D&D 5E Multiverse Theory and you

[TerraDave]

That's interesting.

This is not something new by WoTC. Instead, it is more of a return to how D&D always has been. The multiverse was the original ur-D&D setting, and it was commonly accepted and officially acknowledged by the 1e DMG.

I had a series of posts about this a while ago- here's one of them...

D&D General - The Brilliance of the Original Gygaxian Multiverse

Good artists borrow, great artists steal. I was looking at the following conversations in these two threads about the multiverse in D&D, and how that certain Card Game's setting can be incorporated into the D&D multiverse, and, for that matter, how the multiple D&D settings that we are seeing...

www.enworld.org

But have you had a campaign that moves between settings? Not to an outer or inner plane, but to, like, Oerth.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I ran a world hopping campaign somewhere around 1983, heavily influenced by Moorcock, who I was reading a lot at the time. The party adventured across several alternative prime material planes. They where all homebrew - there wasn't much else around at the time.

My current campaign has visited the Feywild, Ethereal and Astral planes, and several demiplanes, but no alternate PMPs as yet.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So I am curious. I have been DMing for decades and I don't know if I have ever used "multiverse" storytelling. While PCs have done some planar travel, especially when I have run Ravenloft or Planescape stories, I don't think I have ever had PCs traveling from one setting to another, as in, I have never had players transported from Krynn to Toril for example. But with the emphasis placed on the concept with recent releases, I am curious. Am I an anomaly?

So have you done worldhopping as a feature in a campaign? Care to talk about it?

I had a campaign travel across three prime materials (including Toril and Krynn), and it was a lot of fun, but I think it's only for certain campaigns, because it means that the PCs don't get very attached to places and their backstory becomes less relevant in most cases (but that's also true with non-native Ravenloft characters in that setting and so on too).

 

[TerraDave]

I have had a planer element in pretty much all of my campaigns. For something like Ravenloft, I might just merge into the main world, but in that game, there were still other planer elements.

In terms of travel across settings, no. Closest was sending the PCs to Gamma World. Definitely a highlight.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But have you had a campaign that moves between settings? Not to an outer or inner plane, but to, like, Oerth.

I sure have, and recently-ish. I strongly suspect it still happens with newer players too.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

My usual cosmology is a multiverse rooted in Spelljammer with different settings in crystal spheres etc. Most often the campaign is grounded on a continent/planet/setting with eventual excursions to other planes.

But in my current campaign with lvl 9 players the party has just gotten access to a spell jamming ship. My plan is to keep stuff in realmspace, but might continue to a forgotten crystal sphere for the final bbeg confrontation. So there might be another setting involved in actual play, but not an official published one.

 

[dave2008]

Meanwhile, a DM who choses to embrace the multiverse framework runs into some serious worldbuilding constraints:

• It becomes impossible, by definition, to have an omniscient (let alone omnipotent) deity in some settings but not others.
• It also becomes impossible for the existence of deities to be genuinely uncertain, if works describing them in other parts of the setting are established as canonically true.
• If different material planes share the same fire elemental plane, the same 9 hells, and so forth, a DM who takes the idea of a shared multiverse seriously loses much of their ability to homebrew when dealing with these planes.

Interesting, I don't find any of these to be true.

 

[dave2008]

I actually dislike it quite a bit as a concept. Like Eberron to Dark Sun? Just no thanks.

Just curious, why do you dislike it?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'd like to do a multiverse spanning 'Rod of Seven Parts' campaign, but that would entail learning about (and paying for) far too many campaign worlds for my limited time.

You can create your own settings. Some people would have you believe that worldbuilding some arcane art, requiring huge amounts of time and skill, but really it isn't. Especially when characters are just passing through, you don't need thousands of years of history or pantheons of gods.

One thing you can do is borrow a trick from science fiction. You think of one defining characteristic and blow it up to gonzo proportions. It might be kilometre tall trees, or floating islands, or planetary cities, or a lizard world. Political and social ideas taken to extremes also work.

 

[Lyxen]

We had quite a few examples of that while playing a high level in AD&D, whether through Planescape or through Spelljammer, visiting the FR or Greyhawk or DL for short periods of time, or simply because it was a crossover for the origins of the adventurers. We also had a few occasions of visiting earth, sometimes in modern times, including a major incident in which a creeping doom was cast inside the toilets of a 747...