There is no fast travel. Only choices about how slow.

Why distance is kept

Fast travel solves a problem the rest of this design depends on having. A player-driven economy needs goods to be somewhere rather than everywhere, and needs moving them to cost something real — time, risk, or capacity given up elsewhere.

So the question is never whether to travel. It is what you are willing to trade to arrive sooner, and what you are prepared to leave behind in order to do it.

The ways to travel

On foot you are slow, cheap and carrying only what is on your back. It is the baseline everything else is measured against, and for a great deal of ordinary movement it is entirely adequate.

A wagon is the working answer to bulk. It is slow, it is visible on the road, it needs a route it can actually follow, and it carries the kind of volume that makes a trade run worth making. A carriage trades that capacity back for speed and comfort — a way to move people rather than freight.

A ship is the slowest way to move a very large amount of cargo, and by a wide margin the most efficient. If you are shifting a warehouse, you are shifting it by water and you are planning around the time it takes.

An airship is the inverse: quick, and nearly empty. It buys you arrival at the cost of everything you might have brought with you. Choosing it is choosing to show up with your hands free.

The Aether

The Aether is the layer that makes flight possible in this world, and the constraints it places on airship travel are part of why an airship can be fast and cannot be capacious.

The public description of how it works is still being settled, and this section will be expanded once it is.

This section describes design intent. It will be expanded once the detail is settled.