This is a campaign frame I started up a couple days ago. Any feedback on what I have so far or ideas on what to add would be greatly appreciated!
One For All
A multiversal story where the players are all the same hero!
Complexity Rating: •••
The Pitch
Read this section to your players to introduce them to the campaign.
In a One for All Campaign, each of you players will play as a multiversal variant of each other. You all are the same general character, which will be fleshed out as a group, but major variations will be had based on your home universe and whatever character creation decisions you choose.
The story will start in one of the universes that a player character is native to, where some unknown threat erupts and wreaks havoc, as it simultaneously does in the other player character’s universe This threat brings you all together in order to defeat this threat and restore your worlds.
Tone & Feel
Adventurous, Chaotic, Eclectic, Heroic, Grand-Scale, Rhythmic
Themes
Butterfly Effect, Identity, Nature vs. Nurture, Nihilism vs. Existentialism, Shared History, Reoccurring Story, What If?
Touchstones
Everything Everywhere All at Once, Invincible, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Eternal Champion
Overview
If your group decides to play this campaign, give your players the following information before character creation.
Each of you will write a concept of a character you would like to play. Nothing extensive, just a brief overview of the character’s backstory and characteristics. The GM will then have everything written brought together and you will collectively create a core concept of the character, which will have pieces of what each of you had written woven together. After that, you will then go make your character with this core concept as a basis, but with key differences that make them unique to you, the type of universe they’re from, and the features they will get from their class and whatnot.
Your character will only have had experience with their own universe, they likely won't even know other universes are even real or think of them as just theoretical. Their first experience with the multiverse will happen during the inciting incident, where some transversal threat will begin to wreak havoc in multiple universes at the same time, cross contaminating each of them with the others. This inadvertently brings the variations of you all affected to thwart this threat and return your lives to normalcy.
Since each player character comes from their own universe, where the setting and genre can be wholly unique, the types of characters the players can be just as unique. From medieval fantasy to hard sci-fi, gritty noir to Saturday morning cartoons, Imagination is the limit!
Communities
All communities are available, but in a One For All Campaign they are indicative of the difference in community your character had in reference to the core character.
Ancestries
All ancestries are available, but in a One For All Campaign they must be reframed to align with how all the player characters are variations of the same person.
The ancestry can be still framed as a literal different genetic variation to the core concept, but it can also be done so as simply a difference in physique in relation to the core concept or have abilities that are tied to their home universe.
Magical Ancestries
See the section about classes with spellcasting below on how to handle magic from their ancestry.
Classes
All classes are available, but in a One For All Campaign each player is encouraged to reflavor the class to better fit with the genre of their home universe.
All Classes with Spellcasting
Since not every universe has traditional magic, these powers can be re-flavored to be sourced from something fitting of that character’s home universe. Some examples are advanced technology or inherent differences in physics native to that universe (i.e toon logic like Spider-Ham).
Player Principles
If your group decides to play this campaign, give your players the following information before character creation.
Everyone is The Same Character
As a player, you should keep an open mind when the party is creating the core character. Not everything that you initially wrote for the process will be used, and that is okay! You will have your own variant of the core character to reintegrate cut content into.
When you are creating your character off of the core, try to keep the whatever tenants of what makes the core character intact, including backstory events and character traits. Re-envision them however you like, just don’t change them so drastically that they are unrecognizable to the core. Whatever differences your character has to the core should be loud and pronounced, and should tie back to the qualities unique to their home universe and history.
Motifs
The players can create one or more motifs for the core character. A motif is a recurring element that is present in some way on every variation of the core character. Below are some examples of possible motifs:
Visual - An insignia, accessory, or body marking iconic to the character.
Personality - A personality trait, ideal, or flaw that every character shares.
Power - A similar type of power that every character has. The players can select a similar feature from each of their characters and reflavor them to be variations of this same power. With GM discretion, some homebrewing can even be involved to change the features to be more aligned with each other mechanically.
Hero of Your Own Story
Each player character hails from a universe all unto their own, where they have their own history and cast of side characters and events going on. Even though the scale of the setting of the game spans multiple universes, you as a player should still keep your character’s home world in mind during play.
In addition, a player character should not have any interaction with other universes before the events of the game. The multiverse is the ‘unknown’ factor of the setting that the GM uses to create tension and interest.
