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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 7481259" data-attributes="member: 63">Did you ever watch LOST?There was a buried hatch with a countdown clock, and if you didn't enter a code of numbers into a computer every 108 minutes, something allegedly bad would happen. It was unclear whether it would actually come to pass, so people argued about it, but thinking 'better safe than sorry' they kept plugging in the numbers.Maybe the plane the party is on has someone or something they care about, or it's linked somehow to a place in another plane the PCs want to protect (or something they want to keep sealed up), and so they have to come back regularly to make sure all's well.It doesn't necessarily have to have a strict timer. I mean, this is fantasy, not sci-fi. You can say that the portals between worlds obey strange tides, influenced by the shifting orbits of worlds unseen in an infinite aether. In-game, that means you can set a time limit for each adventure as it starts, or have no pre-stated time limit but have the PCs get a ping on their enchanted doodad* that tells them, "We'd better get back soon or else the conjunction will close." And once you go back, the portal seals up, so you can't go to Xuraxia for a few hours of adventuring, scamper home to rest, then go back to adventuring. It's a one-time round-trip ticket, so make your time there count.This premise lets you have them escape really bad stuff with villains not being able to pursue, . . . for now. When the conjunction returns, the villains might show up. (Which happens whenever you, the GM, say it will.)Or maybe there are currents between planes, and in one session the PCs could get stranded and have to start jaunting horizontally to try to find another world that will lead back to their hub home.Basically, have a compelling character reason they want to check in on their home turf, and a convincing hand-wavium reason portals to other places won't always be open.</blockquote>

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