Hello all. I'm thinking up a world-hopping campaign that is, ostensibly, a lot like Sliders meets DnD, with a little Stargate thrown in for good measure.
PCs would perhaps be from Earth(?)or golarion and excavating an ancient artifact, accidentally activate it, and then be transferred to an entirely different world. Some I'm thinking of using are from literary or entertainment sources; for example, the Wizard of Oz or Airbender. Where ever the players go, they will have access to new options to retrain or pick up when they level (for instnce, the spell flurry of snowballs would be available when they've met someone who can teach them it)
My question is, have you ever played in/gm'd a world-hopping campaign, and if so, what worked well and what fell flat on its face?
Also, ideas for non-earth worlds? They could be anywhere from the stone age to the far-earth future. What sort of resources are there out there?
Bumpity Bump Bump
There is the "distant worlds" splatbook with notes about golarion's star system. There are techno-liches, a planet full of evil dark tapestry cultists, several deadly worlds, and a bunch of spells&tools for space.
Your mechanical ambitions seem... ambitious. But if you have the design chops for it then it seems like a super fun and exciting game. I actually ran something a lot like this myself.
My game was about a dwaven space program (as a dwarven empire figured out the interplanetary teleport spell). I had them fight robots on one planet where psionics were the dominate form of magic and also had them jump to a couple of my older and weirder settings.
I would definitely send them to a superhero world and a pokemon-like world (where people capture monsters in boxes or crystals or some shit).
a pokemon-like world (where people capture monsters in boxes or crystals or some s**$).
There's an alchemist archetype that would fit this bill. The Preservationist.
The Distant Worlds book was already mentioned;
Possibly not exactly what you're looking for, but there was a thread here that you might mine for ideas:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2ng5v?Worldbuilding-Exercise-Get-5-Random-Races
Of course, science fiction is rife with thematic worlds; Star Trek and Firefly both come to mind, as do maybe Lexx and Farscape (although I've never really watched either of those, so caveat emptor).
Although I've not been in a campaign like that before, it's similar to any campaign where you have to hook the PCs into the plot 'cold'; you might want to take a look at anything that revolves around seafaring campaign, since you can easily map 'a new port of call' onto 'the MacGuffin has transported us to a strange new land' and go from there.
I'm also assuming that there's an overarching plot to be slowly revealed across the various worlds?