Abdul Alhazred describes Leng as a place where different realities converge, which might explain why its precise location cannot be pinned down.

The Universe can be divided into two broad categories: The Bonelands and the Shadowlands. We live in the Shadowlands. We die in the Bonelands.

The Shadowlands

What is the Shadowlands?

We don’t live in the real world. We live in a fantasy world constructed by our mind. How can this be?

Because we can’t access the real world. Our senses are ridiculously limited in their perceptions. Sight is limited to the so call visible spectrum, unable to see infrared or ultraviolet, radio waves or x-rays. We see thirty frames per second, making the very fast and the very slow virtually invisible to our senses. Our hearing is likewise limited, and our sense of smell fails to notice all kinds of deadly vapors. We can’t perceive radiation, except when it sickens or kills us.

In addition, the idea that our sense will function properly is something frequently disproven, near-sightedness, far-sightedness, blindness, deafness, colorblindness, hallucinations and much more reduce our already limited knowledge of the real world.

And what of our assumptions? Humans don’t come hardwired with the knowledge that an adult possesses, and no two adults accumulate the same body of knowledge, the same cultural baggage, the same heuristics and contexts, stories and biases and on and on.

Locations in the Shadowlands

The Shadowlands adds new locations whenever new information must be recorded into it. The Shadowlands also deepens the features of existing locations, with new areas and features appearing as the story needs them.

The Shadow Seas and the Depths of the Shadowlands

The Shadow Seas are the void in which the realms are bubbles floating in the darkness. The top of the Shadowlands are called the Sunlit Shadowlands, and it is here that the most easily accessed realms floating the void. Below the Sunlit Shadowlands sits the Sunless Shadowlands, and below that the Deep Shadowlands. here are found the Ring and the majority of the Major Realms. Even lower sits the Bottomless and the Abyssal Shadowlands. In these regions float the last of the Major Realms and Hollow Heart. The Abyssal Shadowlands is officially the deepest region of the Shadow Seas, but no Psychonaut has found a lower edge to the Shadow Sea, so this remains in question.

The reader should remember that all of these descriptions are metaphorical maps rather than geographic ones. The topography of the Shadow Seas and the Shadowlands does not conform to the laws that govern the Bonelands. In the Shallows, the disconnect between the reality of the Bonelands and the unreality of the Shadowlands is subtle and easy to miss. But the deeper one travels into the Depths, the more rules of narrative causality take hold. In the Shallows, a great deal of effort must be expended to bend the story to one’s will. In the Depths, such narrative manipulation is the rule rather than the exception. The Major Realms are the result of concerted storytelling by one of more groups. But beware, because all conscious minds can do this. And the Hungry Empire devoted much effort to directing its citizen’s minds and their thinking to serve the goals of the Locust King.

Learn more about The Shadow Seas.

The Atlas

The Universe of The Blood Red Dreaming is a Narrative Universe, the universe of the story- the one in which we live every day. The difference between how will normally live- sleepwalking through the shadowlands- and how psychonauts in the Shadowlands live is dramatic. The Psychonaut Sorcerers of the Shadowlands lucid dream through the Worlds of the narrative.

Learn about The Realms
Learn about The Afterlife
Learn about The Outer Ring

The Wasteland

The Grey seeks to enforce order upon what it sees as a disordered world. But the order it seeks as its end goal is lifeless order of a universe in heat death. The goal of the Grey is to speed up entropy until the universe is cold and dark, silent and still. In the short term, the Grey uses the Hungry Empire to achieve this. The Hungry Empire seeks the impossible goal of limitless endless growth. And in so doing, the Empire consumes ever greater amounts of resources, outputing ever greater amounts of energy. The result is a concentration of energy and resources, and indeed surplus, in the immediate vicinity of the Empire. And the side effect is a spreading wasteland at the edges.

The Wasteland both is and is not a separate realm. More accurately a state of decay rather than a place, the Wasteland is the spreading blight that is the result of the Locust King spreading the Hungry Empire across the land to consume everything in an attempt to meet the every increasing demands of the tribute. The Wasteland exists in each of the major realms and is a guaranteed though dangerous method of crossing between those realms directly.

Each of the major realms have been infected by the Wasteland to some degree, though the degree of infection varies. The Foglands are engulfed by the Wastelands, but its strength is fading. Here and there, between cracked pavement and under fallen towers, life returns. The Glass City is nearly drowned in the blight of the Wasteland. Although most inhabitants of the Glass City do not recognize this fact. Only the Frontier Lands survive, and even they show early signs of the spreading Wastelands. In Arcadia, only the immediate area around the Glass Tower and the First City bear the damage of the Wasteland. A promise of times yet to come and an implicit threat leveled against all free tribes. The Painted Labyrinth is free of the taint of the Wasteland as any permanent feature. Here the Wasteland appears as a blight that follows certain Greater Monsters as they prowl through the darkness.

The Wasteland, like the Grey, is not evil. The Wasteland is a result. As famine follows lack of rain, so the Wasteland follows the Hungry Empire. The Wasteland is what happens when a people live in contravention of the Song of Seven. The best analog when thinking about the Wasteland is gangrene. The Wasteland is the infection, the Hungry Empire is the wound.

The Bedlam Wastelands

In addition to the Wasteland with a capital W, the are the Bedlam Wastelands (also with a capital W but you get the idea). These are a series of senile dying realms and planets developing based around other stories. Most Stories are forgotten eventually. And as they are are, their components are stripped from the Major Realms by the Wasteland and separated out into the Realms of Bedlam. When they die, the Bedlam devours what is left. But these vestigial pocket realms can still be found and explored before they vanish.

Additional Reading

Annihilator by Grant Morrison
Multiversity by Grant Morrison
Flex Mentallo by Grant Morrison
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
Animal Man by Grant Morrison

The Bonelands

The dream is removed, I say to you that you shall always and forever know exactly what you are, and just how little that means.

Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Doll’s House

The cold unfeeling infinity of this world of flesh and bone in which we live. The so-called real world, the world of flesh and bone, the world of fact and science- the alien world so far beyond the capacity of the human mind that we created the Shadowlands again and again to escape it.

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.”
-Carl Sagan

The human mind is a small thing, and fragile. The universe on the other hand is vast. Indeed, the universe is vast beyond human imagining. To say that the universe is beyond human comprehension is to undersell the scope of things quite spectacularly. The human skull runs over trying to hold the seemingly impossible scope of the universe. The concept of zero drove men mad. The idea of an infinity universe terrified the wise. The Catholic Church was so threatened that it declared heretical idea of earth as a tiny speck in a small galaxy in an insignificant corner of a universe so vast that light could only trek across it slowly.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
-Carl Sagan

The method be which Science proves its ability to interact with the Bonelands is the one realm where magick has proven itself perfectly inept: Prophecy. Nostrodamus left a series of ambiguous scraps that could mean anything and thus predicted nothing. Several Popes, Gregori Rasputin, and no less than Isaac Newton (in his mystical rather than his scientific writings) all predicted apocalypses that did not happen.

“The richest sciences are those in which we start from simple rules and then go on to very, very long trains of consequences and very long trains of consequences, which you are still predicting correctly.”
-Benoît Mandelbrot

Science on the other hand, has made prophecy it’s test for everything. Science builds it’s theories out of collected facts known about the bonelands. The theory itself is a prophecy machine. The theory is a construct that predicts the future based on the expected interactions of known facts. When the theory is incorrect, the errors are added to the machine (that is the theory itself), and thus the theory makes more accurate predictions in the future. Science has made the art of Prophecy into a craft whose success can be measured and improved.

But science does not simply look forward. It also looks backward, creating prophecies about the past- predicting answers to mysteries of the days gone by.

“Little by little, the universe was subjected to the methods and tools of science, and became a demonstrably knowable place.”
-Neil Degrasse Tyson

The poor magician ignores the theories and prophecies of Science and does not change the holy words of their grimiores and good books. But the wise magus does not limit themselves to stories already proven to be no more than a poorly cast shadow laying strangely across the Bonelands. The stories of the Shadowlands are always wrong, but using the prophecies of Science, said stories can become continuously less wrong.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
– Stephen Hawking