Last I saw something like this was in Batman: the Brave and the Bold, but its common.
Has a Small Multiverse that has each world full of the same dopplegangers, but with each world being either its own genre, or obviously connected.
In BBB, Batman has Prime world (his), and Reverse Superhero World where the Joker is the top good guy, and Zombie World. (I've discussed this episode before, but I think I'm bringing out a new aspect of it. The One also had this to some degree, and MJ may have mentioned that.)
Arguably, my attempts to add on a slew of Mary Pipers beyond Alpha and Beta is this.
It'd be interesting to have some sort of cross-dimensional scavenger hunt vs. Gecko, Ltd. (Generic Evil Corporation, Limited.) and their Hunter Teams to find the McGuffin of Pan-Dimensional Dominance. Such a group of good guys or bad guys could be drawn to the verser because they have devices that track other dimensional objects, and they think he's part of the scavenger hunt.
Another idea is that the Genre Multiverse is in balance, but one weight is enough to throw things off...in other words, the arrival of the verser is enough to doom a dozen universes, unless Something is Done.
Basically, have a Noir, A Boring Suburbia, a Medieval, a Western, and about six more worlds, and create some sort of cross-dimensional adventure. It would probably be a lot easier to use clairvoyance on other worlds in the same genre multiverse (or it could be.)
Anyways...
Cool ideas. It would be hard to get the verser involved in some cases though. A1Nut's character is not like the Gardener, but he's not likely to follow a quest for example. I think my character might, but I'm not sure. But it's a very cool idea indeed.
Niko,
That's to a large degree what picking worlds is about.
Arguably not. There is no indication that those universes are really connected in any way, and if any two of them exist, it is probably just random chance that has them so similar in such odd ways. That, at least, is how I view the Alpha and Beta connection: there is no connection, and normally any particular verser is unaware that there's more than one universe with a "ship" called Mary Piper, and if he happens to hit both, it's a remarkable coincidence, not a connected pair of universes.Arguably, my attempts to add on a slew of Mary Pipers beyond Alpha and Beta is this.
Of course, your mileage may vary, and that has nothing to do with the core concept.
What you describe is really more of a treasure hunt than a scavenger hunt, and I think a scavenger hunt is the better model. (In a treasure hunt there is one McGuffin and the players move from clue to clue trying to find it; in a scavenger hunt there are several or even many non-unique objects of varying rarity which both teams are attempting to collect in full.) From a Multiverser perspective, the player character has to have another means of traveling between the related universes, since even at stage 6 he can't really control where he is going and scriff control bod skills are pretty much unknown. But assuming that the residents of one of these universes has a scriff travel machine, you're probably all right. (It should probably be a projector and collector system, since if the machine travels to a world in which the machine is biased out, you probably can't use the machine to get out of that world. This creates something of a Time Tunnel aspect, that someone controlling the machine is watching the character at least intermittently and attempting to move him elsewhere when the time is right. Or it might be that they're not able to observe, and so are going to activate their collector at a point when they think it's been long enough, and see if the traveler managed to complete what he intended by then.)
--M. J. Young
But it would be cool if they were.
And thanks for the definition of scavenger hunt and treasure hunt. Its true, the search for the Rod of Seven Parts would work better here.
And thanks for the definition of scavenger hunt and treasure hunt.
Sure. They were covered in Game Ideas Unlimited articles years ago, along with several other adventure designs, one of which was Flag Captures. In a Flag Capture, you know where the McGuffin is, but there are several ways to get to it, each posing its own dangers (To Rasilon's castle we go, above between, below....). That distinguishes it from the Treasure Hunt, in which there is only one path to the McGuffin, but you don't know where it leads, only where the next clue points.
--M. J. Young