You got your sci-fi in my fantasy…
Christian raised a good point in the comments to my post describing the Everret Effect:
“I like this idea for a sci-fi game, not sure how it would fit in with a D&D world.”
As I responded there, he’s got a point. Here’s my attempt to clarify what I’m trying to accomplish with this and how all of this sci-fi background will fit into a D&D campaign.
The scifi campaign world I’m describing will serve as a shell for the actual D&D campaign world. I intend for 90% of the action and background in the campaign to take place and be created for the fantasy world of Altaerra. The remaining 10% – mainly set up for adventures and general background along the lines of what I’ve started posting – will take place on or detail the future Earth.
So what’s the point of going to the extra effort to create the sci-fi “wrapper” to Altaerra? The primary reason is to try to make my job as DM easier. It’s pretty common for players to miss sessions, or have to leave early or arrive late. In the first season or two of the Taera campaign I dealt with this using the Pale Queen. Unexplained and sudden absences of a character due to a missing player were easily written into the current plot line by having the Queen show up and pluck the character out of the scene to fulfill a “special assignment”. No muss, no fuss. As an added bonus, the Queen also provided a ready made reason for the characters to be adventuring together.
In later seasons, after the Pale Queen was taken out of the picture, I found that coming up with explanations for suddenly missing characters a little more difficult – especially when players had to cancel at the last minute. I have never been fond of running someone else’s character while trying to DM and am equally reluctant to have another player take that on. The plan for the Altaerra campaign is to have the Everret Effect and the future Earth serve in the role of the Pale Queen. On the future Earth, the group will have a “director” or “producer” who is responsible for orchestrating their adventures on Altaerra and then marketing their escapades to eager fans back on earth. This producer will occasionally need to pull a character out of Altaerra for one reason or another – perhaps to do some marketing appearrances, or because of a family emergency back home, or to make things more dramatic or even simply for some R&R (perhaps mandated by the “players union”). Plus there’s always the chance that some piece of the character’s tuner malfunctions, briefly kicking them back to Earth. Because of the way time passes differently between Altaerra and earth (more on that in a future post…) and the inherent uncertainty built in to returning someone to Altaerra a character can be pulled back to Earth briefly and returned much later in game time without having to account for all of the missing time.
This entry was posted on March 21, 2008 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Everret Effect, metagame. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
