How many wheres are there?
There are three major media franchises these days that all work with the idea of multiplanar worlds. Sometimes this involves creating a huge and complicated network of just coincidentally competing brand merchandise lines, where two companies bickering about a contract results in a storytelling direction that explains why Uncle Ben is a different guy, but sometimes it’s a direct choice and it’s done because you want a new place to be, a new whole world to play with.
When building worlds, adding these ‘alternate worlds’ – referred to as planes hereon out – can be a great way to continue the ongoing need of the worldbuilder, which is where am I going to put all this stuff? What I’d like to present here are just some ways to talk about how you’re using planar spaces in your worlds.
Here, and There
Examples: Stranger Things’ Upside Down, Narnia as presented in the Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe.
A Here-And-There model wants to have a familiar world and a single unfamiliar world. That other world doesn’t need to have a coherence to it, and it can even exist as a sort of parasitic world to the first. The economics of the Upside Down aren’t important. Narnia is the alternative, some place that has almost no connection to the original world.
Some versions of Star Trek land here, too, with a negative universe where everyone has a mustache. Same basic place, but what if the overall framework of the world was different and sucked.
This is specifically, though, about a binary view of alternate worlds. There’s one and there’s another and that’s it. Travelling to other possibilities isn’t a factor, it’s literally just about how these two places relate to one another.
Basically Protestantism
Examples: The Bible, Dragonball, Yuu Yuu Hakusho, Bleach
Not to make too much fun, but this is what you get when you have a small number of planes that are immediately important to one another. The fact they tend to relate heavily to afterlife stories is kinda a byproduct of dominant cultural framings – Christians did a big colonialism so that story structure is widespread as a result. In these universes, you have multiple alternate realities, but not many of them and they’re not readily accessible. Sometimes only a small number of people can move between them so it doesn’t matter how many of them there are.
In these frameworks, the central plane, the ‘here’ is usually inferior in some way; important, yes, absolutely vital, like it’s the ‘proper’ one after all, but it’s a place where you can’t do as much cool stuff or where all the cool things are missing. Sometimes this is even explicitly the fault of being the place where all the rules make sense.
My D&D universe approach is more here than a big expansive planar cosmology: There are demons and devils and angels and things from ‘outside’ but ‘outside’ represents a sort of wildly different worldscape. In the core of the world, people are aware of the realm of the faeries (the Feywild), the realm of ghosts (the Shadowfell) and then the rest of everything (the prime plane).
A Planar Cosmology
Examples: Many Dungeons & Dragons settings, the DC and Marvel universe of the comics
At the next level of planar availability, you’re low-key just using Star Trek. Not Star Trek and its model of a limited alternate reality, but rather, Star Trek as a series where every week you can go to a new planet with its own established set of ways it’s weird or visually distinct. The model of Spelljammer and Planescape live in this space, where you have essentially multiple world-likes, which are segregated from other things, they can only really transmit from one to another by conscious agents doing things, but which are separated so their rules don’t overlap. You don’t have to think of them as metaphysics or magic or whatever, it’s just the rules of a place.
Conventional D&D models tend towards this because they need places for weird monsters to come from. Demons and devils are from their own special planes of constant war, which represent a punishment afterlife, a hell of sorts, and it’s even weirder that some cosmologies don’t tie those into the life-death cycle, but also, maybe that’s okay? Personally I find the ethical dimensions a little weird – it induces too much of the morality of the universe and diminishes the material reality I favour.
At this point you’re basically looking at a sort of multi-planetary position. I don’t dislike these, but remember that freely travelling between them diminishes their differences. You don’t want Jupiter to be Just Over There, right? I mean unless you do.
Misunderstanding Quantum Physics
Examples: Bioshock Infinite, the Marvel Universe, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
The next step is when you get to the idea of Many Worlds theory and start spilling over yourself. You have a limited pool of alternate worlds for alternate story types but then you just keep setting out chairs and you wind up with worlds that are so common that their distinctions become hard to tell. When you start having worlds where the differences are subtle it becomes hard to see these things as limited in supply and at that point you have the infinite potentiality space that in my opinion collapses everything into sludge.
Because, like, when you have worlds that are only minorly different, and a lot of them, the assumption flows that you have more, that are also only minorly different. Since a world is big and complicated, there’s a lot of it. What if the world you’re in is only different in that instead of Dave’s mother dying when he was a kid, she’s alive now, and the result is that largely, Dave’s life is majorly different… Which you may not care about because Dave is from Myrtle Beach California and your story is centered around Singapore.
Like, these worlds tend to bore and frustrate me because once you have this scope of variety already in place, it requires you to have a very narrow, very specific vision of reality and what you can cope with for that to not be a normal version of reality. Like imagine if it’s a world where the dominant flavour of soda is Fanta, and not Coke. No major changes otherwise. Is that really worth things being different? What if it’s that that dominant flavour is dominant in Perth, Western Australia. I live in Australia, and that doesn’t matter to my life.
But that’s me complaining about a thing I don’t like. What this kind of model gives you is vast, untapped, infinite possibility. It lets you have Mister Mxyzptlk and Bugs Bunny and Doctor Manhattan. Those stories can use that kind of thing.
There, that’s a handful of ways to approach it. Know what you like about them, know what you don’t, and make choices accordingly.