D&D General The D&D Multiverse: Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die

[Hexmage-EN]

I totally get it. When I was a kid we would hang out at the arcade even when we had no money, and loved watching someone who was really good kick butt at a game. Was that only a Nanaimo thing? Come on, Gen X nerds - you were never mesmerized watching the local champ dominate some game at your local arcade or 7-11 or whatever? Like, there are movies about arcade champs being treated like local rock stars.

It doesn't interest me that much anymore, but I've realized that I am old. It's not them, it's me. Teenagers gonna teenage.

Me and my girlfriend are in our mid-thirties and we both like watching certain online personalities play video games, mostly because we like to either hear commentary if one person is playing the game or banter if there's more than one person. Generally it's something we like to put on while we're working on hobbies at the same time.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

BTW, for those unaware the D&D 4E Gamma World spin-off game basically had as its premise a bunch of alternate Material Plane Earths combining into one amalgamated world because the dimensional walls separating them were destroyed.

 

[MGibster]

BTW, for those unaware the D&D 4E Gamma World spin-off game basically had as its premise a bunch of alternate Material Plane Earths combining into one amalgamated world because the dimensional walls separating them were destroyed.

Sounds like they made it into Torg.

 

[Autumnal]

Obligatory mention of Michael Moorcock Elric/Eternal Champion multiverse helping inspire this,

I am a pedant and I come to bring pedantry. You’re right on with Moorcock, whose multiverse evolved through the ‘60s. And there was the more science-fictional version by H. Beam Piper in Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen and related short stories. A few years before either of those, there were Fritz Leiber’s Changewar stories, with The Big Time still hailed as one of the best time travel stories ever. Back and back to Murray Leinster’s “Sideways in Time” in 1934.

Of these, I think Zelazny, Moorick, and Piper were the big three influences in world- and dimension-hopping in…hold on, I left out The Incomplete Enchanter! I think De Camp & Pratt, Piper, Moorcock, and Zelazny were the big four influences on this stuff in D&D. If you read them, you can see the sources of inspiration in each.

If I could only pick one, it’d be De Camp and Pratt. But fortunately I don’t have to.

Superhero: 2044

Largely forgotten now, unfortunately. Published in 1977.

And the DM whose dimension-hopping campaign was such an inspiration was John M. “Mike” Ford, who went on too be one of the finest American sf & f writers of the later 20th century.

Come on, Gen X nerds - you were never mesmerized watching the local champ dominate some game at your local arcade or 7-11 or whatever?

I absolutely was. When I learned about Twitch, I thought, hey, it’s like being 13 again except I can stay home to watch the wizards at work.

 

[Distracted DM]

I am a pedant and I come to bring pedantry. You’re right on with Moorcock, whose multiverse evolved through the ‘60s. And there was the more science-fictional version by H. Beam Piper in Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen and related short stories. A few years before either of those, there were Fritz Leiber’s Changewar stories, with The Big Time still hailed as one of the best time travel stories ever. Back and back to Murray Leinster’s “Sideways in Time” in 1934.

I don't even think there was any pedantry here, unless I missed it
I wasn't crediting him solely with inspiring DnD. I was just referring to his usage of the term "multiverse" in the way we know it. There were other inspirations for alignment wars, Three Hearts and Three Lions for one. But I haven't read any of the ones you cited! Would you recommend them?

 

[Autumnal]

Absolutely yes.

The incomplete Enchanter is funny fantasy. Like, was-an-influence-on-Pratchett funny. Modern-day academics discover how to enter worlds of literature and fantasy. Things go wrong. Complications ensue.

H. Beam Piper wrote af in the 1950s-60s. The Parstime stories share a setting where the people of one alternate Earth have the tech to travel to others. They take care to keep this a secret, with the Paratime Police doing the work of fixing leaks, tracking down people using the tech for bad ends like slavery, and so on. In the novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, the title character, Pennsylvania State Trooper Calvin Morrison, gets accidentally shifted to a timeline where ancient Indo-Europeans went east rather than west, giving rise to an old but low-tech society where PA is here. And one minor god’s priesthood has a monopoly on gunpowder. Whoo boy do complications ensue.

 

[nevin]

I loved the incompleate Enchanter, I like woods out back, Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword, Three Hearts and Three Lions,
I also loved The Song Of Albion Trilogy by Stephen Lawhead. It's scifi but so High tech it could easily be magic. The world of Tiers series by Philip Jose Farmer, where a very high tech reality like ours discovers thier universe has been manufactured when they try to send a probe outside thier solar system and it hits the wall, then they develop the science to make thier own mini universes but never do find out who made the reality thiers all sit in. I loved the fact that Earth was one of the realities they made. The science is so far out there it could easily be switched with magic.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is kind of responding to a necro here, but I wanted to note that the kitchen-sink elements in the broader play culture of OD&D seemed from my experience to well predate any common awareness of Gygaxian cosmology. I forget when that was first exposed to the public but I was seeing things we'd consider outside common fantasy tropes showing up by the time I got into the hobby, and that was early enough the only D&D supplement that existed was Greyhawk.

 

[Mannahnin]

This is kind of responding to a necro here, but I wanted to note that the kitchen-sink elements in the broader play culture of OD&D seemed from my experience to well predate any common awareness of Gygaxian cosmology. I forget when that was first exposed to the public but I was seeing things we'd consider outside common fantasy tropes showing up by the time I got into the hobby, and that was early enough the only D&D supplement that existed was Greyhawk.

The original 1975 Greyhawk? Supplement I?

What kind of stuff?

My recollection is that Fantasy got much more codified as its own genre after Judy-Lynn and Lester Del Rey started their own imprint at Ballantine, particularly looking to piggyback on Tolkien's success. And that before that the genre lines were fuzzier.

 

[Voadam]

OD&D had Robots and Androids and Barsoomian monsters in the original core books.

And that is in addition to the eclectic grab bag elements from Tolkien (Ent, Hobbit, Elf, Dwarf, Orc), Anderson (Dwarf, Troll), Norse Mythology (Fire Giant, Frost Giant), Greek Mythology (Minotaur, Centaur, Dryad, Pegasus), Arabian Nights type stories (Djinn, Efreeti, Roc, Djinn summoning ring), and Alice in Wonderland (Growth and Diminution potions).