Hello everyone, I'm new here and I've finally signed on to ask for ideas on a particular project I'm working on. Bear with me here, it's a complicated one.

Let me set the scene. This is the object in question: Dalbaz, a shattered world that was once a great big maze of interior and exterior spaces.

dalbaz 3d sketch.PNG

And here's a brief turnaround.

Here are the rules and constants:

  • Gravity: Straight down, i.e. galactic south, NOT planetary. Magic, yall.
  • Star orbits the main planet in epicycles that produce seasons.
  • Dalbaz is about 6,000 mi in diameter. Because gravity is globally down, if it were a solid sphere, the only habitable land would be on top of the ball.
  • Before the cataclysm, Dalbaz was like a many-story maze of stacked layers in the shape of a sphere. Most of the usable "land" was underground.
  • Dalbaz is now a hollowed out shell of fractured parts. People now live wherever they can, on the top surfaces of the upper and lower shells and in the volume of the shell pieces.
  • Output will eventually be 2d, RPG book in print and pdf/epub.
  • In terms of climate/geography, Dalbaz is in awful shape. It was the center of magic until it was basically destroyed, now it's essentially a wasteland with interesting things to dig up. Low population.


Core Problem:
How in the heavens should/could I go about mapping such a thing? The other worlds are easy as pie, since gravity is flat, they are too, more or less. But this thing is multi-layered and in several pieces, each in a different orientation.

I'm planning to do world maps of each world, then regional maps for each of the regions as well, so the world map doesn't need to be fully defined, but still.

Bonus Points:
I'd also like to hear any interesting ideas about cultures, technologies, and/or magics that could or would arise on such a world. Sky's the limit at the moment, nothing's written in stone yet, so to speak.

Background Junk:
Gravity goes down more or less because the god responsible for creating this universe wanted it to be easy to navigate. The rings in the sketch show planes of force that hold up the various celestial bodies. There are three other worlds embedded in the rings around this central body. Note that these rings don't work like gravity-based rings like Saturn or Jupiter, they're basically enormous world-rune-magics that hold things in place.

Central body: Dalbaz. This used to be a spherical planet but got hit by a cosmic laser cannon thing that knocked it all to crap. Now the pieces are held together by giant World Chains forged by one of the gods.

Dalbaz has two inner rings, and the innermost has what used to be the planet's core embedded in it. The three worlds in the ring are Khrosadalt, Luonerre, and Kanneum.

The star is a binary object. One of the bodies is a solid one that shades the worlds when the sun is below the celestial horizon.

The rings rotate at different rates, generally getting faster towards the center.