Initial Purpose:

I wanted a game in which I could pull adventures and locales from decades of fantasy settings, modules, novels, etc WITHOUT necessarily making them "fit."

Broad Premise:

A homebrew campaign setting called Chimera. 30+ years ago was an event commonly called the Tangle. 

With no discernable fanfare, the world changed completely. Lands and people from a hundred worlds were suddenly sharing the same world. Mountain ranges, rivers, nations, and people appeared or disappeared. Biomes shifted. 

Chaos and catastrophe reigned in some places, but the event barely affected folks in others.

The Borderlands (where reality is fractured or strained) between vastly different regions is still dangerous; mutations, Schism storms, raiders, etc.

But, as they will, nations and individuals quickly assimilated and adapted to the new normal. Trade returned quickly, exploration, war, adventuring, etc.

The (T)Ask:

Drawing on 50 years of published D&D lore, as well as your own imagination, or other sources, attempt to answer this singular question:

"What is the cause/purpose/endgame of the Tangle?"

More verbosely: 

"What could pull lands and people from across the multiverse, slap them into a new world, make the jagged edges fit just enough that it mostly works, AND why would they/it do this!?"

Naturally, I have my own loose theories and possibilities (largely based around the First World legends of Dragons and Giants), and the Players will absolutely come up with their own pet theories. That's kind of the hope and the point.

But, I'm very curious as to YOUR ideas.

I know my own mind and my own players, so I can only conceive of so many "answers" to this question.

Your perspective and experiences are wildly different and, thus, potentially valuable!

The Prize:

🤔

Uhm. 

Bragging rights?

Some fun mind-stretching?

Helping out a fellow world-builder?

How about this? 

IF I get off my lazy butt and write any of this down in a sharable format, I'll make sure some version of it is linked here, as a thank you for your help!

Cool?

Cool.

So, what've you got?

Oh! And as I'm writing this post on my phone, sitting in a Sheetz parking lot, scarfing down a breakfast burrito, and absolutely avoiding my work day, I may have left things out or made them too vague to be useful. If so, ask for clarification and I'll make edits as necessary.

Thanks folks!

Are you talking about having multiple DND worlds intermix, or are you talking about other IP? Things like the worlds of Mad Max, Bugs Bunny, and Eberron all mixing together?

The first option is already covered by vanilla DND in the multiverse / 'infinite' material planes, and the second is covered by ...

Technically you could just rule it that the second is also covered by the current DND cosmology in the multiverse. 

I'd look at the Tangle as something happening in the cosmology of the DND worlds - maybe The Outlands or Sigil have something funky going on, which is causing all the planes to appear in the same "spot", or something like that. 

hmmmmm. this is really interesting. i reccomend you check out the Codex Inversus wich is a lot like this. as for why, i had a campaign (idea) wich focused on a mind flayer arcanist who made a mind control amplifier to control 501 Kuo-Toa. if you dont know, mass belief of Kuo-Toa can alter reality. his first act with this reality altering power in my idea was to make some level 20 adventurers to kill his elder brain, but the more he uses this machine, the thinner walls between realites become, and thngs from past editions, pathfinder, SCP, and many other things that should not be start showing up in the world.

so you could do something like that i guess 

also if you use this, could you tell your players who came up with it?

Quote from Capatin_Crunch >>

Also, if you use this, could you tell your players who came up with it?

 Count on it!

thanks! :::)

I had a similar thought yesterday during a conversation. My chain of thought:

You can aquire bits of broken and abandoned things here and there, but they are usually mundane things: a rusty spear head, a broken sword, a dagger missing most of the handle...

But you hardly ever hear of broken magical items: a wizard's staff broken in battle, a one enchanted wand that lost its charges, a chipped sending stone.

So, similar to the junk world of that one movie I am not sure can be mentioned here, I proposed a plane where all lost, abandoned, broken, misused, or otherwise discarded magical items get pulled... Initially, it was just natural magical items, such as that magic rock that does nothing but be magical (and has its own story, but cannot tell it for lack of hands, a mouth, legs, or anything else not rock like). Later, golems, entities that died and later came back to life after falling into the Junk Plane, and other sentient creatures discover the plane and as soon as merchants find it, they set up shop recycling things: wands get recharged, staffs mended, ornithopters get cannibalized to make others fly again, ancient lost artifacts rediscovered and now on sale for the low low price of all the gold you possess. (The merchants there only work with chain stores that will keep the source descrete, since a "lightly used" thing fetches a better price than a "mended rod of something that was once sundered")

I just didnt have a purpose for it. Sure, ir could have some guild activity or a place to go for a side quest to find such and such's thingamabob, but nothing else came to mind yet.

I see two possible and reasonable explanations for why this happened.

1) A massive multi-universe disaster, (example: if Devils, Yugoloths, and Demons were to end the Blood War and unite, invading the rest of the universe).  Then a/the God(s) would try to save as much as they could, pulling pieces of the various locations and slamming them together.

2) A Far Realm creature of enormous power does it because of "things man was not meant to know".   Possibly the closest explanation a human could understand would be 'experiment'. But being Abberations, it could also be "to find the absolute best tasting lava".

The Dwarves in my setting believe that all of creation is ruled over by powerful beings called "the Authors" who can rewrite reality on a whim. These beings are mighty, but also fallible. They often get into squabbles with one another, and play favourites among the mortal peoples. Legends say that on more than one occasion, the authors have recreated the world from scratch for no other reason than simple boredom.

The Tangle sounds like a few of the authors got together and decided to remake the world, but they couldn't decide what the new world should be like, so they settled their disagreement the dumbest* way possible.

You can use my Dwarves in your world if you like, but only if you promise to give them your worst New Zealand accent. They're known as traveling bon vivants and are marked by extensive magical tattoos.

*(complimentary)

Read some GURPS Fantasy books. The Banestorm setting is very similar to this, so would be a good source of ideas.

In a manner of speaking, it sounds a lot like a non-genre-specific Ravenloft (especially pre-5e Ravenloft, which had a stronger sense of the Demiplane as an internally coherent setting that simply happened to be a patchwork of regions and characters from other places, with several of the most prominent Domains forming a continent called the "Core"). Perhaps something akin to the Dark Powers is, similarly, experimenting with certain key individuals in each chunk of the world. Maybe not in the "ironic hellish punishment" way the Darklords are toyed with, but more to poke them with a stick and see what happens. And like the Dread Domains, the areas of this world could be a mix of the not-Darklords' actual homes, places constructed specifically for them, or parts of different worlds, but all of them matched with the not-Darklords for a purpose.

Oooo now that's particularly interesting!

For some more ideas like this, check out the game The Strange, by Monte Cook Games. It meshes any number of sub-genres.

Did you ever read Marvel's Secret Wars? Similar concept