The Eternal Champion Meta-Campaign
 

I have a nasty DM condition called switchcampaignitis. Its afflicted me for years. I get bored with a campaign setting usually long before it runs its projected course. The trouble is I get hooked by cool, atmospheric campaigns and games and want to switch to them. This is unfair to the players of course.

So I've been in another rut of late, not liking my homeworld's direction. I've been wanting to switch to Greyhawk again (and run the Elemental Evil campaign), and play Deadlands, and do a more horrific campaign setting.

That's when I remembered a Dragon article a ways back about this very problem. So I fished it out: from way back in April 2000, issue 270 (pre-3rd edition) is the article "When Worlds Collide" by James Wyatt.

The article mentions 3 possibilities for letting fickle DMs play in different worlds. These were:

(1) The world-spanning organization-elite adventurers who travel across space and time on missions.
(2) Shifting worlds-unexplainably and mysteriously, characters shift from one universe to the next.
(3) The Eternal Champion-Across countless universes, there is the eternal champion, going by different names on different worlds (aka Elric).

After reading this, I decided. The eternal champion idea is pretty good and meets my needs. I like it because PCs make a character tree of 3 or more (depending on the number of worlds you use) characters. At any one time you only play one, but whenever you level up, the others on the tree level up at the same time.

So I decided to use the Eternal Champion idea with three campaigns:

(1) Greyhawk (Temple of Elemental Evil)
(2) My own re-tooled campaign world, given a more horrific bent
(3) Deadlands d20

And to tie it all together, an overarching theme (which I can't divulge).

Anyone else tried this? Something similar? Comments?

character tree
 

This isnt the first idea that has come from multiple characters like that. Darksun had something similiar. From my point of view however, I would probrably give the non played characters about half of the experience the played one recieves. True this will slow advancement down some, but it will also keep the players wanting to switch characters every so often.

I may just suggest this to a freind of mine that has the same problem. He comes up with a lot of good ideas (too many) and wants to use them all when he DMs. Of course when he is playing, he is the same way with characters.

I use option 2. (Characters myseriously move from world to world), since I like the Elric novels

The Elric novels actually use 2 & 3. While there are many incarnations of the Eternal Champion (Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, etc), they also end up travelling to other worlds/universes, often meeting each other.

Like the recent novel, Elric meets the eternal champion of this world (maybe) and ends up in WW2

Of the four main incarnations of the Eternal Champion, Erekose is the only one to be "called" to different worlds (it was the same world in the future for Corum!).

The others travelled to other worlds in the way that characters might travel the planes.

I should point out that Gary Gygax sort of confirmed Gord as an Eternal Champion Incarnation in the White Wolf Anthology Pawns of Chaos.

So putting an Eternal Champion into Greyhawk is reasonable. ;-)

More comments?