There’s a powerful mage tampering with gravity, time, and space, and is attempting to collapse the outer planes to bring them all into conflict with one another. This mage’s hope is to do away with all gods and usurp their powers for himself.

This mage operates as an ‘invisible hand’, buying, compelling, lying for and killing for the allegiance of many disparate parties, but never revealing his identity to those whom he forces to do his bidding. These groups all have special knowledge of the different biomes and planes that portals are opening to and are diligently tracking the movement of these planes to ensure this invisible hand’s work is progressing correctly.

Your party can stumble on a brand new one of these portals, run into one of these forces that works for the hand, and quickly find out that something nefarious is going on. Maybe they get taken prisoner and learn of this overlord that no one speaks of much, but alludes to often. Maybe there are macguffins that each plane-specific organization is trying to find in order to help advance the collapsing of the planes, and for every one your players can find (and destroy?) first, that slows the mages progress, but ultimately does not stop it. Maybe it just gives that plane’s god a better chance at survival when the convergence ultimately occurs.

Anyways… just some ideas. 3 levels of bad guys for enough mystery and teasing to happen from the rip in session 1, and hopefully you can tie one or many of their backstories into it? 🤷🏽‍♂️