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Planar Adventures / Building a Planar Campaign / Alternate Cosmologies

Alternate Realities and Parallel Worlds

Source Planar Adventures pg. 87
The universe is a brilliant and multifaceted jewel, with each angle and cut offering a different reflection of existence. Many of the countless faces may look similar, but each is fundamentally different, containing slightly or significantly changed versions of reality. Each of these alternate realities fills a role vacated by the loss of other planes, follows different metaphysical rules, and has natives comprised of one or more specific outsider races. Alignment serves as a linking factor for outsider species but lacks the implications of a broader cosmic force with effects for mortal souls.

Archons might rule one version of reality and travel to others seeking to spread their creed of organized benevolence, guiding some worlds’ development, defending others from rival forces, and perhaps even conquering those impossible to redeem by subtler methods. Daemons could hail from a reality wherein they have already accomplished their goal of obliterating all mortal life. Now, from a cosmos lurching towards entropic heat death—the stars long ago consumed by ravenous daemon gluttons akin to malevolent black holes—daemons seek to spread outward to obliterate each life-form extant in adjacent facets of reality. Proteans, as beings of chaos, would swim freely between facets of the world, belonging to all and none at once, and defy the rules of the cosmos while remaining true to their nature.

Gods in this cosmology exist in their own alternate realities. Perhaps they are the living result of those worlds’ souls merging into singular beings, or, in a world where belief had the power to alter the fundamental structure of reality, gods could be born out of gestalt mortal belief. In other facets, outsiders and gods might hold no sway at all. Each instance of reality is, in effect, an opportunity for you to create entirely new settings for the players to explore. One intriguing possibility with this cosmology is that there could exist multiple incarnations of each character across multiple worlds. Thus, when a PC dies and is resurrected, the restored body is not so much brought back to life as it is pulled from another reality, so each time a character returns from death, she might change in strange and unexpected ways. This gives a player the opportunity to completely rebuild her character upon resurrection, explaining, for example, that the new incarnation was drawn from a world where the character trained not as a wizard but as a fighter.

Archives of Nethys

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Alternate Realities and Parallel Worlds