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HamsterKun
2019-05-18, 12:53 PM
Has anybody here ever played a 'transported to a fantasy world' character in a campaign before?

For clarity: a character that is specifically from our real world, or from a similarly non-D&D/fantasy RPG world, who is transported into the D&D campaign's world through some unknown means.

SimonMoon6
2019-05-19, 10:15 AM
Yes, I have, in a few different ways.

HamsterKun
2019-05-19, 10:36 AM
Yes, I have, in a few different ways.

Like what?

Koo Rehtorb
2019-05-19, 10:40 AM
Sort of. Did a game where we were mid 21st century UN mech pilots sent through a portal, along with an exploratory force, to invade a D&D fantasy world and exploit it for resources.

Segev
2019-05-20, 10:24 AM
I don't know that he ever revealed the full of his origin story, though the other players figured out something was "off" about his history. My paladin was a college student driving home from college when his car wound up in the middle of ... somewhere else. He almost got himself killed before stumbling into a cave where he met a just-hatched little white dragon. He felt this enormous aura of power from the little guy, and was happy to team up. (It took several sessions in-game, long after they'd met, for him to realize he had "detect evil" and that it wasn't "power" but "evil" he was picking up from various creatures.)

By the time he met the party, he was leery of trusting people and knew admitting no ties was dangerous, so he was claiming to be a prince from a powerful fantasy kingdom out questing to prove himself.

This being a Planescape game, when the party wound up breaking a portal out of Sigil and dropping into the Far Realms, their combined expectations actually shaped a new Prime world into existence, and they found themselves in the self-proclaimed Prince's fantasy kingdom, complete with his mother the queen ruling after a disaster killed his father, and his two older and one younger sister. This obviously confused him, especially as he started having dual memories of both lives.

SimonMoon6
2019-05-20, 04:57 PM
Like what?

Well, let's see...

(1) There was the time when 3.0 was fairly new, so I was running a game with the players playing themselves transported into a D&D world, with the PCs being adjusted slightly to fit in a D&D world (in other words, they could start off as spellcasters even though they weren't in the real world). There were also some other hijinks (like the PCs being able to sometimes possess the bodies of dead creatures). Interestingly, since this was early in 3.0's existence, nobody really knew how to abuse the system yet, so people were just taking levels of whatever they felt like. Almost everybody had some levels of rogue, even the main wizard.

Where the game was heading: Eventually, a demon lord (or at least a pit fiend) was going to find out how the PCs entered this world and was going to reverse it, so that he could bring a demon army to take over the real world, which the PCs would have to stop. That was going to be the endgame mission, but the PCs never got that far before the game just ended due to players and their personal lives.

(2) Before that, I ran a game where the players were playing themselves as PCs, transported to a "patchwork" world, where each patch had its own rules of reality. In each patch, the PCs could find a MacGuffin that would grant them extra power, but the PCs had to be careful because evil versions of themselves existed and were already at maximum power. Eventually, the PCs confronted the entity that caused this to happen, and the entity confessed that it was trying to give the players enjoyment... they liked playing games (etc), so why not do it for real? Eventually, the PCs were allowed to stay on the patchwork world (with all their power) or return home to the real world (it was about a 50/50 split).

(3) Before that, I ran a game where the PCs traveled a multiverse of different realities, one of which was a D&D world. Again, the players were the PCs. This was a complicated game that would take a long time to explain fully. The PCs were tricked into going on a quest that they thought would simply remove from their world the beings of Law (and Chaos) from Moorcock's multiverse who appeared and caused problems. Instead, the quest caused those beings to be replaced by the Cthulhu mythos entities. The DMPC went insane and became the game's major villain for a while, traveling the multiverse to gather items of power. The PCs had to stop him (which they did), after which they had found new goals to accomplish. One became king of a city in the Dreamlands. Another studied super-science and had a relationship with a female mind flayer (yes, I know, they currently don't have genders but we didn't know that then) who had been raised by halflings. Soon, the game revolved around the players interfering with each others' plans (which is great for a DM, since you don't have to make up adventures if the PCs make up their own), especially when one of the actual PCs went insane and started abusing the power possible by knowing the secrets of the multiverse. Then, the PCs got to make their own universes. And then, things got strange...

Braininthejar2
2019-05-20, 06:00 PM
I took part in a campaign like that. It ended with cherleeder unicorn riders, a giant mirror spell to bring dawn an hour early to an undead camp, and recording a banshee scream on a magical ipod.

HamsterKun
2019-05-20, 07:13 PM
I thought about it having where there are two ways to travel between Earth (our world) and Toril (D&D world):

1. There are a handful gates between Earth and Toril that can be passed through to travel between the two worlds freely. Catch is, all of them are in very isolated areas that you’d have to go out of your way to find.

2. A 12th Level spell called Conjure Otherworlder can summon a human from Earth into Toril. This is primarily for the “I choose you as Champion” sort of deal.

Quertus
2019-05-20, 07:22 PM
Sort of?

So, in a world-hoping homebrew (think Rifts, but good), our characters met their players (ish). When the next rift opened, my character stayed behind to gather intelligence, whereas I was the first through the portal, using the power of metagaming to roflstomp winrar like no character before ever had!

Admittedly, from the outside, it looked like I ran & hid, and prayed. Then, after the trained soldiers wiped the floor with the rest of (my half of) the party, I surrendered and got taken prisoner. But, trust me, those highly trained soldiers were no match for my powers of metagaming - I had them right where I wanted them! Really. Any minute now, and I was going to take them all, singlehandedly, despite them having just dropped the rest of my (powered) party, and me just being, well, me. And unarmed. It's a good thing (the other half of party, and) a portal showed up when it did, otherwise, those TPK-ing soldiers never would have known what hit them.

Kardwill
2019-05-21, 04:40 AM
Has anybody here ever played a 'transported to a fantasy world' character in a campaign before?


Not D&D, but I did once. I played an enthusiastic and idealistic but pretty clumsy Tokyo cop that ended up by accident in some Anime-style fantasy world. She was utterly unprepared to that kind of experience, but it was a pretty fun ride.
Ended up as a dragonrider in the imperial guard, as she didn't know you should not touch an imperial dragon egg (or, in her case, that you shouldn't monologue about justice while standing barefooted on that weird shaped glowing rock the villains were trying to destroy)

Good times ^^

Lately, I've been tempted to GM such a game on Fate (Core or Accelerated)

Imbalance
2019-05-21, 07:18 AM
I have to post this to try and keep the damn soap opera theme out of my head.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088587/

This premise is highly adaptable.

Quertus
2019-05-21, 08:29 AM
I have to post this to try and keep the damn soap opera theme out of my head.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088587/

This premise is highly adaptable.

Otherworld? Is that the one with then I would start my own collection of severed hands, and the first one would be made of gold? Because that (and a "quiz") are all I remember from some series I watched long ago.

Zakhara
2019-05-21, 03:58 PM
I've been strongly considering a trip to Barsoom for some time. The novels were a big influence on early D&D, and the concept of fish-out-of-water stories has been making a comeback lately. The time may be ripe for it.

I haven't actually attempted it yet, but I think the upsides and downsides start with how mundane the characters are before their entrapment. Especially if you try to use players' own identities, rather than fictional characters (not something that's common, but I've been interested in trying this).

I believe the sense of immersion in this type of story is potentially second to none, as all players know exactly as much as their characters at any given time. The idea of being trapped also provides many interesting story setups and opportunities for roleplay and conflict (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance definitely springs to mind). I say it's worth a try.

Quertus
2019-05-21, 04:26 PM
I've been strongly considering a trip to Barsoom for some time. The novels were a big influence on early D&D, and the concept of fish-out-of-water stories has been making a comeback lately. The time may be ripe for it.

I haven't actually attempted it yet, but I think the upsides and downsides start with how mundane the characters are before their entrapment. Especially if you try to use players' own identities, rather than fictional characters (not something that's common, but I've been interested in trying this).

I believe the sense of immersion in this type of story is potentially second to none, as all players know exactly as much as their characters at any given time. The idea of being trapped also provides many interesting story setups and opportunities for roleplay and conflict (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance definitely springs to mind). I say it's worth a try.

Immersion? I'm not sure. The players start at T=0 knowing exactly as much as their characters, but reading about a song or waterfall or war or amputation or whatever is not the same as actually *experiencing* it.

Further, the details each person pays attention to naturally will vary. GMs have a hard enough time being the interface to the game world to begin with; add in the difference between the types of memories that they form before and after "characterization", and I think I'd actually find it the least immersive possibility.

Then again, I've roleplayed myself before, and didn't really notice - perhaps because the GM knew me, and what they described largely matched what I would notice noticing at the time. After the fact, looking back, the memories are still noticeably wrong, though. I don't know what certain things *felt* like, for example.

Malphegor
2019-05-22, 05:46 AM
I thought about it having where there are two ways to travel between Earth (our world) and Toril (D&D world):

1. There are a handful gates between Earth and Toril that can be passed through to travel between the two worlds freely. Catch is, all of them are in very isolated areas that you’d have to go out of your way to find.

2. A 12th Level spell called Conjure Otherworlder can summon a human from Earth into Toril. This is primarily for the “I choose you as Champion” sort of deal.

There's also a rickety-looking Dungeons and Dragons ride in presumably America that'll take you to the World of Dungeons and Dragons. (https://youtu.be/YacKar7y3mc) This is probably one of those Gates. :)

The Monster
2019-05-22, 06:52 PM
I did a series of convention adventures based on the conceit that someone had figured out how to portal to an alternate dimension, where all the D&D monsters and such existed. They discovered that there is a one-to-one correspondence between each location on Earth and each location the alternate planet, but the geography was completely different - so two points that are hundreds of kilometers apart on Earth might be hundreds of meters apart on the alternate world (and vice versa). The other trick is that when you were alt-world, you would always return to Earth at the same moment you left, even if in a different location.

The players worked for a company that used this for special transportation, delivering time-sensitive goods from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else on Earth - since no matter how long the journey took in alt-world, the package would arrive with no Earth time having passed. Of course, while in alt-world, time passed for the PCs (and the package) normally, so it wasn't quite like global teleportation.

Given the dangers of alt-world (it was informally called Hellgate), these delivery services were heavily armed and took along several 'specialists' who would normally not be part of a martial endeavor (linguists, chemists, diplomats, etc.). Each delivery (i.e., adventure) included fights against various D&D monsters, terrain puzzles, and an occasional social challenge (drow were the main organized opposition. Standard D&D material, but with modern weaponry and no magic on the players' side.