Fics with free-as-in-beer benefits for showing up would be pretty good, honestly, especially if those benefits are shareable.

Or I suppose it could be 'any time that's shown on screen', and then you have to like, think about how far they go in loreflashbacks and if those places are any good...

(or inbetween any times shown on screen, or something like that.)

Oh, that raises the thought about AUs with long time-scales, and whether you can extend the times in which you can show up that way ...
Like, most of Basilisk Borne is pre-modern.

ye! Or just like, places w/ weirdly long histories

like iirc a lot of the history in warhammer that's specced out at all is "the eldar empire is generally kind of cool and in ascendancy" I think
so you'd want to optimize general eldar vibes over what's up at 40k, proooobably?

Frankly, I don't really want to touch any variation of Warhammer with a ten-foot pole. But if there are any fics focusing on the older, nicer empires, that's probably still good to know.

Eminently understandable!

...i'm not sure i trust this set of immunities by itself, unless we have more guarantees about which environments we might end up in

if it's just some generic empty interstellar space then i think it would be fine, but something like inside a supernova, or in the area of effect of various kinds of dangerous magic, or even just "in a place that a big rock is about to fall on top of", aren't necessarily safe for someone who's only immune to poisons, temperatures, air pressure and gravity

Sure — the only way to be actually safe is to turtle up and never go exploring. But with the potential upside, I think the risks are worth it.

I guess that's the risk you have to take! Ideally you like, go to a place where you get a system w/ a respawn feature first? I've seen a few fics w/ stuff like that before...

Though not sure ones like that w/ detailed existing AUs

Oh, a Gamer AU with 'New Game Plus' features might actually work pretty well.

resurrection of troubled explorers also isn't out of the question to begin with

this succubus AU is a tad concerning
like it's an improvement on the unaltered wormverse but it's also, uh,

Yeah the reason it stuck in my head was the concerningness!

or go somewhere with a nice afterlife, or a place that has people who will eventually magically resurrect everyone in a sufficiently general way that it would catch you as well if you died (and are also sufficiently nice that you'd be ok with this)

someplace with the important characteristics others have already thought of, and many cute girls? :V

so the problem is that the stories people write tend to have plot, and in real life plot is not really a desirable characteristic

Indeed.

I think I would go to Slim/LOTR AU/postquel The Harrowing; as long as you don't arrive before the au diversion point nearly the only harrowing that happens is people bravely facing their emotions and being kind to each other and trying new flavors of tea
Or, you know, trying and failing to be kind to each other
There's some of that

But if there was any risk of landing too early or on the wrong continent that wouldn't do at all
I don't know how narrowly scoped your travel method is

I feel like there's not a lot a lot of upside in being a rando in most LOTR settings? honestly might be worth seeing if you could make things work out in the In Space! variant or something like that for more opportunities

Oh no this is not providing upside, in my actual real self I would rather enjoy the peace of the Undying Lands than poke the multiversal bees

Just visiting any other setting at all is pretty useful, for trade and learning, regardless of specific benefits.

But yeah, our travel method is annoyingly underspecified. The only steering mechanism we have is to make a universe more like a particular description of it.
Hypothetically.

Hm then that's probably not enough for this to work out
Alas

LOTR does have the advantage of a long timeline where there is frequently not any immediate problems, and an AU that extends into a postquel might help with that.

True! I'm just not sure as no one particularly important I'd want to go to a canon-like LOTR over like, a coffeeshop AU LOTR, which is probably like, the backstop for "if you had to go to an AU of a particular work, where would you go?"
since if you're just a garden variety human or something LOTR is mostly like, a somewhat more dangerous variant of a like, slightly idealized pre-industrial setting, kinda?
Though it's different if you can get the hospitality of the elves or something, or if you want to try to butterfly the plot
but most of the magic people are pretty if not xenophobic but culturally isolated from the 'common folk' think?

I'm not sure how hard it would be to get the hospitality of the elves. It would probably depend a lot on the specific time period and the personal nature of the explorer(s).

yeah