What is a warpgate?
A warpgate is a transportation mechanism that is natural to the Multiverse. Although vastly faster than most methods of transportation, warpgates do have transit times; it's usually twenty minutes from entry point to exit point. Warpgates naturally appear after Unification, and those that are naturally-occurring cannot be destroyed or meaningfully interfered with. Artificial warpgates are possible, and reasonably common.
What does a warpgate look like?
Historically on MCM, warpgates have just been portals. We're changing things up a little! A warpgate most commonly resembles a fantastical version of a familiar form of transportation to its locale. It is always consistently reachable and always usable by a significant number of people without causing congestion, and cannot be prevented from performing its function. It is often visibly anomalous regardless of relative familiarity, and is a common reason for a world to become aware of the Multiverse.
Examples:
It is possible to make artificial warpgates; this technology was discovered during the Gate Wars. Artificial warpgates are almost always portals, since that's a practical format to make them in and it can be difficult to imitate the appearance and functionality of natural warpgates which, however fantastical, definitely blend in more on average.
How far does a warpgate take you?
Warpgates take you to one of a finite number of nearby warpgates; these will usually be adjacent major cities, with some cities having 'border gates' that lead to another world in the Multiverse. Similar to taking the train, you might have to change routes to get where you're going. Each world is also part of a world family connected to what is called a Patch, a piece of the physical Multiverse where infrastructure from several physically bordering worlds has blended together into a usable state (usually no smaller than a city) with a unique set of warpgates that allow quick travel from the Patch to anywhere else within the family, as well as to any exterior warpgate that borders the family at any point. From the Patch, it's no more than an hour to any other warpgate in or adjacent to the Patch's family.
All warpgates within a family can reach their Patch within twenty minutes in theory, but inbound requirements are usually more tricky. Professional warpgate pathfinders are aware that every warpgate in a family DOES connect to the family's Patch, but usually a patch key is required. A patch key is usually some small ritual action that reroutes the destination; the rough equivalent of heading for 'the second star to the right and straight on 'til morning', but each warpgate has its own patch key and finding it can be a challenge.
While Patches can be physically searched for outside of the warpgate network itself, the quickest way to find them is to search for a Corner. Corners are nodes found on world peripheries that only ever have four connections.
Examples of Patch Keys:
If you have access to your local warpgate's patch key, you can reach one of your neighboring worlds within 40 minutes of entering your local warpgate. If you don't have access to your local patch key, you have to transit through multiple gates at a speed of around 20 minutes per leg, until you reach a gate that has an off-world connection point. If you're central to your world, you might have to spend an hour or two just getting to the peripheries; convenient off-world travel is the domain of the exterior edges of a world.
This is why warpgate route finding and patch key discovery is important enough to be a dedicated profession.
What is experienced while using a warpgate?
Generally, transit is experienced according to the form of the warpgate itself. If you board a bus or train or enter a cab, you ride them. Portal-type warpgates enter a sort of otherdimensional tunnel that act like moving travelators/moving sidewalks; though the effort a person puts into moving through them doesn't change the transit time.
The original formation of the Multiverse was over four centuries ago, at which time the scope of it was more limited and Unifications were happening at a much slower pace. It was still unthinkably huge enough to generate such unwieldy organizations as the Ascendancy and the Union, which coalesced out of the early Gate Wars and collapsed in A.U. 26. During the Gate Wars (B.Z.E. 10-374) the warpgate network functioned more as a seamless mesh, with every warpgate having the capacity to transport somebody from their entry point to any other warpgate in the Multiverse. Control over the warp gate network was the primary concern of all powers during that time, and when it seemed that the Ascendancy was poised to secure victory, a battle within a mysterious region of the Multiverse known as the Volatile Wastes coincided with a mass disconnection event that permanently lowered warpgate connectivity range. Many travelers who were far afield were stranded abroad, a situation that so completely shattered presumed supply and transport lines that it would take sixteen years to fully resolve.
The warpgate disconnection phenomena that ended the Gate Wars caused the network to obtain railway-like properties, with an entry point -- a node -- connecting to a finite number of neighboring nodes within a certain distance. Where before anyone could go practically anywhere important within twenty minutes, they would now have to string nodes with relevant connection points together-- and each change would add another twenty minutes on to the transit time. The current calendar, "After Unification", began one year after the disconnection phenomena. In addition to changing how travel in the Multiverse worked forever, a drastic increase in Unifications centered on what is now known as Sector Zero were recognized. The other Sectors became defined primarily by being comparatively stable, seeing the same rate of unifications as was the norm prior to the warpgate disconnection phenomena.
In the years that followed the disconnection phenomena, it became the practice of monoliths like the Ascendancy and Union to consolidate their primary operations facilities within a type of region that would come to be known as a Patch. Patches are regions of the Multiverse where several neighboring worlds share a border and which mysteriously host infrastructure that reflects a fusion of these world's styles. Although filled with functioning infrastructure, Patches were uninhabited when they came into being and were avoided as potentially haunted or cursed. What the great alliances of the time discovered was that warpgates within the Patches connected to their world cluster almost as well as the original style of warpgate network did, allowing 20-minute round-trip transit to or from the Patch to any warpgate within its family.
Armed with this knowledge, and working to keep it secret, the Ascendancy and Union took control of key Patches in Sector Zero and hoarded the things that made worlds special within them. The relative mobility of these organizations was believed to be a consequence of their hoarded secrets, but when those same secrets caused a collapse of these groups in A.U. 26 it prompted the beginnings of a sector-wide re-examination of Patches.
In the last nine years, experiments in occupying the 'pre-generated infrastructure' of Patches have proceeded quietly. As of A.U. 36 (RL 2026), the Concord, Paladins, and Watch are in the process of launching an education program to convince world clusters to form official connections using their Patches.
File added November of 2025.