📖What it means

A whole tier of the Carolverse world, above cities. It is the world's own geography, not an access boundary — being in a realm grants nothing.

REALMS BELONG TO A DOMINION. Each dominion owns its own distinct realms, recorded per dominion; a dominion forked from another may keep the realms it inherited exactly as they are, or rename them. Renaming one is a change to the record, never to code, and both the agent addresses and the map follow it because both read the same record.

A realm is where a DEPARTMENT lives: an agent's address is derived from its department, which resolves through its dominion's realm record to a city, a realm and a street. A realm may house no department at all — the Ashen Wastes hold only the Dark Factory. A department no realm houses is reported by name as unplaced rather than being quietly given the capital.

📖Easily confused with

[{"term": "Realm of control", "distinction": "A realm is geography; realm of control is what an agent may act on. Same word, unrelated."}, {"term": "Dominion", "distinction": "A dominion is a whole installation of the platform; a realm is a tier of geography INSIDE one. Each dominion has its own realms, and two dominions may use the same realm name for different places."}]

📖Nuance

Realms used to be a hardcoded table inside the address code, shared by every dominion by construction. That could not survive dominions: a forked dominion has to be able to rename its own geography without a code change.

📖Also called

- tier of the world
- plane

📖Filed under

Category: general.

Service: Governance.