Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 136 - Plane Series-Multiverse Concept and Material Plane

Episode Date: August 7, 2022

Before the MCU introduced the world to that word, "Multiverse" meant something different in the RPG world:  a collection of universes, each of which was called a plane.  In this episode, Jeremy asks for feedback about starting a new series about the different planes, talks about running adventures in both a traditional RPG multiverse and an MCU-like one. #DungeonsandDragons #DnD #Pathfinder #DMTips

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. The sky is no longer the limit if the characters can hop to a different plane of existence. And you, my beloved DM, can now create whatever you want. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 136 of the Taking20 Podcast. This week about the multiverse concept and the material plane. This week's sponsor, boats. When boats aren't feeling well, you should probably take them straight to the dock. I've got a couple things to talk about before I get to the episode proper, and if you want to skip ahead to the episode, probably skip to about minute seven. I greatly

appreciate the kind words that I'm still receiving. You're all amazing, and I am blessed that you listen to my little podcast. As always, if you have any show ideas, send them to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com. I'd love to hear from you what you'd like to hear from me. Before I get started, I wanted to talk about the new Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves movie that's coming out in March of 2023, with its trailer dropping at the San Diego Comic-Con a few weeks ago. The online response has been mixed, but a loud minority has really been disappointed. They've had a whole bunch of disappointing critical response, and frankly, a lot of the stuff they've been saying borders on gatekeeping. Criticisms I've heard include, well, according to the rules, druids can't wildshape into

owlbears, and why would anyone dive into a gelatinous cube, and the acid breath weapon in the trailer looked completely fake, or there's so much comedy, I wanted a serious Dungeons & Dragons movie. The tieflings in the movie don't look right, and oh, the movie just seems like they're trying to marvelize Dungeons & Dragons. To those who aren't losing their minds and the movie appears to break the rules of D&D 5th edition, all I would ask is patience. First off, it's the first trailer for a movie, and as we've seen with the She-Hulk trailers, CGI gets improved the closer we get to release date.

Let's give it some time before we condemn this movie to go the route of crabby movies like Morbius and, well, the last Dungeons & Dragons movie that came out in the year 2000. Oh god, who am I kidding? That movie was awful, but I loved it for what it was. Marlon Wayans, Thora Birch, Jeremy Irons just absolutely chewing up every scene he's in. It is so belovedly stupid with its bad CGI and overly simplistic plot, but I just cannot help but give it a warm place in my heart. Sorry, let's get back to the 2023 movie. Before you start screaming about what the movie doesn't have and what the movie's getting wrong, I want to remind you of a few things it got right.

Start with game-accurate displacer beasts and mimics that looked amazing. A dragon in a movie that doesn't breathe fire. It's a game-accurate black dragon spitting acid in a five-foot line. Oh, and plus, how about a fucking owlbear on the screen being bestial and absolutely brutal? You know, I'm just going to stop there. These are iconic Dungeons & Dragons monsters that have been in the game since 70s or 80s. Until now, they've largely just been static images in the pages of a book. I will concede that some may strongly desire a tough, gritty, R-rated, hardcore D&D movie that shows the sweat and the shit and the blood of adventurers solving hard problems. But I want to bring a different perspective to this upcoming movie.

I grew up in a time when D&D was openly criticized as being, quote, the path to Satanism and, quote, a leading cause of teenage suicide, even though we all know that that's not what it was. I've seen it slowly move from that to being a secret that those of us who played carefully guarded, to the fringes of society as podcasts and let's play streams and YouTube series started gaining popularity, to now, thanks to the Critical Roles and High Rollers and Acquisitions Incorporated and Ventureforth podcasts helping to popularize the hobby. We have a movie with Chris Pine, and they made him a goofy bard. This has the potential to be the closest thing to a real Dungeons & Dragons movie that I'll ever see in my lifetime,

because I'm old. Yes, there may be rule issues with the minuscule amount that we know about the movie, but my response to that is, who gives a shit? If the rule violations on the screen really bother you, who gives a shit? If the rule violations on the screen really bother you, I'd still encourage you to give this movie a real shot. You can imagine this is a game played by a bunch of friends, and if anything happens in the movie that doesn't follow the 5e rules as written, maybe it's something that was house ruled by the DM because they're more interested in their players having fun and allowing things because of the rule of cool. Hell, if I were running a game and my player had a mid-level druid that wanted to wild shape into an owlbear,

fuck yeah, mate, let's do this and we'll balance it as we go, any way we need to. Also, did anyone else consider that since Wizards of the Coast have announced their soon-to-be-released updated D&D ruleset that's coming out, whether that's 5.5e or 6e, maybe wild shaping into owlbears might be allowed in that real set? Maybe give druids a little more flexibility? Wider variety of creatures that are effective in very certain situations? Maybe? Finally, one thing I want to call attention to.

Wizards of the Coast story designer and DM extraordinaire Chris Perkins was a major consultant on this movie, and he knows his shit. He's on my Mount Rushmore of DMs, and the man knows how to design an adventure and knows the rules backwards, forwards, and probably in five languages. If there's anyone on this planet that I would trust with a D&D movie, it would be him. So I guess what I'm asking is at least give it one more trailer before you decry this as the worst thing to happen to Dungeons & Dragons since 4th edition. Keep the faith, and if it's bad, yeah, I'll probably go see it anyway.

And if you see it and you think it's bad and you don't want to watch it anymore, so be it. No criticism from me here. Also, by the way, did you notice the dimension door that took the druid from a forest to inside a building? Looks like she's flipping through the floor, and the baddie using Misty Step to get away from the owlbear to jump to the top of a cliff. Oh, in the trailer also there were the cities of Waterdeep and Neverwinter, Revel's End Prison from Rime of the Frostmaidens in it. God, March, get here already.

And it should go without saying that Marvel had a bunch of announcements at San Diego Comic-Con and I had to call my doctor because it lasted more than four hours. It probably means that I'll be giving Disney tons of my money over the next three years to see how phases four through six play out in the MCU. Also a Blade movie. God, November 23, hype! Okay, I've written two pages of intro text and I gotta get going. So...

On to the multiverse. two pages of intro text and I gotta get going. So, on to the multiverse. I received multiple emails suggesting a topic of more information about different planes of existence. They were phrased different ways, so I thought I might try a new series about them. One specifically mentioned he was compelled by the description of the abyss and nine hells and wanted to learn more about them when I was discussing the blood war. That being said, this is the first of a proposed series that could stretch, well, if I keep doing a series on different planes of existence every five to ten episodes or so, this could stretch well into 2024. There's a shit ton of planes of existence, even if I just stick to the ones that are common to D&D and Pathfinder. Should I cover the various planes or not? I'd love some feedback about this new series, so if you're interested,

I'll cover some of the more popular inner planes like the ethereal, the astral plane, elemental planes, and some of the outer planes like Elysium and Arcadia. If this doesn't interest you, please let me know. I don't want to waste episodes on topics that DMs don't find interesting. Please send me your thoughts to feedback at taking20podcast.com about whether this topic sounds like a good idea. Even before I went on my D&D movie rant at the beginning of the episode, I knew this would be a long and complicated episode to set everything up. I apologize, this episode is definitely going long. The word multiverse is in the title of the episode, but multiverse has different meanings. In certain movies like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and at least one episode of Archer's 1999 season,

Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse, the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, Rick and Morty, and even an old Jet Li movie called The One. In those, multiverse means a parallel version of reality, different planes of existence, and for lack of a better way of phrasing it, different living conditions and circumstances around our reality. different living conditions and circumstances around our reality. If you've seen the movie Multiverse of Madness, most of the story focuses on universes 616 and 838, but also references the universe that America Chavez is from,

which I think was called Utopia, but don't quote me on that one. Plus, at one point, there's a rapid plane travel montage with Paint World, Cube World, Comic Book World, one world that looked like a giant beehive, blech, I'm allergic, no thank you, a world where Hydra won, and a that looked like a giant beehive, I'm allergic, no thank you, a world where Hydra won, and a bunch of others that we see glimpses of. Since Multiverse of Madness is a relatively recent movie, I'm not going to dive much deeper than that because I don't want to provide any spoilers. Spoiling Iron Man, sure, that movie's 14 years old. Holy shit, that movie is 14 years old. I'm going to go have a lie down and

possibly eat more fiber. So this first idea of a multiverse is a simple one. If your character is, I don't know, a married human bard with gray hair in one universe, you might be slightly different, like different hair color, different proclivities, different preferences, gender, sexuality, or even greatly different in another universe, like a different species, or different chemical makeup, or different character goals, or what have you. In that way, by the way, I'm very thankful to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for addressing some of these concepts. A lot more of my listeners and a lot more DMs will have heard of this multiverse concept and grasped it thanks to the various Spider-Man and Doctor Strange movies, and whatever else is coming in Phase 5 and 6.

It can be mind-warping to think about multiple infinite dimensions and how they connect to each other. It can be a difficult concept to grasp. Trying to visualize a multiverse consisting of multiple infinite or finite planes of existence can really make things go wonky in your brain. Dungeons & Dragons tends to diagram them as the Great Wheel, with the material plane in the center, and then dividing up the rest of the planes into the inner planes, which are close to the material plane,

and the outer planes, which aren't. Pathfinder tends to show them as interconnected spheres. Norse mythology tends to show them as the Great Tree of Life. Still others will show them like layers of a cake. But think of it this way. Planes are places of infinite size that normally have limited ways of traveling between them, and moving from one to another requires powerful magic, expensive technology, or locations dedicated to allow transit between planes. And here,

if I wanted this episode to go about two hours, we could get into how multiverses form, like is a new one formed every single time someone makes a decision? Or new multiverses only spawned in certain pivotal points in history when major decisions are made? Or is it only powerful beings like gods that can create parallel universes? I do not have time to cover that. So let's just say these various parallel universes exist, regardless of their method of creation, and let's just move past that. While the concept of parallel, I don't know, Faeruns or Galarians or Earths or what have you, it's a neat topic, but it wasn't really what I'd intended for this episode. But since I've opened the cupboard and talked about different Earths existing in a multiverse, at the end of the episode, I will at least give you some tips for running an MCU-like

multiverse for your campaign. But let's get back to the original RPG definition of a multiverse, stretching all the way back to the 1970s. In Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder and Starfinder and hell, Warhammer 40k and Call of Cthulhu and too many others to name, the multiverse is a collective term for all of the planes of existence that exist in that game. Each plane is a universe and reality unto itself. And since there are multiple universes, voila, multiverse. So let's agree on some terminology.

RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder refer to these universes as planes of existence. Throughout the rest of this episode, I will be using that term, plane of existence or plane, but when you hear it, just know it means an entire universe unto itself. All of the planes in the RPG multiverse potentially have matter and energy, are usually infinite but don't have to be. They all have various rules of physics, chemical compositions, etc., but they do not have to be consistent with each other. In one plane, everything can be beautiful, an idyllic, restful, infinite paradise where food and resources are plentiful, gravity is consistent, the temperature is always pleasant, and occupants don't have a care in the universe.

In the next plane over, the ground could be a finite, fenced, fire-baked, lifeless, granite hellhole with lakes and rivers of molten lava, where creatures of the fire subtype thrive and hunt those foolish enough to make themselves visible. In the examples I gave above, they still have a ground and sky and presentably distance and direction, but if you really want to get your noodle in a twist, none of those things have to exist on a certain plane. Gravity, time, directions, the ability to communicate with the gods, alignment, shape, size, elemental traits, and maybe even the way magic works can all be different on different planes. You can certainly generate your own planes of existence if you want to, by the way, and the only limit is your imagination. You can make the absolute craziest place your demented mind can

conjure. A plane where planets routinely turn themselves inside out, such that every two years you change from working on the surface of the planet to the inside of the surface of the planet? Sure, why not? A plane where the oceans are perpetual hot, fresh coffee, and it routinely rains donuts. Weird, but I'm not going to judge. Wait, did I say weird? I meant delicious.

Weird, but I'm not going to judge. Wait, did I say weird? I meant delicious. A time-slowed, low-gravity, life-filled, lawful-eyelined plane run by a giant supercomputer that calls everybody Susan. Unless your name's actually Susan, then it calls you Dave? I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. First off, computer, my name is Susan, and yes, you can do that. Make that happen before I start sticking magnets to your CPU. Starfinder, more so than any other game system I've ever played,

has really embraced this wacky anything-goes multiverse idea. There's a spell, for example, where you can reach through space-time to planes of existence that are nothing but needles and call them to this universe in order to cause damage to your enemies. Which, if we're being honest, a universe of nothing but needles is terrifying. Another spell in Starfinder allows you to channel the essence of a hostile outer plane directly onto your foes for damage and other negative effects. You can design your own wacky planes of existence. Again, no limitation. But it is a massive topic, and we don't have time to explore all the depths of designing a plane and all the challenges thereof. For now, though, let's focus on the most important plane that exists in most gaming universes, the Prime Material Plane.

In Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and Starfinder, the plane of existence where 99 plus percent of adventuring takes place is called either the material plane or prime material plane or sometimes just prime. For simplicity's sake, I'm just going to call it the material plane for this episode, but these terms are interchangeable. The material plane is an unending universe occasionally harboring life on mostly terrestrial planets and other less stable celestial bodies. Most mortals live out their lives on this plane, and they not only never travel to other planes until after their death, they may not even know they exist. The Sword Coast? Yep, it's on the D&D Material Plane. The planet of Galarian and Pathfinder? On the Material Plane. The planets of Akaton, Eox, Triaxis, Castravel,

the space station known as Absalom, on the Starfinder Material Plane. By the way, it should go without saying, these material planes could easily be different from one another, and more than likely are, given the different rule sets. But these material planes are infinite, like outer space is to us. Theoretically, if we traveled to the furthest stars, H2O is still water. Gravity, energy, and mass are interlinked with one another. The rules are consistent because we're on the same plane of existence. RPG planes? No different. You can leave the Sword Coast and travel to another region, continent, or even planet on that material plane, and the rules are pretty consistent. In that case, many campaigns, especially lower-tier campaigns, never leave the plane. And you don't have to go to another plane of existence at all for variety. Galerion, for example, has areas of the world that are akin to the traditional medieval

European settings, ancient and modern Middle East, the Silk Road, late 18th century France, early 19th century America, Conan the Barbarian, Vikings, crash-landed UFOs, etc. So campaigns can be extremely varied, never having to leave your home planet, much less your home plane. Some do leave though, especially at higher levels. You may take a trip to, I don't know, Avernus, Celestia, the ethereal plane. All make appearances in various official D&D adventures, for example. So the material plane, as I mentioned, most adventures take place there simply because other planes of existence can be harsh or even lethal to anybody who lives on the material plane. Take, for example, the elemental plane of water.

Oh, that doesn't sound so bad. It's just wet there, right? Wrong. It's an ocean with no bottom, no surface, no or limited land, and no or limited air pockets. And no matter how far and how hard you swim in any direction, it still looks like you're in 10 meters of water below the surface of an ocean on Earth. Assuming that you have some magical way of breathing water, or you can naturally breathe water, you eventually grow tired and need to rest,

so you float until something big that swims forever in that endless ocean finds you and decides you look delicious. Terrifying, right? That's water. Imagine the elemental plane of fire where almost everything's on fire all the time, or. Imagine the elemental plane of fire where almost everything's on fire all the time, or endlessly falling in the plane of air, or being entombed in the catacombs of infinite rock, dirt, and stone in every direction on the plane of earth. The material

plane is where we set a lot of our adventures because it's easy to understand. It's familiar. We're used to a world with air in the sky and water and earth on the ground, with fire that can be used to cook our food and generate heat. We mortals live out our lives on the material plane, and the vast majority, when we finally pass on and shuffle off this mortal coil, our souls transition to another plane of existence. In most iterations of the game systems, by the way, we mortals are the dominant lifeforms on the material plane, but we're not alone.

We do get visitors from other planes of existence. For example, there are certain undead that may be born in the negative energy plane. During the month of October, by the way, I'm going to be covering horror adventures, including various types of undead, so consider this a slight tease for those episodes coming up during that month. While a lot of undead are raised corpses on the material plane, not all of them are. They originate on the negative energy plane and can migrate to a material plane via rifts between the planes or summoned by magic users or clerics of various types. There can be visitors from other

planes of existence, like the Fae from the Fae Wild or First World, depending on your game system. They love to occupy the wild, untamed places of the world and sometimes hide close to settlements and harass humanoids. And whether they're murderous or just like to harass people for a practical joke depends on the type of fae they are. I need to do a fae episode as well, so look for that in the coming weeks. God, Jeremy, what is this episode? Just teases? The material plane also contains demons, so creatures from the abyss here to sow chaos and destruction at the best of more powerful demons. So why here on the Material Plane do we have visitors from so many different planes of existence? Well, in most game system cosmologies,

the prime material plane is located at the center of the diagram of the multiverse. So our plane of existence is basically the crossroads of all the other planes, good and evil, toxic and Gaia, hell and paradise. Which, by the way, is a good in-game reason to have all these various creatures running around in our world and populating our dungeons. So to sum up, the material plane, the plane of existence where we have 99% of our adventures, the plane where we all understand it because it's largely a mirror of Earth in some way, is at the crossroads of every other plane in the universe, and creatures from any other universe could potentially be found there.

If that's true, then why should a DM allow the players to go to the other planes of existence if these other creatures could be found on the material plane? Well, I do have a few ideas on that. Specifically, six. One. Allowing players to go to other planes of existence completely untethers your game from any existing lore. The sky is no longer the limit if the characters can hop to a different plane of existence,

and you, my beloved DM, can now create whatever you want. New cities, new areas of wilderness, new continents, new planets, any other idea that you've had that you've wanted to add to your game, this is your opportunity to do so. Two, when done right, multiversal games give players a sense of wonder as something brand new. If you emphasize the alien nature of other planes, the differences, both big and small, can really make the characters feel like strangers in a strange land. Differences in gravity, coloration of the earth itself, flora and fauna, even the rules that society is based on, the way things work,

can all make them feel like they are a little bit out of their element. I don't think this is spoiling anything from Multiverse of Madness, considering it was in the trailer, but in one universe, people stopped on green and went on red. Even little changes like that can make the players realize, hey, we're not in Faerun anymore, guys. 3. Using multiverses like this encourages endless exploration. There are gaming groups and individuals within gaming groups

that are drawn to the empty parts of the map, places they've never been, the things they've never done or seen. There's an excitement to knowing that this blank one-mile hextile could be a new dungeon, another city, a desert oasis, or the home of the shiraroon, the amethyst dragon whose entire nest is made in an area of low gravity, and her horde continually hovers and rotates around her endlessly. She likes to bet gold against anyone who dares to place a bet with them. All they have to bet is their hit points in a very high-stake game of poker. 10,000 gold pieces will buy you in, and either you die or

you walk out rich. There's a legend of Slippery Sigrun, who supposedly won multiple rounds against Shimmeroon thanks to skillful bluffing and bought her own island to rule, but no one's heard from her in years, and that victory could just be a myth, and Shimmeroon really is never lost. Unmapped areas could contain anything, nothing, or everything. It's part of the excitement of the exploration part of RPGs, and it's something that I would encourage should they start doing a multiverse-type adventure. Four, antagonists from other planes can have motivations and goals that are completely foreign to the characters and maybe even completely foreign to the players. Creatures that live their entire lives in the Shadowfell or Astral Plane, especially those that live in Aligned Planes, do not think like humans do. They may have a commonly understood motivation like power, revenge, or acquiring wealth, but not necessarily.

understood motivation like power, revenge, or acquiring wealth, but not necessarily. The motivation could be to study something new, avenge a perceived slight, the betterment of themselves, enforcing social cohesion, or to bring glory to their leader and possibly advance in rank. For example, the denizens of Mechanus, the lawful Modrons, have started their Great Modron March across the plains for reasons known only to their leader, Primus. The players inadvertently, or intentionally, interfere with the march, and now the Modrons are chasing the characters. To what end? To kill them for attempting to modify their perfect lawful order? To capture them?

To study them because they're perceived as being this weird mix of chaos and law? To break them down into their component parts for assembly into the plane itself, or maybe to enlist them in adventure since most Modrons are incapable of thinking outside of their rigid, absolute order. Or maybe an undead Lich King may be willing to bathe an entire planet in negative energy for reasons that are inscrutable to us that live on the plane, but to the big bad, this planet's the perfect place for a life siphon to cut off the river of souls once and for all. Or powerful eternal fey may be hounding the characters across multiple planes of existence simply because they have a passion fruit in their bag of holding and it wants it. After all, if you live forever, what's a dozen years of chasing mortals around

going to cost you in the greater scheme of things? Almost nothing, and it'll probably be fun to boot. What I'm trying to say is you got options for the whys of your extraplanar big bad when you're sitting behind the screen. Five, extraplanar adventures allow you to challenge high-level characters and experienced players. Let's face it, high-level campaigns are hard to run and even harder to design. It's really difficult to find things that can challenge 16th level characters or people who have played this edition of the game for a decade, and they seemingly know every monster's stat block, so it's hard to surprise them. Adventures on other planes, though, let you bring out the big guns, the extremely rare monsters that are hardly ever used in the monster manual. Alternatively, it's an opportunity for you to roll out some home-brewed monster that could exist on a certain plane or be native to that plane.

And the sixth and final reason why you should allow multiversal adventures? Maybe the players just really want to. If the players do want their characters to go to other planes of existence, here are some tips that I would give you to my fellow DMs and GMs out there. Give the players information about what's different about the plane that they're going to. There are a number of published planes that are completely hostile to anyone from Earth, Kryn, Galarian, or whatever the primary world of your prime material plane happens to be. Make sure they get this information about what's different, however you have to. Like I talked about in episodes 122 and 135, avoid single points of failure that could mean your adventure grinds

to a halt. Give them multiple ways to find out more about that plane of existence, skill checks, research, NPC experts, whatever you have to do. The last thing you want is for your players to go to the endless bog of Menaris and the Nine Hells on a whim and be completely unprepared for the acid rain falling from a dead brown sky and the sloggy, marshy ground hiding deadly, muck-filled sinkholes that stretch miles down and ambush predators the size of buses and... God, worse. Far, far worse than your players have ever imagined. Even if they're determined to go a place that sounds safe, like the positive energy plane,

because positive energy heals, right? What could possibly go wrong? That's the source of all life everywhere. And if they show up there, they'd better be protected from the magical nature of the plane, or at least adapted to it so they won't explode when exposed to raw positive energy. adapted to it so they won't explode when exposed to raw positive energy. The material plane has been carefully crafted and or life evolved to survive in that particular environment. Most of the other planes aren't conducive to life as we know it, and the players had better make sure their characters are prepared. Another tip, if they're going to plane hop, make it freaking

weird. As I mentioned earlier, emphasize the differences. If hell looks one way in your mind, make sure you write a description or be able to improvise a description that make the players know that this is a very different place with very different rules. Make sure you emphasize the alien aspects of this different dimension. Pull out the stops, by the way. Change gravity, change the way money works, change the way the air works, change anything and everything that you want. This is a different plane of existence with different rules. So it's time to get weird.

But as I promised at the beginning, suppose you do want to run multiple prime material planes, if you will, very similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This could be a very interesting adventure, by the way. You know, have iterations of your game world. That's why, by the way, I think about most published adventures and locations made canon by official published material. We're both running D&D groups through Waterdeep, for example. Your group's Waterdeep and my group's Waterdeep will look very similar, but there will be differences depending on the choices that the players made. Maybe the big bads are different, and maybe the

end results of previous adventures have changed the situation a little bit. I mean, it doesn't mean either one of us are wrong. It just means that our game worlds diverge because of our different groups and different decisions. In my world, for example, maybe Waterdeep is in chaos because one of the crime lords was slain by the party and there's a huge scramble for power in the underground. While yours, the crime lord hired the player characters to take out some of their rivals, thereby cementing their control over the town and bringing stability and peace. Right now, I'm running a group through Skull and Shackles. At the same time, another GM friend of mine is running his group through it. GM friend of mine is running his group through it. We compared notes and we steal ideas from each other. And he joked that given the Marvel Cinematic Universe assigning three digit numbers to the MCU worlds, he had rolled three 10 sided dice and decided he was on Galarian 427.

I kind of laughed and said, okay, let's do this. And on Discord chat with him, I rolled dice and I came up with 333. So we email each other to find out how things are going in our respective Galarian universes. We share NPCs and PCs from our world that we've generated. They'll likely become NPCs in each other's world. So, my Skull and Shackles group may eventually meet Captain Califras aboard the ship the Sticky Wicket. If you do allow multiple versions of your game world to exist in the multiverse, though, there's one thing you've got to decide very early on. Can characters interact with the alternate versions of themselves? I mean, don't get me wrong, that could be a lot of fun to allow your sorcerer, for example, to make two slightly different versions of his level 14 sorcerer that are alternate versions of himself that had made different feat and skill choices along the way.

But what happens if they all want to team up? Now your group of four becomes a group of eight as everybody's running duplicates of each other, or a group of six becomes 12. That can easily get out of hand and be tough to prepare for as a DM. So decide how much interaction you want to allow. I'm not sure I would make the rule, oh, from one of the episodes of Love, Death, and Robots,

where if you touch the other universe's version of yourself, you cause a complete causality and crossover shift and destroy both universes at the same time. But, other than that, the rest of the rules that I talked about still apply. I previously discussed them. Make it different, make it weird, and emphasize the differences between their universe and the one that they're in. The concept of the multiverse is a complicated one, and until the popularity of the MCU multiverse movies, multiverses were fairly esoteric knowledge among DMs and GMs who have embraced the multiplayer campaign adventure

or prepared a pre-existing module or readers of certain comic books. If you're ready to lead your players on an adventure that goes literally beyond the stars, prepare some details about the plane that they're going to, free your mind to embrace any creative idea that might fit on that plane, prepare some out-of-the-world creatures and locations for the players to meet, befriend, run from, fight on and in, and I'll bet you and your players will have fun doing it. I do apologize for the length of this episode,

more than 30 minutes, but I wanted to get my thoughts down on the D&D movie while it was still fresh, and I wanted to cover this topic at least as much as I could. I mean, multiverse is a complicated topic and foundational to the study of any other plane of existence. So what do you think about an episode about, I don't know, Mechanus, the Abyss, Celestia, other planes of existence like the Astral and Ethereal planes? Send me your thoughts to feedback at taking20podcast.com. I promise they won't be 30 damn minutes long. Tune in next week, by the way, when I'm going to cover another user-submitted topic, this time from Anthony in Tennessee. Thank you, Anthony, for the email. I appreciate it.

He wanted to cover the gap in Starfinder lore, and so I'm going to expand the topic a little bit to cover the gap and how you can use empty history in your campaign. But before I go, I want to thank our sponsor, Boats. If you're looking for something a little kinky, try to find the boat that stays in one spot and has a lot of rope on it. After all, it's a naughty boy. I refuse to apologize for that. It's funny, and if you don't like it, you can kiss my poop deck.

This has been episode 136, The Material Plane and Multiverse Concept. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by the respective publishers.