Geography in the Tapestry
The Tapestry is a grand network of different lands which are connected by quasi-mystical paths known as "threads."
Realms
The Tapestry is primarily comprised of realms -- distinct segments of terrain and climate. In realms where the landscape is conducive to settlement, the term “realm” is almost always synonymous with the state which has taken root there.
Threads
Realms are connected by “threads” -- a euphemistic name for the roads and other means of travel which connect realms. A given thread always connects two realms, though some uncommon threads, called “Slipthreads,” are one-way journeys only. Most can be passed freely by anyone, but some require a “shuttle” -- some kind of key item or condition which must be possessed or met in order to walk the thread.
Threads can take a lot of different forms. Roads or “Ways” are a very common type of thread -- travellers must be careful not to stray from the road, lest they find themselves lost in one of the connected realms. “Gates” and “Passages” are less common, but hardly unknown types, consisting of openings or tunnels that connect between two different places, be it a large towering archway that opens from a desert into a forest or a tunnel in a tavern’s root cellar that goes back 50 ft before opening at the mouth of a small cave by a mountain pool. Finally, there are rarer (or possibly just less commonly discovered) Strange Threads that require very specific shuttles to activate, such as a scarecrow in a particular field in Vashtinral; walking thrice widdershins around it causes the walker to emerge from a different corn field in Beldenshire.
Access
No special skills or abilities are required to walk the threads of the Tapestry, beyond simply the knowledge of where the relevant threads can be found and possession of whatever shuttles might occasionally be needed to make the trip.
While the geography of the Tapestry is non-contiguous in many cases, the heavens above the Tapestry all share the same features -- a sun during the day, and a moon against a background of stars at night. Because the sun always rises and sets in the same direction, the concept of direction was created by wise sages in ancient times to facilitate navigation. Hence, one can reckon which direction is North, East, South, and West in any given realm, though such reckoning may go a little haywire while walking along a thread.
Realm Edges
There are three known ways that the terrain of a realm can be contained along its edges. Most common are Barriers, which are just places where the realm’s topography becomes impassible, such as vegetation growing so thickly that it cannot be moved through at the edges of Hanar. Boundaries, meanwhile, are places where attempting to press forward beyond the edge of the realm leads to confusion and somehow turns the traveler back towards the realm they mean to leave, or somehow leads the traveler back into the realm from its opposite side. Finally, there are Brinks, where the land simply stops abruptly, giving way to a starry void cut off by a clear, thin, elastic, permeable membrane.
There is technically a fourth type of edge which can join two realms. A Border is a particularly wide overlap between the edges of two realms . Wider even than most ways, sometimes running for many miles, borders are very easy to find and cross, facilitating casual travel between the connected realms. So easy is this crossing that realms which share a border are said to be “threaded” to each other.
Viewpoint Differences
Living among the often-not-contiguous geography of the Tapestry’s realms has led to certain differences in attitude about the nature of space from those commonly held here on Earth. The first of these is the nature of the world -- the Tapestry gets its name from the similarity between the way the weft threads of a tapestry weave back and forth on the tapestry’s backside, connecting disparate portions of the overall work.
The Second major difference is the certainty that inhabitants of the Tapestry possess that they could visit any given realm if only they knew how to find a connecting thread and which shuttle to use to unlock it. This applies equally to relatively mundane places as well as mysterious places like the Raven King’s Mistyholt and other realms of dream, spirit, and legend. Even the Prison would seem to someone from the Tapestry to be just another realm, even if the threads which connect it are mysterious and secret.
