Article Drafting + Brainstorm: Traversing the Metaverse

Making Use of the Metaverse

As the alternate Great Wheels are parallels of the original, they can contain familiar characters, nations, and villains that the PCs have grown fond of. But given that they are each their own cosmologies, the different wheels can contain different configurations of planes and different representations for alignments and elements. If you want to substitue the endless ocean of light that is the Great Wheel's Positive Material Plane for Eberron's crystalline lands of Irian, you can do that without making an major alterations to the Multiverse the PCs originate from. They can even settle down in the new Multiverse and make home visits whenever the mood or need arises.

There are also many insane possibilities that one might not wish to wreak havoc on the Great Wheel where the majority of your campaigns are played out in, but letting the PCs play through a one shot where Grazz't has drawn Toril's entire crystal sphere into the Abyss or the Mists of Ravenloft have begun dragging yugoloths away in another Multiverse allows the group to enjoy the fun of a "what-if" scenario with their favorite characters. In a parallel Wheel you could let Ma-Yuan devour the gods of the PC's homeworld, have them aid in the quest of returning him to his prison in the Black Wells of the Abyss, then come back to your Multiverse Prime and continue on with the main campaign. One might even allow an artifact that was destroyed in your original Great Wheel to be brought back from an alternate Multiverse, making the one-shot relevant to the major campaign.

There have also been many ancient empires and times of turmoil in the Multiverse, or even one particular world, that the PCs might want to experience without worry about the effects of time travel. What were the planes like under the dominion of the illithids or the spellweavers? What was Athas like during the Blue or Green ages? By allowing them to enter a parallel where the events of the ancient past are taking place in the present, the PCs can experience or even alter "history" with impunity and return, if they so choose, to their Wheel of origin afterword.

Getting around the Metaverse

-Using the Plane of Mirrors

The endless reflections of the Plane of Mirrors ties in nicely with the idea of endless reflections of the Great Wheel cosmology. One can leave their original Multiverse by stepping through a mirror, and enter into a new Great Wheel by leaving the labyrinthine halls of the plane at some other location.

Using the Plane of Mirrors also allows one to involve the secretive nerra in a conspiracy stretching across multiple Wheels.

-Parallel Walking

Planeswalking is a matter of finding keys and accessing portals, or the usage of some clever arcana. Planeswalking is about cutting across distances too vast to be otherwise traversed.

Parallel Walking is different - it is the redefinition of your being, a retuning to bring you into harmony with a foreign reality. So long as you stay in your own Multiverse you are part of a symphony - the elemental foundations of the Inner Planes and liqueur of beliefs that are the Outer Planes are a part of you just as you are a part of them.

To enter a new Multiverse requires unstitching yourself from one reality's seams and sewing yourself into the the cloth of another. It is an act of conscious will, and oftentimes in the beginning you will find yourself vomiting out blood and possibly guts after a traversal so keep your healers handy...and make sure you are going somewhere where their magic will still work.

Every time one journeys into a new parallel they are changed, their body and soul are altered. Some parallel walkers believe only the soul moves between Multiverses, that you make up a body from the material found there. Others say that parallel walking is ultimately a violent act - that you gut one reality, scarring it even as you graft yourself onto another. Others will laugh at this and say one cannot damage the Wholeness anymore than one can scar the sea with a sword - they will say there is only a song, a poem, a Myth retold across the campfires of distant Dreamers. They will tell you that it is in the cadence of the teller's voice and the reaction in the hearts of the listeners from which new Wheels are forged, all branching out from a First Tale so long ago told....

For every Choice, a Multiverse?

One question that may come up in your games is that if there are different versions of the PCs and NPCs that made different choices, then is there a Multiverse for every choice everyone makes? Doesn't this make all choices meaningless?

There are several ways to handle this, though it does present an interesting philosophical conundrum that could occupy certain factions and NPCs in the Metaversal setting.

While we are using the idea of parallel universes, we aren't necessarily making our own Metaverse generate new Great Wheels for every possible outcome, let along every possible choice. It might also be that the number of Wheels out there is determined by the free willed choices that somehow prune and control the branching of probable Multiverses.

Another is that the myriad reflection of your self, and others, represent beings that have been refracted from a higher reality. What you think of as your soul might only be a piece of a greater soul, split through the Metaverse like a ray of light is split through a prism. So perhaps one part of you that is damned might be comforted by another part of you that is in Paradise.

Of course, you may leave the answer as one of the great mysteries or just decide that there are no duplicates of anyone, that each Multiverse is a completely separate dimension.

Metaversal Campaigns

Parallel Walking characters will find themselves recruited by Metaversal factions, entertained by the exploits of their fellows, and pitted against those who would use their ability to walk across the Wheels against those confined to a single Multiverse. While we'll flesh out the Metaverse in future issues, here are few short summaries of two metaversal factions and one particularly nasty villainess.

Faction 1: Alchemists of the Echo

The Mirror Workers believe that not only are the planes in a single Great Wheel connected, but all the Wheels are capable of influencing each other. Similar to spirit realms that parallel and influence the prime worlds they border, the Alchemists tackle this idea on a variety of scales.

The faction is held together by shared knowledge of Metaversal magic and the comfort of evidence that the faction's philosophy is true. Given that there are many Wheels out there, faction members with opposing goals usually attempt to bring about their respective desires in different Multiverses. Rather than all out intra-faction war, this is seen as a respectful, if at times grating, athletic and academic competition between members.

Faction 2: Sculptors of the Avalanche

"One day you'll know. Big change always starts small."
- Joe the Barbarian by Grant Morrison (Author) & Sean Murphy (Illustrator)

The Sculptors of the Avalanche, more often referred to as Chaosticians or Pebble Placers, believe all change turns on small, seeming inconsequential events. Those who come to understand the origin point of cataclysmic change will be able to topple Abyssal Lords and dethrone Lords of Nine if they choose, all with minimal risk. To sculpt history in this fashion is to strike with the weapon of causality.

The philosophy of the Pebble Placers demands that they take their originating Wheel as their control group and then use a combination of chronomancy, divination, and walking the parallels to seek out Wheels with slightly altered starting conditions at whatever point in history they choose to study.

The Sculptors are a largely noninvasive faction when judged on the scale of multiple Multiverses, but the factions members do attempt to put their theories into practice on varying scales with varying degrees of success. Suffice it to say that worlds have suffered for their hubris as well as their precision.

Given the cerebral nature of the faction, it attracts many loremasters and chronomancers with a more scholarly bent. As there is great uncertainty as to the length of time needed to collect results, as well as garner the necessary preliminary data, the faction consists largely of those that are immortal or at least naturally enjoy century spanning lives.

Villain: Laquera

"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out..."
- Mark 9:47

Laquera is a mistress initiated into the Shadow Mysteries who strides across the Wheels of the Metaverse, collecting Eyes and Hands of Vecna. It is unknown when Laquera first replaced her own eye and hand, and when she first realized she could walk across Wheels. At some point she must have concluded that to bear the artifacts of Vecna was to become a slave to the god of dark secrets. Later, after re-maiming herself, she must have realized that she'd become dependent of the feeling of the Hand and Eye, that she was addicted to the connection between herself and a higher power in such an intimate fashion.

If Laquera was not a parallel walker, her story might have ended with either her death or her body being used as a tool of the Whispered One. Instead Laquera crossed the Wheels, seeking out a means in which she might once more taste the presence of the god she feared yet longed for. She sought out teachers, ruins, artifacts of other gods. Because of all the gifts that fortune had seen fit to bestow upon her, Laquera found triumph where others most certainly would have fallen into tragedy.

Using magics developed with the aid of Karagoth, another evil parallel walker, Laquera can draw on the power of the relics of Vecna so long as her parallel selves bear the Hand and Eye from their own Wheel of origin. Laquera delights in befriending and ultimately betraying her parallel selves, a bizarre affliction that even her myriad umbral and undead minions find troubling.

Examples of Parallels:

In future issues, we'll present more details on the Metaverse as well as more possibilities that multiple Great Wheels can offer. To kick off this ongoing series of articles, here are two examples of parallel Multiverses:

Parallel XIV: The "Triumph" of Vecna

Across the worlds they dream of him in some fashion. His eye watching over them, his hand at their throats. As with all omens, all signs, the gullible are led by the deceivers, who no matter how well intentioned leash all miracles to their own ends, their own prejudices, their own exaltation.

Wars are fought in the name of the Hand, children are torn from mothers in the name of the Eye. Such banners herald new empires across the breadth of the Primes even as the Multiverse attempts to heal from the Whispered One's struggle to the throne. This Wheel leans into other Multiverses even as it totters, parts of it stumbling back to its own possible pasts or falling face first into one of its possible the futures. Many are the rivers leading to the Present, many are the directions in which the Present might flow into.

In Sigil all factions are cowed, and the city is a necropolis run by Vecna's warring theocracies. And yet the dabus continue their work, work that at times dismantles edifices built in the Arch-Lich's name. Even his peoples must abide by the interdiction laid down by the Lady in happier days - those who do not find themselves mazed or...worse.

Imagine being confronted by the divine vision of your skeletal god, its one eye burning with mad desperation, its one hand held out like a man hanging off from a cliff, a cutting shadow sliding from his floating incorporeal form - the shadow of a woman with blades for her hair...