Portal Fantasy: Is there an ideal system for this?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Inky

Anyway, back on topic, there was a thread somewhere on the forum a while ago about how portal fantasy messes with point totals (since many traits, such as Area Knowledge, Reputation or a character's TL, will be worth a different amount or disappear altogether in a different world). It suggested various ways of dealing with that, such as "buckets of points" and so on.

GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms actually has a detailed system for this. In fact, two different systems for handling possessions.

[Michael Cule]

Could someone define Signamancy for me?

All my Google-Fu points to conversations about Erfworld where it's assumed you know what's being talked about.

(I love the idea of Dorothy Gale being a summound Chosen One called to destroy another Earth intruder. Hmmmm....)

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

Could someone define Signamancy for me?

Working from the meaning of the words, I'd say something like divinations based off signs and symbols.

From what I can gather from the internet (also stymied by the "everyone either already knows or has never hear of it"), it seems to refer to the idea that in Erfworld good looks good and evil looks evil.

[Michael Cule]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Working from the meaning of the words, I'd say something like divinations based off signs and symbols.

From what I can gather from the internet (also stymied by the "everyone either already knows or has never hear of it"), it seems to refer to the idea that in Erfworld good looks good and evil looks evil.

Evil never lies?

Evil never looks seductively good?

That's half your good plots right out the window!

[Inky]

More complicated than that, it indicates good and evil sometimes to some extent but also other things. It's one of Erfworld's eight or possibly twenty-four branches of magic, and, among other things, deals, yeah, with interpreting symbols and omens and what people's appearance indicates about them. (And also with magically changing people's appearance to try and fool people about this. And also with contracts and other things that involve the word "sign".)

The more complicated aspects of this are usually a job for a trained magician, but Parson discovers that he can pick up Signamancy clues that go over most of the natives' heads simply by playing "spot the Earth reference". For instance, he first realises that that's how it works when he's negotiating with King Dickie of Haggar and realises that he can tell a lot about what he's dealing with here from the fact that the King looks almost exactly like Nixon. This is very useful inside information, but also leaves him more worried than ever about whether he's dreaming the whole thing.

Parson himself doesn't develop any obvious signs of this that I've noticed, he remains just looking like himself. Charlie, on the other hand, has it particularly drastically - he's a nightmare mish-mash of assorted fictional trickster figures, supervillains, and random people called Charlie.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

I'm contemplating (very vaguely) the next campaign I'm going to develop.

I'm currently thinking about a portal fantasy, one where people come from our Earth to a different, fantastical universe. (I want never to have to say to a player "Well, as you would already know....")

There's a very good GURPS supplement on the topic by a distinguished contributer to this platform and I'm reading it with profit.

But I'm wondering if there is a better system for this particular thing.

There are games like THE STRANGE that make coming to new universes a major thing and it was built into NEXUS THE INFINITE CITY and to a lesser extent FENG SHUI which was derived from it. But neither of those quite works for me.

Bounce some ideas towards me, please. Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.

Fundamentally, whatever system you can adapt on the fly easiest within your style of running.

Also, what you want out of the mechanics in such.

If you want to have a consistent set of mechanics that enforce genre? Feng Shui and Torg are the strongest. WEG/Nocturnal D6 Adventure would also be reasonable, as would whatever universal you prefer...

... if you're willing to play with the axioms.

Basically, how willing are you to alter rules to support the different settings?
Are the settings entirely the same physics/metaphysics? (Noting that Nexus and Feng Shui alter the metaphysics by time, and the tech by source time)

Is it the kinds of differences in sliders & planescape, or is it the same kind of portals as Stargate (where the physics/metaphysics are always the same)?