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GameMastery Guide / Creating a World / Parallel Words / Sample Parallel Worlds

Going Home

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 169
While it’s possible that your players may fall so deeply in love with your parallel universe that they don’t want to go home (in which case, you now have a new campaign setting!), for most dimension-hopping adventurers, the whole point is to finally return to the world of their birth. Yet this homecoming doesn’t have to mean the end of the madness. For instance, how do the characters know they’re actually home? After letting the party breathe a sigh of relief, try placing some doubt in their minds, little inconsistencies that might indicate that they’ve only returned to a similar world, not their true home. If the front stairs to the characters’ favorite tavern no longer creak, is it because someone fixed them while the party was away—or because they never creaked at all?

Of course, extradimensional paranoia is only one way to have fun with the characters’ homecoming. Others are more blatant—for instance, if time doesn’t pass at the same rate between dimensions, the PCs might return home to a world 30 years after than they left it, during which time they’ve been vilified for abandoning their responsibilities. Once you’ve opened the door to parallel worlds, you’ve given yourself carte blanche to play fast and loose with your world and your players’ expectations, and nothing will ever again be quite what it seems.

Archives of Nethys

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Going Home