Also check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT_CtFMQouU
Sol Niger...
The lyrics "that what never was shall always be" are quite fitting.

As for the visuals - yes, Unthar will be a disc of nothingness, surrounded by a swirling nimbus of chaos, undoing and mad possibility. Go to Comment

There is no !space! reality behind this one. There indeed was a divine womb from which sentient "suns" sprang forth, beings that happen to roam the sky, shed light for creation, and at night, they actually go home, dim, cool down and drink tea with dad.

This being a "fantasy" sub, it is about a world where this is reality. There is no orbit, there is but the sky, and in it three suns. They fly because they are divine. They shed light for the same reason. You could measure the power of the sun, but the reading could be "317 milliJesus" or something like that. It's just that in that world they never heard of our savior, they have their own.

So. Unthar is an undead divine entity. Those do not fly in elliptic paths around anything. It is locked in a real sub-dimension that is the Houses of the Dead, where you could sneak in and chat up your dead grandpa. It has a mind.

So. Suspend disbelief, there's lots of stranger subs than this one inthe citadel. Go to Comment

It can be a fold in space.
The N-th dimension above mundane reality.
The lint in the navel of the Vogon Lord of Poetry.
A computer simulation.
The inside of an effed-up bag of holding.
The biggest holo-deck ever built gone haywire.
An existence created by the eternal dream of Bakuki the Slime Prophet (you can enter it by getting stoned on a joint dipped into his mucus).
It could be a reality before our time, before the universe was remade into what it is now.
An alternate reality.
On the other side of a black hole.

Being open-minded does not make the brain fall out.

Also, the fact that a submission does not fit into one setting does not mean it requires a compatible explanation, nor is it a flaw of said submission if it comes without such a compatibility pack. Go to Comment

I did not give Unthar a motivation per se - it's a stillborn undead sun, an aberrant force of nature. But the room for an actual agenda is there - the dead sun may want something, and its escapes may have meaning (with the true horror being revealed once the consequences are understood).

Feel free to add an idea. Go to Comment

Good idea. 5/5 Go to Comment

I look forward to giving this an HOH. Go to Comment

This should win the Quest, I think. Go to Comment

Congratulations for winning the Quest.

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Very nice Echo, I enjoyed reading this piece from top to bottom. I dont want to jinx it but this is my favorite for the light quest. Go to Comment

Very surreal and intriguing... I too thought of Soundgarden when first trying to visualize Unthar. Go to Comment

You have quite a way with words, Echo! I will second val's comment, and oh, the concept itself, the SUN OF THE DEAD, is brilliant! (no pun intended). Will use this in next weekend's table-top somehow.

Top notch! Go to Comment

I have given 5s to things I thought were cute or made me laugh, but this one seems deserving of much more than a 5.  It is a wonderful thing to have in game world, a mark of strangness and horror but not evil. Excellent. 

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This is a very odd comment. Why does the story have to have any mundane counter part? When you deal with Gods and the supernatural there are going to be ineffable concepts.

Also you use the word science incorrectly. Science is a description of the natural world through experimentation and analysis of data. If the natural world described in this post has different laws and different forces then our natural world then the conclusions science would reach would not suggest the existence of planets or stars (as you suggest, and the star may not be light years it way, it may be something a bird could reach). A scientist in this world maybe able to measure Unthar's power or describe the scenarios necessary for his appearence, but what if stars as we know them don't exist in this universe? What if the world was flat, what if the physics of the world was defined by the content of earth, fire, water and air in each substance? Go to Comment

What if the will of divine beings alters reality? Go to Comment

Awesome - this is something to hang a campaign about. It could be the sole source of undead and monsters in an otherwise 'normal' world.

Really well done sir!
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I do wonder what this actually refers to (all stories refer to somethig mundane or are compelte fabrications.) Is there a actual 'darker, sickly, star' that is in a complet arrangement with it's solar system? (Like say two stars rotate around each other, each with a system of there own, the third star is some light years distant (say 2) and has the inhabited planet around it, and a fourth star is distant/dim and sufficently rare to be the only one in the planet's sky that it is indeed considered a 'bad omen'? (This fits with the 'the skies glow darkly, strange constellations are visible' bits.))



I guess I'm wonder the science behind this entry.

 

Or maybe it's fabrication and myth.. then why the plot hooks that involve the sun's apperance?

 

I'm just confused by this entry.. too much myth.. not enough backing it up.

EDITED - I did not know brackets around a string made a link here, edited. Go to Comment

Oh, here's my vote too. *oops*

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Wait, so it's a demiplane of it's own connected to some 'world of the dead'? (With 'suns' moving on a 'sky' (merely a 'outer layer' of a demiplane?)

I just want to know the cosmology. (I have a setting that combines Scifi and Fantasy and it means I need* to know the 'explination' being things. It's made my view of things become more 'reality' affixed.) Go to Comment

Only voted Go to Comment

I like the sun.  Everyone likes the sun.  It'd be a pretty cool centerpiece for any campaign.  Or dinner table.

I'm left wondering, though, at the nature of Unthar.  He/It is a being of godlike power and sentience, but all of his ambitions? seem to resemble the motivations of a gerbil I used to have: escape my cage, run around for a bit, and then get caught and put back in.

I'm not bothered by it.  Gods are supposed to be inscrutible, sometimes.  But the sub leaves more room for development, which I am thankful for.

Maybe Unthar actually has the mind of a gerbil?  Maybe he's friendly, naive, and just wants to hang out with his siblings?  Or maybe he's plotting thier murder (I would like to see the suns fight in the sky, please)?

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