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Message: <blockquote data-quote="random user" data-source="post: 1650249" data-attributes="member: 16581">Sure, the post was getting long enough as it was that I didn't want to make it any longer.After my players leveled for the first time, they experienced their first group dream.  No one in the lands had ever had them before, to their knowledge.  This had the added benefit of giving them an in-character reason for remaining together.After that happened, they started asking around, and they found an expert in sleep and dream research.  He traveled to him, but had leveled again in the meantime, and had another group dream.  When they talked to him they found out that about 5000 years ago, there was another reported incident of people who had group dreams.  (In fact, those people went out to create the doomed city the party later visted in both the past and present...)He had no idea how to recreate the dreams, but told them that he would like the opportunity to study them the next time they thought they would have the group dream.  He also noted that he had been doing experiments with subjects with deep trance-like states which sounded similar, although on an individual level.He hypothesized that also using the same setup for the characters might affect them.  For his experiments, he does the following: He gets blessed incense candles from a temple, an uncut topaz which has only been out of the earth for a year or less, and 1/5 of a potion of confusion (custom cursed magic item, causes the drinker to be confused as per the spell).  The potion is hard to get ahold in the general population, and unless you have a permit, will land you in prison.Pour the liquid and the gem into a bowl on a suspension (or find another way to get the candles under it).  Light the candles (they are fairly large) under the bowl.  Be in an enclosed setting so that the vapors won't all escape.  The liquid won't boil over, but the heat will create some vapors.  Breathe in the vapors and do the mental exercies he advises.The next time the party leveled, they went back to him and let him do the experiment on them before they went to sleep.  Whether it worked or not was unclear, but the characters found themselves facing a choice of a door they had seen before (the path back to the dreams they previously had) or a castle they had never seen.  They chose the castle and ended up in city 5000 years ago.So there are potentially (my players may be reading this so I don't want to get more specific) many ways for my party to experience alternate scenarios.Yeah Eberron is just the flavor of the day.  I'm not likely to do that either.  But I did forget to mention that don't forget you can drop them into the future as well as the past.  The "present" and "future" are really relative, after all.For my campaign, each scenario will play out differently.  For the gestalt, they will all have their own stats.  When the time gets closer that they might want to do this, I will ask them create a N-level single class character.  They will be able to reference both sheets to determine which is better for any particular score.I wouldn't rule out altering stats, weapons, etc, for other scenarios.  There's a lot of freedom here, and I don't know if any book that has a specific ruleset to cover options here.The very first dream scenario was railroaded onto them, but I had told them when the campaign started that there was one thing that was going to happen to them, that they would have choices after that, and that it was the only time they would be forced to do something.  I likened it to being in a caravan and being ambushed by orcs or being in a tavern when a brawl ensues.  It's a one time thing used at the beginning of a campaign, and shouldn't be taken as an indication of the way things will usually run.My PC's do have some control, though they might read this and they aren't sure what methods they have yet, so I don't want to say.   They have limited choices of scenarios based on... something they haven't totally figured out yet.  And the justification is the group dreams.And they also have a mechanism to end each dream if they simply want to hit the eject button.The party actually wandered around through the night trying to figure out where they were (Sola, the name of the city, looked very different back then), then what date it was, and then their names.  Then they were sent away on a mission and the city was destroyed by lizardmen while they were gone (which isn't what happened in reality).  As a note, there is a bard in my party, which has made life a lot easier for them.If the players go back, they will be reset in time, a la Groundhog Day.  Though this time they will know where and who they are, and spent some time making a contact that they will have this time around.  They're still not sure what they are "supposed" to do.There are a lot of methods to generate effects in the real world based on alternate scenarios, no matter how they are created.  One is to provide rewards (xp, stat books, spells which remain memorized after waking (which I will rule can then be scribed to a spellbook), information that leads to rewards (such as hiding a cache of treasure or helping a minor lord become a major player and then say "I give you this ring in secret and ask you to keep it secret, only handing it down to your direct heirs to your lands.  Some day in the distant future, someone may come and describe this ring to you exactly.  When they do so, please help them in any way you can."), etc.  The other is recon info.  You may be able to wander around the castle during peacetime and learn it's defenses.  Back in the present, you need to infiltrate the castle.  You may go back to witness a battle between the BBEG and someone else (or perhaps yourselves in alternate guises) in order to better understand his tactics and weaknesses.I definately think that these scenarios should be uncommon to rare, at least to start.  They do have the ability to bog down a campaign if it is presented too quickly or if there is too much of it.  And they should tie into the campaign if possible.  If you are curious as to the specifics about my campaign, I'd be happy to email you more info.  I just don't want to write down stuff which my players haven't been warned to stay away from.There was also a time-travel thread here recently that I can't seem to find...Edit: found it: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=93728" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=93728</a></blockquote>

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