Radit’s side of the story.
An adventuring party crosses from the sixth to seventh Ringworld of Midgard.
The old rules limiting development have collapsed with Asgard’s fall.
Only a generation ago a hunt would be taboo on the Ninth, as would a hamlet or farming on the eighth. Only by the seventh could there be settlements if any significance and only by the sixth could there be a sense of territory or true trade between towns. By the sixth there were tithes paid to inner Ringworld powers for protection.
At five the first cities appeared. At four a battlefield of nations. At three empires rule. At two there is a single authority. At one it is the administration.
With the collapse of rules the outer rings are being invaded, conquered. Inner powers are desperate for territory as they are pushed out be inner more power.
At the heart is an invasion of the Ring One administration from the aliens that conquered Asgard and shattered the Bifrost that made controlled connection between rings of the same number between realms easy and stable. Now it is wild.
A year, only a year has passed since the invasion started. The first Ringworld of Asgard, home of the Aesir fell, conquered within a season. Then the invasion spread outward, speeding up from ring to ring.
The rings of the realms of the World Tree spin at faster and faster speeds moving outward. Time for each is relative. A year in the first Ringworld of any realm is a two-hundred fifty six years in the ninth or a hundred twenty eight in the eighth.
While the ninth rings of the nine realms tend to be the most wild and untamed, the eighth is a good compromise for game and safety.
The seventh is where the toughest live.
The sixth is both the prey of the seventh and their lifeblood in trade.
Sixty four years in the seventh for one year in the first. Thirty two years for the sixth. Getting down to a generation.
Asgard stopped enforcing the rules well before the year was up, and incursions pushed outward before there was a desperate need.
The sixth within a decade local time had actual armies ceasing land and rapidly expanding. The fifth ringworld found itself competing with the fourth.
Once the pressure came, the fifth ringworld became a massive battlefield and the sixth was quickly developed.
This pushed development into the seventh and finally into the eighth and even the nineth.
At the start of the invasion when the Bifrost was broken bits of the ringworlds got mixed up, not just from one ringworld to another within the same realm, but across realms. This continued sporadically. The first were called dungeons. Finite in number they could hold great treasure and also great peril. The second are called gates. They connect to the other place for a time and can leave behind a new dungeon. Going though can mean being stuck in another ringworld or even another realm.
