A Sphere (the sphere is fucked up)

[Rombles]

Building a lil' setting for Fabula Ultima, and looking for suggestions about nifty setting elements to add. An overview of what I've got right now:

1. The world is layered (like an ogre), with floating islands forming an upper layer, an Earthlike surface layer, and then an underworld deep underground which is largely the remnants of the previous surface.

2. The world was previously dominated by the Church of None, which teaches that the God who created all things is gone, but continues to worship the guardian angels of the planets, left behind to oversee the cycle of the world.

3. The moon is not one of the nine spheres, though it is ruled by an angelic being. There is a celestial kingdom of fucked-up moon elves living on it, and I hate them.

4. The Church of None has been in retreat from a yet-unnamed magitech empire who have been mining the underworld to power their superior devices. The empire's campaign started in reaction to justified grievances under the old order, but there is some fear that their overuse of magitech might yet cause disaster.

5. Obviously it is going to do that, in the form of a heavy-handed climate change metaphor in which the formation of sky islands increases in pace as the world tries to smush the underworld back down. Sometimes that's just how it goes.

6. Instead of dwarves, there were underground kingdoms populated by dragons, who once were the sole keepers of Underworld Shit thanks to their ability to fly down there and get it without touching the ground (if you touch the ground in the underworld you can't go back up). An embittered dragon may have been responsible for giving the Empire the secret to mining the underworld in the first place.

~~~

Please feel free to give me stupid ideas because there is nothing on earth I like better than doing stupid ideas.

[selkie]

Idea: mad max style raiders in the underworld comprised of magitech miners who oopsied onto the ground before the technology was good enough

[Alewife]

Somebody gets to the core of the planet and it's just smushed down ruins from cycles of exploitation and then they bring the compressed spite diamond up to the the sky islands and portentous events ensue.