My idea started out both simple and challenging: "What if I ran a D&D game with as much surreal, plane-travelling weirdness as there was in late-90s Magic: the Gathering. I'm talking the peak insanity of the era of Tempest, Ice Age, Urza's Destiny, and Urza's Legacy, where the game was simulating a war between insane cthulhoid cyborgs and a race of precision-bred magicians with living shards of crystal and an inter-dimensional goblin horde in the middle.
I wanted low-level PCs to be roaming the planes, dealing with truly out-there wizards, and warped magical entities. As always, I subscribe to the theory that level one should feel as awesome as level 10.
My Setup
Swords & Wizardry played RAW, but using a cosmology based on the AD&D2e / D&D3.X era Great Wheel / Planescape planar layout.
The PCs come from a kingdom on a mostly-undetailed world I am basing mostly on a mix of H.P. Lovecraft's Dream-Cycle mixed with a bit of Lord Dunsany, then brought kinda' down-to-earth with the trippier bits of The Elder Scrolls' Tamriel.
At the beginning of the campaign the PCs are new arrivals at Armathan, a grand castle on a high-mountian meadow. The Mountain's great workshops are powered by a waterfall and streams that run right through its undercroft. The Castle itself was built as a part of and to defend a silver mine and an important monastery. The mine in turn connected to ancient pre-human ruins.
Each PC has some reason why they have an oath to keep or duty to uphold to some important figure in the castle.
Start Properly: With Running and Screaming
Once their caravan is in the gate (and thus unable to turn around and fetch help) the castle is invaded from above by bat-riding hobogoblins and a dragon supported by a few mid-level sorcerers.
Forced to flee deeper into the castle to hide from the feather-falling invaders, the PCs eventually persuade a guard to let them hide in the undercroft, where they witness the court magician turning the queen to stone and wrapping her in an amulet of proof against detection before hiding her in the castle cistern, releasing giant crayfish into the water with her, and promising to return when he knew who the invaders were, and had a means of driving them off.
The Court Magician swore the PCs to secrecy and offered to help them escape to a place where it was too dangerous to take the queen. When the PCs assented, the guided them to a hidden magical portal in the castle's dungeon that led to the Outland. The escape was close, and they an expect the portal to be guarded if they try to return by that path.
There the magician took them to hide in The Tower of Evanine the dominion of his chaotic sorceress mother, who has be missing for years.
Framing the Campaign
With a borrowed laboratory and library, the court magician can only learn so much about the invaders and their goals. Many of the divinations he is attempting to perform are blocked by powerful illusions and abjurations. He didn't exactly have time to grab his crystal ball and his ritual implements before he started his flight.
The PCs are not in the Outlands in a castle with its own mystery-filled dungeon and multiple pocket-dimensions hidden in paintings and books around the castle.
To fulfill their various oaths, they have to help the wizard acquire tools, treasure, and information to plan the liberation of Armathan. And given where they are, and that the portal is guarded, getting what the wizard needs is easier done by travelling magical doorways across the planes.
And, of course, the more strangeness and wonders they discover the more opportunities to pursue their own interests.
To make travel even easier I imported the idea of the College of Doors from Numenéra: a pocket dimension with hundreds of thousands of doors that lead to places all across the planes, ruled over by inscrutable outsiders, and the home of the Lurker on the Threshold as he was depicted in D&D3e's Unearthed Arcana. The Lurker is a being who could be summoned by a challenging and expensive ritual, and would answer questions... but only about doors, and had a limit on the number of words it would use... a limit it happily wastes on insults if you ask it about anything except doors and portals.
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| "Lurker on the Threshold" illus. by S. Tappin from Unearthed Arcana ©2004 Wizards of the Coast |
This, along with a magic item from the D&D3.5e Planar Handbook, the Planar Compass, any my PCs are set to take perilous, confusing, and twisting paths through the planes to reach destinations, and a list of various and sundry research, scouting, and fetch-quest style adventures from a patron. And the freedom to go virtually anywhere with a library of material from an all-powerful and quite mad sorceress... not to mention a home base full of dangerous twists and turns.
Come With Us Now On a Journey through Space and Time...
With the pieces in play I have taken the opportunity to turn the weird up to 11, using strange alien vistas, weird treasures, and unearthly encounters that have so far made levels 1 through 3 feel like an epic journey. So far the party has...
- Rescued a masked nomad from the Outland hunted by a many-eyed bird-like being created to punish her people for their neutrality.
- Bargained a strange lesser hag "Omen Peddlar" who can smell items that yearn to be home or have an important connection to the person she is observing, allowing her to sell things to people most likely to take them where they belong.
- Wandered into the petrified skull of a titan where the fossilized brain is being mined for amber. Digging it causes you to have flashes of memories going back to the dawn of creation... but spawns gibbering mouthers and other mad things if mined too fast.
- Used the college of doors to travel to Mount Celestia by way of a storage closet door in a temple where souls come to have their memories erased.
- Visited a cave where the luminous clarity of a bodhisattva crystallizes into quartz so pure that it makes the perfect material for crystal balls, but the light blinds the selfish and impure, and the endless refractions in the man-sized make seeing living crystal guardians.
- Found a cavern where a mortal used an artifact so vile he was able to desecrate it even on the face of Mount Celestia, and was conjuring manes to kidnap the freshly dead Lawful souls passing by to feed the artifact so that it would continue to sprout addictive mushrooms that allow him to contact other plane.
- Met a roaming mercane time witch in a giant walking clockwork orrery home, and mordon slaves. She was full of treachery, and greed.
- Dug a crashed spelljammer from a rust-desert on the surface of Acheron while dealing with rust monsters and orcs hunting tieflings for slaves.
- Sailed the Astral Plane in the wrecked ship, studiously avoiding an undead hermit living on the petrified head of a dead god.
- Bargained in secret with the sorceress Evanine where she is hiding in her own paradise-like demiplane... she only allowed them to leave when they swore an oath not to tell her sons where she was hiding.
- Got sucked into a two-dimensional plane where spilled magical ink acted like predatory oozes.
None of this was mechanically very hard to cover, but by cranking the weird, throwing the PCs into the deep end with the planes I have taken one of the simplest and lightest versions of D&D, I have made the game feel very new and fresh to some very experienced players.
Mostly it is just a matter of jumbling some ideas up, and discarding the idea that certain experiences are specifically for certain levels.