Our D&D 3.5 "Ghourmand Vale" campaign, DMed by my friend Dan, is fast coming to a close - he has three more adventures planned for the next three Wednesday evening game sessions, and then he returns the DM reins back over to my son Logan. Logan has decided his next campaign will be called "The Middle of Elsewhere" and it has an interesting premise: there's a small village that, for reasons unknown and not understood, plane shifts on the same day every year, landing on a random (?) plane, where it remains for the following year. The village is surrounded by a bubble of breathable air no matter where it ends up, so the inhabitants of the village (whose name has also been lost to the mists of time; the inhabitants have taken to calling it "Elsewhere") won't suffer any ill effects from having suddenly been plunked into the middle of, say, the Elemental Plane of Water for a year.
This situation has some unusual side effects. As a result of the village's frequent plane-hopping, there are creatures from a wide variety of planes who have decided to "come along for the ride," so to speak. And anyone born in Elsewhere picks up traits from the plane the village was on for the majority of their gestation time, which means everyone born in Elsewhere ends up with a template. The template does not automatically affect the newborn's alignment or mental outlook in any way; you could run a good-aligned PC with the half-fiend template, for example, if your PC simply had the misfortunate of being born in Elsewhere while it was parked on a layer of the Abyss for a year, for example.
So our first choice, as players, was to decide what templates we wanted our PCs to have, and we'd be starting off at whatever level allowed everyone to have a PC of the same general power level as the others. As it turned out, we all chose templates with a +2 Level Adjustment, so we'll be starting this campaign at 3rd level, running 1st-level PCs with a +2 Level Adjustment.
My character is Avoroth Bleakborn, a fiendish human cleric of Boccob. He's neutral evil, because I wanted to take this opportunity to run an evil character in a manner in which he'll still work well with others. Of course, I intend for Avoroth to start out as a complete and total prick, looking down upon others and thinking he's the smartest one in the room (no matter what room he's in and who else might be in it with him). I intend for him to mellow over the course of the campaign, and eventually learn the value of teamwork, but to begin with he'll see himself as the obvious leader and the other PCs as expendable pawns. (I'm patterning him after Kerr Avon from "Blake's 7" - an insufferable character if there ever was one.) His campaign goal, as a cleric of the God of Knowledge, is to discover how to "steer" Elsewhere to he can take it to only the desirable planes. Avoroth doesn't have any "standard" fiendish features like horns, a tail, or cloven hooves - he looks like an ordinary human, save for his sharklike eyes, which are all black. Here's what I'm using for Avoroth's image:
Dan decided to also run a human PC, but his is a druid with the shadow template, as Wilber Von Schattenwalde was born on the Plane of Shadow. Logan's decided that any time Wilber uses a summon nature's ally spell, the summoned creature will show up with the shadow template, but any animal companions will have the template of whatever the local plane was when it was called into service. As we're starting the campaign at the end of the year-long visit to Mount Celestia, Wilber's original animal companion will be a Medium celestial viper named Goldie. Here's the image Dan selected for Wilber:
Dan's wife Vicki opted to run a celestial elf witch, Amris Goodwitch, using the wizard character class. (Vicki prefers to call her wizards "witches" - I think it might be a Harry Potter thing.) She has a celestial owl named Pivot as her familiar. Here's the image she chose to represent Amris:
And when this campaign was first being envisioned, we'd expected my nephew Harry to be playing with us, and he had tentatively decided to run a half-vampire elf ranger who was born on the Negative Energy Plane. He never did come up with a name or settle on an image for his PC, but in the end it doesn't really matter, as he'll be starting college in the fall and doesn't wish to join in either this campaign or my own next one, which should also be starting up in the next month or so. So it looks like we'll be running just the three PCs, who will be part of an exploratory team that checks out the new plane once Elsewhere arrives at its new home for the year. Logan's said there will be several "time jumps" in the campaign; we'll likely spend something like 3-6 adventures on a given plane before we fast-forward to the end of that year and Elsewhere finds its next new home. That will allow him to use a lot of different planes over the course of the campaign.
It ought to be an interesting run!
Johnathan
This situation has some unusual side effects. As a result of the village's frequent plane-hopping, there are creatures from a wide variety of planes who have decided to "come along for the ride," so to speak. And anyone born in Elsewhere picks up traits from the plane the village was on for the majority of their gestation time, which means everyone born in Elsewhere ends up with a template. The template does not automatically affect the newborn's alignment or mental outlook in any way; you could run a good-aligned PC with the half-fiend template, for example, if your PC simply had the misfortunate of being born in Elsewhere while it was parked on a layer of the Abyss for a year, for example.
So our first choice, as players, was to decide what templates we wanted our PCs to have, and we'd be starting off at whatever level allowed everyone to have a PC of the same general power level as the others. As it turned out, we all chose templates with a +2 Level Adjustment, so we'll be starting this campaign at 3rd level, running 1st-level PCs with a +2 Level Adjustment.
My character is Avoroth Bleakborn, a fiendish human cleric of Boccob. He's neutral evil, because I wanted to take this opportunity to run an evil character in a manner in which he'll still work well with others. Of course, I intend for Avoroth to start out as a complete and total prick, looking down upon others and thinking he's the smartest one in the room (no matter what room he's in and who else might be in it with him). I intend for him to mellow over the course of the campaign, and eventually learn the value of teamwork, but to begin with he'll see himself as the obvious leader and the other PCs as expendable pawns. (I'm patterning him after Kerr Avon from "Blake's 7" - an insufferable character if there ever was one.) His campaign goal, as a cleric of the God of Knowledge, is to discover how to "steer" Elsewhere to he can take it to only the desirable planes. Avoroth doesn't have any "standard" fiendish features like horns, a tail, or cloven hooves - he looks like an ordinary human, save for his sharklike eyes, which are all black. Here's what I'm using for Avoroth's image:
Dan decided to also run a human PC, but his is a druid with the shadow template, as Wilber Von Schattenwalde was born on the Plane of Shadow. Logan's decided that any time Wilber uses a summon nature's ally spell, the summoned creature will show up with the shadow template, but any animal companions will have the template of whatever the local plane was when it was called into service. As we're starting the campaign at the end of the year-long visit to Mount Celestia, Wilber's original animal companion will be a Medium celestial viper named Goldie. Here's the image Dan selected for Wilber:
Dan's wife Vicki opted to run a celestial elf witch, Amris Goodwitch, using the wizard character class. (Vicki prefers to call her wizards "witches" - I think it might be a Harry Potter thing.) She has a celestial owl named Pivot as her familiar. Here's the image she chose to represent Amris:
And when this campaign was first being envisioned, we'd expected my nephew Harry to be playing with us, and he had tentatively decided to run a half-vampire elf ranger who was born on the Negative Energy Plane. He never did come up with a name or settle on an image for his PC, but in the end it doesn't really matter, as he'll be starting college in the fall and doesn't wish to join in either this campaign or my own next one, which should also be starting up in the next month or so. So it looks like we'll be running just the three PCs, who will be part of an exploratory team that checks out the new plane once Elsewhere arrives at its new home for the year. Logan's said there will be several "time jumps" in the campaign; we'll likely spend something like 3-6 adventures on a given plane before we fast-forward to the end of that year and Elsewhere finds its next new home. That will allow him to use a lot of different planes over the course of the campaign.
It ought to be an interesting run!
Johnathan
