D&D General Adventures into the multiverse

[The Mirrorball Man]

D&D’s unique ruleset and multiple settings make it very easy to tell stories where characters from one universe end up somewhere else. One could say that Planescape and Spelljammer both offered ways to make that even easier.

Have you ever tried anything like that? Is it something you’re interested in or something you would never ever try? Do you have ideas, concepts, wishes?

A group of cynical adventurers from Greyhawk transported in bright and idealistic Faerûn?

A lonely Warforged from Eberron lost deep in the Dark Sun desert?

A villain from Ravenloft wanting to ascend to godhood on Theros?

An astronaut from our universe, hit by a radiation wave and shot through a wormhole, lost in some distant part of the multiverse called Mystara, aboard an airship full of strange life forms?

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

My suggestion is the time spheres from the AD&D 2nd sourcebook "Chronomancer". Even this could become a transitional setting. Do you imagine fandom publishing their own time-spheres ( = uchrony or parallel worlds) of Dragonlance in DM Guild?

Other idea is something like a "ideaverse" or "akasha realm", a demiplane created by the memorie of the sentient creatures, a copy of the pasts in the way how this is remembered (but maybe not how really happened). This last option could allow "travels to the past" without worry about temporal paradoxes.

About Ravenloft is easier to enter than the exit. Possible but not easy, and a bird has told me usually in the last times the people who run away from the demiplane of the dread arrive to Innistrad. Some pieces of fandom say Ravenloft is a weekend in the hell.

 

[GlassJaw]

I did some brainstorming on a campaign that was a mashup of Planescape and Spelljammer, with lots of weird tech a la Chaositech and Arcana of the Ancients.

Basically there was a massive cataclysm (war between an ancient civilization and elder beings/gods) that shattered the planes of existence. Realizing they couldn't defeat the elder beings, they attempted to create planar "prisons", but in doing so, royally screwed the planar pooch so to speak. Each plane became a self-contained sphere that "floats" is the phlogiston, some of which still imprison the elder beings.

Each sphere is very unique and has a specific theme, sort of like Star Wars planets (water world, fire/lava, forest, desert, etc).

Over millennia, people have started to uncover tech used by the ancient people, including spelljamming (allowing ships to travel through the phlogiston) and ways to detect gates, which are safe passages between the planes. Some powerful tech can also create gates for a short time.

There are still only a few population centers, which are usually near stable gates. Passage through is heavily protected and regulated. Survival is hard, as food, water, and fuel,are hard to come by. Many factions vie for control of the gates and seek new sources of ancient tech. Some cults have arisen that seek to locate and release the elder gods from their prisons.

It's very much a kitchen sink setting - Mad Max, Star Wars, Dying Earth, Cthulhu, etc, etc.

Edit: I never really had any interest in crossing settings per se though, at least not traditional fantasy (like Greyhawk to FR for example). Transporting the PCs to Dark Sun would definitely be interesting though, especially if they were unaware of it beforehand (very Barsoom). It's definitely my preferred way to send hapless PCs to Ravenloft though!

 

[R_J_K75]

We based most of our campaigns in Faerun but branched off into Spelljammer, Planescape, & Ravenloft from there. Forgotten Realms often had references to all 3 in the modules and source books. There was even 2 adventures the crossed over from Faerun to Ravenloft. The opening passage of the Lands of Intrigue; Tethyr book places the Rock of Bral from the Spelljammer setting in the Tears of Selune from the Realms. As the Realms is littered with portals, especially Undermountain, its almost a given that at some point the partys going to end up in some far off distant place.

 

[wingsandsword]

Our campaigns are typically a mix of Forgotten Realms and Planescape.

Faerun is treated as the default, baseline adventuring territory. . .but characters from Zakhara or Kara Tur, or even Maztica (but that doesn't come up much ) are considered quite normal, and in the mid-to-high levels the game usually takes a distinctly planar take with more time on the planes, and potentially at least minor crossovers with other parts of the multiverse (about half the time a campaign playing around Halloween will have a visit to Ravenloft, for example), or a game might have a brief stopover on another prime material world like Krynn or Athas. Spelljamming stuff is at least mentioned to exist, but the games generally leave it as an "offscreen" mention.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Sometimes I imagine a planar gate in Athas and this is toward a different dessert planet, and this also can be visited by people of the island of Jakandor and also the Hollow World of Mystara, and some "Hyrborean"-look plane of Magic: the Gathering.

 

[Quickleaf]

Yeah, a long time ago I ran a long-running Planescape campaign with the following premise: Not-Ancient Egyptian tribe/town vanished mysteriously, and actually ended up in the Outer Planes. Unraveling the mystery of what happened involved some time travel where a PC inhabited the consciousness of an ancestor (so basically like Assassin's Creed before that became a thing), and it turned out the PC made the critical choice which led to the planeshift of the entire tribe/town.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I did some brainstorming on a campaign that was a mashup of Planescape and Spelljammer, with lots of weird tech a la Chaositech and Arcana of the Ancients.

Sounds fun. Is this online anywhere?

 

[GlassJaw]

Sounds fun. Is this online anywhere?

Is what online? Chaositech and Arcana of the Ancients are Monte Cook products. Chaositech is from the d20 days and Arcana is a 5E book based on his Numenera setting.

 

[jayoungr]

D&D’s unique ruleset and multiple settings make it very easy to tell stories where characters from one universe end up somewhere else. One could say that Planescape and Spelljammer both offered ways to make that even easier.

Have you ever tried anything like that?

For the past couple of years, I've been running a world-hopping campaign in which the PCs are all from different worlds. I told the players anything that counts as fantasy is open for character concepts, and almost every player has at least two characters. Here are some of the characters who hail from recognizable settings:

A Jedi (homebrew class)
A Draenei shaman from the Warcraft universe (homebrew class)
A "magical girl" from an anime-inspired alternate Earth (blade pact warlock)
An abjurer from the Forgotten Realms (wizard)
A shugenja from Rokugan (homebrew)
A teashop owner from Per-Bastet in the Southlands of Midgard (college of glamour bard)
A drow evangelist of Lolth from a slightly modified Gothic Earth/Masque of the Red Death (college of whispers bard)

Their home base is a pocket dimension envisioned as roughly one part Hollow Earth (as seen in Hollow Earth Expedition) and one part the junk planet from Thor: Ragnarok.