Multiverse Studios - The Basics

In this section, you will learn just what we mean by "Multiverse". The Multiverse's In Character environment, that is the place where your characters will live and interact in, is rather complex. Much of it is based on science fact, most of the rest on theory and everything else we just made up. We will begin with the terminology/basic structure of your average Universe.

The graphic above depects a typical, monary (single star) Star System with circular, blue lines to represent the orbital paths of the planets in this system. A Star System generaly consists of one or more stars, rocky planets, gasious planets, moons, asteroids and commets. The diagram above depicts our own real-life Star System: Sol.

Galaxies are huge, even the small ones are positively gigantic. Galaxies are generally broken up into Quadrants, or fourths. Those Quadrants are further broken into Sectors, which can vary in size but are usually one-fourth to one-third of a Quadrant.

Galaxies generally contain billions of Star Systems. Within our real-life Milky Way Galaxy alone there are about 100,000,000,000 (One-Hundred Billion) Star Systems. Galaxies come in all shapes and sizes like spirals, barred-spirals, and irregular to name a few. Large galaxies tend to contain super-massive black holes at their centers which are actually very slowly eating the stars within their galaxies. Smaller ones tend to clump together via the gravitational forces of the star systems within them, kind of like how individual Cheerios clump together in a bowl of milk.

Galaxies also often collide (our own Milky Way is due to collide with the Andromeda Galaxy sometime over the next 5-10 billion years or so) But the distances between the stars within galaxies are so vast that individual stars rarely crash into one another. The two colliding galaxies pass through each other almost like ghosts, tearing themselves apart before coming together to form an even larger galaxy.

Galaxies, like Star Systems, tend to clump together and form even larger structures called Local Groups or Galactic Clusters. It is within these groups that most galactic collisions occur. Even so, the distances between galaxies are usually enormous. Take the distance between the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies; the Andromeda Galaxy is about 2 million light years away. In cosmic distances, that's not down the block, that's just across the hall.

Superclusters contain thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of galaxies. From a distance, these structures resemble stringy nebulae or dewdrops clinging to a spiders web. Now, to be fair, our RPG doesn't deal with thousands upon thousands of galaxies; things are complicated enough as they are. However, it's important to understand the nature of the environment of which our characters exist in.

Welcome to the edge of the Universe. This is what our percievable Universe might look like if it could be viewed from a great distance. It's about 12-15 billion light-years across, mostly because it's 12-15 billion years old. The Universe very well could be infinite, but if it is we have no way of finding out presently. But, for the purposes of the Multiverse FFRPG, this visualization I'm sure will help you understand just what we mean by "Universe". So, what could be bigger then a Universe...?

What exactly is the Multiverse? Essentially, it's an infinity of Universes, each one existing on a different Quantum Membrane then our own. As illustrated in the diagram above, you could look at the Multiverse like the color spectrum of visible light. As you can see, we've assigned each Universe a different color in the spectrum. Think of the Multiverse as if it were an infinite color spectrum. Now, lets say that Universe G was our own Universe. Universe F and H would likely have fewer (if any) differences from our own. Compared to G, H could have only one, solitary atom in a different place. But the further you move away from G, the differences increase. So, if comparing Universe A with Universe O, the differences might be so great that it would be almost totally unrecognizable, perhaps even with different laws of physics.

There is technically no space between Universes, but since each one exists on a different Quantum Membrane, we can't perceive them at all. However, that doesn't mean they don't exist, in fact, according to M-Theory or String Theory, a Multiverse is necessary for our own Universe to exist at all. It's all rather complicated and would take at least a few pages to explain all the reasons, but it comes down to the electrons of atoms. Electrons are quantum sub-atomic particles that orbit the nucleus of atoms. Now, in order for atoms to be stable, the electron theoretically has to be in all places at once around the atom. According to M-Theory, this is where the Multiverse comes into play. On the quantum level, the barrier between Universes breaks down, thus allowing a single electron to be in all places around an atom at once. This is all rather difficult to prove one way or another, but this is kind of how it works in the Multiverse FFRPG. Also, a myriad of alternate universes is constantly being created. For every action, every possible re-action happens in alternate universes. As I said, it would take pages and pages to explain this stuff. Hopefully this will be enough background.

Now, here's a rather cool idea: If the Multiverse is infinite, it is not only possible but downright probable that our Multiverse FFRPG, all our characters and empires and species and civilizations, really exist somewhere out there. In fact, anything that you can think of (and anything you can't think of) exists out there in the Multiverse.

We hope this is of some help. If you have any questions or suggestions for this section of the Newbie's Guide, please feel free to post a comment on our forums.

This small map displays the known galaxies within the Universes of the accessable Multiverse. Even at this rather small scale, a map of the entire known Multiverse would be at least four-times as large. As you can see, the known/accessable Multiverse consists of Four Universes with a combined total of 15 large galaxies. Below is a listing of these galaxies whose numbers correspond to the numbers displayed on the galaxies above.

The Ormaran Universe
1 - The Outworld Galaxy
2 - The Karfixi Galaxy
3 - The Peacekeeper Galaxy
4 - The Snikerz Galaxy
5 - The Shadow Imperium Galaxy

The Dairaian Universe
6 - The Myrillian Galaxy
7 - The Irksacarian Galaxy
8 - The Hada Galaxy
9 - The Alpaca Galaxy
10 - The Amaris Galaxy
11 - The Yargul Galaxy
12 - The Irksacarian Mirror Galaxy

The Weirdonian Universe
13 - The Skotak Galaxy
14 - The Arak'Vhan Galaxy

The Shadow/Babylon 5 Universe
15 - The Milky Way Galaxy
These maps, though not absolutely neccessary, help us to understand our role-playing environment a better, especialy when you want to know things like: "How big is the Dairaian Empire?" or "How far away is space station Za'Ha'Damaged from the capital of the Shadow Imperium?" This map also shows the major interuniversal wormholes between the Univeres. As you can see, they don't call the Outworld Galaxy the "Hub of the Multiverse" for nothing!

This map is somewhat incomplete, but it should help you get a better understanding of the size of our RPG's RP environment. It is rather huge, but it is a lot smaller then it used to be! There are two reasons the Multiverse is so large: one, we try and make this somewhat real and in real life, our own Universe is stupendusly gigantic; and two, when you get a group of world builders together, especialy ones not affraid to think big, after a while things tend to build up real fast. As I said before, not all of the Known Multiverse is still accessable as there are several Universes that are now inaccessable for various reasons. The In Character explaination is that the wormholes to these Universes were either accedentaly or purposely closed-off. The Out Of Character explaination is that the world building members who created those Univeres are either no longer active with our group or had to scale back their activities due to real life time constraints.