D&D 5E Multiverse Theory and you

[UngeheuerLich]

Yes, I did world hopping. In 3.0 PHB we started in Greyhawk. Then we had to transition to Forgotten realms. We just hopped there with the help of a powerful Lich.

 

[Yaarel]

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.

And also, one only need to worry about one small place, the one where the heroes are. One need not build the rest of the world unless the heroes go there.

Just jot down the stuff that comes up about the world during the gameplay, for consistency, and develop the ideas further, when useful.

 

[Jer]

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.

As @Paul Farquhar says, you don't need to invest a lot of money or time into campaign settings to run a worldhopping campaign. The dirty secret of worldbuilding is that you only need to create as much as you're going to use for your games and the rest can be implied in the imaginations of the players.

For a world hopping macguffin quest it becomes a question of what kinds of worlds will entertain your players. And honestly you can often rely on cliches possibly with a twist. You start on your personal campaign world and then maybe you travel to some kind of "Viking world" or to a "Fairy tale world". If your players are up for it you can do a sci-fi world (fantasy characters in Gamma World is always fun) or an "Old West" world. If you do have any campaign settings lying around you can steal from those - a Gothic Victorian world is always a fun stopover on a cliched worldhop and Ravenloft provides a lot of fodder for one.

(Worldhopping goes all the way back to the AD&D 1e DMG where there was advice and even rules on dropping your characters into Boot Hill, and Gamma World. Not even an appendix, but right in the middle of the book! Cynics might suggest that it was TSR trying to move units, but even as that's probably true it's also the case that Murlynd from Oerth had traveled to the Old West long before the DMG was printed and came back with magic sixguns, so it goes...)

 

[Scribe]

Just curious, why do you dislike it?

Let's suppose you have not just a party that can jump from Eberron to Athas, but many.

Now why haven't they gone and cleaned it up?

It removes something from World building if you can have beings from a setting with a wildly different tone show up.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Let's suppose you have not just a party that can jump from Eberron to Athas, but many.

Why would there be many? Powerful magic is rare on Eberron, no reason anyone other than the PCs has ever made that journey.

 

[Jer]

Let's suppose you have not just a party that can jump from Eberron to Athas, but many.

Now why haven't they gone and cleaned it up?

It removes something from World building if you can have beings from a setting with a wildly different tone show up.

I mean, in this particular case my assumption is always that magic in Athas is defiling magic by default and preserving magic is difficult to learn even for native Athasians. So the Eberron armies you're talking about (or magical armies from any other world) are going to basically just make things worse, and possibly trap them all in Athas.

 

[Scribe]

Why would there be many? Powerful magic is rare on Eberron, no reason anyone other than the PCs has ever made that journey.

Because, let's suppose.

Even if it's one party of level 15-20 adventurers that's still too jarring to me.

I prefer settings retain their own distinct nature without tourists.

 

[Lyxen]

I prefer settings retain their own distinct nature without tourists.

It's really a matter of taste, and although some "tourism" might be interesting, too much might become a problem, or many.

By the way, for people who read Brandon Sanderson, I think that's a bit of the difficulty that I see in the current developments from the Stormlight Archives, at first, there were a few World Hoppers, and a few artefacts to track, but now it seems lots of people are doing it, and it just looks a bit messy.

 

[Baron Opal II]

I'm quite acclimated to multiversal campaigns.

Back in the day there was a community center that I went to that had 4-5 DMs running their games. There were two sessions, afternoon and evening. Some people traveled to different tables, some stayed with one DM. I spent most of my time in two games, Aphonion and the Land, with occasional travel to a third whose name I forget.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Because, let's suppose.

Even if it's one party of level 15-20 adventurers that's still too jarring to me.

I prefer settings retain their own distinct nature without tourists.

I'm pretty sure that they would have better reasons for travelling to a difficult-to-reach plane than tourism. But if a world contains any level 20 adventurers they can do whatever the heck they want.