Hi.
I'm more of a lurker than a poster but I wanted to get this out, so that later I could point to it and say "it was planned all along".
I have a meta-game that I have been running for quite a few years now, it may go for several more or end quite soon. Things have begun to step up a bit.
Several years ago(right before 5th edition champs came out) I was running a Champions camapign and I used an adventure in Champions Presents called: Menace out of time.
This module introduced a villain called Tempus. A scientist who figures out the secrets of time travel. In the course of the adventure his beloved
wife is killed in an accident, he blames the heroes and attempts to destroy them.
As in most such adventures he was beaten and jailed, but I wasn't quite done with Tempus.
He later frees himself from prison and continued his time travel research. I decided that his main goal was the return of his wife to life and the adventure clearly states that with his style of time-travel, preventing her death was now impossible.(paradoxes and such).
So like any good mad scientist he broadened his scope if mastery of time was not enough then he must control ALL REALITY!!(insert evil laugh here)
In short he used his time travel skills to gain even more knowledge about reality, the laws of the universe and other dimensions.
After plotting and planning he realized that his conquest would be something akin to Chess or maybe Dominoes would be a more apt analogy.
In different worlds and dimensions great events would be set into motion whose out come would be determined by a ridiculously small group of beings.
Great wars, political campaigns, battles of morality between good and evil, all these would be decide by just a few key individuals.
Eliminating or controlling these beings would be the key to success....
My inspiration here was something from a Dark Champions Villain-the Fool. The fool saw people as blanks but was drawn to "high-energy" beings, it
is implied that player characters or high-point npcs are such beings.
In his cell at the asylum he writes on the walls cryptic references to-DEX., STR., etc.
So my targets were clear: Player Characters(even if playing in different systems.)
So I crossed the genres.
Nobody noticed at first. I kept the genre similar if a different system. Something from 1 fantasy game ended up in another fantasy game. Players
went "huh, that was odd" and assumed I was just a fan of that monster.
I kept track of all the campaigns(even the ones I was only a player in).
For a while it was simple: something from say ADnD appeared in a palladium game or a Star Wars game crossed over with a Star Trek game.
Nothing was noticed until the other day.
June 12 the next phase started.
It was yet another fantasy game but during a lull an NPC from Dark Champions(RETRO from Hudson City Blues) popped up out of a portal and
started shooting p.c.'s by surprise.
He managed to badly wound 2 players then was beaten and dissapeared(though he left a fedora behind, along with quite a few bullet wounds).
The players are thoroughly mystified, they recognize that the attacker wasn't an appropriate foe but did not connect him with the DC villain.
The rest of this campaign will have 2 more incidents.
1. A portal will open and a large Mecha from BESM will attempt to come through but will be stopped by a player character from a previous campaign.
2. In the climatic battle of the fantasy campaign 2 giants will dissapear through a portal. they will re-appear in the next campaign. Which I wont even be running!
I will ask the GM to let me run a quick encounter(it will be a RIFTS game). The players will be sure to remember the 2 giants even though 3-6 months will have elapsed by then.
My ultimate goal here is pro-active players. Once they begin to realize something is up(and recognize beings from other campaigns) they will have to
take matters in their own hands. I assume they will demand to rerun certain older characters and campaigns to get to the bottom of the mystery.
I am not even certain many of the players will remember Tempus or even think of him as the possible villain. However if they become Pro-active
then all bets are off. Tempus won't try for subtly anymore, the enemies will become impossible to ignore and Tempus may even try to bring characters from 1 game to another just to get them to fight each other.
I intend for it to all end up back in Champions(since HERO can simulate everybody elses rules pretty well).
My end-game is still a bit up in the air, The module Reality Storm gave me a lot of insipiration on what kind of place Tempus should be holed up at.
Some early Hero products contained information on changing characters from 1 system to another.(I even have the old-Bad Medicine For Doctor Drugs superworld module somewhere).
Luckily my players don't peruse this forum. I am open to any contructive criticism and advice, but remember this plan may take several more years
to pull off.