D&D takes place across many different worlds. Indeed, one of the great things about D&D is that it allows DMs to homebrew an entire world in which to set their games, with nations and gods and landscapes all designed for the kind of stories they want to tell. Many of the official settings began as homebrew ones - obviously, Exandria (of which Wildemount is one of its major continents) began life in Matt Mercer's mind, becoming the setting for Critical Role and finding publication first as a 3rd party book with the Tal'dorei Campaign Setting book and then an official WotC release with Explorer's Guide to Wildemount (shortly after it was made canon with an offhanded reference to Arkhan's assistance to Vox Machina in their fight against Vecna in Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus).
There are a ton of different settings for the game. In 5th Edition alone, after a few years with nothing but Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and a number of "gazetteers" in various adventure books filling in details about the Forgotten Realms, we've gotten a steady stream of them. At this point, we have the Forgotten Realms, Ravnica, Eberron, Wildemount/Exandria, Theros, Ravenloft, and the upcoming Strixhaven book, along with what I believe are two confirmed-but-not-yet-announced "classic" D&D settings coming this year (assuming there wasn't a miscommunication - though good money is on Dragonlance as a likely release some time relatively soon - not sure what the other will be, if it's not just Strixhaven.)
Now, Ravnica, Theros, and Strixhaven are imports from WotC's other headlining IP, Magic: the Gathering. So while it's fun to have adventures in that multiverse (as I've been for the past year and change) these aren't canonically linked (depending on whether Acq-Inc's brief visit there was canon). Even if we're getting a Magic set that takes place in the Forgotten Realms, I'm mostly filing these as a bit of cross-promotion and fun rather than part of the full mythos of the game.
Still, that does still give us Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Exandria, Ravenloft, probably Dragonlance soon and actually kind of Greyhawk thanks to Ghosts of Saltmarsh as settings the edition has visited.
These take place within the same multiverse (even if Ravenloft is in a far weirder corner of it,) so I wonder:
How about we get some tools to travel between them?
In fact, such tools already exist. Because most of these worlds (again, other than Ravenloft... and possibly Eberron, depending on how the retconning works out) take place on the same plane - namely the Prime Material Plane. Therefore, all you need is simple teleportation magic to bamf around from one of these to the other. If you find a sigil sequence for a teleportation circle in Zadash, it doesn't matter that you're currently in Waterdeep - you can go there.
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything was lighter on spells than Xanathar's had been, but one of its additions was Dream of the Blue Veil, a spell explicitly designed to take you to other worlds of the Prime Material Plane, which typically means other campaign settings.
Like Plane Shift, there's a handbrake here for DMs - in order to use this spell, you need a magic item from the plane in question.
In fact, I think you can almost compare this concept with the Mist Talismans from Ravenloft. Ravenloft, as a setting, is actually a collection of demiplanes that are all separated from one another by the Mists. To reliably get to another domain of dread, you'll want to find a Mist Talisman that corresponds with that domain - for example, you might find a wine bottle from the Wizards of Wine vineyard, and if you hold it while you enter the Mists, you and your allies can reliably expect to arrive in Barovia.
I've been hoping that we get some kind of planar-travel book comparable to the Manual of the Planes, which we got in 1st, 3rd, and 4th editions. But I'd love if such a book also had some guidance on how to build adventures that take players from world to world.
Sure, that's also partly what a Spelljammer campaign setting would be about (and don't let me stop them from making that!)
I think D&D, and maybe 5th Edition specifically, struggles to make adventures that can challenge a party that's very high level, like the upper teens. But one way to make a challenge that feels epic enough for a group like that is to make an adventure that has people jumping from world to world.
Now, of course, one of the things about D&D is that a particular place doesn't have to have a level range. There's nothing stopping you from sending your players to The Abyss at level 1 (in fact, do that! Just maybe don't have them fight the Demogorgon yet unless their dying and getting resurrected is part of the story you're intending to tell). So these need not be reserved for high-level groups. And obviously, every setting has creatures and situations that are an appropriate challenge for low-level parties.
I'm happy to see WotC putting out a lot of campaign-setting books (though maybe I'm just an old fart, but I'd really like to see them do a Dominaria book instead of a brand-new MTG setting like Strixhaven) and I certainly won't complain if and when we get a Dragonlance book, and I'll jump for joy if we get a Planescape or Spelljammer one. But I would really like to see some thought put to the massively epic potential for campaigns that journey across these worlds, and the mechanics of simply having people from all different worlds bumping into one another.
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