AoS Visualising the Mortal Realms as Planets: Brainstorming Thread

Greetings fellow lizards, I’m back with another brainstorming thread, this time for AoS!

As many of you know I’m getting a lot more interested in AoS now with all the awesome stuff GW has released, and I’ve been thinking about the lore for a while now, specifically the nature of the Mortal Realms, and have since thought about how they could be seen as full physical planets that are interconnected by the magical realm gate portals (I don’t know if GW’s Canon officially describes them as such in Second Edition now, or if they have still kept it mysterious). Based on this, I have thought of how each Realm could be very similar to a planet we know, fictional or actual:
Aqshy: This one’s pretty easy - volcanoes and lava everywhere, Aqshy’s got to be the Mustafar of AoS.


Ghur: From artwork I’ve seen Ghur comes across as being largely a desert world (indeed a place where the tough survive and the weak perish). Although initially I thought Ghur would be similar to Tatooine, I’ve had second thoughts about this, because Tatooine has a lot of sand dunes and unstable sandy ground, which I haven’t seen in artwork of Ghur - the sand in those images is darker and the ground much more rocky. Bearing this in mind, I believe Ghur would be very much like Jedha from Rogue One, with rock formations everywhere creating vast canyons and mountain passes.



Azyr: Azyr is the Realm of Heavens, so it would make sense that the planet of Azyr would be a gas giant, with its cities hovering in the air through Dwarven anti-gravity engineering of some sort (one of the things Grungni’s done to help the alliance). The gas giant would need to be one with a breathable atmosphere, or at least have some sort of habitable layer within it, so I would say that Azyr would be something like Bespin.



Chamon: Chamon is the most difficult one to visualise in my view, as metal is not alive in the way a planet’s crust is. However, one piece of art has led me to a possible way to view it - the Kharadron Overlords artwork featuring a skyport really helps to conjure the image of Chamon being another gas giant, but one with a much more hostile climate and atmosphere like our own Jupiter (specifically one that contains a lot of gaseous metals like the aether-gold that the Kharadron harvest).


Ulgu: Ulgu is a Realm where nothing is as it seems, so I believe a good candidate for this one would be a planet wreathed in mists and illusions like Dagobah, where you can always only see a few feet in front of you.



Hysh: While I think it would be a bit silly if the Realm of Light was always full of bright dazzling light (nobody would be able to see each other or move around), I do think it would be a place where everything is clear and you would be able to see for miles around you in every direction, with a sun always shining so that it is always daytime. Therefore, I think the best candidate for Hysh would be somewhere like Crait with its flat plains of salt (although without the mountains). I think that such a planet would certainly be a good mirror image to the dark, misty Ulgu.



Ghyran: Ghyran is of course the paradise world, so while there are several paradise planets in Star Wars, I think Naboo would be the best candidate for Ghyran, as it has all the different types of environment for supporting all the different animal life (forests for smaller creatures and plains for the larger ones), with a perpetually temperate climate.



Shyish: From various illustrations, I’ve seen Shyish as being both as cold as the grave (literally) and congested with the settlements of the dead, so I see Shyish as being both like Hoth in terms of its freezing climate and having its surface almost entirely covered with buildings like Coruscant, but the buildings are shaped out of bone rather than built out of metal.



In any case, I just thought this would be an interesting topic to discuss to pass the time, and I look forward to seeing what you all have to say on the matter.

 

Mustafar works brilliantly for Aqshy, and the picture you picked for Ghyran looked really good as well, but I feel like relying on film based Star Wars planets for the others seem pretty limiting for what they would be like. Perhaps I’m missing the point of this thread, but I feel like there could be far better pictures for what the Realms could be like - I’ll try to stick them on here as I find them.

For example, replace the red with a darker black or maybe purple or blue and...



I think we have a pretty good depiction of Ulgu (admittedly this is still a Star Wars planet - Dathomir - )

 

Planets need stars at the correct distance to make them either hot or cold Worlds. Do the realms have that..?

 

For metals to reach gaseous states we are talking stellar temperatures....red giants or worse-hotter.

Boiling points of metals

If the metals all around you have boiled you are trapped inside a Star. Have a nice[?] day.

 

...or the pressure is very low Or aether-gold could be akin to mercury, which albeit it is dense and liquid at standard temperature and pressure (STP) on earth, still has a high volatility due to quantum shennanigans giving it physical properties mimicking noble gases. Cs, Rb, and some actinides are not far behind, barely solid at STP on our world, so it is entirely possible to imagine a world where those elements, or some fictional ones akin to them, would be present in the atmosphere - not by the wagonload, but that's not different to their abundance in planetary crust for most of them.

If we are talking about compounds of metals, then the possibilities are endless - and most ore is extracted as a metal compound (for example uraninite/pitchblende, or UO2, and its cousins, for uranium ore) before being transformed into the metallic species. Indeed many compounded metals are more volatile than the pure metallic species.
Add in some magical voodoo as there is plenty of it lying around in AoS and voilà, you've got yourself a semi-realistic realm

 

Nope, no sun in the Mortal Realms. The day / night cycle is dependent on whether Hysh or Ulgu is visible in the sky above (i.e. Hysh makes everything light, Ulgu darkens everything.)

What is less certain is whether this means that the realms are indeed planets (as Hysh/Ulgus presence in the firmament seems to imply) or whether they are pocket dimensions encapsulated within spheres.

 

For most metals this is the case, but as @Cerind said some metals on Earth, like Mercury, exist as a liquid state at normal temperature rather than as solids, so it could well be perfectly possible in some fantasy world like the Mortal Realms that there are metals which exist as gases at room temperature as well. Besides, GW have already established that there are gaseous metals in AoS (which is why I mentioned Aether-gold - a key part of established Kharadron fluff) - I’m just extending that idea. I was just using Jupiter as an example of a gas giant with a particularly inhospitable gas layer, not one with specifically gaseous metal content.

Also aside from this, have I done or said something to offend you in the past? I only ask because you seem to relish picking holes in so many things I’ve said about various topics in a particularly blunt fashion.

I’d still like to think that they’re planets because that would give it some basis in realism. Perhaps because Hysh is the realm of light and Ulgu is the realm of shadow, they radiate these properties out from their surfaces so that they affect the presence of night and day in the other Realms somehow.

 

I've always seen the realms like Thor:The Dark World showed it's different realms with Azyr being the space between them. Azyr is the realm of heaven and can be seen from every realm so it's just sort of the sky. This would also explain why Sigmar can throw his Stormcast to any of the realms from Azyr and why the Seraphon are able to descend from the stars of High Azyr in any of the realms. Azyrheim and our temple ships are giant physical bodies floating through the space between realms. Think the MCU Asgard. It's not really a planet it's just a city that powers of gods have built up some land masses around it so that it can grow.

So I dont know if every realm is a physical planet that can be seen from the others (like I dont think you could look up from Azyrheim and just see Ghyran floating there) but whenever you look to the sky from any of the other realms you're looking at Azyr.

Another thing that came to my mind as I'm writing this. All of the realms have edges where their magic coalesces in a big way. Nagash gathered all the shade glass he needed by sending untold numbers of skeletons to the edge of Shyish to bring back one grain of shade glass. This helps me believe that the realms are sort of different planes of existence that are connected by Azyr.

Edit: this is not to detract what you think they would look like which I think is pretty spot on. I just wanted to throw in my ideas after you said you didnt really know what the realms were.

 

You have not offended me personally.

I apologize if comments of mine have registered as personal attacks. I am not trying to make an enemy.

Tone is hard to convey over the Internet. In instances where my general comment can be characterized as: “nope, wrong, entirely incorrect“ I am trying be succinct, matter-of-fact, and to the point. And as emotionless as possible. Think LA Detective Joe Friday or Starfleet Lt. Cmdr. Tuvok.

If you’ve felt like a frequent target, I’m sorry. Could it be that you relish frequently typing out things that I just consider to be nonscience or unfactual?

For the sake of others reading along and never posting I sometimes can’t help but counter things like that cause me to think

In this thread I got the incorrect idea (from the original phrasing) that you thought real universe Jupiter had gaseous metals in its atmosphere...but you have clarified that here:

So, no harm no foul? At least on this one?

(For anyone reading along Jupiter’s atmosphere is 90% Hydrogen, 10% Helium, and a tiny amount of Ammonia (plus a list of other gases in scant trace amounts). Ammonia accounts for the colors in the bands. Deeper than 30 or 40 miles down we know next to nothing. But at some point** a Liquid Hydrogen Ocean is suspected. **1000 miles deep? 2347 miles deep? nobody knows.)

 

This looks unlike a planet.

That said, a lot of the Star Wars planets are presented in the movies as mono-environments. Such as: Ocean Planets, Desert Planets (three of those so far?), Ice Planets, Jungle Planets...

The descriptions of these Realms seem to follow the same simplistic notion. (Except maybe GrrrrruR ? as was noted in the first post.)

Weirdly, I think that makes StarWarsian planets decent stand-ins for Age-Of-Skirmish-Realms.

I can’t think of any real planets that work, the few real ones known are more exotic.

~~~~ throws a switch ~~~~
~~~~ sends us onto a secondary track ~~~~
​

I can’t hardly stand the names they’ve invented. They look goofy. Bizarre combinations of consonants. I find them awkward, unpronounceable, tongue-twisters. They need renaming, or nicknaming, or changing into more ordinary words. Here is how I am uncaringly mispronouncing some of them in my head.

Aqshy - I morph that into Ash-Squishy

Ghur — Gah-Rurrrrrr
Ghyran — Gyro-Land
Shyish — Shy-Eeeesh
Azyr — Azure
Ulgu — Ugg-Glue
Chamon —
Hysh — High-ish

Yet to settle on anything for option C. Does it alliterate with Charisma or Charmed?

 

Ah but just because the inhabitants of the Mortal Realms think their worlds are flat, doesn’t mean to say they’re right - you could say that they are still in the Middle Ages stage of scientific reasoning.

That’s what I meant when I said ‘a planet we know, fictional or actual’ - I wasn’t sure if anyone wanted to try to refer to real planets as having possible similarities to AoS Realms, so I decided to cover all the bases.

I do agree they are a bit silly, but remember they were also the names of the 8 Winds of Magic before AoS - GW simply took those winds of magic and made a planet/world based on each of them when the transition of AoS came. AoS itself can’t really be blamed for that if GW wanted to recycle some names. But yes, I agree they are rather daft names. I suppose they just wanted to push the boat out on them to make them sound really fantastical.

 

A fair point. They might have some long range plans for a ‘Big Reveal!’ that divulges this later. Planets! Who knew?!


The real history of who knew what and when about a curved Earth is interesting. There was a Greek, (Erastothanes?) who lived in Alexandria before the great lighthouse collapsed, who calculated the diameter and circumference (and got close considering the method available to him).

 

Is there a realm that is all about the water? An Ocean world?

 

Not that I know of - all the mortal realms have their own oceans though as far as I know (oceans of what depends upon the realm).

 

It’s not planets, it’s Ovals. Ellipses. ( With drop shadows...)

Is Mallus a planet? planetoid, planetesimal?

 

Where did you find that? How do you know it's factual?

 

I found it with an image search.
It might have been on a Reddit thread?
(I don’t really know what Reddit is :: check the URL to the image.)

I have no idea if it is factual...it is someone’s made up drawing, of some made up world-places, with made up names.

 

I found a older thread about planets:

http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/other-planets.14986/

 

Hi, lurker from a few weeks now, I suscribed after reading this thread.

The question about the realms is causing a lot of headeache on the community. They could indeed be seen as the star wars planets regarding the general "feel" of the environment. You will have this kind of weather, this kind of atmosphere etc.

But "physically" I see it the same way as middle earth. Look at the silmarillion if you got it at home (i'm sure you do) or check on wikipedia or something. From the artworks from Tolkien himslef when he explains what is middle earth as a plane of existence into the void.

I'm thinking the realms are exactly that, but there is more than one, and each one is connected to the others trough realmgates.

 

Welcome to the jungle these boards. Glad you like the thread.

How is it causing headache in your local(?) community? I have always found an ignorance-is-bliss policy works the best for me. They write fluff; I largely ignore it (at some later point... they are going to retcon it anyway... so, why invest?)

And that is in the Silmarillion? I read it many, many Earth turnings ago. But I’ve forgotten that.

That is the canon, such as it is, (and as best as I understand it).