Happy New Year, fellas!

[@BBeast] we don't deserve you, but we sure do need you. :lol

In my mind I've been imagining things by your Galbaric Middle model for much of this time, but our talk the other day about option B does lend me to favor the Upper/Lower model by forcing any of the 'Galbar-parallel' Spheres to choose to be nominally Upper or Lower. Before the distinction would have been rather arbitrary, but it is made more impactful and significant by your proposed Upper/Lower model in that it restricts direct connections.

The disadvantage of the Galbaric Middle is that it introduces significantly more complexity to an already potentially confusing system. Having a divide between the Upper/Lower gods along the lines of the Aesir and Vanir, Aedra/Daedra, or any other example was a topic I found intriguing and was a primary reason behind me conceptualizing the distinction. Where would the middle gods under Galbaric Middle fit into this? Would they be neutral and of neither side? That might make the whole thing less thematic, but then again, I expect that some gods won't really see the universe in such a divisive way and won't care so much about exactly where any other given god lives so much as what said other god does.

IC the reason to justify not adhering to the strict hierarchy model is to simply say that even though the Spheres like [i]do[/i] fall into some rough hierarchy based upon height relative to Galbar, there's enough empty space between them to enable a direct physical length (or even a magical gateway) to bypass any intermediary Spheres and link straight to Galbar. As a practical example, if we divided the solar system into Spheres then the moon would definitely be encompassed within a Sphere below that of the much more distant planets like Mars. However, there's enough empty space in the Cosmos to bypass the moon and travel straight to Jupiter without landing on any celestial bodies along the way. OOC, the reasons for not adhering to the strict hierarchy were covered pretty well by BBeast. I don't think it's a feasible system even if it makes a lot of sense thematically.

I favor Upper/Lower over Unrestricted Connections because I don't see a reason to throw the categorizations out altogether, and with unrestricted connections I think the universe would ironically feel a lot more disjointed and [i]less[/i] connected. Even if it wasn't more nebulous in practice, it'd feel that way; I imagine it would seem like we have Galbar plus a bunch of random pocket universes, separate planes similar to the current private planes of Mk. 2.

Re: Portals, I find no disagreement in any of what you said, and I do like the idea of imposing some sort of difficulty condition along the lines of examples.