Help me with my half-baked "mirror universe" plot

With my ice age story arc finally coming to a close, I need to start thinking about what is coming next in the game.

I was insprired by the writeup of mirror realms in the Manual of the Planes. Basically, the concept is that

• There are numerous planes that connect a limited number of mirrors that you can travel to if you have the right spells.
• However, as soon as you enter the plane, a mirror duplicate of yourself is created, with opposite alignment. This mirror self hunts you down and tries to kill you.

Now, before I launch into what I want to do, we must turn our attention to the dramatis personae NPCs of the game:

• The Arcane Alliance: A secret cabal of mages that is determined to bring usher in mages as a ruling class.
• Galea: A female summoner and member of the arcane alliance. Not in the inner circle, but a powerful operative. The party HATES Galea.
• Roetha: A mirror magess, and the former disciple of a now deceased member of the Arcane Alliance. Roetha is now a member of a secret society called the Emerald Brotherhood and is friendly and well known to the party.
• Emerald Brotherhood: A secret society that is concerned with maintaining the safety and security of the people of the land. As such, they actively struggle against the Arcane Alliance and similar organizations.
• Gavannon Alderhard: A knight in service to the same kingdom the PCs serve. They have only met him once, in reality, I have set him up to be a traitor. He is secretly allied with dark elves and follows an evil goddess. I decided a long time ago that his keep would be the site that an artifact called the doom engine would be built

Now this plot doesn't need to be completed immediately; its fruition is a month or two off. But I need to get started setting hooks so it can go off as smoothly as possible.

Now here's the idea. The party has usually been able to handle their problems in a fairly straightforward fashion (i.e., find out what the bad guys are up to, find a way to stop them, thrash them) so I was going for something a little more complicated and memorable here.

The basic thing that I want to do is this. Galea as she exists in the campaign is not the real Galea. For that matter, Gavannon Alderheart, the lord of Drake Keep, is not the real Gavannon Alderheart.

Here's the backstory I have settled on so far:
Galea and Gavannon were good kind hearted people who met and fell in love and were betrothed. However, for some reason I have yet to decide, they made their way into a mirror plane and were slain by their mirror selves. The mirror selves escaped, and have taken the place of their good reflections. They are also no longer betrothed, but have went their separate ways.

Now, ideally, I want the party to stumble on this fact. Ressurecting the real Galea and Gavannon is a possibility, but ultimately not required. The ultimate point of the adventure/story arc would be for the party to discover that Galea is not the real Galea and through that, discover that there is a traitor in their midst, and thus create a convenient segue into the adventure where the party takes on Gavannon and quests against the drow.

Now the question is, how to do this in an adventure-maximizing way.

One way would be for the Roetha to let the party know about a mirror she has found that she knows is linked to a mirror owned by a member of the Arcane Alliance, and she might provide them with a spell that will let them traverse the mirror and they run into the corpses of the real Galea and Gavannon. As intruiging as that sounds, I am having a problem deciding how I could work that event into the game and am planning on forgoing the trip into the mirror plane as knowledge that they were there, came out changed, and the nature of the plane (however they discover that information) would be sufficient.

Another possibility is that an honor obsessed relative (or former love) who knows Galea has been searching for her, and finds that the party beleives her to be a criminal. He challenges the party to defend her honor. The party is high enough level that any one of them could scrag this NPC easily. But the party, if astute, will soon learn that not only is this individual not evil, but quite certain in the conviction that Galea is a woman with a good heart and it genuinely pains him to see a good woman slighted as he sees it.

Once they discover this, then perhaps they might explore a little, and if they ask the right questions they might discover that she was once betrothed of Gavannon and start asking him questions (not knowing that he shared her fate), they might learn from Roetha the nature of the mirror plane, and eventually stumble on the fact that both of them are mirror-dopplegangers.

That is where I am standing. I am trying to tie this together and am having a little trouble. Any ideas?

Well, I could see where someone could possible be wanting to replace a lot of people with their mirrors, migrating their race.

The other is the other way around, where the mirror realm is trying to grather those that have gone missing. This could be part of the doom engine, an unbalance between them.

What happens to a mirror person if they cross over again? Does the dead come back to life or is it another mirror?

Hand of Evil said:

Well, I could see where someone could possible be wanting to replace a lot of people with their mirrors, migrating their race.

The other is the other way around, where the mirror realm is trying to grather those that have gone missing. This could be part of the doom engine, an unbalance between them.

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Eh. Not looking to really use the mirror universe as anything but a plot hook to make the party question their hatred of an enemy and explain why a loyal knight became a turncoat. I am still entertaining the possibility that the party might have to go in and retreive the bodies and ressurect them... but I don't have a good motivation for them to do so yet.

What happens to a mirror person if they cross over again? Does the dead come back to life or is it another mirror?

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I'm not sure that the MotP says, but I don't think the old person would come back to life, entropy being what it is. I might let a new mirror be created, or simply make it so that nothing at all happens. If that is the case, the mirror selves would likely consider that an attractive form of transit, as anyone trying to follow them would have to face their own reflections, while the mirror selves could travel with impunity.

Interestting Psion.

Heres what i had in mind.

Have this Mirror Mage they know inform them of what the Mirror Plane is (after explaining to them about the linking mirrors tothe arcane order).

PCs are smart enough to know that when LG person 1 has a CE Spawn, what happens when CE Spawn walks through a mirror? Does a LG spawn take place?

Of course!!

But wait! A paradox you say?

Exactly!!

You need to get the PCs to trick this evil Galea into crossing a mirrored threshold. She will then spawn the good counterpart of herself. The PCs will need to kill the evil galea.

Now granted the good Galea MAY not be the original ... but then again, if she has her memories, she mayknow where the real one is buried to be reserected, and give the PCs enough information to nail Alderhard ...

Hmmm...

I looked over the plane last night. It says that if you kill your mirror self in a given mirror plane, you never have to worry about your mirror self on that plane again. I think the way I'll run it is that the same applies to mirror versions -- they don't spawn new mirror versions from the same mirror plane. (They could spawn one from other mirror planes, but I don't want to go there.)

Now another thing caught my attention. It states that the mirror planes can be used to access planes that you could not otherwise access.

The players have been to the sanctum of the arcane alliance. It is effectively compromised. So say they abandon it, and they find one that is otherwise innaccesable. So, let's say that there is a demiplane that can only be reached through one of the mirrors that the arcane alliance had prepared some time ago as an "ultimate sanctum." Roetha's former master used it as a hideaway, but he was eventually killed. However, Galea and Gavannon died while exploring the mirror universes that he left behind. Mirror Galea returned, and offered both her services to the Arcane Alliance, and told them of the secret sanctum.

Using the mirror universe has several benefits. First, as mentioned above, it can only be approached through the mirror universe.

Second, it has a very powerful security feature. Since Galea can return to the mirror universe with impunity, she offers to accompany all the members of the arcane alliance to the mirror universe to ensure that they can defeat their mirror selves. However, anyone wishing to pursue them will get stuck facing themselves...

Third, the mirror universe connects perfectly normal mirrors. The mirrors can be transported various places in the world and be used as access points. However, they are not magic and no one could detect them as access points to the specific mirror universe.

Finally, the mirror universe might be used as a tool by the arcane alliance. They identify good spellcasters, like the ones in the party ( ), and use the mirror universe in the attempt to create mirror versions of them that might be pliable to their organization.

Heh... actually, this is quite insidious. Even if the party learns about the mirror universe thing and gain the spell, only the arcane alliance members know which mirrors are connected. They can disguise the "important" mirrors by putting up a scad of mirrors, so the party doesn't know which mirror universes they have already conquered.

So here's what I am thinking: if the party wants to take on the arcane alliance, eventually the question will come up of where the arcane alliance is hiding now. They track down some AA members and discover that every arcane alliance safehouse has a number of mirrors in it -- perhaps a fleeing AA member uses one to escape. They will in all likelihood go to Roetha, and she can tell them about the mirror universes and possibly ever provide them with the spell.

Still not quite a complete plot, but it is getting there. One question of tantamount importance is what kind of "out" can I give the party to ensure that they can survive a confrontation with themselves?

Psion said:

One question of tantamount importance is what kind of "out" can I give the party to ensure that they can survive a confrontation with themselves?

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The mirror party won't have as much experience truly working with each other. Sure, their abilities are the same, but the new group won't be able to compensate for their deviant alignments.

So the cleric will cast other spells instead of healing. The mage might catch the fighter in the blast radius of the fireball assuming he could "take it". The (chaotic!) monk might charge into combat leaving the rest of the mirror party in his wake.

Another solution is to gyp the mirror party on magic items. Say they sold a bunch of them to get established in the world.

Hope that helps!

A commonly-heard complaint about evil PCs is that they don't work well as a team. This can also hold for evil mirror-PCs -- so they don't coordinate, get isolated, and get bushwhacked individually.

Or, they don't have the exact same items as the party has. Maybe they only have +1 weapons instead of +2, or don't have the same miscellaneous magic, or don't have any scrolls/potions.

Or, they're really simulacra as per the spell, and have 51%-60% of the real PC's abilities and hit points. (Whatever that means.)

Thanks all.

Well, I am thinking if the party knows about this effect ahead of time, forwarned is forearmed. Perhaps what they could do if they are clever is simply trade items before they enter the mirror universe, and then trade back. The mirror selves, from what I can see, are created individually vice as a team (or even if they are, the party might go in separately), so they aren't in a position to trade. So the thief has the rod of maximazation and the sorcerer has the magic bow, then the mirror version that get created are not fully equipped unless they bump into each other.

Hmmm...

Just curious.... in this mirror realm are you also doing the inverse of an Ice Age as its climate? Are you using ths Extreme green house effect which ususlly brought on an Ice Age for this?

Of course I could be out in left field.... I'm at work and haven't a copy of MotP here.

Limper said:

Just curious.... in this mirror realm are you also doing the inverse of an Ice Age as its climate? Are you using ths Extreme green house effect which ususlly brought on an Ice Age for this?

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It sounds like

1) You are thinking of the Doppel cosmology, not the mirror plane. Mirror plane isn't a reflection of the PCs plane, but rather an independant transitive plane that creates mirror versions of PCs who actually enters. There are multiple mirror planes, each one of which connects 5d4 mirrors. The mirror planes are rather small in size and are composed of relatively featureless corridors.

2) You think I am talking about my Ice Age world Aphrodomis. My current group of PCs aren't actually from that world, but are just visiting. They should be going back to my world Trinalia as of this week if all goes right (crosses fingers.) All of the characters listed for this plot are in Trinalia, and most of the action will occur there.