Given the massive diversity of gaming campaigns, it's not a surprise that D&D uses a multiversal model to explain the setting. Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse further tweaked monsters by removing setting-specific lore and alignments, allowing near infinite variants of creatures that could fit in any world. The baseline assumption for Fifth Edition is that the multiverse encompasses everything in D&D, including each DM's campaign.

With the release of both of these settings the multiverse felt a lot less distant. Conversely, Spelljammer created crystal spheres, each of which represented a published or homebrew campaign world that characters could sail to and from. Planescape explored the basics of dimensional planes and how they might interact, positioning them as worlds in their own right (and not just exotic places to be visited by characters from the Prime Plane). The two settings were Planescape and Spelljammer respectively. It wasn't until two capstone settings were introduced that the multiverse was truly explored. The implications of such a multiverse went largely unexplored, with the implication that each individual dungeon master's campaign world existed in a network with a common rules system, and therefore a multiversal argument could be made that any character jumping from one game world to another would reasonably expect similar (but not the same) baseline worlds, even if the names were changed. But the concept of a multiverse appears later in the First Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, in the Player's Handbook : Multi-me, Multi-youThe idea of crossing universes is not new to D&D, and was part of the original Boxed Set. Thanks in part to Elric's influence on Dungeons & Dragons, the various planes of existence and the campaign worlds therein have come to be described as a multiverse.

This concept has become a key part of the Flash franchise, featuring in the television series and the upcoming movie.Īnd of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made the multiverse a key part of how it explains time travel, featuring prominently in the Avenger movies, and later Spider-Man and Dr. The idea of a multiverse kicked off a series of crossovers in which DC was encouraged to revive other Golden Age characters who were no longer in print. Barry Allen teams up with Jay Garrick (the Golden Age Flash) to defeat a rogue's gallery of villains. In the comic 'Flasth of Two Worlds!' Earth-Two is introduced along with a DC multiverse, in which it's possible to have variant characters exist simultaneously.

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