I watched one of my numerous CDs of anime music videos, and played Halo for a little while, and looked at my old notes for a planehopping campaign, and this is what I came up with.
I'm going to be running two campaigns, and I want a way for them to be contiguous, with the occasional overlap, and maybe even a session a few months down the line where the two groups game at the same time.
Group 1 - 10th level. Adventures involve dancing around the darkened parts of the ring, until eventually they discover someone trying to restore the day-night cycle.
Group 2 - 1st level. Game begins with everyone waking up, hearing a voice crying out to them some message (yet to be determined). One of the PCs in this group will have the same player as a PC in the other group, and she'll remember the events of the other sessions as the group is spurred into adventure. They are not on the ringworld.
The multiverse is an infinite collection of planes. Some planes connect to many, others to only a few. It seems inevitably that the greatest cultures emerge on those planes connected to many others. One such world was, in its ancient past, home to extraplanar forces far more powerful than any of the mortals of the world. The mortal races would have been overwhelmed if not for the Ban of Pleian, a magical ritual which sealed the world's access to all but eight other planes. The planes whose connections were still allowed aligned into a physical system of planets, moons, and a sun.
The planes of this system are, in order from closest to the sun to farthest away:
- The plane of fire, a tiny molten sphere that orbits within the fires of the sun.
- The plane of air, a small gas world, like a huge, eternal comet.
- Trema, the main world of the campaign. The 'material' plane.
- The plane of water, an entire world that is simply a sphere of tides and debris. It has numerous moons.
- The plane of earth, an array of asteroids that may once have been a planet. There is practically no air to breathe.
(The four elemental planes are necessary to keep the world intact, or so believe the creators of the Ban of Pleian).
- The plane of dreams, which is the moon of Trema.
- The plane of time, which is inspired by Chronos (or as he was called by the Romans, Saturn). This is a huge world of swirling gas, dark to the living eye, but to the vision of the dead it glows with a beckoning light.
- The plane of spirits, which surrounds the plane of time in a huge ring. There is a broken inner ring as well, and the two rings used to spin at slightly different speeds, so that the glow from the plane of time (seen only by the dead spirits lingering on the plane of spirits) would shift from day to night, eclipsed by the passing inner ring overhead.
- The plane of lost dreams, a pair of cold, dead worlds, covered with mirrors and reflections of unfulfilled desires and abandoned stories.[/list
The first group of adventurers goes on a quest to stop a particular bad guy, attempting to find the 'lost arc' (a section of the ring of spirits that has broken free and is drifting). At the end of the first adventure, they encounter the villain, who is also there for his/her own 'nefarious' purpose, and the party is trounced, knocked unconscious. When they wake up, it's daytime, and they seem unable to planeshift back to their own world. They're stuck on the ring.
They are, of course, dead.
The other group begins their adventures in the same world the other PCs originally started in, but ten years later. People are dying mysteriously, the result of some magical-planar booby-trapping done by a powerful spellcaster who wanted to make sure that if anyone killed her, the rest of the world would die too. This group doesn't really consist of 'adventurers' as much as of normal folks, travelers for their own reasons, who are the only ones left alive in a town they're traveling through after the curse kills everyone else.
I think this game will begin with one character having a disturbing dream, and when he/she awakens, everyone in the group also awakens, hearing a scream on the wind. There is the sound of battle, and the voice cries some important message that I haven't figured out yet. But it is from their past, the future of the other group.
We will discover, eventually, that the big Kahuna plan is to tap the plane of lost dreams (which, conveniently enough, exists beyond time, both spatially and chronologically). Not sure exactly why someone would want to do it, but I'm thinking it'd be for some noble reason, that just happens to destroy life as we know it.
The importance of the ring is that the dead go there, and have eight days to barter a passage to the afterlife, or else they are condemned to limbo. But someone arranged to tidally lock the inner and outer ring, so day never passes, and no spirits are leaving. Time is beginning to collapse.
That's the big picture, but the small picture needs much much more fleshing out, so that the world is interesting. I want the immediate beginning to be fun, and to hint at something bigger going on, but I want to do primarily episodic stuff for a while, before trying to tackle the plot arc.
