4 different universes that affect the party differently. Ideas?


Advice


Starting up my first campaign and I am currently creating my worlds and stories. I plan to have 5 worlds, one which will be your standard pathfinder world. The others however will be different such as "only humans exist" or "magic doesn't work or works differently". Looking for more ideas on what could affect the party in these different worlds. Thanks for the help!


One of the worlds likely should be an unpleasant place - either the 'evil mirror' world or just overrun by whatever evil nasties you want to run. Undead, demons, twisted fey, standard issue evil empire, whatever.

If you want a form of magic which is known/works only on one of the worlds you could use occult magic, or a 3rd party one such as psionics or blade magic.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

I'm going to second the use of occult magic. Its pretty cool stuff. A world overrun with evil is definitely fun. Steampunk era has potential, as does a world where magic is hunted and killed. On the flip side, a world of almost all casters could be a trip as well, with everything modernized, but run by magic. Plenty of fun to be had


Thanks for the ideas, that definitively helps!


Get the midnight setting and have that world be the place they sealed rovagug away in.


How about an inverse-alignment world? Where demons are noble, pure, and LG, while paladins are vicious, insane, and CE? The key here is that the player interactions will be different, and the divine casters will have opposite alignment spell effects- Any Good subtype spell effects become Evil, Law becomes Chaos, *maybe* positive energy becomes negative energy. If positive energy becomes negative energy, then maybe the world is populated by undead, some who create living creatures through immoral experiments?

Alternatively, an alignment-free world. Where aligned magic simply fails.

Perhaps a lifeless world somewhere? Or the elemental plane of shadow? Somewhere bleak, atmospheric, and full of traces of living things- but no sentient living things around. Healing magic (besides negative energy healing) cannot be used, antimagic effects are doubled in range, shadow is CL and DC-boosted, etc. Players would wander around to find maybe some golems and ancient war machines littered around, giant craters everywhere, and wild magic zones in places. You might go into abandoned villages to find journals on a war, or on daily life after the war. Detect Magic would ping randomly if used, so it would be unreliable. As a bonus, maybe Read Magic effects would find words in midair or something.

Also consider a setting where humans are the weird ones (so most people would be elves or something), or humans are considered to be monsters.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

A world where humans are giant-sized or teeny-tiny sized (fine?) might be fun.

A "hollow earth" world where the "stars" in the "sky" are really cities across the gulf of the entombed sky.

A world of relatively small floating landmasses, with local gravity being "down" towards the center of each moonlet, and flight between the moonlets powered by your mind.

A world of the mind, where mental stats replace the roles of physical stats (Int for Str, Wis for Dex, Cha for Con).

A non-Euclidian world where you use hexes in place of squares, but they're used as weird orthographic matrices, messing around with vertical and horizontal movement.

A world where the players' races are "scrambled"--humans are halflings, elves are dwarves, gnomes are orcs, etc.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

How about one where instead of humans, elves, and dwarves being the norm, it's duregar, drow,etc? Maybe that world has 3/4 night, 1/4 day?


How about a world where nothing changes, instead it returns to how it was at dawn the next day. No one can die, and no one from that world can remember what happened the previous day. Someone from off world will remember what happened but can't preventing it resetting.

A world where animals can speak and have gods of their own. Animals neither want nor need civilisation and any towns or cities that contain humans are quarantined to stop their cruel ways infecting the rest of the world. The animals are wise and insightful and recognise that the PCs are not like the other humans. They will need to prove themselves though.

A world where people live backwards in time. They are each born as wise as knowledgeable and as they age they forget the knowledge they were born with and become impatient and irrational. Gangs of elderly folk terrorise the young.

A world which has already gone through some form of apocalypse that is yet to affect the other worlds. The 'survivors' there have been reduced to an almost feral state. Evidence of the cause of the disaster is on the world somewhere, but to find it you need to survive the ghouls and savage people.


Hmm. I was once going to do something a little similar, but rather than different worlds, it was simply kingdoms that had very extreme differences.

Long ago, there was a kingdom was at war- a neighboring kingdom launched a massive invasion. The emperor himself rode out to battle, leaving his four children behind on the throne in his absence, intending to return after encouraging the troops with his presence. However, a stray arrow killed him, leaving the small kingdom with an enemy army at its borders. The four children of the emperor begged the gods to intercede on their nation's behalf, offering themselves up in return. The gods heard their plea and accepted the exchange. They put powerful divine magic over the entire kingdom that dulled weapons and slowed strikes to the point where fighting was impossible.

Centuries later, the nation is known as the Kingdom of Four Children, and the magic remains. All weapon damage within its borders is nonlethal, and nonlethal damage never rolls over to lethal. Poisons become harmless water, even alcohol. Since the only way around the divine interdict (apart from roundabout methods like significant falling damage) is summoned creatures, summoners are extremely common and ritual dueling is a generally accepted practice for resolving disputes. Much of the culture and magical craftsmanship revolves around summoning as a result, with summoners carrying carefully painted wooden cages (traditionally white and red) on their belt to house the "spirits" of their summoned allies.

Spoiler:
The whole thing was an elaborate set-up to make a Pathfinder version of Pokémon, with the Kingdom of Four Children being based on 4 Kids, complete with harmless weapons and frothy mugs of water.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

A world where (demi)humans are pets to giant animals.

A world with lots of people-powered transportation (bicycles, skates, skateboards, rickshaws, pedal-boats, etc.) instead of animal-powered transportation. Maybe a totally vegan society?

A world where everyone has one level in oracle or sorcerer, and their casting stat is their highest ability score.

A world where all the outer and inner planes are actual locations on the prime material you can walk or sail or ride to.

A world where most places are vertical instead of horizontal.


A world of only women.


A world where death has no place, but new life cannot be created. All beings are sterile, however anytime a living intelligent (any value higher than -) being dies, it is subject to a Reincarnation automatically, rolling randomly for both gender, and race (from an expanded table, with a separate table for animals or humanoids). Because there is no real death, this world has never developed healing magic, or necromancy (or any kind of undead). Since a being's race can change randomly, racism doesn't exist. Since gender can change randomly, relationships are a very fluid concept. Since animals also reincarnate they are difficult to use for food, so plants are the primary food for all beings, but unique fruits grow here that have the nutritional qualities normally found in meat.

The people are mostly fearless, and knowledgeable from lifetimes of learning, but naive and innocent. There is an extremist sect that believes they can escape from the cycle of reincarnation if they live long enough to die from age, however their policy of self-isolation prior to death ensures that no evidence exists to verify their beliefs.

Monsters exist, and still act as they would, but since the worst they can cause is a moment of pain, they aren't seen as a threat, and since they too reincarnate, culling them seems futile.

The highest peak in this world, somehow visible from all points on the surface, looks as though it is ringed at all times by a mass of white and dark clouds. In truth this mass is the body of the deity of this world, a Goddess of Life. In some great battle lost to time, she was thrown down upon that peak, by a deity of Death, and this world exists only in (what is to her) the final moments of her life (Which is an aeon even to the quasi-mortals who live in this world). Her dwindling energy is even now preventing the deity of Death from affecting this world. When her life ends, this world, and all in it, will be consumed by Death.


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"You could have, like, a world with no shrimp. Or with, you know, nothing but shrimp"


I have a friend who's using his own variant of this idea. He's traveling to videogame worlds, like Mushroom Kingdom and the realm of Dark Souls.

He plans to use stark variances in descriptive terms, representing the different graphic styles, and to introduce unique mechanics to each world such as a turn based world where your speed determines your turn order, rather than distance traveled, so a bit of math on his end gives him ways to create an ever shifting initiative score similar to final fantasy 10.

Another world introduces advanced technology items, and blight burn, most of which only function there (except a few items we could take with us).

Each world has a core concept taken from the video game itself, a unique mechanic that will help and hinder every player. On the Pokémonesque world, only humanoid players can speak and must act in battle based on verbal commands. Our party is exception to this, but if we are caught acting contrary to the system it can cause problems, proving that we aren't part of that world and making our goals more difficult.

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