Desdichado
Hero
Gene Roddenberry famously pitched Star Trek as "Wagon Train to the stars." For a long time, I've had a concept bubbling around in the back of my mind that could probably be called "Wagon Train to the Planes," a game where planar travel through different planar conjunctions was the whole point of the game, and each "module" or adventure was mostly focused around the exploration of a single plane, the solving of some problem there, and the finding of the gate that led to the next one.
This requires a cosmology that's like a string of rosaries, with each plane being like a bead. Or perhaps like a vast web with multiple possible connections. Some endpoint is the ultimate campaign goal, but reaching that requires the travel through a long string of planes that exist in between, so that ongoing planar travel becomes the main focus of the campaign.
I'm dusting this idea off because I just finished reading Paizo's Distant Worlds which, although detailing a semi-space opera take on the solar system of Golarion, the main setting, feels an awful lot like planar travel to me. Add to that Beyond Countless Doorways, and of course Manual of the Planes and I've got a lot of material to borrow, steal from, and adapt into a long and hopefully interesting and exotic potential campaign.
There are a few things that I need to overcome. Perceptions, if you will, to undo. Paradigms to reset.
First off, planar travel isn't a high level one-off pursuit. The players will spend the first level or two identifying the need to get off-world and finding the apparatus to do so (probably planar portals, or some kind of planar traveling device, not unlike Aahz's d-hopper.) And from then on, they'll be "in the planes" for the entirety of the campaign. There isn't any going home, so they're planar travelers starting at very low level. Plus, I still don't even like playing or running any version of D&D at high level. Heck, I might even make this an E6 game with Incantations/Rituals to replicate some few high level spells.
Planar travel doesn't have to be high magic. It's up to me as the GM to keep challenges appropriate for their level, of course, so 2nd level rogues have no business going to the Elemental Plane of Water and immediately drowning, or going to the Plane of Negative Energy and immediately level-draining to death. Some planes are too hostile to regular life to work for anything other than extremely high powered and highly magical characters to travel. Naturally, I'm going to either assume that such planes are extremely rare and out of the PC's path, or make some other changes to ensure that they can handle the challenges that they have. Maybe most of them don't even exist in the first place.
That said, it's easy to get in over your head in the planes. If you play the kind of game where you attack anything vaguely threatening on sight, expecting that you'll be able to kill it, well... your character might not last long. TPKs are totally a possibility if you don't keep your wits about you and look at any problem from multiple angles before charging in.
Whatever you think you know about the planes is probably wrong. There's no Great Wheel. Planes don't line up based on alignment. If you think that, that's probably the garbled mythology passed on by generation after generation by someone who never really understand cosmological reality all that well to begin with. You'll do better if you assume that you don't know anything that you don't have direct first-hand knowledge of, or at least highly reliable first hand accounts of.
Because most of the material I have (and the system that I'm most comfortable running) is d20, this will be some variant of the d20 rules. Not sure if I'd use 3.5 or adjust to Pathfinder for it. Honestly, I probably don't care much. Either way, I prefer to run the game a little fast and loose, winging DCs and details on the fly, and relying on rulings moreso than rules. Remember the motto "Tools, not rules?" Well, that's how I run.
My own gaming group is unavailable for me to run this for right now (since we're in the middle of another campaign that will run for some time, and I would never suggest that we change mid-stream when the GM is obviously excited to be running, and it seems like everyone else is excited to play. Including me.) Can I find another gaming group locally? Or is this something that I'd end up having to play online, maybe using Google+ or something? I've heard some pretty good reports from folks who "hangout" on Google+ to run RPG sessions. I'm actually kinda curious to give it a try and see how it works. I tried to organize another group of old friends who were widely separated geographically not long ago, but it didn't really come together very well. The secret to good online gaming is having players who are excited to contribute and play. If I feel like I'm pulling teeth to get them involved, coming up with character concepts, replying to questions, etc., then that's a major red flag that the campaign isn't going to work very well.
Anyway, I'm still at a very early planning stage. I opened up an Obsidian Portal campaign for this, but other than a paragraph or two of rough draft executive summary, I haven't populated it with anything yet. At this stage, I have basically, just a high concept and a bunch of material from which I can steal. Therefore, I welcome suggestions, comments, cat-calls, or anything else.
This requires a cosmology that's like a string of rosaries, with each plane being like a bead. Or perhaps like a vast web with multiple possible connections. Some endpoint is the ultimate campaign goal, but reaching that requires the travel through a long string of planes that exist in between, so that ongoing planar travel becomes the main focus of the campaign.
I'm dusting this idea off because I just finished reading Paizo's Distant Worlds which, although detailing a semi-space opera take on the solar system of Golarion, the main setting, feels an awful lot like planar travel to me. Add to that Beyond Countless Doorways, and of course Manual of the Planes and I've got a lot of material to borrow, steal from, and adapt into a long and hopefully interesting and exotic potential campaign.
There are a few things that I need to overcome. Perceptions, if you will, to undo. Paradigms to reset.
First off, planar travel isn't a high level one-off pursuit. The players will spend the first level or two identifying the need to get off-world and finding the apparatus to do so (probably planar portals, or some kind of planar traveling device, not unlike Aahz's d-hopper.) And from then on, they'll be "in the planes" for the entirety of the campaign. There isn't any going home, so they're planar travelers starting at very low level. Plus, I still don't even like playing or running any version of D&D at high level. Heck, I might even make this an E6 game with Incantations/Rituals to replicate some few high level spells.
Planar travel doesn't have to be high magic. It's up to me as the GM to keep challenges appropriate for their level, of course, so 2nd level rogues have no business going to the Elemental Plane of Water and immediately drowning, or going to the Plane of Negative Energy and immediately level-draining to death. Some planes are too hostile to regular life to work for anything other than extremely high powered and highly magical characters to travel. Naturally, I'm going to either assume that such planes are extremely rare and out of the PC's path, or make some other changes to ensure that they can handle the challenges that they have. Maybe most of them don't even exist in the first place.
That said, it's easy to get in over your head in the planes. If you play the kind of game where you attack anything vaguely threatening on sight, expecting that you'll be able to kill it, well... your character might not last long. TPKs are totally a possibility if you don't keep your wits about you and look at any problem from multiple angles before charging in.
Whatever you think you know about the planes is probably wrong. There's no Great Wheel. Planes don't line up based on alignment. If you think that, that's probably the garbled mythology passed on by generation after generation by someone who never really understand cosmological reality all that well to begin with. You'll do better if you assume that you don't know anything that you don't have direct first-hand knowledge of, or at least highly reliable first hand accounts of.
Because most of the material I have (and the system that I'm most comfortable running) is d20, this will be some variant of the d20 rules. Not sure if I'd use 3.5 or adjust to Pathfinder for it. Honestly, I probably don't care much. Either way, I prefer to run the game a little fast and loose, winging DCs and details on the fly, and relying on rulings moreso than rules. Remember the motto "Tools, not rules?" Well, that's how I run.
My own gaming group is unavailable for me to run this for right now (since we're in the middle of another campaign that will run for some time, and I would never suggest that we change mid-stream when the GM is obviously excited to be running, and it seems like everyone else is excited to play. Including me.) Can I find another gaming group locally? Or is this something that I'd end up having to play online, maybe using Google+ or something? I've heard some pretty good reports from folks who "hangout" on Google+ to run RPG sessions. I'm actually kinda curious to give it a try and see how it works. I tried to organize another group of old friends who were widely separated geographically not long ago, but it didn't really come together very well. The secret to good online gaming is having players who are excited to contribute and play. If I feel like I'm pulling teeth to get them involved, coming up with character concepts, replying to questions, etc., then that's a major red flag that the campaign isn't going to work very well.
Anyway, I'm still at a very early planning stage. I opened up an Obsidian Portal campaign for this, but other than a paragraph or two of rough draft executive summary, I haven't populated it with anything yet. At this stage, I have basically, just a high concept and a bunch of material from which I can steal. Therefore, I welcome suggestions, comments, cat-calls, or anything else.
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