Campaign Structure Advice - Sliders

[HeloDragon]

I was thinking about running a campaign that would go a little bit like the old Sliders television show: every 1-3 sessions the players would jump to a new plane, and a lot of the action would be based on figuring out how to make the jump to the next plane.

I'm a pretty new DM, but experienced enough to know that I shouldn't try to map out the details of a campaign before starting. I still want to map out the basic rules of how the multiverse works and the goals of some antagonists. I find that having a slightly-rigid framework helps me map out sessions, foreshadow, and so on. I'm looking for advice on how to do this.

Goals: The only real point of having multiverse rules is to serve the gameplay. The "main" rules should be simple enough that the PCs understand immediately what is going on, and they should put a lot of pressure on the PCs to keep jumping. Ideally, they would still allow some messing around (e.g. so that PCs will usually jump to a new plane alone, but might occasionally jump to an old plane or have people tag along).

Current Ideas for Multiverse:

PCs start on a low-magic, high-tech world. Government has recently figured out how to "drill" between planes. They build a little drone to do this, and find that the nearby planes are low-tech. They decide to build a big drilling machine to build a "tunnel," travel a low-tech nearby plane, drop another device to stabilize the "tunnel" between planes, and drill for oil. They start building the device and training a crew to operate it. However, there is a training "accident": the drilling machine turns on, the crew follow it and can't get it to turn off before it makes another jump. The PCs are sent to rescue the initial with a one-use "get-back-home" teleporting device and some kits.

The basic rules for the drilling machine are something like: the machine "drills" at a constant rate, but the boundaries between planes are of different thicknesses. Every few days it "breaks through" and creates a tunnel between planes. The tunnel is unstable and oscillates: it is open for about an hour, turns off for a day, on for an hour, off for a week, on for an hour, and so on.

PCs may have other McGuffins that lets them e.g. phone home and talk to their original government, though this should be at least a little unreliable. This allows for the possibility of them getting new tech or instructions (or for going rogue).

Current Ideas for Antagonists:

The original training crew was contacted by some entity from another plane, who told them it's plane's "coordinates" and instructed them to drill towards it. I don't think it is too important to know what this entity wants or what the original crew believes, but I'm thinking something like:

(1) The original world has a lot of ambient magic (because it isn't being used), and the entity wants to harvest it. This is of course an inversion of the government's plans.

(2) The crew believes that the entity is essentially an angel, and that they are going to merge the worlds.

Presumably at some point the PCs should catch up to the crew and figure some of this out. Presumably the original government will also have some goals, and the PCs should run into people on various planes.

Some Sketchy Ideas for Early Encounters:

- A bunch of planes should be "played straight" and have no big connection to the plot: fish-out-of-water stories, tunnel is in a guarded location that the PCs need to break into, there is some treasure to loot and take with them, etc etc.

- The original crew should be pretty awful - in some planes, PCs need to deal with fallout of their actions. This should prepare the PCs for the fact that they might not face a very pleasant reception when they catch up to the original crew.

- In some planes, people figure out what is going on and try to take control of and stabilize the tunnels.

- In some planes, allies and/or antagonists follow the PCs.

- In some planes, the PCs run into a major threat to other planes (e.g. the plane has been completely taken over by shadows, who threaten to spill over into adjacent planes through the tunnels the machine is making).

- Some planes should know about planar travel, and it should be possible for PCs to steal some of this technology (maybe this is how they catch up with the original crew for the first time). This tech shouldn't stay with them forever. One option I like is stealing a planar "battleship" like in the Planebreaker campaign book.

Thanks for any advice!

PS: I've run into a lot of DM advice along the lines of "at first, just prep the small area you start in." However, that seems really hard to do for this sort of campaign - I don't know how I would get NPCs to act coherently without first establishing the basic rules for how planar travel works. Am I missing something? Or does "the basic magical premise of the campaign" count as "the area you start in" for this sort of campaign?

[Pauly]

1) Daleks. Not literally Daleks, but a figurative equivalent. One of the early enemies they defeat pursue them relentlessly across many planes with the single minded obsession of destroying the intruders who embarrassed them. They will also upset the BBEG’s apple cart at times due to their high collateral damage.
This helps with the “gotta keep moving” theme as well as giving you a deus ex machina to keep the plot within the boundaries. It also justifies the existence of some sort of inter-planar tracking device that can be captured from the Daleks as a means of locating the current whereabouts of the original crew.

2) in one plane they run into a world where the original crew are revered as gods, so any attempt at persuading along the lines of “we need to stop the original crew” will end up the PCs thrown in jail.



As for just prep the area you start in advice. I think in your campaign you will probably want to adjust the plane the party go to next based plot needs, and you’re not tied to a map. In which case having a library of potential planes at least half prepared will be a great asset even if you only use half of them. I’d say preparing no more than 20 planes - that’s roughly a year’s worth of material if you finish each plane in 2-3 sessions assuming one session a week. Then prepping another 10 planes when your supply gets down to below 10 planes.

[False God]

Distractions.

One big element of Sliders was that there was other stuff on every world that the crew got involved in, usually having nothing to do with their Sliding. Romances, petty criminal stuff, huge scandals, etc...

It's one thing to simply need to get from Point A to Point B within the Timeframe. What IMO makes it interesting is what the group has to deal with along the way. These events can be major or minor, but they should generally be enough to attract player attention, or even involuntarily rope them into it, to cause players attention to be split between two goals: "Get to the portal." and "Resolve this local situation."

Otherwise the in-between worlds are functionally forgettable.

Not every world needs to be super interesting, nor every event super engaging. Maybe it's just that this world made a "Doom" movie and someone wants to see it, but the next showtime and its run length, plus getting to the next point, means you're cutting the clock close. These "other" events should generally not be related to the main plot of the game. They're distractions to make time matter and force the players to make choices.

[Alcore]

PS: I've run into a lot of DM advice along the lines of "at first, just prep the small area you start in." However, that seems really hard to do for this sort of campaign - I don't know how I would get NPCs to act coherently without first establishing the basic rules for how planar travel works. Am I missing something? Or does "the basic magical premise of the campaign" count as "the area you start in" for this sort of campaign?

Yes and yes...

I'll second the "at first, just prep the small area you start in."


I found the show boring but my mother loved it so I know a few things. One of the things I do know is that they wanted to go home. If you want to adhere to Sliders you want the players to like and want to return. The characters will, of course, have a good reason but if you can get the players to want to return you get home as the goal.

I don't think that actually happened but I do know they lost the black guy when they reached a world where his alter ego was a celebrity.


If this was Dungeons and Dragons this is also the time I would establish the pantheon of gods they are most likely to meet the worshippers of. Anything that is a "universal constant" counts as the small area you start in. As those elements are either needed for character creation or for you to create a coherent narrative. Sometimes both.

To continue DnD (or, more specifically, Pathfinder) what I would do is; take a pathfinder hex (which is 12 miles long) and zoom in so it is represented by seven haxes. At this scale terrain could have some variation but will definitely have a theme to it and anything smaller than a small city can fit snugly in a mini hex. This also means seven encounters per world (plus a main quest or randoms) and unless there is a drastic change you can recycle most of them.[

[Morgaln]

1) Daleks. Not literally Daleks, but a figurative equivalent. One of the early enemies they defeat pursue them relentlessly across many planes with the single minded obsession of destroying the intruders who embarrassed them. They will also upset the BBEG’s apple cart at times due to their high collateral damage.
This helps with the “gotta keep moving” theme as well as giving you a deus ex machina to keep the plot within the boundaries. It also justifies the existence of some sort of inter-planar tracking device that can be captured from the Daleks as a means of locating the current whereabouts of the original crew.

A variation on this idea: Maybe there is an entity (or several entites) who are in charge of keeping the boundaries between planes. They would hunt both the players and the original crew in order to restore the original status and keep these upstarts from upsetting the natural order any more.

Distractions.

One big element of Sliders was that there was other stuff on every world that the crew got involved in, usually having nothing to do with their Sliding. Romances, petty criminal stuff, huge scandals, etc...

It's one thing to simply need to get from Point A to Point B within the Timeframe. What IMO makes it interesting is what the group has to deal with along the way. These events can be major or minor, but they should generally be enough to attract player attention, or even involuntarily rope them into it, to cause players attention to be split between two goals: "Get to the portal." and "Resolve this local situation."

Otherwise the in-between worlds are functionally forgettable.

Not every world needs to be super interesting, nor every event super engaging. Maybe it's just that this world made a "Doom" movie and someone wants to see it, but the next showtime and its run length, plus getting to the next point, means you're cutting the clock close. These "other" events should generally not be related to the main plot of the game. They're distractions to make time matter and force the players to make choices.

The main problem here is getting the players engaged. Sliders solved the problem by forcing the protagonists into the plot a lot, usually by having one of them getting mixed up with their alternate plane counterpart or running afoul of local laws in some way. Otherwise, most episodes would have been "hunker down somewehre and wait for the timer to go down." It worked for the show, for a game, players might get unhappy if something bad always happens to them when they arrive on a plane.

A potential way around this could be the following:
The players' drill works automatically, thus setting a timer on how long they stay on a plane. However, it also works undirected, meaning the next plane it chooses is pretty much random. The players can, however, direct it at specific planes. For that, they need to track somehow what plane the crew they are trying to rescue went towards. This tracking requires them to interact with the world and potentially the people on each plane. That gives players something to actively work towards (whatever form that takes) and gets them involved with whatever is going on in that plane.

[Pauly]

A variation on this idea: Maybe there is an entity (or several entites) who are in charge of keeping the boundaries between planes. They would hunt both the players and the original crew in order to restore the original status and keep these upstarts from upsetting the natural order any more.

.

That works just as well. The important thing is that this group is implacable, relentless and unreasonable (ie can’t be negotiated with). They don’t care that the PCs are good guys or that the BBEGs are the bad guys. The natural order has to be maintained and anyone who messes with it gets targeted with extreme prejudice.

From a scenario design POV the question is are they Daleks (wave after wave of mooks) or Terminators (1 or 2 extremely powerful individuals)?

[DCraw]

One idea you might consider borrowing from the Pratchett/SandersonBaxter Long Earth series would be limitations on what the characters can take with them between planes. In The Long Earth, people can travel between different versions of Earth, but one of the limitations is that they can't take anything Ferrous, so no iron or steel tools. You want to set up a new utopian village a few thousand steps (worlds) away? Fine but you'll have to take bronze tools and set up a forge when you get there -oh, and most modern electronics needs iron in one way or another.

One way I could see this working would be that nothing crystalline can survive the trip. This would allow you to add in items or give gear to enemies that would normally be far too OP to risk the PCs getting their hands on. You could even give them some fun toys to play with, knowing that they will have to leave them behind in a few sessions and it won't destroy your campaign: "You find an ornately carved rod with an almost incomprehensibly intricately faceted crystal inlaid at the top. As you pick it up, you feel as if you could do anything at all; reality itself has become your plaything." The players find a Wand of Wishes and can go absolutely wild with what they do with it, but when they move to the next plane the crystal shatters and they are left with a rather nice decorative stick.

The key to this is to setup the rules around travelling before you give your players anything that would be affected. Perhaps one player has a high end watch that they take with them on the first journey. As soon as they step through the tunnel it stops working; the quartz crystal used to keep time has turned to dust. Now the players know that some things break between worlds, and a little chat with the scientists back home can sort out what's happening. This also plays into the sense of exploring the unknown.

[edit]: Brainfart corrected.

[Morgaln]

Pratchett/Sanderson Long Earth series

Pratchett/Baxter, actually.

[DCraw]

Pratchett/Baxter, actually.

You're completely right. D'oh.

The rest of the post still stands, though.