I’m really starting to dig the Warcaster lore. While most sci Fi references an ancient or modern political context projected into the future, Warcaster references itself, aka Warmachine and projects it into the future.
In this way, Warcaster has a 70’s pulpy early 80’s feel like the Metamorphosis RPG, RIFTS, or Heroes of Might and Magic 1-3.
With that in mind, why don’t the dead in the void stay dead? If a gate closes, do you automatically become a Wraith Fleet or can you wander around to find another exit?
Why is the Void empty? Is it like a Backrooms situation, like a layer underneath all reality in the Cyriss Galaxy or just between the stars?
Why are there no Infernals in the Void? Does the cosmology just includes multiple realities and if so are they connected like doors to a main room or like layers?
Why are there no other pantheons like in Warmachine? Is this basically because Cyriss won the War of Souls in her galaxy?
And could there be other galaxies that are dominated by one deity who won their own War of Souls and is this the natural end point for life and meta physical reality in the fiction? Or is Cyriss the exception due to her clock work nature?
Many questions that we would all love to know!
With deities, we don’t know if they are exclusive to Caen, or if there are other equivalents out there. We know that the Cosmology of Warmachine is tied to the land with Urcaen being a specific place with specific influence from Caen.
The same for the Infernals. They seem, from what we’ve seen so far, to be tied to Caen as well.
I think we dont know the answer to any of these, and that at least several premises are presumed.
Do we have any fluff at all about what is in the void? And to be specific, not the void of interstellar space (which is one type of void, and some threat does seem to lurk beyond the galaxy - in intergalactic space) but the void through which ships and people are transported, on different scales. .
We know the general fluff section tells us the void is NOT empty, but “a trackless, unpredictable expanse fraught with chaotic storms and hidden dangers and haunted by the trapped souls of those who failedto staytge course.”
We know Sek, using his alien tech to void step, is creepy and he hears whispers. Its also described as “not unlike a void gate” but not the same thing. Hes traveling some other dimension, not the void of void gates.
We don’t know if the Void is empty. No-one has charted every nook and cranny of the whole place.
We don’t know that there are no Infernals in the Void. They’re sneaky.
We don’t know whether there are other pantheons. In fact, among the billions of inhabitants living on a thousand worlds, some sort of religions or sects are almost guaranteed to exist.
Well there is one deity, Cyriss herself. And she seems to dominate the galaxy through the Empereans, but she also guided humans from Caen on building the gate so they could teleport to the Cyriss galaxy.
With all the problems humans cause with ARC consumption, I wonder why she felt humanity was necessary as galactic inhabitants?
To be honest, I am quite sure that Cyriss is never mentioned as a goddess in any Warcaster source. In other words, in Warcaster there is no goddess Cyriss.
Cyriss is a galaxy with a “celestial body” called Cyriss Prime at its center. The Great Constellation, the home word of the Empyrean orbits Cyriss Prime.
Cyriss as a goddess is a thing in the Iron Kingdoms setting of course. Although she herself does not directly interact with her followers if I am not mistaken. She rather communicates with them via encoded and cryptic messages that the Convergence of Cyriss is so eager to decipher. And the magical energy wielded by the Convergence and used by their Vectors is actually “ambient energy” and thinking of it now we know the Warcaster setting probably has been Arc all along.
These are the facts to the best of my knowledge. Now I start speculating:
I believe there are two possibilities regarding Cyriss:
Option 1: There really is no goddess and the Convergence has been receiving message send out by the Empyrean all along, instructing them to build the void gate that was meant to add Caen to the Hyperuranion. Why so late? Well maybe humankind was just slow in the intake and/or Caen was very far away.
Option 2: Cyriss Prime, the “celestial body” is in fact the goddess Cyriss. Pretty much like Caen “is” Dhunia. And the messages received by the Convergance are indeed from Cyriss who is trying to reconfigure the leyline network to effectively kill or drive off Dhunia to replace her with… herself? A child? To inhibit two celestial bodies?
I am not sure which option I like better, but I wanted to add the option that there is not and has never been a goddess Cyriss to the table.
Option 1a: The message wasn’t actually meant for the people on Caen, but for people in the Cyriss galaxy. The signal somehow managed to reach the next galaxy and was intercepted and misunderstood by some Immorese astronomers. Throughout the ages, people have explained mysterious and inexplicable phenomena as acts of gods, so when they start receiving signals from outer space - of course it has to be a god.
That’s kinda what has been going on. 5000 years ago: “Oh, there are some new organics in the galaxy, let’s do something about it.” Then they blink, and suddenly “What happened, now they’re everywhere, and our lawn is a mess!” The Empyrean hivemind perceives time on a vastly different scale as humans, which is why individual Aeons are so important to them.
It enabled more standardized predictions when void gates would close, thus reducing the fleets that would get stranded in the void due to conversion errors between different time systems and thus reducing wraith fleets.
My theory about the void is pretty abstract. Its a dimension in which arc freely takes form. Arc as I see it is both a media and medium to be written on. Of course as well as a power source. In the void a caster, manipulator, and Arc Mechanik isn’t need for Arc to “do stuff”. The void is completely dark to the naked eye, prolong expose to it opens the senses and allows organisms to sense their surroundings since everything is surround by ARC. The only light that could be seen is trails of pathways made by void gates while they are open. In my theory of of how warcasters, weavers, and theurges interact with the void, Weavers are the most sensitive to the void. This allows them to see, envision, and hear things from the void from time to time. This will sound like muffled static to warcasters, and theurges are unable to hear the void, be they can “feel it” from time to time.
Wraith fleets – Fleets made up of vessels and souls lost to the void. Those who lose their way in the void risk becoming stranded and never finding their way out again; they are doomed to become void wraiths, part of the ghostly fleets that aimlessly drift through this extradimensional realm of shadow for all eternity. These ghostly vessels generally exhibit strange behaviors but otherwise show few signs of life. Most often when they are encountered, such ships simply trail the living as the living make their way through the void, the wraiths either pursuing them from a distance or falling into line behind them.
Though the sightings of ghostly wraith ships have continued into the present, the wraith vessels seem to have appeared with less frequency since the near-universal adoption of Arcanessecent Time throughout human space. The wraith fleets have been of particular interest to the Aeternus Continuum, whose agents study the phenomena as a means to gain insight into the nature of death, the fabric of the soul, and the void itself.
I believe they will stay for as long as the ships are able to move through the void. But of course they don’t necessarily have to stay on the direct path between two void gates. They scatter naturally I believe over time over the vast space that is the void. The number of new ones though reduces when fewer get stranded, which may reduce the number of recently stranded fleets that have not yet moved far and are still relatively close to the path between two void gates. This gives the appearance of less fleets overall (?).
one eventually becomes dominant and that shapes the character of that galaxy and the life within it.