Copyright (c) 2009 Kyrinn S. Eis All Rights Reserved
The Grand Tapestry refers not only to the entire Urutsk Cycle, but to the Metacosmos in which Urutsk is but one of an infinite number of Cosmoi. It is within this Metacosmos that all of the 'alternate' realities and non-'related' settings I have ever worked on/gamed reside.
The result, within game-terms, is that certain High-Order events/spells/artefacts/etc. cause the individuals within the effect to 'shift' into Threads which are more accepting of the transformed natures of perceptible reality than those of the Thread from whence the individual observers hailed just prior to the effect.
--These shifts may be so subtle that the observers will never discern a difference, as the changes take place on a scale far beyond the perceptual pale, whether vast and distant cosmic differences (the number of radio stellar objects, for instance), or sub-atomic (the local number of affine/exitonic particles varies, creating a different density of time-space, altering the trajectory of wandering debris by a picometre to crash into a planet ten millennia later).
By extension, when an alter reality or a wish spell is cast, what is the actual effect? In The Grand Tapestry, and necessarily 'in' Urutsk, the observer(s) are shifted to a thread in which those conditions exist. This is also the case with powerful effects of artefacts, probability travel, and the like. One could argue that resurrection and its related spells do the same.
This means that gamers never need fear that their Urutsk: World of Mystery games drift too far from canon as to make the setting superfluous, and likewise, that the Old School tradition of affine characters blipping back and forth between campaigns never need be a 'bad thing', only one more factor for the vigilant Referee to consider before allowing the exchange to take place in their game.
--This factor has arisen in the Playtest Campaign, as I have posted previously as regards Tybalt and Mela and their 'dopples' in the prior 'unrelated' Pathfinder game.
But, this doesn't minimise a character's life and death, as, in a sense, the Player(s) and Referee are the observers in this equation. Even the asymmetrical distribution of one character's career between campaigns and pick-up games add a depth of richness that is rarely seen in fiction.
--The meaning is in the details; in the playing-out of the events, and the reaction of the character and its fellows' reactions to the character's actions.
Perhaps a bit like our reality?
