CIDRI ACCOUNT #1 To understand what Cidri is, one must know something of its builders.

The Mnoren were human--and a little bit more. They had the ability to move unaided between the many alternate worlds that co-exist with Earth in other time-streams. One a bility--but it was enough. The first Mnoren used his talent only six times, and then stopped forever in fright and confusion. But those six trips made him a wea lthy man. His power bred true. His children read his journals, and wondered, and experimented. They became the secret rulers of their home planet. Their childre n did not bother with secrets...they merely ruled. The Mnoren ale] first eventy-one em honored multiplied and prospered. Three hundred years after Jen Mnoren's [a m jump, is descendants had found, mapped, and conquered three hundred s alternate Earths. Three had space travel; eleven had magic. All of th the Mnoren rulers.

The key to the Mnoren dominance, of course, was knowledge. Knowledge is power, a nd the knowledge of one world is power unimaginable in another. Jen Mnoren's six trips yielded two simple devices and one book, and made him rich. His children imported inventions, techniques, and gold ... and the Mnoren power grew. A Mnore n was effectively invulnerable, wherever he traveled. A dozen different protecti ve devices, physical and magical...intelligent bodyguards from strange worlds... and, most formidable of all, a very long lifetime of experience. Anything that c ould extend his life was of interest to a Mnoren; the medical techniques of 371 worlds made old age merely a measure of experience. And in their power, the built Cidri. How? We don't know. Where? Good question. I t orbits the sun where Earth would be--if there was an Earth in that universe. N o one today knows for sure even WHAT Cidri is. Certainly no ordinary planet. Cid ri is BIG. No complete map of its surface is known. The standard work, compiled two hundred years ago by the Imperial College of Cartographers at Predimuskity, shows 48 continents (defined as land masses of over 5,000,000 square km.); five of these are in excess of 60,000,000 square km. Almost half the known surface of Cidri is covered with water; most of its seas are dotted with islands. Yet even the great Book of Maps lists nine hundred and eleven locations which cannot be found within the known area--including the mountain city of Paska-Dal, which (by Gate) has carried on commerce with gem merchants everywhere for at least four h undred years. Yet build it [PROBABLY FOUND IT, NOT BUILT IT??] the Mnoren did--a whole enormou s world. And, having built it, the peopled it. Farmers, technicians, servants, g uards, slaves, stowaways...plants for gardens, jungles and fields...animals for companions, food, hunting, or to balance the thousands of ecologies interweaving across the planet...creatures great and small from every one of the worlds they knew. For hundreds of years they enjoyed their world. Few traveled elsewhere--what nee d, when Cidri held all? The other worlds of probability were once again left to their own peoples. A few thousand of the rulers (for their numbers had never bee n great) lived in glittering mansions scattered through Cidri. The broad contine nts, with their diverse people and cultures, were their playgrounds. And gradual ly the Mnoren changed. From rulers they became watchers, gamers, dilettantes. Th e Mnoren Emperor handed his scepter to one of his human barons, mounted his flyi ng steed--and was never seen again. The word of any Mnoren remained law--but the y rarely spoke. It was as though, having wielded absolute power for so long, the y had decided to sit back and enjoy life for a while. And gradually, they were seen less and less. Three hundred years after the Abdic ation, no Mnoren was governing anything more than a household anywhere on Cidri.

Two hundred years later, the Empire was a shrunken, quarrelling muddle, and the Mnoren were gone. Where did they go? Ahhhh...another good question! There are many theories. Perha ps they simply died out, their eldritch strain weakened by time and the weight o f empire. Perhaps the assassin's game that their wilder types enjoyed (what prey was really worthy of a Mnoren but his deadly relatives?) drove them into hiding on other worlds. Perhaps they built a grander playground somewhere else. Perhap s they're still here, wise and immortal, watching but not taking part. That's wh at the villagers believe. They threaten bad children with demons, orcs, and Mnor en. Maybe they're gone, and maybe they're still watching. It doesn't seem to matter; Cidri is ours now. And what a place! Infinite adventure. Infinite variety. Wher e once there was one Empire, now there are hundreds. Different races, different cultures, different everything ... decadent city folk, proud barbarians, merry f armers, battered mercenaries. Most lands are peaceful, most of the time--but the re's always a war somewhere, and a border raid somewhere else, as an ambitious p rinceling seeks to expand his holdings, or a robber band sets its sights on a ri ch prize. A world of constant adventure--adventure to be found nowhere else. The Mnoren im ported many things--and some of their gates still lead to other worlds. Most of their strange devices are lost or broken, not to be rebuilt--for few of the peop le of Cidri have any great love of, or interest in, technology. But the exceptio ns form the Mechanician's Guild, always alert for new inventions or old gadgets. Sorcerers go about their daily business like the honest tradesmen they are. Tru ly a world of fantasy. Indeed, many creatures from Earth's fantasy have their co unterparts on Cidri. It seems likely that Terran legends of elves, dwarves, cent aurs, and other fantastic creatures are dim memories--of a time when these being s roamed the Earth, or of people who somehow went to Cidri and returned, none ca n say. But the gates remain, and certain it is that if one knew where to go, he could s tep through a shimmering portal today and be in Cidri... ACCOUNT #2 Here is my take on it: the Mnoren discovered a planet in some parallel universe or another that is, indeed, the same distance from the sun as our Earth. But it was significantly larger - I would suggest something between 10-100 times as big, in terms of surface area (implying a diameter range of 40,000 km to 125,000 km - Earth is a "mere" 12,756.3 km). As an aside, I would keep it on the smaller end of the scale - the bigger you go the harder it is to explain how Cidri could be earthlike in terms of gravity, length of day, etc. Further, it has vast (though not inexhaustible) mineral resources - indeed, the Mnorens (who, obviously, lack an EPA) managed to mine out and heavily pollute some areas (c.f. Soukhor). Interestingly enough, LBTM makes mention of "pre-Mnorens", which suggests that Cidri possessed an indigenous population of some sort prior to the arrival of the Mnorens. Further, this mysterious people possessed some degree of technology, as they had blasted "rough hewn steps" into the face of a mountainside to form a pass. I'm not really sure what to make of this; certainly there is no mention in ITL of any "pre-Mnorens" and it's obvious that SJ and the writers of LBTM were kind of going their own separate ways. I have no idea what "pre-Mnoren" are, nor how to explain their existence. Speculations invited on this point. Regardless, some degree of Terra forming, through the use of some advanced technology or magic (or both) to regulate the gravity level, length of day,

and so forth to make it as Earth-like as possible, seems to have occurred. Indeed, the description in ITL implies this, when it states that the Mnoren brought "...plants for gardens, jungles, and fields... animals for companions, food, hunting, or to balance the thousands of ecologies interweaving across the planet. . ." Though Cidri appears to have been inhabited already, it was the Mnoren, through the use of high technology and powerful magic were able to make Cidri bloom, though it probably took at least a few decades, or maybe even a century or two. One implication of a planet Cidri's size is that the general climate is not likely to vary as much over distance as on Earth. For example, if I drive from the Gulf of Mexico in Texas to Lake Superior in Minnesota in the winter I can see some pretty sharp differences in climate; but on Cidri, the same distance would not likely evoke any meaningful change, as degree-wise you will not be going so far "north" in terms of latitude.

These demon-launching thought experiments have got me to thinking a bit about Ci dri itself. For starters, how big is it? We're told it's BIG, apparently the o riginal idea was 'big enough that everyone's campaigns can fit on it, all in the ir own areas'--or, at the very least, big enough that an essentially unlimited n umber of settings could theoretically be placed on it. All very nice, but it doesn't mean much. Just throwing some numbers around I de cided to see how big a planet would be if it had 100 times the surface area of e arth. I came up with a radius roughly ten times that of the earth. That leads me to two notions: If Cidri is a planet ten times the radius of the earth, it seems to me that it w ould have to rotate ten times as fast as the earth in order for each 'day' to be 24 hours long. Now while I'm no physicist, I know that on earth its easiest to launch things from the equator because of the momentum you get from the earth's rotation. Und zo...if the rotation is ten times faster, that might make the la uch a good deal easier, ja? Since the gravity is apparently only 1G and all... Goodness knows what else would be affected by having a planet this size. The ho rizon would probably be about 200 miles away, and climate would either have to b e produced artificially or not vary significantly across HUGE areas. But who says it's a sphere at all? It could be flat, I suppose, since those Mno ren are so dashed clever and all. If it were a flat object, but still rotating and revolving around a star, you could get a day night cycle, albeit with a very abrupt sunset/sunrise. If it were 'corrugated' to some degree that could perha ps give regional climate variation,although it might be easier to do that by tin kering with the atmosphere to make some areas reflect more sunlight than others. Of course, a ringworld or dyson sphere are always possible, but it's hard to giv e things an 'earth-like' appearance to to the residents with either of those set -ups. What I'm thinking, though, is that maybe it's a cylinder. This seems to be the easiest way to get a huge area with earthlike rotation speeds and sunset-sunrise patterns. Climate variation could again be done with corrugations, or with atm osphere tinkering. Just some thoughts.

"In the Labyrinth" says that Cidri has 48 known continents, and many more land m asses that are considered smaller than continents. There's good evidence that th ere are more continents than the known 48. It says that Cidri is about half land and half water. Every Cidri-based campaign that anyone ever mapped is on Cidri somewhere. Let's say 100 continents. The Earth has 149 million square kilometers of land, and we usually say we have 7 continents. Divide by 7 and multiply by 1 00, and you get 2,127,700,900 square kilometers of land area, and a total global surface area on Cidri of 4,255,401,800 square kilometers. If I did my sums righ t, that's a planet with about an 18,400 kilometer radius. With a similar density to Earth, that's 1.44 times ten to the 24th kilograms of mass. If I figured thi s right (a big "if,") Cidri would have a surface gravity about nine times that o f Earth. The exotic anti-mass in the middle would have to push on people with ei ght gees upward acceleration to make it cancel out to earth-like gravity. In physics class I learned that gravity cancels itself out inside a hollow spher e, so if the Earth were hollow, there'd be no gravity at all inside. In the holl ow space around the anti-gravity ball, the only gravity you'd feel would be the anti-gravity. The "up" force from the ball would be stronger than on the surface because you'd be closer to it, so there'd be more than eight times Earth's grav ity pushing you towards the surface. If a mad Mnoren built the universe's deepest stairwell on Cidri, as you walked d own and down, you'd feel the gravity get lighter. You'd eventually fly down the stairs in zero gravity. Then you'd be climbing up a staircase instead of going d own, as the anti-gravity got stronger. Climbing those stairs would get harder as you got heavier, and heavier, and heavier. The Cidri might have built big underground habitats at different levels under th e surface. A low-gravity level would allow adventurers to jump around like John Carter of Mars. Deeper than that, you could have strange zero-gravity ecologies, as in Larry Niven's "The Smoke Ring." Deeper still, there'd be places for stock y little high-gravity beings. The dwarves of Cidri might be humanoids whose ance stors lived in higher gravity. I can imagine a race of weird light-hating gravity-loving beings living on the i nner surface of Cidri. If a scientist among them predicted a disaster that would wipe out all life on the inside, he might teleport his son to the surface. Perh aps the child would be taken in by kindly farmers. Little Kal would be fantastic ally strong, but he'd have to wear sunglasses. When he grew up, he could move a city and be a great hero. TFT MONSTERS http://tft.brainiac.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.TFTMonsters

From: "Charles Gadda" Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 18:59:42 -0700 Original Post Cidri Timeline This information is derived from ITL and all of the TFT modules save Grail Quest (which is obviously unrelated to Cidri). Some abbreviations DT1 Death Test 1 DT2 Death Test 2 FLD Forest Lords of Dihad ITL In the Labyrinth LBTM Land Beyond the Mountains LOU Lords of Underearth MOA Master of the Amulets

OQ Orb Quest SS Security Station TL Tollenkar's Lair WLD Warrior Lords of Darok YBP Years before present Note that the majority of these dates are approximate. Dates derived directly fr om the text (no matter how vague) are given with an "*" after them. All other da tes are estimated. YBP Event 2800-3300* Jen Mnoren's first jump (ITL) 2500-3000* Mnoren settlement of LBTM by the B'Orja clan (LBTM) 2000 Jas N'orn transports shelter ST119 to Cidri (SS) 2000-2500 Mnoren Abdication (ITL) 1500-2000 Mnoren disappear (ITL) 1200-1800 Founding of Chalasi (LOU) 1000-2000 Dirringar the Black creates the amulets & is destroyed (MOA) 700-1300 Battle of Silver Crossing. Askthor XI slain. (LOU) 600-1200 Orcs launch attack on Chalasi in 21st yr of Askthor XIV (LOU) 500* Mikarth's expedition to LBTM (FLDWLD) 400-800 Coming of Crythal the Amber & destruction of Chalasi (LOU) 400 City of Paska-Dal begins gem commerce via gate (ITL) 375 Gems found in LBTM; Kirsten Kalandai comes from Elyntia (WLD) 350* Bruthe ascends throne in LBTM (WLDFLD) 325* LBTM fragments upon Bruthe's death-Y174 of the province (WLD) 300-600 Rise of Rodrom (LOU) 300-350 "High-tech" wars devastate Kel (WLD) 275-300 Darok brings in mercenaries & introduces Akhora Cult (WLD) 250-500 Founding of the Thorsz empire (OQ) 250-275 Purges of Arlen II in Darok (WLD) 248* Landmaster Hall destroyed (TL) 200 End of war that devastated Elyntia (ITL) 200 Imperial College of Cartographers produce map of Cidri (ITL) 65* Head of t'Bur clan executed for treason (WLD) ~40* Muipocan forces make furthest advance into Darok (WLD) ~40* Ziero Mhaddray murdered and his treasure buried (WLD) 40* Reptile men attempt to storm Interris (WLDFLD) 25 Umbar Cerdan joins the Dihadian Army 23* Savin k'Raag wins Command of Darok (WLD) 16* Arkintrodt becomes Count of Dihad (FLD) 13* Petros wins Command of Darok (WLD) 8* Darimenza tames Kaloth (FLD) 7* Valnezbad appointed as Arkintrodt's Court Magician (FLD) NOTES: There are VERY few dates given in any of the published material, along with few descriptions. Thus, there is wide latitude for interpretation. There are some "f ixed" (using the term loosely) points, namely the Mnoren settlement of Cidri (st rongly implied as being the same time as the settlement of LBTM), the Mikarth ex pedition to LBTM, the fragmentation of LBTM (in the year 174 of the province), t he destruction of Landmaster Hall, and accession of the rulers of Darok and Diha d. Supplementing this are some associated dates, such as the conquest of 371 wor lds and settlement of Cidri within 300 years of Jen Mnoren's first journey, etc. All the rest is informed speculation. With regards to Underearth, I presumed 50 year reigns for the first 10 lords of Chalasi - though dwarves are not long lived like elves, I figured with magical h ealing, Youth elixirs, and the implied wealth and stability of the Underearth re alm through most of its history that a 50 year reign was not out of line; indeed , I may be *underestimating* to a degree. Askthor the XI was slain in the 13th y

ear of his reign, and then there are two more monarchs (XII & XIII) and I assume d 100 years total between them. Askthor XIV endured an attack on Chalasi by orcs in the 21st year of his reign, though it is not stated whether or not he was sl ain (depends on how well you play the scenario). Though no timeline is given for the attack of Crythal the Amber (which destroyed the realm of Underearth) some length of time is implied; for Underearth had become a wealthy and stable trade centre surrounded by a "sea of disintegrating kingdoms." One would speculate tha t a minimum of two, and possibly upwards of three or four centuries, had passed. The following scenario involving the fleeing emissaries again implies at least a century or two gap in time, perhaps longer. The very last scenario, which is i mplied as present, states that at least a few and perhaps several centuries have passed, since there is question as to whether or not the dragon even existed... Note that one could easily extend this timeline, if desired. I have presented a date range for each event, and one may choose a "high" or "low" chronology, as desired, or choose a span of time in between.