A Multiverse of Adventure: Taking Your Campaign Beyond the Veil

Tags author-davyd-atkins monsters of the multiverse Spelljammer

The multiverse is something we know precious little about, but this year is pulling back the veil! On the heels of the release of Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, we have the August release of Spelljammer: Adventures in Space! So there’s no better time to bring mind-bending multiversal shenanigans to your D&D table.

Here are exciting ways to send your players tumbling through an infinite realm of possibilities, either as part of your existing D&D campaign or a new one.

A gathering of mages study the multiverse

A Fork in the Road of Destiny

A single decision can change the course of history, sending it down one path or a completely different one. Consider, for example, how different an adventure or setting would be if a character had made different choices in their backstory? Perhaps the fighter took up the arcane arts and became a wizard instead of perfecting their martial abilities. Maybe the rogue went straight and became a cleric. Exploring parallel stories to your main campaign with slightly different versions of your player’s characters can give them a chance to explore other character options while maintaining the familiarity of the adventurers they’ve come to love.

Here are some possible alternative realities your players could explore:

  • The characters swap classes: At first glance, this looks like the same party—a wizard, a rogue, a cleric, and a fighter. But on closer inspection, in another world, wasn’t that elf the wizard, that dwarf the cleric? Have the players make new versions of their characters but swap classes with each other.
  • Same class, same items: This is a new reality where everything you may think you know has changed! Each player can make an entirely fresh character with a new backstory and race, but keeps their class and magic items. A different party rose to become the noble adventurers that the game focuses on!
  • Slight change in details: Something went differently in the party's adventuring career. Maybe the fighter looted a +2 sword instead of a +2 axe. Perhaps the sorcerer has a prosthetic after losing their arm to a fireball from a wild magic surge? It’s the same party, but a little different.

Fight the Future … Literally

A hero lost in time uses a futuristic laser pistol to slay a monsterYour players are fighting desperately to prevent the evil machinations of the Dread Lich of the Necrospire and thwart his world-ending plans. But what are they actually fighting to prevent, what is actually on the line? Time can be a fickle thing, especially in Dungeons & Dragons, where an unlucky encounter with a sphinx or taking the wrong turn in the Feywild can fling you tens or even hundreds of years into the past or future.

If you fling the characters into the far and desolate future, be it through a magic portal, capricious archfey, or inscrutable sphinx, they'll be able to explore what might come to pass if they fail. This can be a great opportunity to shift the tone of your game, if only for a short while. Think about what kind of world your villain would usher in. Perhaps you draw inspiration from Eberron to reflect an industrial dystopian future. This can present a great opportunity to try new storytelling styles and explore new settings and tones, safe in the knowledge that the characters will return to the "present" of the original campaign … or will they?

Alternatively, you could hurl the characters back in time, setting them adrift amongst the pages of history. Now they have to find a way home to their present without setting off a butterfly effect that could change everything, maybe even erasing them from existence. This can provide a great way for your players to explore the lore of the setting they’re adventuring in a much more interactive way. You could even set up a big reveal that some major historical event involving a mysterious band of heroes was them all along!

Just be careful, as time travel can be as confusing for the Dungeon Master as it can be for the time travelers! It helps to set your rules of time travel first. Do changes cause branching timelines of alternate realities, or is changing the past impossible? Can you erase yourself from existence or does the universe fight back to protect the chain of cause and effect that leads from past to future?

Race for the Relic

What better way to explore the multiverse than through a scavenger hunt for the artifact you need to save it? There’s a gadget, device, magic item, or other rare MacGuffin and the characters need to venture from world to world.

This can be a great trick for saving yourself work as a DM—each location they need to acquire the item from is the same as the last, except with some minor or major differences. Maybe it’s an interdimensional dungeon, where one version is underwater, the other in a volcano, and the third on top of a mountain or a floating island. Even though the layout might be the same, the enemies and environmental hazards are not.

The players get to learn the layout well each time they hop dimensions, giving them an edge, but they can’t afford to get lax because what might be a room with a single flameskull in one world could be a swarm of water elementals in another.

A World Gone Wrong

Nautiloid ships hover over a landscape corrupted by illithids

It’s not just the player characters who can explore the possibility of other worlds and other timelines, the villains can as well! There’s even the perfect spell for it, wish! Give the villain a chance to make a wish and change the world. Perhaps they try to erase the party from existence, but something or someone intervenes. While the party's actions are erased, they remain and only they remember what the world used to be like.

This can form an exciting foundation for a campaign that kicks into gear around the third act. The players have just got to the stage where they grasp the world and maybe the villain is on the back foot and suddenly everything changes! A whole new world and a whole new goal to set right what has been made wrong.

This is another excellent chance to draw on different settings. Maybe your Forgotten Realms-inspired setting is now more akin to Greyhawk, renaissance fantasy replaced with sword and sorcery. It all depends on what change the villain made, which is where you can get really creative. Did they erase the player's characters? Change the outcome of a war? Erase magic? The possibilities are as endless as they are terrifying.

Heroes of the Multiverse

Perhaps you don’t want to surprise your players with multiversal shenanigans but instead want it to be the core concept of the game from the start. Why not have the players be multiversal heroes, traveling between worlds saving the day? This is the idea at the heart of the wildly popular Planescape setting from earlier editions of D&D, and a great way to make a more episodic campaign.

Each arc of the campaign—which can be as short as a single session if you wish—explores a different world where the heroes try to right wrongs and save the day. Depending on if you lean toward hopefulness or hopelessness, Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel and Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft can provide great inspiration for a multitude of small settings for your players to explore.

A Secret War

If your players can’t go throughout the multiverse, have the multiverse come to them! Doppelgangers and clones from another world have started infiltrating your campaign and it's down to the players to figure out who’s an imposter and what they want. This can be great for a low combat, high social encounter and roleplay campaign with lots of mystery and conspiracy.

The best part about a campaign like this is that it gives you, the DM, a lot of flexibility to decide what’s actually happening on the fly. For bonus points, use your players' theories—as wild and wacky as they may be—to inform what’s going on. Few things in D&D are quite as satisfying for a player as the moment where the answers to the big mystery are revealed and it turns out they had successfully figured it all out beforehand.  

A Multiverse of Possibilities

These are just a few ideas for how you can explore a realm of infinite worlds and possibilities across the multiverse in your D&D game. When you’re meddling in matters of a multiversal nature, there is no limit to what you can do! Let your imagination run wild! And don’t forget to draw on your players for inspiration. Maybe one of them has an idea for an alternative world they’d like to explore, if only for a few sessions.

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FAQ for Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse
by Davyd Atkins

Davyd is a moderator for D&D Beyond. A Dungeon Master of over fifteen years, he enjoys Marvel movies, writing, and of course running D&D for his friends and family, including partner Steph and his daughter Willow (well, one day). They live with their two cats Asker and Khatleesi in the south of England.

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