Thoughts on changing the tone from undead-horror to unknown-horror

Is Maeleff a world, in the way we think of one? A roundish planet hovering in space somewhere around a star? Do I need to be that... I don't know, mundane? Literal?

I might make it a flat world, with the "outer edges of the universe" being the far reaches of the flat plane, encircling a small island of order. But I do't want to have to figure out the physics of that.

I've said before that the gods found Maeleff as a raw natural world, file with animals but no intelligent life, and changed some of the animals into the intelligent races. Buy what else did they do to shape the world?

Ideas:

- no molten core, the gods changed the core into pure magic. That's where magic power comes from, and where mist of their blood now resides.  Thus it's not really a well of magic, it's a literal sphere of liquid power, with a denser liquid core if corruption.

- the planet below the surface was changed extensively over time, for whatever incomprehensible purposes the gods had. The entire crust and mantle is riddled with tunnels, huge caverns and cavern complexes, occasional decaying artifacts and incomprehensible machines, some of them incomprehensibly large, and all of then incomprehensible in purpose. Along with other things, this gives a reasonable excuse for the prototypical dungeon crawl.

- the gods cut Maeleff off from the rest of the universe when they were alive, but their walls fell when they did.  Stars and sun only became visible when the gods died, before that the surface had patches of light or darkness as the god willed.  Mages and academics are only now starting to really look at the universe outside their world and form theories about it.  For some years, it was believed that the sun was what killed the gods, and the stars were the gods' dead souls. Now we are unsure.

- the gods were simply another race, from another world. An old, old race, decadent and powerful, that had traveled the galaxy for uncountable eons performing experiments and changing worlds before moving on.  The creation of magic, and ultimately of the virus that killed them, were the first truly new things they had done for millions of years. One of their number had continued to explore the universe, and came to its absolute edges, where things broke down into insanity without form or natural law, and strange, directionless and shapeless power. He brought some o that strange stuff back, and the gods studied it, and from it they crafted magic. Unknown to the rest if the gods, that one explorer also brought something else back, the very thing that eventually killed them.

- magic is in everything and is a part of everything, but that was not always the case, the gods simply made it so. They were so enamored with their new creation that they bound it to life force somehow. In a sense, the sphere of power at the planet's core is thus in some sense a vast ocean of life force.

Think very carefully before making this change:

- magic is just shapeless power - like electricity that responded to will and intelligence.  The Blood of the Gods however is something else. It is, in some sense, alive. A parasitic organism, a virus, that lives for no purpose other than to spread itself.