I have a story idea of having a war between all of the gods of every pantheon, that pulls in all of the creatures of all of the realms(mortal or other wise). In other words all of the races from all of the realms are dragged in a all out war with ever changing alliances between the countless factions. The question is how can this works?
War is an extension of politics. You'd have to determine what the exact goals and resources of the players looks like.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
War is an extension of politics. You'd have to determine what the exact goals and resources of the players looks like.
This
Also, it's probably too big for a normal campaign. D&D doesn't do war well, and even 20th-level characters are not powerful enough to intervene directly against the gods. It's likely to end up feeling like either the PCs don't matter, or that they matter too much. (If all this cosmic conflict ends up hinging on what the PCs do, it's gonna be kind of weird.) Or even both.
No matter if you create a campaign, or a youtube series - you need to figure out why the realms would go to way against each other.
And that's tricky. Each is it's own multiverse (maybe some are in the same one?). Wars are generally fought over some sort of ressource - and it's really hard to imagine a ressource you'd need to go to another multiverse to find, and then dedice it's easier to invade than trade for it.
It's a problem even on the scale of interplanetary warfare: Invading a planet like Earth (assuming vaguely similar tech levels) would require hundreds of millions of troops, along with everything they could need for the duration of the war. It's ... on a scale beyond reason. Invading a different multiverse is .. worse. To actually invade a multiverse, you'd need .. I mean, potentially trillions of troops.
If you can work with that sort of scale and make it believable - hell, I'll watch your youtube thing. But I think you'd be the first.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
With a little work, most D&D settings can fit under the same Planescape/Spelljammer paradigm.
Yes, I know - but that really doesn't solve the problem I'm describing =)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
With a little work, most D&D settings can fit under the same Planescape/Spelljammer paradigm.
Yes, I know - but that really doesn't solve the problem I'm describing =)
Planescape and Spelljammer, probably Spelljammer more so than Planescape, is the perfect way to bridge the gap between realms and settings to start that massive multiversal, planehopping war. I'd advise going on a lore dive into Spelljammer from older editions. I think that version connects the dots better than current Spelljammer does. I've pondered the same idea you've described before, but the scale is daunting and frankly unrealistic to try and manage. Although, I would be happy to be proven wrong if you can pull it off. Just be sure to share how you did it. You'd need to give the party good reasons to side with or against certain powers. Perhaps they're just trying to survive the conflict in one piece? Also, you might need to keep track of those alliances that could be forming or breaking down elsewhere that the party hasn't interacted with yet too. A war that size wouldn't happen in a vaccuum. Maybe put some limits on the size of this war to keep it more manageable? Making your own custom setting could help out with that. Not to mention, how might this campaign end? What would the fallout be like if everyone has been in a universal state of war for who knows how long? While it's not a bad idea, I'm unsure it can be done. However, I do wish you the best of luck! I'd be fascinated to see something like this actually work.
You could use the lore on the Blood War - the war between the Chaotic Evil Abyss and the Lawful Evil Hell - as a basis. Its been going on since the dawn of creation and has spilled over into other realms before. So it could spill over and keep growing with gods taking sides as it spills. You could also steal concepts from the multiverse war that is alluded to in David Weber's War God series. The gods, especially the evil ones, use the monsters of a conquered realm as cannon fodder. But also a god comments to a paladin that if the gods stepped in and fought it could destroy reality.
Remember a war of that magnitude would not start all at once but grow with events bringing groups into one side or another, even if that is not the side you think they would normally join. Also a war of that scale would have massive repercussions. A single pantheon war in a campaign killed all but one god and shattered a realm's crystal sphere so the gods at war across multiple realms would create massive devastation.
You could use the lore on the Blood War - the war between the Chaotic Evil Abyss and the Lawful Evil Hell - as a basis. Its been going on since the dawn of creation and has spilled over into other realms before. So it could spill over and keep growing with gods taking sides as it spills. You could also steal concepts from the multiverse war that is alluded to in David Weber's War God series. The gods, especially the evil ones, use the monsters of a conquered realm as cannon fodder. But also a god comments to a paladin that if the gods stepped in and fought it could destroy reality.
Remember a war of that magnitude would not start all at once but grow with events bringing groups into one side or another, even if that is not the side you think they would normally join. Also a war of that scale would have massive repercussions. A single pantheon war in a campaign killed all but one god and shattered a realm's crystal sphere so the gods at war across multiple realms would create massive devastation.
Oh! That's a good idea! Maybe look into the modron march too! That'd be some interesting lore to include for that scale of war.
If there was a simple resource that was rare and limited enough that the gods themselves would go to war to get it, this would be cool. Maybe something with the filler name of "Planesium".
As a thought exercise, I asked one chatty AI the question about the odds of a planetary invasion - if some evil force from a great conflict in Earth's history fled to the dark side of the moon, prepared for ... less than a century, and then returned to conquer the world.
Now, there are various considerations. Like, just for starters transporting millions of troops 384000 km across space to make planetfall. But the estimate that said AI arrived at, just to build the stuff needed (and it used the terms extremely conservative) was that it would be necessary to mine the top 24 meters of the entire surface of the moon - just to build the ships and weapons and so on. 3 trillion tons of rock.
That raises the question of where all the food was to come from. For each 1 million troops, they'd need 2500 tons of food - per day. And ... well, I'm hardly any military expert, but I'd say you'd need at least 10 million troops to have any chance at victory. The above estimate, the 24 meters? That's for 1 million troops.
And that's not an entire multiverse, that's just the Moon bad guys invading the Earth.
But someone could ask an AI: What if you had enough clerics to just create the food, and portals to take care of distances, and so on. What then? =)
Disclaimer: I did not fact check the AI's work here. My grasp of math is nowhere near solid enough.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I feel like we are forgetting the negative and positive energy planes, which would probably play out like Super Smash Bros: Ultimate. As both would make life literally impossible in their own ways. So factions based on how each other plane would react would be interesting.
I have a story idea of having a war between all of the gods of every pantheon, that pulls in all of the creatures of all of the realms(mortal or other wise). In other words all of the races from all of the realms are dragged in a all out war with ever changing alliances between the countless factions. The question is how can this works?
War is an extension of politics. You'd have to determine what the exact goals and resources of the players looks like.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
This
Also, it's probably too big for a normal campaign. D&D doesn't do war well, and even 20th-level characters are not powerful enough to intervene directly against the gods. It's likely to end up feeling like either the PCs don't matter, or that they matter too much. (If all this cosmic conflict ends up hinging on what the PCs do, it's gonna be kind of weird.) Or even both.
So would it be a better idea if I made it into a YouTube video series?
No matter if you create a campaign, or a youtube series - you need to figure out why the realms would go to way against each other.
And that's tricky. Each is it's own multiverse (maybe some are in the same one?). Wars are generally fought over some sort of ressource - and it's really hard to imagine a ressource you'd need to go to another multiverse to find, and then dedice it's easier to invade than trade for it.
It's a problem even on the scale of interplanetary warfare: Invading a planet like Earth (assuming vaguely similar tech levels) would require hundreds of millions of troops, along with everything they could need for the duration of the war. It's ... on a scale beyond reason. Invading a different multiverse is .. worse. To actually invade a multiverse, you'd need .. I mean, potentially trillions of troops.
If you can work with that sort of scale and make it believable - hell, I'll watch your youtube thing. But I think you'd be the first.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
With a little work, most D&D settings can fit under the same Planescape/Spelljammer paradigm.
Expanded 5e Spelljammer Cosmology
Yes, I know - but that really doesn't solve the problem I'm describing =)
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Planescape and Spelljammer, probably Spelljammer more so than Planescape, is the perfect way to bridge the gap between realms and settings to start that massive multiversal, planehopping war. I'd advise going on a lore dive into Spelljammer from older editions. I think that version connects the dots better than current Spelljammer does. I've pondered the same idea you've described before, but the scale is daunting and frankly unrealistic to try and manage. Although, I would be happy to be proven wrong if you can pull it off. Just be sure to share how you did it. You'd need to give the party good reasons to side with or against certain powers. Perhaps they're just trying to survive the conflict in one piece? Also, you might need to keep track of those alliances that could be forming or breaking down elsewhere that the party hasn't interacted with yet too. A war that size wouldn't happen in a vaccuum. Maybe put some limits on the size of this war to keep it more manageable? Making your own custom setting could help out with that. Not to mention, how might this campaign end? What would the fallout be like if everyone has been in a universal state of war for who knows how long? While it's not a bad idea, I'm unsure it can be done. However, I do wish you the best of luck! I'd be fascinated to see something like this actually work.
You could use the lore on the Blood War - the war between the Chaotic Evil Abyss and the Lawful Evil Hell - as a basis. Its been going on since the dawn of creation and has spilled over into other realms before. So it could spill over and keep growing with gods taking sides as it spills. You could also steal concepts from the multiverse war that is alluded to in David Weber's War God series. The gods, especially the evil ones, use the monsters of a conquered realm as cannon fodder. But also a god comments to a paladin that if the gods stepped in and fought it could destroy reality.
Remember a war of that magnitude would not start all at once but grow with events bringing groups into one side or another, even if that is not the side you think they would normally join. Also a war of that scale would have massive repercussions. A single pantheon war in a campaign killed all but one god and shattered a realm's crystal sphere so the gods at war across multiple realms would create massive devastation.
Oh! That's a good idea! Maybe look into the modron march too! That'd be some interesting lore to include for that scale of war.
If there was a simple resource that was rare and limited enough that the gods themselves would go to war to get it, this would be cool. Maybe something with the filler name of "Planesium".
Dragons, kobolds, and draconic things everywhere!
the same with gods, demons, and everything else, both mortal and what ever else.
As a thought exercise, I asked one chatty AI the question about the odds of a planetary invasion - if some evil force from a great conflict in Earth's history fled to the dark side of the moon, prepared for ... less than a century, and then returned to conquer the world.
Now, there are various considerations. Like, just for starters transporting millions of troops 384000 km across space to make planetfall. But the estimate that said AI arrived at, just to build the stuff needed (and it used the terms extremely conservative) was that it would be necessary to mine the top 24 meters of the entire surface of the moon - just to build the ships and weapons and so on. 3 trillion tons of rock.
That raises the question of where all the food was to come from. For each 1 million troops, they'd need 2500 tons of food - per day. And ... well, I'm hardly any military expert, but I'd say you'd need at least 10 million troops to have any chance at victory. The above estimate, the 24 meters? That's for 1 million troops.
And that's not an entire multiverse, that's just the Moon bad guys invading the Earth.
But someone could ask an AI: What if you had enough clerics to just create the food, and portals to take care of distances, and so on. What then? =)
Disclaimer: I did not fact check the AI's work here. My grasp of math is nowhere near solid enough.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I feel like we are forgetting the negative and positive energy planes, which would probably play out like Super Smash Bros: Ultimate. As both would make life literally impossible in their own ways. So factions based on how each other plane would react would be interesting.