A blinding flash, a sonic boom, and the Silver Wheel appears. Twelve feet high, perhaps a hundred and twenty across, the wheel is a perfect cylinder. Its surface is smooth, without any obvious rivet or seam. It is beyond cyclopean; a featureless catastrophe from unknown realms. Any thing or any one which occupied the space the wheel chose for itself is gone.
Some time after the Wheel appears, a door opens. People emerge. They have no recollection of what is inside of the wheel. No recollection at all of their lives since they last entered it. They do have a mission in the forefront of their minds, which is always the same on every world they visit: the Silver Wheel desires treasures. It is somehow fed by them, and has indentured these people to procure its sustenance. Once they have returned with enough valuables to sate the Wheel, it will shift again. When it does, an identically sized bit of another world will appear, displaced by the Wheel’s movement. Where that bit of a world once was, the Wheel now is, and soon it will release its servants to seek new treasures.
These servants of the Wheel are the Player Characters.
Background
“They Came from the Silver Wheel” is a campaign I intended to run back in 2014, but it never came together. Eventually, I gave up on the idea to focus on other things, and for some reason it only now occurred to me to use it as blog fodder.
The Silver Wheel is a framing device, meant to allow the referee to connect as many disparate adventures together in a single campaign as they want. There are too many interesting settings out there, and not enough time to run a whole campaign in even a fraction of them. Using the Silver Wheel, you can spend a few sessions in A Red and Pleasant Land, then warp to Greyhawk, then to some old campaign setting you ran back in high school, then–fuck it–why not appear in Star Frontier for a bit, before jumping to Scenic Dunsmouth.
The Silver Wheel allows a group to poke their heads into a ton of different adventures and campaign settings, and in so doing, preempts setting fatigue. The Wheel’s voracious appetite for treasure keeps the game focused properly, but skirts the niggling issue of what the players can do with all their money.
And, hopefully, the wheel’s many benefits will encourage the players not to abandon it.
Benefits of the Wheel
Servants of the Silver Wheel are well cared for. They are healthier, and more capable than other men. They are well equipped, and even allowed to keep those treasures which are useful to them–such as magical items. But, since those servants are also player characters, they have agency. If they wish, they can abandon the wheel at any time. Eventually, it will recruit new servants from this world. They will gather what it desires, and it will disappear, stranding the PCs on this world forever. They will lose all of the wheel’s many benefits, but they will be free.
So what are these benefits? Well, whatever happens to people inside the wheel must be good for their health, because whenever they level up, they roll a bonus from the following table, in addition to whatever benefits they would normally receive:
- +1d4 hit points
- A random save is reduced by 1.
- 1 skill point
- A random ability score is raised by 1
- Character gains +1 to attack rolls
- Character’s speed is increased by 30′.
These benefits are permanent so long as the character returns to the Wheel regularly. If the Wheel leaves them behind, these boons will begin to fade. After each month of time the characters spends away from the wheel, randomly determine one of their boons for them to lose, until they have none left.
The servants of the Wheel also have access to special equipment. At the start of each new adventure, the players are entitled to any basic piece of equipment they can carry without becoming overly encumbered. Things like rope, iron spikes, 10′ poles, bear traps, etc. These must be identified at the start of play, and cannot be swapped out until the players are ready to jump to the next world.
Basic equipment from the Wheel is somehow better than standard examples of its type. The exact nature of the improvement is left to the referee, and may not always be the same, as the Wheel is fond of experimenting with new ideas.
By way of example, a short sword that normally deals 1d6 damage might be enhanced by microvibrators, causing it to deal 1d8 damage. Or, it might have a basic artificial intelligence to it, allowing it to adjust attacks of its own volition, increasing attack rolls by some amount. As another example, a rope might be programmable, so that it will twist itself into knots when a command is sent, or it might be able to crawl up to some desired position like a snake. Armor might brace the body in such a way as to increase the player’s carry capacity, or it might have built-in communications tools.
Whatever the improvement, these items are ephemeral. They depend on the energy that infuses them within the Wheel, and deprived of it for more than a month, they will cease to function.
It angers the Silver Wheel if any of its gifts to its servants are not returned. When players re-enter the wheel, their experience gain will be penalized by the base cost of any equipment they left behind, multiplied by 100.
Secrets of the Wheel
Within the Wheel is a creature of the mind. It is neither corporeal, nor fully incorporeal, but exists between these two states. It has a sort of gaseous body, but its essence is not strictly bound to that frame, and may be tangible or not at different times. The creature is an exile. The Wheel is its prison, the only place in our dimension with an environment it can endure.
The creature’s only source of amusement is traveling to different worlds, and experiencing the minds there. It tastes their conceptions, searching always for new flavors. Of particular use to it is the concept of value. This is the mother’s milk which allows it to perform the titanic feat of leaping instantaneously from world to world.
When the creature takes a gold piece into itself, and vaporizes it, the amount of power generated is proportional to how local minds value the object. So, on a world of plenty, an apple would be useless; but during a famine, an apple might provide significant energy.