Revised Core Earth World Laws

Core Earthers are a tenacious lot; they will fight desperately for what is theirs and adversity only increases their resolve rather than breaking their spirit. In roleplaying terms, a Core Earther is loathe to the idea of giving up or surrendering a fight if it means compromising his beliefs, ideals or goals. This does not mean that Core Earthers will futility struggle against impossible odds - if one means of resistance won't work than he'll find some other way of continuing the fight.

In game terms, convincing a Core Earther to abandon his principles or to give up a fight is made more difficult by this world law. Characters receive a +3 bonus to their willpower skill or to the appropriate resistance value in such situations, including ones caused by foreign world laws. For example, if a Nile villain tries to use Inclination Seduction on a Good Core Earther in a Nile dominant zone, the Law of Resolve will give him a +3 bonus to resist the villain's attempt. (Though if the effect of the world law disconnects the character, obviously it can't provide him with the bonus.)

In cases where there is no obvious resistance value, the Law of Resolve will seek to lessen the effects or possibly to reverse them at a later time. For example, Nippon Tech's Law of Intrigue states that there will always be traitors in organizations over a certain size. For Core Earthers in Nippon Tech dominant zones, the Law of Resolve will seek to minimize the number of traitors the Law of Intrigue generates (fewer Core Earthers would be willing to betray a trust) or Core Earthers who do turn traitor might have a change of heart and revert to his previous beliefs at a later time (a staple of heroic fiction, characters redeeming themselves at the dramatically appropriate moment.)

Note that the world laws does not mean that no Core Earther will ever give up, just that they're less likely to give up. Those without much resolve in the first place (such as those who have a low willpower skill value) will probably still buckle in the face of serious adversity.

Another effect of this world law is that Core Earthers cling to their reality as fiercely as anything else, and as a result are harder to transform to another reality. For ords, this is expressed by lower odds of transforming over a period of time than for ords from other cosms, as explained in the Law of Hope in the Delphi Council Worldbook.

For possibility-rated characters, this is reflected in their gaining a free add in their reality skill during character creation. Some characters who transform to Core Earth reality also benefit from this effect after their transformation; newly transformed characters with +0 adds in reality immediately increase to +1 adds in the skill. If they transform with one or more adds still remaining in the skill though, they do not receive a free add from the world law.

To further represent how Core Earthers' resolve strengthens them and enables them to persevere in the face of adversity, Core Earth characters may play one card into their pools at the beginning of round play instead of having to wait until after their first action. Note that non-Core Earth characters in Core Earth will also benefit from this effect as a contradiction.

Second, in combination with the Law of Imagination (representing Core Earth's large store of possibility energy), Core Earth characters get one more card in their hand than normal. Again, note that non-Core Earth characters in Core Earth can benefit from this effect as a contradiction.

Finally, the number of possibility-rated individuals created in Core Earth, both before and during the Possibility Wars, is much greater than in any other cosm. While this is in part due to Core Earth's surplus of possibility energy, the willingness of Core Earthers to "stick to their guns" increases the likelyhood of their making a strong moral choice during a Moment of Crisis and transcending.

Law of Imagination

As outlined by Wu Han in The Chekov Strain, Core Earthers are able to imagine and believe in things outside of their own reality. Unlike people in most other realities, they are not constrained by their axioms and world laws to see existence in only one particular way, unable to think and dream of how the world could be different.

Originally this was explained as being due to Core Earth's surplus of possibility energy. While that does play a factor in it, this world law clarifies and establishes how that works - simply having a lot of possibility energy can't account for it since High Lords and their Darkness Devices do not show the same types of creativity and imagination, yet possess huge amounts of possibility energy.

The most prominent effect of this world law (or of Core Earth's excess of possibility energy if you prefer to think of it that way) is that almost all of the cosm is dominant reality rather than pure. Dominant reality allows for contradictions, "things outside of their reality", while pure reality does not. Most cosms are at best only fifty percent dominant.

Second, because Core Earthers have more possibility energy to invest in such endeavors as pushing an axiom up (or pulling it down), axiom changes can occur at a much faster pace than elsewhere. Rather than the decades to centuries required for a one point change mentioned in the rulebook, it may only take a few decades to change an axiom level by a point in Core Earth (case in point, the Tech axiom increasing by two points in the last fifty years.)

A corollary to this effect is that localized, long-term axiom shifts are more prevalent in Core Earth than other cosms. Haiti, Tibet and Germany are all examples of this, with Germany also indicating that localized shifts can occur over the course of a few years, something unheard of in other cosms.

Also, cosmwide axiom shifts can result from the efforts of a minority of Core Earth's inhabitants rather than requiring a majority of the population. In effect a localized shift is expanded to encompass the entire cosm when there are enough dedicated and industrious believers supporting that localized shift.

Core Earth's Tech and Social axioms best illustrate this effect. The population of countries like the United States have determined those two axiom levels for the entire cosm even though they do not constitute a majority of the population in the cosm.

One detrimental side effect of the Law of Imagination is that it actually aids the High Lords by making it easier for them to establish new stelae zones. Stelae zones depend on a minimum number of believers to support the invading reality, and since the Law of Imagination makes it easier for Core Earthers to believe in other realities, new stelae zones gain supporters faster than normal. Because the rules do not provide any concrete information on what constitutes enough belief to support a stelae zone, this effect is for the most part unquantifiable.

On the individual scale, being able to conceive of and believe in different realities or different ways of viewing the world has a couple of effects. One actually runs counter to the Law of Resolve: some people are more vulnerable to transformation to some realities if that reality is similar to the way the character sees reality or is similar to how they wish reality worked. For example, a technophobe in search of religion might have found the Living Land or the False Papacy (pre-Tech Surge Cyberpapacy) very appealing and would have been more susceptable to transformation to either of those realities.

In game terms, a Core Earth ord who is predisposed towards another reality has his transformation odds figured without the modifier from the Law of Resolve when he is in that reality (in other words, two rows lower on the Transformation Table.) If he is in a reality other than the one he favors, his transformation chances are calculated normally. A possibility-rated character caught in a reality storm (natural or invoked) of the reality that he is predisposed towards is stymied in his attempts to resist the storm.

Note that this assumes the Core Earther does not actively wish to transform to the new reality, that on some level he wishes to remain a Core Earther. According to WEG in Infiniverse, a character who is totally committed to transforming to another reality (which should be incredibly rare) can supposedly speed up the transformation process, but the details were never provided and I haven't thought up any myself.

Determining whether or not a Core Earth character has a predisposition towards a different reality is something for the gamemaster and the player to work out together. A predisposition is not the same thing as an interest; the average AD&D player or SCA member is not predisposed towards Aysle and the average spy is not predisposed towards Nippon Tech. The type of person who would be considered predisposed towards another reality is someone even people with similar interests consider a little weird and obsessive, or might be described as "not in touch with reality" (which may actually become the case in Torg.)

Law of Glory

As stated in the Delphi Council Worldbook, when a Core Earth character plants a story seed or is involved in the planting of the seed, a +2 bonus is applied to the attempt. If the Glory card that forms the basis of the story seed was played by a Core Earther then the bonus is doubled to +4. These bonuses represent this world law working through the Core Earth character to energize the story seed and insure that it reaches people and restores hope within them.

Core Earth characters do need to make a contradiction check when the story seed is being planted, even if he is only assisting and not planting it himself. If there are multiple Core Earth characters involved in planting the story seed, they must all make contradiction checks.

As long as one of them does not disconnect, the bonus is applied to the attempt. Once the seed has been planted, the world law is no longer acting upon the populace so there is no need to worry about the character having to sustain a contradiction over a long period of time.

On a more personal level, the Law of Glory also allows for "individual glories", small measures of exceptional ability which can allow characters to serve as inspirations to others. This is essentially the same effect as the Law of Prodigy from the Delphi Council Worldbook, during character creation players may choose to sacrifice three starting possibility points in exchange for three extra skill adds that are added to their tag skill. Alternately, characters may pay for their prodigy package with some kind of severe mental or physical handicaps as described in the Law of Prodigy.

Once applied, these extra skill adds do not draw upon the world law so they do not cause contradictions in any other reality. The world law simply caused the character to develop their particular talent at an unusually rapid rate, but it has no further effect upon the character once character creation is completed.

Torg, West End Games, and WEG are trademarks of Purgatory Publishing. You can find out more about Torg at www.westendgames.com.