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Many Worlds Forum v2 - Rules of the Multiverse
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mwf2.md

Many Worlds Forum

Rules of the Multiverse

version 2.4.1

0. The Bare Essentials

  1. Continuity Breach: This is an entirely new continuity.
  2. The forum is now hosted on the Constellation instead of Proboards.
  3. For those just joining us: the MWF is a sort of e-LARP, where your posts correspond directly to your characters' posts on an in-world(s) online discussion board.

1. Adjacency and Fire Suppression

  1. The forum cannot transmit magical effects under any circumstances.
  2. No form of magic works outside of its native world/sheaf. Sufficiently advanced technology may turn out to be local as well; not all worlds necessarily have exactly the same physics.
  3. A given world/sheaf is adjacent to at most one other at a time.
  4. Time syncing is only guaranteed between adjacent worlds.
  5. Non-forum contact of any kind (in particular, travel and trade) is only possible between adjacent worlds.
  6. Disconnecting adjacent worlds is possible.
  7. Establishing adjacency works Omegle-style: the characters have no control about which world they'll get connected to.
  8. There are, however, a few basic constraints on the counterpart world:
    1. It's also a world that was trying to establish a random connection.
    2. Contact is not immediately fatal or otherwise catastrophic. For example, explorers will be able to breathe each other's atmosphere, unless they are taking precautions sufficient to survive anyway.
  9. The interface for connecting/disconnecting your world's adjacency is idiosyncratic to each world, roughly analogous to how forum manifestation tailors itself to the local tech/idiom, but more so. Operating the interface is not necessarily convenient, easy, or cheap.
  10. An adjacency link can generally be disconnected unilaterally from either side, subject to idiosyncratic interface requirements.
  11. These rules are not necessarily immediately obvious to the characters.

2. Further Miscellany

  1. When creating a thread, please remember to place it in the right subforum/section.
  2. Mother Starlight (the forum admin character) is an NPC. Feel free to imply, assume, or state that she takes as little or as much time at any given task as is convenient to the plot. Similar remarks apply to e.g. the quality of translation.
  3. Sonata (the player behind Mother Starlight) does not actually have much admin power. Please take responsibility for performing any "admin action" on your own characters' posts.
  4. Please feel free to contribute to this document. The version number at the top follows semantic versioning.

3. Design Notes

  1. The fire suppression rules are intended to discourage pealing, the pattern where each world is either Pealed or Unpealed, and Pealed worlds get all of their problems curbstomped by the collective resources of the multiverse. In particular:
    • Important resources tend to stay local, rather than being spread and accumulated. (The classical pealing problem.)
    • Travelling to where the resources are is nontrivial. (The Silmaril problem.)
    • It's possible to lose access to valuable resources - and in fact there's an incentive to do so intentionally, since staying connected to the same world likely has diminishing marginal utility, and carries the opportunity cost of all the other worlds one could be contacting instead. (The Jane problem.)
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