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View Full Version : How might you write alternate continuities for your games?



MonkeySage
2015-03-18, 12:35 AM
The idea dawned on me just a bit ago, thinking about how one of my players had pretty much a 50/50 chance of surviving an attack.. The idea to begin work on an alternate continuity in which the player's character didn't make it... that it might be something fun to explore for a session or two when they end up in this alternate continuity and realize what could have happened without them.

It isn't original, I know. I got the idea while watching a gaming channel on youtube, they played radical dreamers in the video and it reminded me of chrono cross.

This PC considers herself insignificant, has a very low sense of self worth, doesn't believe she's heroic.

MrNobody
2015-03-18, 06:16 AM
Try to convince him that he is heroic even when i doesn't want to, that he is a fate's tool that is needed to accomplish the group's quest.

In this case, working on details is necessary: remember that time you almost got one-shotted by that disintegrate? well, if you weren't there the party's wizard would have been morphed into fine dust, and all your companions would have died. Remember when you were scared and remained at the outisde of the room while the rogue was murdering the local mafia boss? You were mistaken for a guard and no one cared. If you hadn't been there, someone would have caught the rogue in action and murdered him.

mikeejimbo
2015-03-18, 11:51 AM
So kind of like It's a Wonderful Life?

MonkeySage
2015-03-18, 01:35 PM
Something like that, yes. It'd pretty much be a split off from the point of the player's near death experience.

Flickerdart
2015-03-18, 01:45 PM
Time travel is always an option - the character bites the dust, the world goes to hell, and her remaining allies travel back in time to save her. Hell, you don't even need to play out the future if she'll believe the future party.

Alternatively, "future vision". Oracles are great for this. Have the PCs visit one before the fight in question, where the oracle reveals the PC is fated to die and then you can either tell the story of what happens next or let them play it out. Make sure to remind them that destiny is a load of crap and can be changed, though.

MonkeySage
2015-03-19, 01:00 AM
Very similar to what I had in mind. :)

BWR
2015-03-19, 04:44 AM
I've run an alternate universe game based on a discarded idea for the core campaign my gf runs. In the core setting after defeating the BBEG, the surviving heroes, including my PC, return home to universal praise and gratitude. Being married to the Emperor's daughter, my PC has it pretty good from then on and the campaign turns to focus on his children, then grandchildren and now great-grandchildren.

In the alternate storyline while the heroes are out, a coup takes place. Being a war hero who literally saved the empire, my PC is kind of beyond the reach of the new Emperor to do anything about right then. Despite being pissed as hell about his lord and entire family being wiped out, he retires to a temple to spare the tattered country from more war. His daughter-in-law - a great beauty the new emperor took as his concubine - escaped with her newborn son (her husband's, not the usurper's) and handed him over to my PC to raise. She then took a random peasant's kid as her own and committed suicide with it and left their bodies to be found by the Emperor's men.
16 years on and the new PC has grown up strong and skilled under the iron discipline of one of the country's greatest warriors and sets out to avenge his family and remove the oppressive yoke of the usurper and his cronies. It was a fun game.