Worlds Enough

Universes are quite small things. Titchy, really.  Not that they necessarily seem so, of course, when viewed from the inside; their inhabitants tend to speak of vistas and infinities.  Yet from the appropriate wider perspective they are really, really small.

Milton knew this. In Paradise Lost, Satan, whom Blake identified as Milton’s hero, following his defeat in the battle with heaven, goes through many challenges, traversing the storms and seas of mighty chaos, passing hints of other worlds, before landing on a small, glowing sphere.  He enters within, to find inside our whole Universe.   Milton’s Universe, with all its stars and planets, the great spaces within which Earth abides.

(As an aside, Milton rather dodged the question of whether the Earth sat at the centre of that Universe; it was too controversial a subject in his time).

When compared with the grandeur and complexity of Milton’s cosmos, a single Universe can appear a little insignificant.  Of course, it is his argument that that insignificance is misleading: even the attitude and actions of single person matters.  But that sense of a grand design remains throughout his epic.

Milton wasn’t the only one to use this image.  The mystic, Julian of Norwich – who also wrote And all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be exceeding well – found the universe in a hazelnut.

Hamlet suggests something similar in his madness:  I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Milton, however, also tells of places outside the universe; in some fashion, he prefigures the multiverse.

As above, so below.  We argue that you can consider at least some of the multiple settings of roleplaying games in the same way, and that this is particularly true of the big daddy of them all, D&D.  From the original Blackmoor setting, to the sprawling Greyhawk universe, and Forgotten Realms, to the more  explicitly self-contained worlds such as Eberron.  Each a Miltonic Universe.

But these published worlds barely scratch the surface.  Many, many further worlds have been created by individual referees, building multiple scenarios and even whole universes, to entertain their players.

Small worlds contain multitudes.