The Elysian Plane
They are rage, brutal, without mercy. But you. You will be worse.
The Elysian Plane
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» The Elysian Plane
Summary:
Le Earth... Not round?
I think the opening textbox from Dr. Graham gets a bit flowery, I see what you were going for with it, but I think you should tone it down a bit.
Background
He found even more anomalies on the island of Ven.
This sentence feels a little repetitive with the paragraph also having the phrase "island of Ven." I would suggest "He found even more anomalies as his studies continued.
Brahe, contemplating his observations, speculated that he may have accidentally built his observatory on some sort of portal to a supernatural realm.
I feel like this is a bit of a leap in logic. Obviously, we the reader know that's where this is going but I'm skeptical that he would come to this conclusion as easily as you make it look. You should maybe go into a little more detail about what he did and how he tried to explain it.
The paragraph after this also makes it seem like he was just pulling stuff out of nowhere rather than basing his theories on what he observed.
The Elysian Plane
However, as one extends beyond the intersection point, there is a progressive distortion in the fabric of physics.
"Extends" feels like the wrong word here. "Travels", maybe?
The synchronization of time with that of baseline Earth only transpires when the intersection aligns, a phenomenon facilitated through a process denoted as Convergent Synchrony.
I'm not sure what this means, it feels like you could expand on this and make it a bit clearer. Also, I think "called" sounds better than "denoted as", the latter feels like a bit much.
Overall I think this section could probably be improved by expanding on some of what you're talking about, you just kind of rush through stuff about time dilation and hallucinations becoming real, but they don't leave much impact because they're not really detailed further
Otherworld Drift
However, as of 1952, it was discovered that the number and size of the various intersection points on Earth began slowly shrinking since their discovery and documentation in the late 19th century. This phenomenon is later named the Otherworld Drift. This drift is only mitigated by Convergent Synchrony.
You bounce around between present and future tense here.
It's not "as of 1952" it's "in 1952".
It should probably be "it was discovered that the intersection points on Earth have decreased in size and number since their discovery…" Also, didn't Tycho Brahe discover them in 1580?
The next paragraph, you seem to contradict what you said "Convergent Synchronity" was earlier, first it had something to do with time, now it's got something to do with the Otherworld drifting from Earth
This dynamic process is activated by the traversal of sapient entities transiting between Earth and the Elysian Plane.
How? And is "activated" the right world rather than say, "accelerated"?
Perhaps there will be a day when the Elysian Plane and Earth will fully drift apart, never to be seen again.
I think you mean "never to meet again."
Sea of Chaos
This whole section just feel disconnected with the rest of the article, it's just there. How does this border even work? Where do people encounter it? How does "the inherent self-adjustment of their cognitive faculties toward the coherent structure of Earth" prevent people from seeing it?
You say it's at the edge, but then you say it's at the threshold, isn't a threshold an entrance?
Final Thoughts
I like the idea behind this article, but overall it just feels rushed and half-baked. There's nothing really interesting about the Plane on its own, since we don't even get a good idea of what it's actually like. It just feels empty. I think this really needs some expansion.
Situation normal, Cap'n! Spiraling out of control!
Very interesting stuff. A few thoughts:
He saw that planets exhibited an unusual, static motion; as Venus, Mercury, and the moon weren’t undergoing phases, which implies that at that very moment, the planets were revolving around Earth under a Geocentric model.
Try this:
He saw that the planets exhibited unusual, static motion in addition to the absence of phases among Venus, Mercury, or the moon. These observations implied that the planets were at that moment revolving around the Earth; a geocentric model of space.
Although, how would he know the planets and the moon weren't 'undergoing phases' over the course of one night? It's not explicit but when I started reading this seemed like a discovery that happened at once instead of over the course of at least a few days of study. Specify that this is something he observed over like, a week or something.
Brahe believed that this "other" world was a hidden gateway to one of 9 realms as mentioned in the Poetic Edda. (footnote)
In that footnote, I would also specify what the Poetic Edda is- you describe Yggdrasil, even though the name isn't given in the actual article.
Incidences of inadvertent access to the Elysian Plane are not uncommon among practitioners of thaumaturgy, children, and individuals teetering on the brink of mental instability, with a subsequent return occurring upon the restoration of cognitive function.
That was a really hard sentence to pull off, but this looks good!
Organisms speculated to have originated from the Elysian plane include RPC-014, RPC-064, RPC-430, RPC-865, among others.
I'm a little unsure about that many crosslinks at once, and it seems a little random. If this is going to be canon, I would keep it to just anomalies you have written or gotten approval for. Even if they all are, you should name just one or two RPCs instead of four.
The Great Smog of London (1952).
The image is okay but the big black box looks a little silly. I imagine it'd look better without it. Also, the redaction in the associated paragraphs are a little excessive- we don't really see how pure information would turn people into what I assume are monsters. It's a bit boring and disappointing. I'd rather you cut it down to a sentence or two implying there's monsters than giving a spot for us to fill in like Mad Libs, lol.
Overall, I really enjoyed this. I hope this crit is enough to get this thang posted.
the barrier separating Earth from certain Elysian Planes weakens
Odd that the possibility of the Elysian being plural is just dropped like that with zero explanation. I was under the impression that the Elysian Plane was singular until here.
Suggest either making sure every mention is either plural or singular, or using the term "Elysian Plane" for the whole concept and introducing a secondary, distinct term for individual planes.
Earth's climate exerts no discernible influence on the Elysian Plane beyond their point of intersection. Likewise, the existence of the Elysian Plane doesn't manifest any meaningful impact on Earth's baseline meteorological conditions. Unfortunately, this property appears susceptible to change.
The phrasing here is really awkward because you're introducing this property as an absolute first, then adding "it's susceptible to change". I think it might be best clarified like so;
"The influence of Earth's climate on the Elysian Plane is generally limited to the point of intersection, and vice versa. Unfortunately, this property is susceptible to an entropic process."
In 1952, it was ascertained that the quantity and dimensions of the various intersection points on Earth have been gradually diminishing since their documentation in the late 19th century. This phenomenon has resulted in a convergence of Earth's and Otherworld realms' climates […]
I think these two sentences need some logical connecting tissue. How does one thing lead to the other?
Mr. Penglai
MISTER PENGLAI?
The wood engraving image at the bottom is broken.
Interesting stuff, I like how there's essentially zero jargon and everything's fairly open for expansion. I feel like everything that I could bring up are just ideas for more, but this doc is more of an intro to the concept anyway. The only thing I feel is missing is a bit more info on what the Authority's relationship with the Elysian Plane(s) is, maybe a bit here and there as to whether new Elysian Planes are still being discovered/created or their number only decreases.
Legacy crit gave over a month ago that I forgot to post to the forums. Most of it was given in DMs, so here's some snippets:
3/5 It’s inoffensive and will probably do well rating-wise. But it feels like a ghost page. It’s forgettable, and I’m sorry to say that. It started out strong and characterized the elysian planes' processes but never delivered on what it wanted to do past the exposition. It’s like every other document.
If you were looking for criticism on what is there, I do not really have much other than it’s bland and should probably have more exerpts. It’s written well and has a clear line of focus.
Quote referring to the opening boat story:
I'm still confused about the relevance of this passage about this guy and his boats. You could cut it out. He doesn't even really discover Planes themselves, IMO.
I get what you're trying to do: You wanna blend fact and fiction to make something weird and believable. The problem is that the facts in your fiction are boring, say jack shit about your anomaly, and is tenuously connected to your story at best.
It's okay to exaggerate details. This is probably what Brahe did in real life, but I want more. I want him to find Hyperborea and have his brain broken by the horizon line looping in on itself. I want something more than a boring, standard story about a guy doing boat science. You're writing fiction; write it.
At the very least, I can say that his hypothesis of the Elysium Plane is sketchy and ill-define and described in the passage, AT BEST.
The Elysian Plane Side:
This entire section is flawless. It sets up its premise and explains it eloquently. Sadly this is the peak before the article goes down.
While celestial bodies like the sun, moon, or Mars may have Elysian Planes of their own, the likelihood of their size rivaling Earth's is little to none.
"Their" instead of "its," implying life on Mars.
Idk if this is intentional, but if it was, I think it would be fun if you continued to imply there was in some schizoid manner. This isn't a criticism, as much as something that intrigued me.
My statement on the Chinese Section of the article:
Despite these locations and their differences and historical importance, not a single one stands out. Not one. As settings, they're not even particle new, interesting, or rich. They just are.
If you want to explain your ideas, why not tell me about incursions into these other realms? Why not connect the Infrastructure Beuarea of RPC to the FOA, which isn't that popular or important (that Containment Dept. isn't either, but at least it's part of the Authority)?
I'm retyping my comments, and I forgot about this section entirely. It's neither useful nor insightful.
New Comment: I know you didn't ask for this, but I wanna direct a broader criticism of the MI13 rework. Many of these pages feel so sparse and specific that it hurts the storytelling and makes pages feel half-baked.
The world-building feels half-baked, one foot in the door and one foot out. It explains to me events that have passed and thus has the staying power of someone long-windedly pitching me their fantasy world in an elevator. It never reaches that next step. And I'm afraid to direct your criticism because the flow of information always makes any deeper criticism of what's on this specific page feel useless cause there might be another page that does what I want this page to do.
What results is that there feels like several mini-documents that you have to read in tandem to get the full picture while never feeling stratified or engaged with any of the others.
The discovery of Mr. Penglai is attributed to the explorer Admiral Zheng He, who discovered a supposedly incoherent landscape he believed to be the legendary Mt. Penglai. Since then, the evidence of the realm's existence has been kept secret by the various Chinese states and dynasties. By the 1960s, the PCAAO had effectively restricted all access to the major Chinese Otherworlds, including Penglai.
This is a prime example of this article's microcosm. The spag is flawless. The flow of information and your prose are flawless. The content is engaging. But you mention a GoI, give me a rundown of information, and it's not impactful. It's not something worth remembering.
There are no excerpts, no history of struggle. There are no opinions or studies in this area. Just "We're making medicine… uh, ancient Mongolian secret." And while revising this criticism, I've forgotten it was even here.
Hi, it’s Qual. This is an editor’s note. I want to be clear in my criticism. I need to explain why this section is wasted potential. A problem with info-documents is that the writer often believes in their idea way more than I, the reader, do. This is a problem I’ve outlined to you guys before in what matters with what I’m reading and what I’ve learned writing for RPC, which has been 90% exposition.
The majority of readers do not care about world mechanics themselves. Like exposition, mechanics are a necessary evil to get to the juicy bits of lore, which is fine. Most people want to read about interesting people doing interesting stuff, and that’s fine. That doesn’t immediately evaluate your work because you can make mechanics easy and okay to read. This is what you did: You used examples, a good authorial tone, and generally stayed within the preview of the RPC-verse. The problem with most documents is that they only half commit to telling a story or fleshing out a world.
You’ve pitched your premise, and now you’re embedding it in lore. However, you don’t go far enough. You explain events with the same speed of breath that you explain that boat lover and star guy Brahe’s observations. As a reader, I want details on these events and historical periods. Moreover, yes, maybe you have them squared away on another page, but the thing is that I don’t care. It should stand up independently if you want it on a separate page or section. Initially, you included these wonderful diagrams and excerpts, and now I’m scant on details.
You are writing a living, breathing document, yet it feels sparse for breath. Don’t get me wrong, what’s there is good, but what’s not there leaves more for wanting. Your lack of detail and prioritizing storytelling has made the document feel like a paste-like homogenous blend and for details to phase past each other. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a tasty homogenous blend, but not a filling one. Not what I want.
If I could also do a vibe check on this article, I don’t know how to explain it. It has the tone of a “compromise page.” I don’t know how to explain it, but the article is a jack of all trades, master at none. It doesn’t excel at one thing while trying to be explanatory and lore-important and blend history with fact but it is too close to the boring parts of history in some cases. There are fog and storms. What the fuck does that mean? Do you know what happens when you fail to describe that? I don’t picture anything unless prompted, and mentioning the fog becomes another filler detail. The lore doesn’t flesh out the world; it just gives me facts to quote in RPC general. It’s factoids relevant to the thin bones of a narrative. I don’t care because the passage doesn’t care.
You’ve explained details but have given me, the reader, no reason to care. If you’re writing this for the writers, I still don’t care. The passage has given me no tools or anything really out-of-the-box to consider adding an Elysium Plain to my article. Weather events bleed into our world if specific conditions are met. Any Hollywood writer could make an article about it! Stephen King wrote about it. This isn’t a clever use that makes it special within the lore. It’s just another document article geared to get as much in-house attention as the ACS machine or whatever it's called. Jokezm mentioned something about other writing finding these Plains a popular idea, and I don't want to be presumptive… but I do. You’re cutting corners on a naive assumption. After making three contests and making a dozen ideas like this that were similarly popular, I can say that attention and ideas are fickle and fade fast. What you write down and outline about them leads to people using your ideas.
There is a reason why so many authors are so eager to build off other articles and crosslinks despite it used to be frowned upon: RPCs are a fleshed-out document. They give fleshed-out ideas, realized in their webpages, that urge other people to want to build off of them, no matter how clunky and how hard it will ultimately be to pull off. This page isn’t, and many documents on the site aren’t. I know how useful or how much of this you’ll listen to, but I’m telling you to rise above those pages. When I read Butters Memotics' article or Tarb’s black site article, I quickly forgot about them and never referenced them because they weren’t fleshed out or fully realized. I know you have a page on the Elves and such. Maybe that’s where you want to showcase how Elysian Planes work. However, consider this: I don’t care about that page. I’m reading this one, and if you think the idea is good enough to make a document about it, it should give me a sense of this world on its own. And it doesn’t.
I’ve bitched a lot about what you’re doing wrong but haven’t told you about what to do: You need to expand on these lore tidbits. Again, this is a LIVING DOCUMENT. They should have perspectives, excepts and histories. They need to be VIVID while maintaining a formal framework around them. You need to sell me on the importance and impact of these events to me. You can’t be vague. I need to be immersed to realize your ideas. You vaguely mention that there’s smog but don’t describe the events, how it works or the intrigue in studying it.
/forum/t-16654744/the-elysian-plane#post-