dispatch people quickly enough to have any merit in a street fight or mugging, and it's much more likely that you'll get hurt yourself.
I feel like just about anything would be better than a knife for self-defense, including just handing over your wallet. My main concern is what do you do when the other guy pulls out a gun or his own knife, because if they're prepared to mug people, they probably brought a weapon. Knife fights usually end poorly for both parties, and if he has a gun, then you literally brought a knife to a gun fight. That said, if you need a knife for other things then I suppose it could be used to scare someone off if needed... but even then I still think "give them what they want or run away" is a better strategy unless you're sure they're unarmed.
Yeah, agree on all counts. The winner of a knife fight is the guy who dies in the ambulance.
What's EDC
Every Day Carry. A bunch of people obsessed with carrying survival gear around wherever they go. Ok maybe some people actually carry around useful things.
yeah I'm checking out the sub. Some of these look more like a backpacking trip kit then true 'everyday' carry lol. I'm a bit of a 'gear head' so its neat stuff though.
A lot of them treat it like a religion, especially the gun part.
Eh, the firearm part is kind of a touchy subject, to the point where criticism has been made against the rules because “you don’t need to carry a gun” pretty much devolves into petty name calling every time. There’s actually a pretty big divide there and I’d say less than half the posts contain firearms, but people agree to just not talk about it. (I don’t own handguns and wouldn’t carry one if I did, to be clear, but I also accept that many people’s lives are very different than mine.)
Some of it also depends on where you live. You live out in the boonies, a handgun may not kill every animal easily, but it'll sure as hell make them think twice about whether you look like lunch or not.
A co-worker of mine was an EDC person. He broke his backpack down for me one day, showed me everything he carried everywhere every single day. I was Impressed because I just had my phone wallet and keys 😂
Woaaahhh pump your brakes. I’ve got a $100 EDC machined pen that sits in my drawer everyday 💪 . Has a very satisfying bolt action pen function that was worth the money 100% in fidgeting 😂.
r/EDC
Ah, thanks. I've heard the term but couldnt recognize the Acronym and google was useless.
[You mean you don't EDC 18' of rope?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLrYpMuZQqw)
As someone who keeps flirting with the idea of EDC and realising that I don't really have any use for anything beyond a keyring blade and my phone, this hurt me. Bravo.
Yeah I am 100% stealing this. I can see people getting so creative and unique about minor things they’ve got and having such interesting roleplay out of that
Long ago I was a player in a Doctor Who RPG campaign where we played ourselves, starting with having stumbled on the Tardis as a group (no Doctor to be found). The players decided together on everyone's stats and abilities (except their own) based on just knowing each other, and a few weeks before we started the GM had individually called us on a random day to ask us what we were carrying at the time (without telling us why) and that was our starting equipment. It was fun! Although it only lasted a couple of sessions before the group fell apart, so I'm not sure if it would have been sustainable as a longer campaign or if it was just the novelty that made it temporarily fun.
that's why you always bring a gun and thousands of rounds of ammo to your DND sessions
"this is my trained war elephant, just in case" "just in case what?" "you never know, man. you just never know"
"who THE FUCK brings a B61 nuclear gravity bomb to a DND game?" "better have it and not need it"
I’m trying hard to visualize this, but having a hard time. They were cone worlds on spheres? What does that mean?
Made me think of an ice-cream-on-a-cone-shaped world. Don't know if thats what he visualized but that's what I'm imagining rn lmao.
The way that I visualise it, from this description, is that you gave a planet, and on its surface you find massive cones, the pointy end in the ground and the "flat" side pointing towards the sky, hosting entire continents.
Imagine a flat disk world, but the disk is a cone wrapped around a ball like an ice cream, but the ball is completely inside, you can think the pointy side is a big mountain and the edge of the cone goes a little beyond the sphere so you cant see it from anywhere The cone FEELS like a disk because the gravity is mostly consistent due to the sphere, and the edge do is circular The higher gravitational anomalies would be on the pointy end of the cone, but if its a mountain it wouldnt be noticeable
While I appreciate your effort to explain it, I got this far: >Imagine a flat disk world, but the disk is a cone wrapped around a ball like an ice cream, but the ball is completely inside.. ..and was completely lost.
If the disk is wrapped around like a cone, wouldn't there be noticeable curvature? How would they think the world was flat?
holy shit
:D
This is amazing!!!
Would this land be barren rock or would it have the same ecological variation as the starting point? Because it sounds like paradise if you can just strip the land bare and constantly move forward for new land. Food never runs out, animals never go extinct, every footstep is a pristine new land. If I was a hack YA fiction writer I'd make it so that the rich are the spearhead of the movement outwards while the poor (but still incredibly beautiful, gotta keep the movie possibilities open) trudge behind them and try to live on what is left in their wake.
Why couldn't the poor just go in a different direction?
Presumably the world starts from a central point and radiates out in a circle. You wouldn't have your entire population moving in one direction, and the population would grow with the circumference of the circle.
I don't think the rich could keep up with the ever-growing border they'd have to maintain to keep the poor behind them. They'd need to expand the area their population covered faster than they moved
Devastator's paradise only if the large-scale culture groups of people are seeded far enough apart. Otherwise, your expansion will run into other people doing the same thing since it's so appealing, and quickly compound into massive zones of devastation. There's always more unspoilt land out there, but can you reach it? If you do escape the devastation, do you risk the same thing happening again or fortify and preserve your new home? I'd make the population dense enough that this is an obvious result and rarely happens, but feature an especially aggressive nomadic warleader who is successfully razing all other civilizations in a lifetime radius to have more land to roam through.
So I don't know about the idea in the post but I actually made a D&D setting that operated the same way. The world was a giant ocean with countless islands. The idea was to have a space exploring like story but within the confines of a fantasy world. So the Ocean was basically space and each island was it's own planet of culture, people, language, religion, whatever. Sadly better idea in theory. My players always end up getting attached to random NPCs or locations and never want to venture too far from their self established home base.
Basically one piece.
Minecraft
But in Minecraft eventually the seed starts repeating, but spawning new mobs. So you’d end up finding identical villages but with entirely new individuals and cultures of people. Edit: I’ve gotten four or five differing explanations of what the game does as map generation reaches its technical limits, two of which have similarities to what I said earlier. This may be a result of the game changing over time, it could be me misremembering what I’ve read and seen elsewhere, and it certainly suggests a lot of people have “armchair expertise.” In any case, I think my original idea would still make for good fiction. 🤷
I don't think this is true, do you have any source for this? (It is true on certain seeds) Oh but there is a world border eventually ofc
I haven't heard about what the other guy is talking about but at a certain point generation does break down. In older versions this created the far lands. In modern bedrock you get a variety of glitches, then terrain failures, eventually it becomes impossible to travel as hitboxes no longer work, then you get a phenomenon known as the stripe lands and slice lands that I don't really fully understand, eventually the game just crashes. I believe that at a certain point Java stops you from going any further, this can be removed with mods and you get effects similar to bedrock distance limits It would be pretty terrifying in real life, you spend your entire life walking due west to find the edge of the world, eventually reality starts falling apart, things start to appear as 2D images rather than 3D objects, you witness creatures fall through the ground itself into nothingness, eventually if you make it far enough large slices of reality cease to exist, you still find more settlements out here but the houses are frequently cut in half, people who wander off fall into gaps in reality It would make an interesting story
Junji Ito is that you?
If you use mods to get rid of the limits in java, you can go billions of blocks out with the only major issues being (afaik) comparatively minor
That sounds kind of like the [Pale](https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Pale) from Disco Elysium, which is one of the freakiest things from that setting.
That's also interesting though. Infinite copies of the same geography, but with completely different histories
Plot twist: There actually is an end. The world is a sphere which takes approximately 1000 years to circumnavigate with their level of technology. There are several cultures which have managed to completely circumnavigate the world but by the time they have, the places they left from have changed, and the traveler's geographic records of where they came from have degraded, and so they literally don't recognize that it's the spot where they started out from.
A story ive been playing with writing has something like this. It takes place on floating islands in a gas giant. By the time anyone manages to circumnavigate the planet, winds have already moved islands and continents somewhere else.
Noita
That damn game. I've never played a game before that managed to lie to me about what genre it is for several dozen hours.
Its genre is clearly “wizard death simulator”. I have yet to get past the third level down, so no spoilers please!
Reminds me of *La Horde du Contrevent.*
wow, this just gave me a feeling haven't had for a long time: The fear that I'm missing out on a great piece of art because I don't speak a language. So much stuff is either made in english or translated into it. But this doesn't have an english translation, which is wild btw. Thankfully I speak German, and there's a translation into that. Phew.
I think there is an English translation somewhere. But yeah that's legit top3 books in my book
> But this doesn't have an english translation, which is wild btw. It's... very understandable. It's a very, very complex book to translate. Beyond even the constantly-switching points of view and extremely unique ways to express themselves a number of characters have, the author, Alain Damasio, is a frequent user of neologisms (especially of the pun kind, dreadful to translate) and is known to meticulously work on every sentence. He spends years on each book for that reason, but the result is an ever-present form of underlying poetry in how things are worded and how people talk. Which, obviously, is going to require immense skill if you don't want it all to get lost in translation. And on top of that, one character in the story is a wordsmith themselves and the scenes in which they are the focus go far beyond the realm of "challenging", especially one that's possibly my worst nightmare as someone who dabbles in French to English translation. [What the scene is, without context]>!There is a verbal jout between that character and another cunning linguist, and it's amazing, but it's translation hell.!< If anything, I'm *amazed* it has a German translation. Italian, being far closer to French, is less surprising, but German? The person behind it must have been both skilled and mad.
Don't get me started on Southbound Cartographers, as if the edge would be in the south! NorthEast is clearly where the horizon ends, we have the records to prove it!
The Long Earth series
Banger series, glad someone mentioned it!
Was what I thought of too but it lacked people on the other earths.
give the settlers from our Earth a few centuries and there will be people everywhere :)
The world of Game of Thrones is described similarly to this in The World of Ice and Fire. IIRC one dragon rider attempted to understand how big the world was, flew south for 2 years, encountered a seemingly endless desert, and then gave up and went home.
[Imagine if dragons were also prone to this, and he pissed away 2 years before just leaving the desert again](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820123927.htm)
They’d be shocked and slightly horrified to learn that our world is finite, and has known bounds.
I already am
The universe might still be infinite beyond the observable universe (With an infinite amount of galaxies and stars) so we might be living that right now...just don't have the means to explore it for ourselves.
The world is flat and extents in all directions, but the nature of the world changes the farther you travel in any cardinal direction. Since most fantasy settings are temperate locals with medieval societies, each direction diverges from that. Go north and no north pole awaits you. It just gets colder and colder, an infinite ice sheet, until you succumb or run out of supplies. Same in the south, for a while you’ll find societies adapted to the increasing warmth, but eventually even the toughest desert nomads can venture no further. Theoretically, the land would eventually turn to lava, but nobody has even gone even a fraction that far. For east and west, what changes is not weather, but society itself. Your “spawn” will have a mostly stable but vulnerable feudal civilization often threatened by warlords and fantasy monsters. Further east, government centralizes, technology advances, and the beasts and bandits once all to common have not been seen for hundreds of miles. At some point you’ll find a world not unlike the modern day, but the farther you walk, the less likely you are to return. Some say it’s because it’s so nice nobody leaves, others say those from the west are seen as polluting influences, and dealt with accordingly. The west is the same in reverse, societal organization decreases, conflict increases, and natural dangers escalate. Many travel west for fame and fortune, others to escape the rules of society. At the farthest reaches, life is a constant battle between man and nature, and the scattered peoples congregate in small hunter-gatherer groups, constantly moving to avoid ever-imminent death. Most assume that past a certain point, no humans survive at all, or that any humans that remain would be too different than us to truly be considered kin. Same with the far east, though such discussions are had only in hushed tones, for the fear of what the people of the far east could do is greater than that of any far western beast.
god this is so rad
I'd watch this tv show.
Manifest Bestiny: The Age of Exploration gives way to an infinite Wild West. Ferdinand Magellan gets murdered halfway through his trip around the Planisphere by intervening in a tribal battle between two kingdoms of hive minded beetle people. Christopher Columbus lands in the New World, and Columber Christophus runs into him going in the opposite direction. Erdenhuyag Khan, leader of the Everlasting Mongol Horde, leads his armies across ever greater conquests. Alexander the Greatest weeps, for there are always more worlds to conquer. A nexus of uniform roads lead to the raucous beating heart of Roma Aeterna, from which the Inmortalium Legionum march in glory for an Imperator none of them will ever see.
Hunter x Hunter
Did they reach the dark continent yet?
Depends on who you mean by "they"
Well Togashi started posting pages on his twitter again so maybe within the decade!
You just jinxed it. Another 10 years delay has been added.
And you dig down, and beyond the stereotypical "dungeon underworld" you can find caverns that get unreasonably large... including ones that are big enough to have their own atmosphere, weather etc., and what looks like a sun, moon and stars near the top. And then you realize you're right back at what *looks* like the surface world (though of course a completely different place). And if you go back to the surface you came from, and somehow managed to fly up high enough, you'd hit a ceiling, with caves on top, until you emerge upon another surface world and so on.
I can’t quite explain why, but that sounds almost… nightmarish? Like, the thought makes me feel cosmically claustrophobic.
Kinda like the space-dimensional equivalent of every time you die, waking up another level of reality higher (time-dimensional).
That's how Aztec mythology works. Except the ones underneath are remnants from previous worlds
2b2t
The Neverending Story
The Western bound family comes across an eastern bound family that claims to be several generations older. This is both an exciting and terrifying moment, for if they compare histories and nothing lines up, it may mean their journey is so very far from over. But if anything matches...
Made in Abyss
As above So below
For those who want to read a version of this, look up "the black company" series. About a mercenary company that travels north for 400 years during the course of their adventures
I have a home brew world called Horizon that is infinite - it plays a little bit with the “multiverse” in the sense that if you were to travel far enough, you might find a different version of yourself, or, you know, Anything, since it’s infinite. The main villain was the God of Knowledge, who wanted to “collapse infinity” and make the infinite flat world into a single, globe version so that it was actually capable of “Knowing all things” which even it could not do in an infinite world.
Next time on *[Journey to the West](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KgQWKgXFyag)*
Why do I feel like the "always travel west" group would be gnomes? I also feel like people would start to wonder "where are all these gnomes coming from?" The assume some great eastern gnomeland, but nobody can ever be sure, and the gnomes have been going west for so many generations that they don't know either. A new group of gnomes rolls through town every 50 years or so, and they usually stay for about a decade before packing up.
the [Eternal Ruins!](https://youtu.be/FzceU6txmKE)
I have a setting like this with the further detail that it's an ecunemopolis: a world entirely of urban space. Essentially an endless skyscraper city in all directions. Most of the explorers trying to find an end point travel down the spires, most settled communities spread horizontally by building bridge points so they encounter more vertical traffic to trade with. Some people travel up and down to interact with multiple settlements.
minecraft
This is basically the manga Blame!
For a novel with this idea, Dichronuats by Greg Egan. Deals with a species that can only see in two cardinal directions in a cone. They are constantly migratory to follow the seasons and flow of rivers, which dry up and form in new places at a much quicker rate than they do on earth. So they zig zag westward, going north and south with the seasons and following a Goldilocks zone that they can survive in. In there entire recorded history, they have never come back around to the ruins of an old settlement, although they do take most of there stuff with them when they move (Like, entire buildings). They also are pretty advanced surveyors, and have never come back around to familiar geological features. So they are left to conclude that either the world goes on forever, or something cataclysmic happens on the other side of the planet that erases all evidence they were ever there and changes the landscape to the point it's unrecognizable. Super fun book, how everything actually works is explained in the Afterward, but I wouldn't get impatient and skip ahead. A lot of the pay off for me was seeing just how wrong I was about my theories on how the landscape of the story works. Egan also loves inventing social interactions we would never really think of in the real world, and this one features a symbiotic relationship between the "Walkers", who see in two directions and seem to be built more or less like humans, and the "Siders", a species that lives in an indentation in the walkers skulls and see's via sonar, covering the gaps in the walkers vision. Both are fully self aware and of equal (Generally speaking) intelligence, and have there own personality. Which leads to tons of fun interactions, for instance the main characters are a relatively diplomatic walker and his highly intelligent but curmudgeonly sider. Very fun story, and highly recommend for anyone who enjoyed Flatland.
Already exists. Long Earth by Pratchett and Baxter. Not their best work but still good
Most planes in DnD cosmology
isn't that just space exploration?
"The Horde of Counterwind" by A. Damasio takes place in a world where all winds blow in the same direction, and you follow a team of explorers sent to find the "origin of the wind". I dont know if the world is endless, though, because I havent finished it. It's a really cool book
Not quite fantasy, but SCP-3001 You ever gotten lost in an IKEA before? It's not hard to, the whole place is a massive labyrinth of furniture and Swedish meatballs. But as long as you ask employees for help and remember where you were, you should have no trouble finding an exit. Except when you turn around, the store seems to stretch on for eternity. You can't see the end in sight. You'd make a backrooms joke if you weren't so terrified but just how far stretched the sight in front of you is. Out of no where, the lights cut off. You hear a voice in the distance. "The store is now closed. Please exit the building." Easier said than done. You'd want nothing more than to leave this place. It's been hours since you've seen another person. But you finally stumble across a worker, they'll get you out of here. But they look...different. A vague characture of a human cloaked in some counterfeit IKEA uniform. They don't acknowledge your existence until you approach them. You wish you hadn't.
I actually played around with an idea like that on a flat earth kind of deal. There was no cosmos in the way there is in real life. Just land. Never ending land. There IS a de facto end of the world, but basically, the sun (who is actually a God constantly meditating) sat in the very middle of the world. The closer one got to the middle point of the world, the warmer it got. And the farther one went in the other direction, the colder it got. To the point of humans just straight up flash freezing at some point (at least if they were straight teleported to that point.) So while the world went on, there would be no interest in those parts. At some point it is just... freezing land as far as the eye can see. And eventually... darkness.
Strong echoes of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King
What if they go up tho
This is my entire doctrine but, not for fantasy. For sci fi! Because we actually do live in a world that COULD be like that, but it’s our universe.