I originally posted this ion the "Article Requests" seciton of Dragon magazine's forum, but generated no interst. I got to thinking that this is because it is more of a Dungeon Magazine thing. ANyway, here's a reprint if anyoneis interested in commenting.
"Do you get many submission queries regarding alternative Prime Material Planes?
According to the Planar Handbook, there are an infinite number of them, all right next to Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and others. I wasn't thinking of entire Campaign Worlds or huge Backdrops, where every detail would have to be built - rather, a few details that would make each world a little bit different, allowing it to fit into a regular sized article.
For instance, have a colder Prime World, where the sun is a distant blue star, and surface races have crowded around pockets of geothermal energy.
Or perhaps a world where magic is flooded, and every mortal is born with a small, select list of spell-like abilities that are innate.
Or a shattered planes, where a couple of Prime worlds collided together, leaving pockets of different climates and topogrpahical features, all patchworked together into one large continent (this one was not my idea - belongs to Tony B. in Clarksville, IN).
And so on. . .
What would be the interest level for regular articles highlighting a different alternative Prime Material Plane? Considering that there were over 11,000 submissions for WOTC's Campaign World contest (I sent 4 myself, but they were absolute stinkers compared to Baker's Ebberon), I think there might be a font of unused material out there...
I think it would be cool to have an adventure using two different WotC settings as alternate primes of each other or possibly a campaign arc that did all three (The Realms, Greyhawk and Eberron). It might be kind of fun to see how a plot could weave its way through all three gameworlds. If not, just using two would be cool as well. It wouldn't necessarily have to be world-shattering. It might be more fun to have the campaign arc represent a little blip in the continuity of the different primes involved.
I think it would be cool to have an adventure using two different WotC settings as alternate primes of each other or possibly a campaign arc that did all three (The Realms, Greyhawk and Eberron). It might be kind of fun to see how a plot could weave its way through all three gameworlds. If not, just using two would be cool as well. It wouldn't necessarily have to be world-shattering. It might be more fun to have the campaign arc represent a little blip in the continuity of the different primes involved.
Hey - that is a cool concept.
The problem is that a lot of us don't have the source material for campaigns we are not using. I'm very unlikely to pick up all the Eberron and Forgotten Realms books just to run a cool 4 part adventure series. Hell I wouldn't do it for a 24 part adventure series.
So the trick would be getting off the flavour of the varous adventure locals while not requiring all the books. Pretty trouble some really.
That said for the DM that does have more then one set of campaign books it might make an interesting adventure to try and link some Dungeon Adventures set in different campaugn worlds into some kind of over arcing plot.
True enough. That was one of those ideas you have before thinking of the logistical hurdles.
Without the books, that idea wouldn't work. . . but let's say you DID have all the books... hmm?
A concept that ties multiple Primes together... heh heh, this reeks of Spelljammer. Remember the Phlogiston, or whatever it was called? Interesting idea...
I had an idea once about a ArchWizard from my world (Wistera), who kept a number of specially designed crystal balls. Each one represented an entire minature world.
The idea was, he would start with the basic building blocks of a cosmology, and then accelerate them with a bunch of temporal energy.
Each crystal ball's world would evolve in a completely different way, and once the world developed some level of inteligent life or civilization, the ArchWizard would slow them down and shrink himself to visit them.
With the knoweldge of all possible existences and worlds at his fingertips, he ifgured his knowledge would be infinite as well, as he can use anything these alien inteligences cooked up in their own culture.
Greyhawk was one of these worlds, so was FR, Eberron, and even a D20 modern world. I wanted the PCs to be from one of these worlds, and eventually figure things out, Matrix style.
Never worked it all out though.
Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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Funny story.
When I was hired as the editor of Polyhedron in 1999, while third edition was still a'birthing in the minds of Wizards of the Coast's brilliant design team, I was smack in the middle of writing "The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer," my first professional gamebook credit and an absolute labor of love. I wrote a line in the beginning of the book positioning Oerth as one Material world along a metaphysical axis that brought it into alignment with other alternative versions of the same world, a nod to an old Gygax Polyhedron interview in which he explained that Oerth had sister worlds like Aerth, Earth, and Yarth.
The third edition design team, upon reviewing the manuscript, called out that detail for ridicule, noting how "science fictiony" and silly it sounded.
Meh.
--Erik
PS: I will remember to my dying day that during that stressful meeting, Bruce Cordell quietly said "But I loved that line." Great guy, that Bruce.