This week I wanted to share a peek behind the screen of the games I run. I wanted to talk about the media that has been extremely influential in how I run games. This post will be about how I see the players as a multiversal constant. If you’re Familiar with Michael Moorcock’s work then you already know from the title what this is going to be about. If you aren’t then here’s the skinny.
The Eternal Champion:
Elric of Melnibone, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum Jhselen Irsei, Erekose. These are only some of the incarnations of the eternal champion. They are the same person, but they aren’t. Sometimes they are aware of this, sometimes they are not. They have met each other, they have fought at each other’s sides, and even crossed swords on occasion. The Author Michael Moorcock has created a massive multiverse of heroes spanning more than a few genres. The eternal champion fights for law or chaos always serving balance, even if they don’t know it. Each of these heroes, or anti-heroes, or villains, depending on how you look at it, are connected to each other through an unbroken chain of reincarnation across the multiverse.
I am not at all doing this justice but I strongly recommend Moorcock’s books. My introduction to his writing was Corum and I think it’s a good place to jump in. His books are influential enough in DCC to have a spell named after the concept of the eternal champion.
What does this mean for games?
This starts with a question. What is something that every single character you have ever played has in common?
Most people will answer that question with some trait they give their characters or something along those lines. They may be right but it is highly unlikely, if you play long enough you’ll eventually play someone who doesn’t have that quality. And this question applies to more than just the games I run. What does your character from Exalted have in common with your star wars clone trooper veteran? What about your Legend of 5 rings ninja? How about your pathfinder warrior? Now, I’ll admit that there are people out there that try to play literally the same character in every game they get into, no matter the system or genre. Ironically those people play into this even harder than those who don’t.
The real answer is that every single one of those characters has been played by you.
You are the thread that ties these characters from different worlds, times, places, and even games together. Each of them is a piece of you. You might play a character who is nothing like you, but it’s still you playing that character, even if they aren’t like you. Every character you’ve played is secretly the same hero.
How do I use that?
In the games I run, This means something. It’s not a literal one to one recreation of the eternal champion of Moorcock’s books but his books are telling a story with a planned ending, so we take some liberties for games. You are the eternal champion. Each of your characters is a piece of you, a shard that you cast into a setting. That shard fights for one side of the eternal conflict, bringing balance, even if you don’t realize it.
It doesn’t come up often but when it does, its important. Players have gotten themselves into situations where they end up in the wrong universe, a character from a Heroes Unlimited game might end up in the world that runs on the rules of Pathfinder. Sometimes you see a glimpse of the multiverse you aren’t supposed to. This was how a lesser villain of a prior campaign summoned his monstrous reflections, through a shard of a mirror meant to glimpse the multiverse. That mirror, when it was whole, was a portal what was shattered by a character some 20 years ago in another game, scattering the pieces of the mirror to the multiverse and breaking his character into slivers of himself.
This is how it plays out, magic and technology get a little weird, things break, people end up in the wrong places. I don’t create a new setting for every game, so naturally shards of your eternal champion can exist in the same position and meet each other. To this day no one has ever asked about the-four-who-are-one or what happens if they gather enough shards in one place. Most of my players have never and will never pick up a Moorcock book. That is okay. They don’t need to in order to interact with that part of the games.
This works in my games for three reasons:
First, because I’ve connected all my settings. Games that run on different rules simply use their own rules when in a non-native setting. Conflicts defer to the visitor’s rules. It keeps things simple in what could get out of hand very quickly.
Second, because I’ve run the same handful of settings consistently for decades. Things that happened in the superhero game 10 years ago are still being felt by players now. This long history means that they can recognize these patterns and threads across games. Their warrior from DCC lands in the streets of NY and looks around, they have no idea what is going on but the player sees a poster for the 457th jack dagger movie and hears the name “Ultimate Stealth” on a nearby TV and they instantly know, out of game, what happened.
Third, I’ve spent decades using the same system for a dozen different Genres, palladium. Yes, I also ran non-palladium games. heck this is a DCC blog. What palladium offered was a system that could do a lot of things without being GURPS. No shade for GURPS but it is just not for me. With Palladium I could run superheroes, space opera, mecha, TMNT, a game based on kung fu movies, horror mystery, Spy games, basically anything. So with this multiverse using mostly the same system it kept things tidy. Given that Palladium was built on the back of a d20 system and also somehow a d100 system it blobbed up against other games with shocking smoothness. In recent years I’ve transitioned away from Palladium, I use DCC for everything now. My kung fu game uses Kung Fu Classics. My superhero game is Evolved: Justice Edition, you get the idea. So i’m cheating a little bit by having my games mostly use the same system it allows seamless blending with only a few hiccups… but there are still other systems that are connected, and I am always ready for those to interact.
As a small bonus to all this I like to change things that interact with the multiverse, like the Eternal Champion spell, it no longer just pulls a generic guy out to fight, it pulls one of your other characters from somewhere else in the games, potentially even a game I didn’t run, to fight for you. Sometimes I’ll have something show that it’s operating at a whole different level by directly addressing the player, in the same way that Vivec of elder scrolls addresses the player, not the character you play, using a phrase that basically means “you who is controlling this incarnation”.
The Meta-nature of games
This brings me to possibly my favorite part of this idea. How games are all connected to each other, through the players. You and I might never play together, we might never even have players who play with each other, but through the games, slowly, branching out into other people’s games, our games are connected to each other. In the same way you know almost everyone through 6 degrees of separation or less, you’ve likely been connected through this web of eternal champions and shards longer than you realize. I think that's wonderful. My player Steve has played in in a game I’ve run. Steve has also played at another Judge’s table, putting his characters into that Judge’s games. Creating a connection. That Judge might have their own player who plays in the Third Judge’s games. That player, the eternal champion in my interpretation, has played with Steve and is now connecting those three tables. Adventure League for 5e was something that, to me, really leaned into this without realizing it.
Sometimes this takes on a more direct appearance. This post is getting a little long but I really want to share these two stories so I’ll keep them short.
I have a friend who I have never played games with, I’ve never run a game with him in it, I’ve never been in a game with him, nor has he run a game I played. We orbit the same spheres of players. This friend heard about something in my games, called “the house” which players had been using as a dumping ground for problems they didn’t want to fix the hard way for decades. When I ran this game, The House, I would allow my players to pick any character they wanted from any game I ran or use a character from any other game they had played, the only rule was that they had to have played the character at least once. This lead to all kinds of interesting things coming into this supernatural place, a pokemon trainer, some superheroes, a spartan from halo, at least one clone trooper, a bard from the witcher. So my friend learned that the house was a makeshift prison in the games, created by lazy and cowardly players. He approached me and asked me if I would let him take something out of his own games and put it into the house. I shrugged and said sure, why not let him write something for the games? But what he meant was “Toast, i have no way to contain this thing in my setting. Can I put it into yours for safe keeping?” This was the first and only time someone asked this and it was wonderful. It meant our games, though never really connected, now had a very real connection to each other.
The second story is also about The House, which is really where the multiversal fabric of the games gets thinnest. A player brought in a delta green character. His character died in the house. Now, within my setting i warn players, if you bring in one of your characters to the house and they die in there, they are erased from the multiverse. Obviously this only applies to games I run, I can’t kill a character in someone else’s game. But this player nodded when is character died and got back to me something like a month later. He told me that this character had been erased from that delta green game. He approached his GM for that game and asked if he could have his character erased because of what happened in the game I ran. I thought this was pretty cool, because it created a very real connection between the games I run and another GM’s games, even though neither of us knew each other.
This was a long one that turned more into a tangent but I just really love the concepts of a multiverse and interconnected continuities in games. I think it’s possibly my favorite part of games, to see the connection we all share and might not even realize. I love when things get meta, I love when your characters meet each other. I love when something that happened in an unrelated game influences even a small decision in another game.
Thanks for reading. I hope you got something here to think about and maybe take home to your own game.
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