Gates: Multiple Primes?

[JoeGKushner]

Alright, there are just too many cool campaign settings out.

I'm an old FR player and GM. Love the setting. Find that it has so much material that I can pretty much just toss anything I want into it.

Now however, I've been feeling nostalgic. This may be because Wilderlands is out and Blackmoor is out, but I've been wanting to do some GH too.

However, Iron Kingdoms is really impressing me with it's art and huge core book. My only beef would be no map, but thankfulyl, I have the older book with the map in it.

On another front, one of my friends has Dragonmech. One of the other guys didn't like it and traded for it but the guy who has it now... well, he's loving it. He likes that these aren't slick and fancy anime style mechs, but big old boys that are meant to smash!

So I'm thinking... is it time to go back to Planescape and/or Spelljammer and start doing the multi-campaign thing again? It's been a while since I broke out Greyspace and the Rock of Bral as well as the other books.

What campaign options should I start looking at if I want to incorporate multiple campaigns into one mssive 'Uber' campaign if you will.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

You might take a page from the latest edition of GURPS - they have a setting ("Infinite Worlds") where a civilization (="modern-day Earth") has learned how to travel to parallel universes. They used this to explore different worlds and exploit the resources of uninhabited or thinly inhabited parallels.

Then, sometime later, they made contact with another civilization that learned how to travel parallel worlds - and they are trying to rule the different worlds. Usually from behind the scenes, as they don't have the manpower to do it through brute force, but they can get pretty nasty when required.

"Infinite Worlds" has technological rather than magical plane-hopping (though it does have an evil, magical "Cabal" and psionic dimension-shifting Nazis), but you can steal ideas from it nonetheless.

First of all, come up with a general cosmology: How fit the different worlds with each other? Some might be easily reachable from the next, while others are more difficult to reach - and others still impossible (you have to jump to one or more "intervening" worlds). Try to come up with some sort of "Shiftweb", where the relationships between the various worlds are explained.

Second, come up with one or more dimension-travelling organisations or even civilizations - and why they are keeping the secrets of cheap dimension-travelling to themselves (if everbody did it, the impact on the various campaign worlds would be huge...). One might serve as the "good guys", while others will serve as the villains. Each of them has a different world as their "main base", and each of them has different motivations - and perhaps, means of travel.

That should be enough to get you started. Now throw your PCs into the mix, and see what happens...

 

[Psion]

I am sort of doing just that.

When I got Mearls' Portal and Planes, I was really sucked in by the "River of Worlds" concept. The river of worlds is a "planar pathway" (or in MotP-speak, a transitive plane) that is essentially a great ocean. Other worlds/planes float in it like great bubbles.

I first posted about this campaign concept a long time ago on ENworld. I am turning my attention back to that campaign next week. At last:

Here's the "Sailors on the River of Worlds" thread:
http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=69918

 

[JoeGKushner]

One of the things I'm looking at though, isn't using a sea based campaign. More along the lines of the Riftwar where there are some permanent openings to the different planes. I'm still trying to think through all the implications.

Another option if I did go with the sea bit, is using Freeport like the Vanishing Tower or Tanelorn, both from the various Eternal Champion series.

 

[Psion]

Whatever works. I'm not sure why the seafaring thing appealed to me. It just did.

I think that linking worlds together like this, it's nice to make a certain logic or "crunch" to the method by which the worlds are linked.

 

[JoeGKushner]

You might take a page from the latest edition of GURPS - they have a setting ("Infinite Worlds") where a civilization (="modern-day Earth") has learned how to travel to parallel universes. They used this to explore different worlds and exploit the resources of uninhabited or thinly inhabited parallels.

Then, sometime later, they made contact with another civilization that learned how to travel parallel worlds - and they are trying to rule the different worlds. Usually from behind the scenes, as they don't have the manpower to do it through brute force, but they can get pretty nasty when required.

"Infinite Worlds" has technological rather than magical plane-hopping (though it does have an evil, magical "Cabal" and psionic dimension-shifting Nazis), but you can steal ideas from it nonetheless.

That should be enough to get you started. Now throw your PCs into the mix, and see what happens...

I own the GURPS 4th Edition Slipcase limited edition. It looks nice on my bookshelf. However, they really didn't go into a lot of detail with the Infinite Worlds bit. That's getting it's own setting book isn't it?

 

[jgbrowning]

I'm working on something similiar right now. Basically, there are "paths" that when walked upon by the right people anytime, or by regular people at the right time, or by regular people at the wrong time, take you over the hill in a different way than what normally happens.

joe b.

 

[Psion]

I'm working on something similiar right now. Basically, there are "paths" that when walked upon by the right people anytime, or by regular people at the right time, or by regular people at the wrong time, take you over the hill in a different way than what normally happens.

There's something like that in Portals & Planes, too. Actually, its one take on portals... and thus planar pathways. For example, in the aforementioned campaign, the PCs transit to the River of Worlds by following a certain path in the sea.

 

[jgbrowning]

What's the OGC like in Portals & Planes?.....

joe b.

 

[Psion]

What's the OGC like in Portals & Planes?.....

Being at work, I can't tell you. It's FFG, though, who often aren't the friendliest with OGC.

But then, you can't copyright ideas, can you?