Island Realms

The Island Realms are a set of linked evolutions which share the characteristic of having complex populated archipelagos that happen to be connected by inter-realm gateways on at least one of their islands. Many are publically known portals but some are secret and most likely some are undiscovered, so that the full extent of these Realms has never been mapped with certainty. Because of the relative ease of transfer between them, a single quasi unified civilization has arisen across them all but this is more cultural than political or military. The technology available throughout the Island Realms is roughly equivalent to that of late antiquity on Earth Zero (think Roman or Greek cultures).
The Island Realms are considered to be less secure than the Stable Worlds, yet not quite so volatile as the Borderlands since their connections to the Discontinuum, though numerous and complex, appear to be almost totally confined to the connections between them, rather than more dangerous links to deeper archetypes.

Geography

The Island Realms are known to consist of at least thirty four worlds and there is a complex pattern to the graph that describes their connections. The patterns expressed by the gateways, strongly dictate the possibilities for travel, and the distances between the furthest locations are typically far too long for the natives to traverse in "reasonable" timescales, leading to some fragmention of language and culture.
This would be unusual enough in its own right, if it were not for an aspect of the physics of the Island Realms which is completely unique within the local Discontinuum. At regular intervals the end points of the connections change, rewiring the inter realm geometry, sometimes with massive knock on effects for economics and politics. The Stability Council believes that this is an artifical and automatic process, devised and implemented by a mysterious and certainly unknown Power who may no longer be taking an active interest in the working out of their design. A great deal of effort has been expended to analyse the patterns of the changes, with some success. There are certainly seasonal elements that rotate in a known fixed sequence, but above these are higher order patterns operating at frequencies that have yet to be reliably predicted in all cases, despite some promising theories, and perhaps some changes are truly random.
When the gateways change, realms that were hitherto closely connected for purposes of trade and travel, may suddenly find themselves very remote from one another, whilst the converse is also true. Major gateway changes are very disruptive to the civilization of the Island Realms and always require an extensive period of exploration to map the network again afterwards, which can take several years.

History

The Stability Council has long been interested in assisting the cultures of the Island Realms and guarding them from possible incursions from malign Powers lurking deeper in the Discontinuum.
One of their boldest plans was a project known as the Silver Build, in which they sought to construct an energy wall, making transfers from the Borderlands into the Island Realms much harder, without the use of Stability Council tokens. This happened at a particularly unfortunate time, when the culture of the Island Realms had developed some hostility to interference from Earth Stable and ended in an embarassing failure when important Binding Rules were stolen by one of the key contractors in the Construction Project. As a result there is now a distortion matrix affecting all external access to the Island Realms, but fortunately there appear to have been no obvious effects on the inter realm transfer geometry or dynamics.
It is currently very hard to access the Island Realms from outside but the Stability Council is working on ways to recover their ability to travel there more freely.

Type

Multiverse