Small multiverses in fiction.

[halfeye]

This .... basically sounds like core premise of Kingdom Hearts?
but maybe not the aesthetic you're looking for.

Maybe there was a LEGO game that allowed you to go to different LEGO worlds...
Or maybe I only dreamt of that...

I was thinking of text stories rather than games, but games could be good.

There's plenty of dimension hopping stories where the universes may as well just be one planet. Piers Anthony's Mode series for example, or David Drake's Northworld.

I don't remember reading either of those, if they're recent I probably never did.

Not too many stories of the type very interested in space travel at all. Kind of...adjacent genres? One kind of takes the role of another. If there's space travel you can just make Planets of Hats. If there's multiple universes you don't really need space travel.

This is likely why you haven't seen anything exactly like this before.

Planet of hats sounds bad, the idea (in the levels of magic multiverse) would be that the no-magic universe could be explored by a high technology civilisation, but they couldn't conquer the rest of the multiverse because magic. Another idea is that someone from a low magic universe gated into a high magic one tries to light a fire, and woops, scary mega-fireball. It's probably mainly a setting for journeys, or pursuits, the paths from gate to gate can be mapped, but the gates only have one destination, so there might be a short cut through gates, or the way back might be thousands of kilometres, then ten, then hundreds, then thousands, then thousands, depending on which gate went where.

"The Long Earth" by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter might fit what you are looking for.

It's good, but it's nothing like this.

So might "Interworld" by Neil Gaiman.

I haven't read that. Oddly, the Chronicles of Morgaine also feature gates, but those are different, they're bigger, they can be targetted, and they allow (disastrously) time travel. A good set of stories.

I could see a potentially interesting variation if you assumed each planet existed in each universe, but altered according to its local rules. That would sorta still be the same end result as simply having X universes/planets rather than X planets copied across Y universes, but somewhat more tightly themed.

That's a valid possible variation.

Why would they even need to be multiverses? Nothing in the OP particularly suggests the idea couldn't be done in different planets.

I wanna.

Mind you, I would never be the target audience, because I WANT to try and impress on people an Understanding of Scale and how truly enormous the universe is, and how complicated and messy and difficult to explain it is, and so be able fully appreciate the grandure and complexity for what it is. Metaphorically, that one clip of Samuel L Jackson (presumably for Pulp Fiction) about wanting someone to acknowledge that miracle that just happened.

The real universe is too big. It's inhuman. I don't think anyone really gets the scale of the thing. Just the Milky Way is too big, and there are a billion of it.

(But having written exceeding quarter of a million words on that sort of thing (and ironically noting in variety the sort of diversity between worlds or powers in the OP's multiverse suggestions), which I can only verify has been 100% read by two other people (both from this forum, thank you Thanqol and Rater202), it rather confirms I am in a minority of asymptoting to one. I'd be more self-deprecating, but I'm sort of past the point it is self-deprecating humour and more the bitter truth, so...)

Actually writing is difficult.

I feel like the issue with designing a setting with the specific goal of of encompassing several different styles or genres of stories is that most authors don't want to write several different genres of fiction. Writers, like most artists, tend to specialize in a particular style, or maybe go through phases from one thing to another as their interests change and evolve over time.

This idea might work as a means for a group of authors to do some sort of interconnected storytelling, like how Marvel brings together magic and space and spy heroes in one story, but that takes a lot of work and planning.

I'm not thinking of a multiverse being for multiple genres, I'm not thinking of more than one multiverse appearing in one story (if they do, doesn't that just make it one bigger multiverse?) I'm thinking of the story being about the journeys across the lands between the gates, not about the details of the rests between journey stages. I particularly do not want long and vaguely detailed descriptions of food eaten at various stops, nothing wrong with people wanting that if they do, it's just not me.