![]() ![]() For RPGs, make sure you’re not removing everything the players can do-games like Dungeons & Dragons are all about feeling powerful! Or maybe problems can no longer be solved with fighting. “You have no power here”: maybe certain spells stop working, or they work in different ways.You can make a full adventure out of this! Key to go back: there’s probably a very specific (and potentially weird) way to go back to the normal world.But be careful-if the guide it too useful, the plot will be too easy to resolve! Just like how we don’t know everything about our world, someone from a pocket dimension won’t know everything about it either. Mentor figure: the characters will probably need a guide to this new world.Communication issues: different world, different people, different culture! Think beyond language-what parts of communication that we take for granted aren’t present in this dimension? What do they take for granted that a stranger might not understand?.Here are four tropes you can use in your pocket dimensions: If you do so, you bring the narrative differences to the meta part of the game! Using tropes effectivelyĭon’t be afraid to use tropes! Tropes are popular for a reason: they are amazing tools to use in your stories. In RPGs, you can also apply this to game mechanics and rules, which can be extra fun if your players are already very familiar with the game’s rules. For example, making the dimension similar to the regular world but with a single difference (“what if there were dinosaurs everywhere?”). Pocket dimensions are amazing worldbuilding tools because they let you expand on your setting with “what if” questions. Well, a pocket dimension is a great way to do so! If the world around the characters is not the one they’re used to, they won’t be able to go on with their usual lives-adventure will come to them! Your players or readers will have to answer a question without you even having to ask it: what do you do when everything is so different from the world you know? Why is a pocket dimension useful?Īs GMs or writers, we’re constantly looking for ways to hook our audience to our stories. Other examples are the Upside Down from Stranger Things, Ravenloft from Dungeons & Dragons, and the Holodeck from Star Trek. The landscape is a winter forest, there’s a lone streetlamp, and a faun (as if a bottomless wardrobe wasn’t enough!). ![]() One way of accessing Narnia is through a wardrobe, and the change is immediately noticeable. Narnia is an amazing example of a pocket dimension. And thanks to the mystery and fear that a pocket dimension can cause, it’s a great way to introduce plot hooks too. This change in the rules of the world can keep a story fresh, as the characters will be open to new and different things. At the end of the day, they all have a common theme: a place where the rules of the world change enough to be noticed. In this blog, we call “pocket dimension” any kind of parallel dimension, regardless of its mechanics. ![]() A pocket dimension (or parallel plane) is an amazing tool to use in any kind of game or novel, not just in fantasy stories! But how can you use it effectively without overwhelming your players or readers with new information? We interviewed Wolfgang Baur and Celeste Conowitch, amazing game designers, in our podcast-here’s what we learned! What’s a pocket dimension? ![]()
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