Multiple mapping styles in a single game, and dimensional travel concept

[Zoltor]

Over the past couple days, I have been perceiving a problem with my mapping. I'm making my city Aleasia now(It's pretty much done, there's just a few tiles I forgot to add to the tileset, so I need to make another tileset for those tiles), and that's fine, but what what if I want to use another style of mapping for other towns(radically different)? This has been bothering me for 2 days now, how to warrant such, while having the player be accepting of it.

Then it hit me, the answer is in my char background stories/their other stories ingeneral, as well as the start of this story. They have the ability to travel to different dimensions, infact the story starts off with Gwaelin(this far in the timeline, that would be Queen Gwaelin) goes off to excavate some ruins(yea, she's not your typical Princess/Queen, infact she went out of her way, to more or less be allowed to go alone).

She then inadvertently triggers a broken down Ancient Gateway(Ancient Gateways are special relics/shrines created by a omnipotent race called the Ancients, that can be used to travel to other dimensions. she gets stuck there, becauese the Ancient Gateway in question is little more then rubble. Zoltor goes after Gwaelin, using a special means to reactivate the Ancient Gateway(however It's a one way trip deal, so now they are both stuck), he pretty early finds Gwaelin(lmfao I fooled you didn't I, you thought this was gonna be a typical save the Princess deal huh, well nope), and they have to deal with what comes their way, while trying to find a way back.

Now this fixes the problem with mapping styles differing, but now I have the problem with the fact I want Aleasia to be accessible at some point, but they're stuck in another dimension, how to get away with this?

Well here's my idea, I'm gonna create a relic(they'll probally get it midway in the game or something), that will temporarily(there may even be an actual timer connected to it so it can't be abused, I'm not sure, but in any case you wont be allowed to leave the town normally, due to the use of this relic, you can only be within the town, otherwise you need to go back through the rift)  open a rift to the places they are from, but they physically wont beable to fully travel there(think of it like sending a shadow of yourself, that has substance through a small rift, that you control like a puppet).

Talk about thinking out of the box lol, but that seems to fix my problems nicely, what do all of you think?

"necccesity is the mother of invention"   Seriously if I didn't run into that problem, I wouldn't have thought of something like that in a hundred years.

 

[Najir]

Very interesting concept and mechanic. This could be a great idea and i think it would encourage people to go deeper in the lore and story of the game.

 

[Zoltor]

Very interesting concept and mechanic. This could be a great idea and i think it would encourage people to go deeper in the lore and story of the game.

Yea, there is no doubt gonna be a lot of lore in this game(it uses char, and a multiverse(there's even two completely new races I created) perse that have been developing for a long time now,  so there's bound to be a lot of of things based around that in this game. This dimension they got them selves stuck in, no doubt is the location where the Ancients had an outpost, and it predates the Great War(most of my stories, including this one, take place well over 10,000 years after the Great War, so that dimeson is gonna be very interesting.

I'm also gonna tie a quest they were on/kind of still on, into this other dimension, which I'm sure people will love, once they see all that play out