PDA

View Full Version : Campaign idea: Many Worlds Theory



genderlich
2017-07-03, 04:43 PM
I don't remember where the idea for this campaign came from but I got very excited about it and plan to spring it on my Pathfinder group's characters after we finish the current adventure.

Simply put, the party is going to travel around all the alternate timelines of their world, seeing how things are different, meeting the alternate versions of themselves, while being chased by a Terminator-like figure bent on killing all versions of the party across the multiverse. This is Golarion, the default Pathfinder setting, so there's a lot of existing lore I can tweak to come up with interesting variations on the setting for them to explore, spending one or two sessions on each world.

When I sat down to actually start planning the game, though, I ran into some speedbumps, since the details could go any number of different ways. So I turn to the Playground for help fleshing out this idea.

The first thing I have to decide is the party's means of travel across universes and whether they control it or not. They could have a special ship or magic item that can transport them; they could have to locate and step through portals on each world; they could have outside help from some kind of Timecop-like group that transports them; they could transport at random or after a set length of time like 24 hours on each world; or something else I haven't thought of. I definitely want them to not be able to decide what world they end up on so what they find is a surprise each time, but would it be more fun for the party if they can control when they travel with a ship or magic item, or if they can't control it? I don't want this to be on rails but I also don't want to have them find a world, decide it's not interesting, and leave immediately without doing anything.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the Terminator-like villain and its motivations, and I ended up deciding that it's the alternate version of one of the PCs who found out about the multiverse and went insane with the belief that free will is an illusion due to the infinite variety of timelines and it's trying to exert its will on the multiverse and "free" all its duplicates by killing them - or erasing them from the timeline entirely. There's gonna be a meta twist of some kind that each "timeline" is in-universe the fictional world of another roleplaying group just for my own amusement, I'm not sure how or if I'm going to communicate that to the players. Somehow (maybe with the Mythic rules) this duplicate villain has pretty powerful time and space powers, so the party will have to be clever in escaping from it / saving their duplicates from it on each world. Not that the specific system is important for this thread but I think I'm going to give the party Mythic tiers as well, with the justification that if they're outsiders to the timeline they're on they have the ability to alter its time and space.

I came up with a group of "temporal regulators" who observe the multiverse but can't interfere, maybe saving the party from the villain after they've already jumped worlds once and explaining everything to them, but I'd rather have the party figure things out on their own. I also want the party to have the freedom to explore the multiverse as they like (with the goal of preventing the villain from killing them and their duplicates and finding a way to stop it) instead of following orders, so I might introduce them later in the campaign.

This idea is wacky, meta, experimental, and very high-concept, definitely a sci-fi story in a fantasy setting, but I'm really excited for it. Has anyone done anything similar in their own game? Any advice for how to run it or how to set up the details of things?

Recherché
2017-07-03, 04:58 PM
My first random thought was to reuse an actual lore ship, the King Xeros of old Azlant (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/King_Xeros). The King Xeros was an experimental Azlanti ship made to travel through all the planes and possibly universes. It was launched shortly before Earthfall and the Azlanti civilization was destroyed. Earthfall unfortunately killed the crew and the ship has drifted over the universes since on autopilot.

You could have your players slowly learn how to operate the ship so they eventually move from being carried along randomly, to being able to activate or deactivate it but not steer to eventually being able to give general steering directions and return to old worlds. There's also the possibility of other people trying to steal the ship or attack it as it sails between worlds. That being said I'm not sure you can really force your players to engage with a world if they don't find anything interesting to do.

TheYell
2017-07-03, 06:05 PM
Ever read Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein?

genderlich
2017-07-04, 10:40 AM
My first random thought was to reuse an actual lore ship, the King Xeros of old Azlant (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/King_Xeros). The King Xeros was an experimental Azlanti ship made to travel through all the planes and possibly universes. It was launched shortly before Earthfall and the Azlanti civilization was destroyed. Earthfall unfortunately killed the crew and the ship has drifted over the universes since on autopilot.

You could have your players slowly learn how to operate the ship so they eventually move from being carried along randomly, to being able to activate or deactivate it but not steer to eventually being able to give general steering directions and return to old worlds. There's also the possibility of other people trying to steal the ship or attack it as it sails between worlds. That being said I'm not sure you can really force your players to engage with a world if they don't find anything interesting to do.

That's an interesting idea... my main issue with a ship is I don't want them to be able to bring a whole bunch of people with them on each trip, since a whole crowd of duplicate characters doesn't sound fun for me to run.


Ever read Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein?

No; what's it about?

Bohandas
2017-07-04, 11:44 AM
Sounds kind of like a combination of The One and Life, The Universe, and Everything. Cool.

TheYell
2017-07-04, 11:57 AM
Number of the Beast is about people in a flying car traveling through six dimensions of space and time to alternate realities and fictional universes, pursued by bad guys.

I like your idea of the story.

If your objection to a ship carrying people it can be overcome by having the Ship honed to its Home reality, and it can only carry people from that Home reality. So the villain's ship is set to Omega reality, and your guys come from Alpha reality. You can never board his ship, it just pops you outside when its turned on. And he can never board your player's ship, because he's Omega reality and the ship is Alpha reality. Same is true for any of their duplicates from Gamma and Beta realities.

If you have running the controls be a DC Knowledge (planes) check, then you really don't have to create all that many realities. A failed check can take them back to a reality they've already explored, while a successful Check can take them to a reality of their choice.

Lvl 2 Expert
2017-07-04, 12:06 PM
The first thing I have to decide is the party's means of travel across universes and whether they control it or not. They could have a special ship or magic item that can transport them; they could have to locate and step through portals on each world; they could have outside help from some kind of Timecop-like group that transports them; they could transport at random or after a set length of time like 24 hours on each world; or something else I haven't thought of. I definitely want them to not be able to decide what world they end up on so what they find is a surprise each time, but would it be more fun for the party if they can control when they travel with a ship or magic item, or if they can't control it? I don't want this to be on rails but I also don't want to have them find a world, decide it's not interesting, and leave immediately without doing anything

I vote for something based on the anomalies from Primeval (the series, not the unrelated movie). Natural semi-randomly occuring portals with unknown lifespans popping up and letting everything that wanders into it move through to the other "end". As the game goes on they learn more about the portals, maybe learning to track them down, get a timer, lock them, find spots in spacetime where one can be opened, get info on the other end without going through, whatever seems to fit best.

JustIgnoreMe
2017-07-04, 12:32 PM
Luther Arkwright is a comic book on this theme, but it's sci-fi rather than fantasy-based. Might be worth a quick look for ideas.

genderlich
2017-07-04, 04:58 PM
I think what I might do is say there's a portal on every world that they have to find, which incentivises them to explore and see how things are different. The issue that raises is "why don't people go through these portals all the time"... I might say they only activate in the presence of another spacetime anomaly (e.g., someone from another timeline), and maybe they don't look like portals to the average eye, maybe they're something like a symbol on the ground or just a ripple in the air.

TheYell
2017-07-04, 05:14 PM
Is the villain tracking them specifically, or just going to every alternate timeline randomly? Can they start tracking him somehow when they learn what he's up to?

genderlich
2017-07-04, 05:24 PM
Is the villain tracking them specifically, or just going to every alternate timeline randomly? Can they start tracking him somehow when they learn what he's up to?

I think it starts off going to random worlds to find/kill that world's set of the party, but after the party starts escaping from it, it'll start trying to get them specifically just out of anger - and knowing that once you leave your timeline you start being able to see "behind the scenes" of the multiverse, as it were, and not wanting them to figure out what it is and what it's doing or be able to stop it. It'll start out way too powerful for the party to fight, but at some point they can try to take the fight to it if they're confident enough.

Recherché
2017-07-04, 06:28 PM
Other random thought would be to have the portals needing to be opened with some kind of key...

Jaelommiss
2017-07-04, 08:15 PM
An unknown benefactor sends the PCs the schematic for a magic ritual that will banish the terminator from the timeline. Unfortunately, it also takes the PCs along with it (and only the PCs, no gear or anything else). They arrive in a new timeline, with the party together and the terminator somewhere else. The PCs now need to collect the reagents to repeat the ritual, keep their alternate selves safe, and lure the terminator (who has learned from last time) into the ritual again.

The PCs gradually learn to tweak the ritual so that it can bring along clothes, then weapons, then a small bag of supplies each. Bringing more to the next timeline increases the cost of the ritual. Eventually they will be able to choose to return to a previously visited timeline.

The terminator was created by an alternate copy of an old enemy of the party. After it destroyed the PCs on that timeline (who in a final act sent the schematic to the PCs controlled by the players), the terminator continued its directive in all new timelines it entereds. The party wins when they get its creator to call off the terminator. The PCs could negotiate with the villain ("We'll leave you to your timeline if you call it off"), by killing the villain after it gives a benign command to the terminator, or stealing research notes on its creation and finding the secret off switch or weakness.

TheYell
2017-07-05, 01:13 AM
I know you said you didn't want to roll up duplicates of the party, but how about the villain? The villain is a madman who's contacting variants of himself to perform ritual magic. They keep sacrificing one of their number, usually a goody-two-shoes variant, to power a six-armed golem who's pursuing variants of the party through the realms of the possible. Wear down the number of "donors" and you defeat the golem. You also have the option at a high level of taking the fight to the madman and his cronies in their dark temple.

Algeh
2017-07-05, 02:40 AM
If you want to keep them from easily backtracking, one-way portals are an easy way to do that. Each world contains one or more portals to other worlds, but you can't use that same portal to go back the other way. If you want to enforce them staying on each world long enough to do some minimal exploring, you can make it so portals only open with some kind of magical device that in turn has a 24 hour cool-down period before it can be used again (or however long fits with your pacing). Perhaps this device also helps them locate portals and/or has additional features/upgrades that are added as the adventure goes on. Eventually maybe they find some "loops" with portals that lead back to already explored worlds, giving them the choice of trying that same world-chain again or trying a different portal off of one of those worlds the next time. (Maps of the local section of the portal network would also be really helpful treasure in this set-up. If each world tended to have 10-ish portals, and loops back to earlier portals were reasonably common (0-4 portals on each world might go to some world the characters have seen before), it would be likely that gradual knowledge of "good" world-chain paths would accumulate with time, but each time through a non-mapped portal would be very unknown in terms of ever getting back again.)

Ultimately, you can't make them explore someplace they're not interested in, but you can make them announce "ok, we found the next portal and are now making camp at it and waiting for the key to work again", while also giving the players an easy way to justify their characters taking the time to explore any given world even if they should also be racing the clock against some larger plan (since they're stuck here in Wacky Steampunk Land for another 3 days no matter what before they can travel again, they might as well go see what the local gear-covered plot hook wants help with even though, in a larger sense, they're in a hurry to get to wherever Main Villain went).

Vogie
2017-07-17, 12:51 PM
This is a cool idea, and there's lots of things to draw on from inspiration.

Obviously, the easiest parallel would be the TV Show Sliders, where the party had a device that would open a wormhole to a random parallel universe. The "vortex can only be opened after a specific but random period of time on each new universe, monitored by a countdown clock on a portable timer that they carry; failure to open the vortex in time would strand the Sliders for 29.7 years in that universe."

The Villain sounds like Jet Li's evil Character in The One, who is hunting down all of the multiverse versions of himself, gaining a bit of power each time he does so.

I would make your terminator actually have gone insane when a malfunction dumped all of the alt-party into a single body - There are an equal number of personalities, each similar to one of your party members, which explains why the terminator is after all of them instead of just one. You can have that reasoning hid behind the normal psychosis, and give it layers of complexity that the party may not immediately think about. You can tap into the TV show or comic series of "Legion" for inspiration.

Instead of a series of portals, I would think that a craft or device that is able to plane shift itself would be better. You don't have to have it on rails, per se, but you do want to make sure they can only go in one direction through the series of multiverses... and that is the same process that the villain's device/craft would go through, so party can catch up, keep up, and later stay ahead of the villain as they go. I would probably go the Craft route, so the party has the ability to hang on to things larger than a bag, and upgrade it as they shift through. What the PCs (and the villain) don't know is that the drives of the two crafts - theirs and the villain's - are two halves of a whole, and once the villain is defeated, they can combine them to go anywhere they want in the multiverse.

I would also have the villain have one or two lieutenants that will accompany him/her as they're going, so your PCs will have a couple different recurring villains. I would say that one of them would be someone who, inexplicably, is able to drum up support in the 'verse they're in - always showing up with a series of mooks from the local area. Maybe the villain's plane shifting ship is some sort of prison ship, where they collected evil individuals, then will allow them to be free if they attack the party/find the duplicates/serve as distractions/et cetera