Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Alternate Dimensions

We talked about the dimension super movement, but I wanted to take a second to detail potential locales for superheroes to go into.

Space: Space is nice. It requires only 3 dimensional travel, so with a ship you can bring in any other planets you want. Of course, since space is "easy" to travel for superheroes, it's easy for aliens to come back. It's all about distance. The nice things about space is (based on speed of light) it's possible to communicate with other planets (albeit potentially slowly) so people may be able to communicate with you even if you're stranded on another planet.

Separate Dimensions: Think of D&D dimensions here, a plane of fire, the astral plane, the ethereal plane, Heaven, Hell, etc. These are dimensions that do not overlap earth in any kind of "dimensional space). This is what people typically think of when you think of alternate dimensions. Requires dimensional travel to access. Typically if you're trapped here you have little ways to communicate with home.

Alternate Dimensions: These are like Sliders alternate earths, not time travel, but the exact same place but on an alternate dimension. The Flash TV show justifies that the different dimensions vibrate at different speeds thus we simply don't see each other, which is interesting. Just like separate dimensions, except you're more likely to see very familiar items here, where separate dimensions will have drastically different areas, gravity, etc. This one is less likely for you to need some kind of environmental adaptation.

The Microverse: Accessed by shrinking to the subatomic level, you enter a microverse, which could be an entire new universe existing within a singular atom. It's not an alternate dimension, it just exists within very small space, so you can't escape it without growing in size.

The Macroverse: The opposite of the microverse, this is done by growing so large that our entire universe fills the space of a single molecule or atom to you. The danger here is that returning to your own universe is VERY difficult, as you have to find the exact atom you used to stand in before shrinking back down (also you will probably do some damage while growing). Special teleportation might be able to help you get home, but it's not an alternate dimension it's space.

Alternate Universe: This is based on you leaving your universe, and entering another one. For all intents and purposes, this involves 3 dimensional space, but you might not be able to access it properly from your own universe. Imagine that your universe is a donut- no matter what direction you go, you loop around somewhere, but there may be other donuts that you can jump onto. (Perhaps by traversing the macroverse). Alternate dimension won't help you, though you may be able to teleport between them, or use the macroverse to travel.

Alternate Timeline: An alternate timeline is your own dimension, but affected as if the past was different. This is similar to Alternate Dimension, except that you can't teleport off it, the only way back to your own timeline is to go back in time, repair the issue, and then go back to the future. (Pretty tricky to accomplish). Time travel stories frequently use this.

Alternate Time: This is your own timeline, but somewhere in the past or future. It could be millions of years, making the world very different (regardless of direction) but you might be able to utilize postcognition or precognition to communicate with your home time, or if you're in the past, you might be able to use fossils or stalactite formations to communicate with the deep future. Temporal movement is the way to get here or home from here.

Did I miss anything? Let me know what dimensions you've played with in your campaigns.

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