Quote from: RPGPundit;396942What are the best features about those games or campaigns that involve travel through different dimensions (parallel earths or fantasy worlds, or impossible/divine realms)?  What do you want in such a game? What ideas do you have for these types of games to have their fullest potential?

RPGPundit

Different parallel "Earths" to do some touring in. Maybe to do some business in. Maybe to do some hired killing in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4MgpwKYQ1Y

Coming from a D&D background, most of the other planes are really boring except for the Shadow Plane. The inner planes are featureless expanses that exist only to power certain spells, the upper planes are too idyllic, and the lower planes are too deadly.

It took reading OGL books like Dark Dungeons, Classic Play: The Book of the Planes, Countless Doorways, Legends & Lairs: Portals & Planes, and Dark Roads & Golden Hells to get genuinely interesting gazetteers.

In the end I adopted the Sephirotic model from CPBotP, but moved the inner planes to elemental poles in the plane of primordial chaos.

after all, the original d&d setting was a multi-universal spanning setup. what with the seven original Primes, after all.

even in the original boxed set, you had that crashed starship in the north-western corner of the world, and alternate dimensions of various origins. and they just expanded that as the editions progressed.

Quote from: nijineko;854067after all, the original d&d setting was a multi-universal spanning setup. what with the seven original Primes, after all.

even in the original boxed set, you had that crashed starship in the north-western corner of the world, and alternate dimensions of various origins. and they just expanded that as the editions progressed.

Yup, this was a feature of D&D pretty much from day one. It's not surprising given the sci-fi that was popular at that time; both the "planetary fantasy" type stuff (which for example Tekumel plays off of; where Tekumel is actually an alien world that a human colony ship landed on long ago), and the multiple-reality stuff that Zelazny and others were really developing right then.

Quote from: nijineko;854067after all, the original d&d setting was a multi-universal spanning setup. what with the seven original Primes, after all.

even in the original boxed set, you had that crashed starship in the north-western corner of the world, and alternate dimensions of various origins. and they just expanded that as the editions progressed.

Seven Primes and crashed starships in original D&D? Has somebody been messing around with the timeline again? :confused:

Quote from: rawma;856031Seven Primes and crashed starships in original D&D? Has somebody been messing around with the timeline again? :confused:

Not that I'm aware of. That stuff was in there from the beginning. Earth itself is supposed to be one of the seven primes, the least magical one (Gygax was always cagey when speaking of them as they represented potential future IP, one of them was going to be an action setting; the named ones are Oerth, Aerth, Uerth, Yarth and Earth. There is also the possibility that they were going to stop with the five. And maybe I just mis-remembered 5 in favor of 7.)

However, most timelines I've seen simply fail to include those parts. I guess that would imply that most timelines skip it due to ignorance or maybe a little rewriting to suite their personal preference? After all history is "his-story".

Quote from: nijineko;856084However, most timelines I've seen simply fail to include those parts.

I meant the timeline of the real world. What do you mean by "original D&D"?

Quote from: RPGPundit;397145To me its all about Gonzo and Grandeur.  Multi-dimensional games can have all kinds of really surreal stuff you just couldn't fit in a normal campaign, and can show spectacular "views" as part of its setting.  They just operate on a huge scale.

RPGPundit

You can also do the reverse. Go from the fantastical to a more grounded and mundane setting. Or near featureless plains, empty worlds, and other things that make back home look great by comparison.

I am currently trying to write up one of my own planar campaigns into a publishable pdf for others to use as background story to their campaign.

What I found so fascinating about my story was that it was spread out across not only all the planes but also time and then i added in re-incarnation for the protagonists.

So i could do flashbacks to a previous life that had the same focus as the current campaign as well as have a time travelling antagonist running around sowing seeds for the future and doing this all over the planes.

I never got to finish it, but the last scenario i ran in this campaign was the party running around a drow city now under control of a priestess of kiriansalee and they were eventually transported 30.000 years back in time to the land where Kiriansalee were once a 'mortal' elf queen and was framed for murder which led to her banishment from the kingdom. She was consumed by hatred and rose an army of undead which ended up engulfing the entire world, this was the stepping stone for Kiriansalee to become a demigod. If the adventurers could somehow prove she was framed and prevent her banishment, she would not become a demigod and her priestess in the drow city could not be her priestess.

This kind of entanglement is fascinating to me, but that is more or less just time travel paradoxes in a nutshell and not so much planes.

Another thing i did was have an artefact every once in awhile transport the adventurers into a dreamworld, which was built around the double morality standards of the party wizard and eventually they would have to deal with a manifistation of this.

While also being visited by someone they don't know, except he knows them, rescuing them and taking them to another plane as if it was perfectly normal business and sending them back.

but like many others have said... it is about being able to do what you do your typical material plane only bigger

Deities fighting over power, villains executing plans across several planes, chasing someone from plane to plane, changing enviroment and laws of physics.. but also it is like it is abit more legal to create the even more bizar and extravangant and wild.. although it is ourselves that sets those limits in any setting

Quote from: rawma;856356I meant the timeline of the real world. What do you mean by "original D&D"?

OD&D or "original" typically refers to the original boxed set released in the mid seventies to include reprintings, with the three base booklets and four expansion booklets which made up the entire game, at the time.

Quote from: nijineko;856617OD&D or "original" typically refers to the original boxed set released in the mid seventies to include reprintings, with the three base booklets and four expansion booklets which made up the entire game, at the time.

Alternate Oerths and a crashed spaceship were in that original 1970s D&D stuff?

Quote from: rawma;856625Alternate Oerths and a crashed spaceship were in that original 1970s D&D stuff?

Temple of the Frog. Aliens from another world setting up shop and using advanced tech. That is in the Blackmoor book. I believe somewhere there is mentioned the Egg of Coot might have originated from another dimension or space? Or did that come later? One of the players from OD&D crossed over to Boot Hill and back even. So it was going on fairly early on.

Quote from: rawma;856625Alternate Oerths and a crashed spaceship were in that original 1970s D&D stuff?

There wasn't a lot of 'official' scenario stuff from TSR pre-AD&D. Temple of the Frog was for a while the commonly available example, rather than exceptional. There was more stuff in the magazines (Tractics WW2 Germans meeting the minions of a D&D Evil High Priest, for instance).

The original set had encounter tables for Barsoom (no stats, but I think TSR briefly had a miniatures rules set for that on the market).

Empire of the Petal Throne and Metamorphosis Alpha were early follow up releases.

MA was the inspiration for Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. The Giants-Drow series of modules concluded with Queen of the Spiderweb Pits. Later scenarios included Wonderland (Dungeonland and Land Beyond the Magic Mirror), King Kong (Isle of the Ape) and Averoigne (Castle Amber).

The Dungeon Masters Guide included a section on worlds colliding, with conversion notes for Boot Hill and Gamma World.

The unofficial Arduin Grimoire (1977) mentioned a Multiversal Trading Co. (which idea I developed on lines similar to Niven's Flight of the Horse).

My memory of what the Judges Guild offered is hazy, but I'll bet there was more plane-hopping than just Dante's Circles of Hell.

Quote from: Phillip;856883There wasn't a lot of 'official' scenario stuff from TSR pre-AD&D.

That's how I remembered it; some science fiction elements like Barsoom encounter tables (maybe tied to Warrior of Mars from TSR, or maybe they just expected you to make it up if you were going to use it) and robots and androids (but no stats). The only crashed spaceship I know of was Expedition to the Barrier Peaks which was after AD&D was out, and Oerth et al were only mentioned even later. So take "original D&D" with a five to ten year sized grain of salt.

Quote from: Phillip;856883The original set had encounter tables for Barsoom (no stats, but I think TSR briefly had a miniatures rules set for that on the market).

Yes. And yes.