Alternatives to Planescape

 The recent release of Planescape left a lot to be desired for me. But, this is not a review of that product. Instead, I want to continue using Magic the Gathering to inspire my D&D game. I want to start with a disclaimer: I am not an MTG lore expert. This is not an attempt to port a mechanic or lore from MTG directly to 5e. The goal of this is to use the ideas laid out in the Magic lore to enhance our D&D games. Also, I do not DM my games with an entire campaign-spanning adventure in mind. I run 1-3 session adventures that may or may not have a throughline. The characters stay the same, but for me, a campaign is a collection of adventures, not one big long adventure. 

So, what do I want from a plane-hopping campaign?

1. Varied and thematic adventure locations.
2. Home base.
3. Adventuring is required to unlock other planes.

(This might sound like how the recent God of War games handle the Nine Realms. I am currently playing through Ragnarok, so it is at the forefront of my mind.)

Why MTG? 

    Magic the Gathering has characters that are called Planeswalkers. These characters have a special trait, called a Spark, that allows them to travel from plane to plane and go on these adventures and appear in multiple sets across multiple planes. In recent MTG lore, the MTG equivalent of Thanos from the MCU did the equivalent of snapping his infinity gauntlet and de-sparked or killed many planeswalkers. This was a multiversal story that was a long time coming. Now they have introduced planar gateways called Omenpaths that allow for characters to travel from plane to plane on a much more limited scale. Basically, they got Infinity War'd but there wasn't an Endgame cop out. 

This is where we have two options

1. Operate Pre-War of the Spark where our characters are planeswalkers and have a spark and can freely plane hop.
2. Operate Post-War of the Spark where our characters never had/no longer have a spark are rely on the Omenpaths to travel from plane to plane. 

These two options provide drastically different campaigns. The former will have less emphasis on the journey, and more emphasis on the action that's happening there. The latter will flip that, the journey of finding the Omenpath or planar gateway will be a larger part of the adventure. Both are great styles, but every DM has a preferred way to play the game. Personally, I prefer to slow everything down a little bit and let the journey breathe. So for this exercise, I am going to go with the second option. 

This is where I will diverge from MTG lore. Again, this is not an attempt to run a level 1-20 campaign set in the MTG multiverse post-War of the Spark and try and be lore accurate. Instead, I am skimming the top of the ideas that are being presented in Magic to run a fun campaign. 

Campaign Premise: A group of adventurers go on a short adventure (See MTG Pack D&D Adventure), and at the end, they find a key to an Omenpath (or whatever you want to call the Planar Gateway). They would then need to seek out a more knowledgeable NPC about said artifact. When they start poking their nose around and asking questions, two factions arise that both want this artifact. An allied and an enemy faction. The allied faction could potentially be the Harpers since it was in the last adventure. Maybe the enemy faction is the Cult of Bane. You can then choose a few things about this key. Is it tied to a specific plane? Is it general and this gains them access to the liminal space between planes and then get to freely choose their destination? Personally, just to keep the workload down would rather have the former option.

So let's assume we use the adventure from my previous article and we have started in the Forgotten Realms. Now, I get to use the list of MTG planes at the bottom of that article and pick a destination that I want the next adventure to take place. For this, I'm feeling Theros and a Greek Mythos-inspired adventure (notice this is focused on one adventure at a time, not an entire campaign. We will aim to spend 2-4 sessions here and then jump somewhere else.)

Key Campaign Notes so far:

• Allied Faction: Harpers as planar police?
• Enemy Faction: Cult of Bane or Cult of Darkness
• The characters have an Omenpath Key to Theros. Their allies will help them open it and traverse it safely, this time.

Next time I will go through the Adventure Building Process with another pack of cards and see where it takes us!

- Daniel