Planar travel - Forgotten Realms to Eberron

[Dee]

Hi all,

I was hoping someone might be able to help me out with the mechanics of this idea. I am currently DM'ing the Shackled City AP and I was thinking that it would be really cool to have a little diversion into the realm of Eberron. This is for two reasons: 1) Develop characters a bit more and give each player an exciting mini-adventure in Eberron 2) Give the players (and myself) a taste of the Eberron campaign setting to assess its suitability for later campaigns/adventures.

Now what I was thinking of doing was having the party stumble through a portal somewhere which comes out on to one of the planes that touches on Eberron. They will be falling through this plane, so only catch a brief glimpse as the ground (or matter, whatever is suitable to the plane) rushes up to meet them. Miraculously that plane is in alignment with Eberron at the time and, even more miraculously a portal opens from that plane onto Eberron at the exact point where they hit the ground. Obviously they'd have to land in like...a big pool of jelly or a pillow factory or something ;) Possibly in Sharn, with the plane they fall through being that which has a manifest zone there (I have forgotten the name)?

Anyway, I'm just wondering if that kind of planar travel, from Forgotten Realms (the setting I'm running SCAP in currently) to Eberron is possile, and what you think some good ideas are for making it work. Basically I only want a short adeventure on Eberron which will be focussed on getting them back to the Forgotten Realms so that they can continue the campaign. So something along the lines of an artificer needing a dragonshard to open a portal for them or some such?

Anyway, help would be most welcome!!

[Grimcleaver]

The primary way to travel from one setting to another is through the plane of shadow (don't ask me why the plane of shadow and not the astral, which is supposed to connect to everything at once...*grumble* but that's how the Manual of the Planes guys decided it so there you to). Apparently though you can travel away from the prime plane from within the plane of shadow until you are entirely in the shadow realm. If you keep traveling for long enough you can pop through in the shadow plane of another prime material plane, for example Eberron.

Other alternatives are the City of Sigil and the Infinite Stair. Sigil is replete with doors to every part of every plane in every setting, and ANYTHING doorlike can serve as a door--if you have the right key. One key + door combination would take you from Faerun to Sigil, a crazy ring-city straight out of Mirrormask, and another would take you from Sigil to Eberron. The Infinite Stair is a similar idea, but is a large spiral staircase floating in nothing with doorways every few feet (think the backdoors in the Matrix) that open into places in other worlds. I'm fuzziest on this last one, no real hard knowledge--just what I've heard. There's other even weirder ways to make it from world to world (like some magical items that deal with planeshifting or blasting creatures into other planes--which sometimes can rarely access other settings) but the above are the ones I'm most familiar with.

If this seems like a lot of work just to get from Faerun to Eberron it's because 3rd edition largely did away with the idea of easily travelling between settings with just a portal or a planeshifting spell. The main reason for this was their settings were becoming a jumbled mess. Major characters would bounce between settings. Atmosphere and flavor would be wrecked by stuff that just didn't belong--like a spelljamming spaceport on Faerun for example. Any given campaign would become a nightmare of different weirdos from different worlds all suddenly crammed into the same setting. You'd be trying to tell a story and then suddenly the group would just boink off to some other setting on a whim, wrecking the whole deal. Pretty ugly stuff. Now going from game to game is an adventure in itself. It's more involved than just popping through a portal, but then it also means the worlds get to stay nice and distinct for the most part.

[Jonathan Drain]

Actually, how I'd do it is simply to have the same (or similar) characters in a different world. Consider, for example, the Fullmetal Alchemist movie. It's an entirely different world, and yet there's still a Roy Mustang in that world just as there is in the other world. The two have never met and have never travelled to each others' worlds, they're just the same characters in different, parallel settings.

Game-wise, of course, assume that any XP and loot gained in the alternate world is somehow duplicated by some unstated adventure that the characters of the first world undertook while the players were away.

The reason I dislike having the characters literally travel between worlds is that it tends to jumble the world up a little. There's nothing written in the Eberron book about someone coming from another world, and I don't like the idea that it's at all possible for Elminster to zip in when he wants and visit the City of Towers.

[Dee]

I see your point about the world's getting jumbled up and that being a bad thing. However, I was thinking that the planar travel in this instance would just be a freaky coincidence of everything happening at the right time, which makes it impossible (or nearly so) for the player's to travel back and forth at whim. Basically it would go something along the lines of Vhalantru (in Cauldron) hiring a guy to give the PC's a suicide quest, although of course not telling them it's a suicide quest (just something innocent and easy sounding). The quest giver happens to know that there's a concealed portal into (taking the first poster's advice) the plane of shadow which the PC's will fall into and hopefully never return. However, luckily for the PC's, the plane of shadow is connected to one of the planes that orbit Eberron which at the time is actually touching Eberron, so whilst they are falling through the shadow plane they fall right through another portal which lands them in Eberron. They do some minor adventuring and discover that there is apparently only one, very powerful and slightly mad artificer who can create a temporary portal back into the shadow plane and give them the means of returning home. Obviously because the fact that these portals were all in alignment was freaky to begin with, they will have no way of getting back to Eberron once they return home...so hopefully fixing the jumbling problem. The adventure in Eberron is intended to be fast paced, they won't really get a chance to say, buy up on a bunch of magical/technological items or hire a warforged bodyguard and import it into FR :P

[Tequila Sunrise]

I've been under the impression, since the 3rd edition era began, that each campaign setting is totally independant and isolated. Because of the fact that each setting has its own unique cosmology, cross-setting travel wasn't meant to happen (one of the changes from 2nd to 3rd ed. that I don't like). Of course you're the DM and you can decide that some freak temp planar portal can happen; and hey this kinda stuff happens on the Sci Fi channel all the time and nobody blinks.

[Jonathan Drain]

Dee: Well, when you put it that way it might work out. The main issue is that it shouldn't be something that tends to happen or that people are aware of happening, or else it can corrupt the setting.

[Bocklin]

Then, beside planar travel, you can use the "Spelljammer" system. It's from ADD time and, as far as I understand it, every setting (called "crystal sphere") is a different planet/solar system.

"Spelljammer" was offering rules to manage "space travel" between the different "crystal spheres".

I understand that some old lore (non-Spelljammer, but consequent to the publication of Spelljammer) sometimes includes reference to the devices used to so travel (i.e. the "spaceships") or to spelljamming creautres/adventurers (e.g. in "Greyhawk - The Adventure Begins").

If you played Baldur's Gate 2 you will maybe remember this big metal sphere that your mage could claim as his stronghold. I think that it's a reference to Spelljammer as well.

You could have Spelljammers from the FR discovering the way to the "godless" world of Eberron and help with the post Last War reconstruction taking back the heroes with them. Or your artificer could work on some Eldritch Machine that "Spelljamms" them through the void to the cystal sphere of the FR.

Bocklin

Bocklin