A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the Bronze Dragon flying toward the sunset. In that post I challenged readers with a stupid question and the winner(s) could chose the subject of a Trope in RPG post.
Davetrollkin stepped up first and requested I tackle Time Travel. Since time travel, much like the Rule of Cool is such a massive trope, I called a few of my fellow bloggers for help. We’ll see who turns to take the challenge…. and you, would you be up to it?
This post is the introduction to the series and my tackling of one subtrope.
According to the TV Tropes Wiki, Time Travel stories usually belong to one of the following categories:
- You Cant Fight Fate : Visit the horrible Future, then come back to try to prevent it!
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Go to the Past to fix the horrible horrible Present!
- Stable Time Loop: Go to the past to fix a problem, come back and realize you created the problem then!
- Temporal Paradox: Go to the past and screw everything up, destroying your future existence. Think Butterfly of Doom.
- Connecticut Yankee: Characters gets stuck in past, adapts or exploit knowledge of future to live the good life or find way ‘home’.
Many of these have great potential for RPG campaign ideas. I know of at least one RPG product that specifically addresses that trope and it’s Gurps Time Travel which focuses on the ‘How’ and various rules and background info to run an Earth-based time traveling campaign.
In a Fantasy RPG setting, time traveling ‘technology’ is usually related to Magic and/or portals. I won’t spend any time on the crunch of it all. However, designing Time Magic and the thinking about the way you plan on dealing with temporal paradoxes are things you need to address.
You can pick any of the time traveling tropes listed above and adapt it to your campaign by either making the campaign about the trope or as an element of the backstory.
Since I don’t actually like thinking about parallel co-timelines and other types of paradox when I design adventures , my favorite Time Travel trope is by far the…
Through Applied Phlebotinum, Functional Magic, or some other means, our heroes travel back to the past. In the past, they wind up being responsible for the very events that underpin their own “present.” This creates a chicken-and-egg scenario, in which the looping sequence of events has no clear beginning.
This is sometimes referred to a “time loop” paradox, particularly when a character, object, or piece of information was never originally created, but exists solely because of its own existence.
Thus, a time travel adventure arc based on this pre-supposes that the characters actions in the various timelines are what actually created the initial problem the arc started with. The Star Trek TNG series finale was based on that sub-trope.
The reason why I like this trope so much is that it gives you all the power of a Time Travel story, complete with characters who’s actions affect the timeline. However, you maintain significant control over what that effect is (its actually pre-determined). If you don’t make Time Travel the campaign’s main focus, when your character realize that their actions caused the initial problem, you’ll get a nice ‘doh’ moment. But don’t make this a recurrent theme…
Here’s my checklist for such an adventure:
- Think of a problem the PCs need to deal with. The presence of some entity released from some Evil Sealed in a can is a good start.
- Create a way to time travel at set times in your adventure (i.e. leave them in past long enough to play out scenes)
- Plan a way that makes the PCs create the problem in the 1st place:
- Planting false clues, …
- Giving PCs a disgusting choice like certain irrevocable death or creating the problem.
- Making coming back the source of the problem!
- Have them find a solution that shows how to deal with the problem in the present (this is a RPG, not Twilight Zone, you don’t want the loop to repeat itself)
Here’s my stab at it:
A huge Demon has been rampaging a kingdom for ages, a hidden survivor of the royal family comes to the PCs and explains that his research in his land’s history reveals that the Demon was released by members of his own family a long time ago. He also found a device that may have been designed by his ancestors to defeat the Demon and he shows them a sort of astrolab-like device.
He asks the PCs to take it and save his kingdom in exchange for a significant amount of the hidden royal treasure. Studying the device shows it to be a Time machine. The PCs uses it (or it trigger accidentally, or the Demon tracks it and the PCs must escape using it to survive).
PC’s arrive in past, in a dungeon, in the middle of a fight between an outmatched a party of young adventurers. Device is broken during fight (or ceases functioning). Dungeon is an ancient ruin found in a savage wilderness (that also happens to be the future kingdom they are trying to save). A female adventurer the PCs just saved happens to be a gadgeteer and can fix the device.
PCs learn that the quest of the young adventurers is to locate a sealed vault rumored to be filled with treasure. Understandably, PCs will try to prevent such a quest to succeed.
BUT! The broken device needs pieces made from a strange metal and gadgeteer shows old journal that says that vault doors and surrounding are made from such a metal. he he he!
Gadgeteer is confident that taking just a little metal won’t affect seal of vault (She’s right). PC’s get gadget fixed and get promise from Gadeteer and rest of party to maintain the seal. They go back home. (Extra Evil DM bonus if you get a male PC to have a fling with gadgeteer).
Once back, demon is still there… uh oh! Talking to royal descendent (if Evil DM plan worked, guess who’s royalty now?) shows that multiple such devices were made by ancestors… (Hoe predictable!). But the exiled king knows that some of that warding metal is left and PCs could inflitrate ruins of castle recuperate the metal and forge weapons of it to kill demon with it.
There are many things that Genre Savvy players could try to prevent the loop, like creating a Cave-in around vault or even killing the gadgeteer. It’s your choice as a DM to allow time to change (making the adventure based on Set Right What Once Went Wrong) or to have elements in the past reorganize themselves to lead to the stable time loop.
The idea of the trope is that no matter what you did, the problem is still there and you need to deal with it NOW, not THEN.
Extra Evil DM Bonus:
Have players stuck in a 1 day/1 hour Time loop (à la Groundhog Day) either in a time-trapped dungeon or a cursed village. As long as they don’t find the keys to break the curse they have to relive events. If you want to get out of this alive, let players fast forward scenes when they decide not to change a thing in how they played it out in an earlier iteration. I also suggest making the loop as small as possible (4-5 elements tops…) this is a hard stunt to pull off because players will grow bored.
I suggest that, at a certain point, you allow a way out for the PCs but hint that solving the curse/puzzle will bring a reward far greater than anything else found at the PC’s current power level.
Example:
A Chronomancer has warded his treasure vault with a 10 minute time loop. It features interconnected 5 rooms with fiendish puzzles (The Challenge of Champions series in Dungeon Magazines are a great source of puzzles). Leaving from the area resets the trap. Area is not the adventure’s choke point.
Stay tuned in the following weeks for the next post of this series by a fellow DMing blogger. Maybe it will be you?
Yay! a groundhog day references! 😉 Loved that film.
That being said GURPS time travel is an excellent book on the matter fill with material that can be applied to any kind of campaign whatever the system with a fleshed out time cop setting (if I remember correctly).
As much as we loved that film I’d bet my next pay that you’d be screaming at me if I pulled one on you in a D&D game!
But man the idea is tempting!
Yep, not a big fan of the stable time loop.
I prefer the each event spun an alternate time line approach. In this approach you’re not as much a time traveller then you are time line hopping guy. Unnable to really change the past just moving in a dimension where the event did not occurred yet. Of course if they(the heroes) would move to the present of this new time line they would met them selves who did not try to alter the past… 😉
As I discussed offline with Yan, this sub trope can be considered railroady in the sense that the consequence of the PCs are already pre-determined. In that sense he’s right
However, I believe that if you want to fit in a one shot time travel adventure, this sub-trope is easier to pull off than others (easier to plan for) and leads to a strong punch.
Plus, for story driven games, the exploration of the past, and some player choices can help explain some of the campaign’s present-day mysteries and loose threads.
That being said, if your campaign screams for a reset button, I’d definitively go with Set Right What Once Went Wrong sprinkled with some Temporal Paradox.
Finally, longer time travel campaign should feature only a few time loops and maybe only as the result of major character failures or loops created by NPCs that characters have to break.
Ah yes, my favorite way to handle it too. See the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle.
Yay, Real time travel Science!!!
I must now go back to this morning and tell me to add this principle in the post… or just edit it now… much simpler!
🙂
I’m with Yan, in that while this principle works great in storytelling, it can be frustrating in a game.
Unless, of course, it’s used as part of a Xanatos Gambit.
Big Bad is in power due to some event in the past. Big Bad knows that the people who caused the event were sent by himself from the future (or came back to try to stop said rise to power from happening). So he orchestrates this event to happen, and the PCs are unwitting pawns to make sure the Big Bad rises to power.
Or something like that.
In any case, combining this (where the players’ outcome is predetermined) with something where the players’ outcome is being manipulated will tend to put the focus on the manipulation, rather than the predestiny.
It’s funny, whenever I get comments that don’t go the same way I thought they would, my reflex is to say ‘but you don’t understand…’ 🙂
I’ll resist… I see your points and agree with Graham that using the Sub trope with a Bad guy’s Xanatos Gambit is an easier sell for players allergic to railroads.
I very much enjoy time travel stories, especially for the potential to provide new dramatic hooks to the PCs. I just completed final testing on a module for the “Living Arcanis” campaign that allowed the PCs to “virtually” travel in time to save a small village. They basically pull a “Trancers” and have their minds sent back to different bodies/characters and then they have to challenge fate without their equipment and skills. They are told to avert a specific bad end for the village. Problem is, all the other options involve death and suffering also. I was very happy with the role-playing this brought out. The only concern I have is the “grandfather paradox” problem. I dodged that issue with a “it was all a dream” trope, but it still exists as an issue in “real” time travel.
Trask, the Last Tyromancer
Trask: That’s a cool concept. I wouldn’t worry to much about the Grandfather paradox and I’d look at Tangent128’s link on the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle
🙂
Whatever the structure of the time in your universe, there is one thing I have a hard time with in time travel… It’s what I like to call the Star trek Phenomenon.
In this show their is so many different way to time travel and they do it so often, that you wonder how come nobody stumbled through a rift in the space time continuum while going to the bathroom. 😀
The point is be consistent with whatever you decide and stick to it. If you determine that paradox are possible and that the universe crumble if you manage to do one. Fine just don’t do it halfway.
Story from a friend about a game from who know how long ago:
In the process of going after a villain who was threatening to unravel all of time, the heroes faced possibly the greatest threat they ever could: Their actual past selves. This meant that they couldn’t afford to kill them, but a few of the party had events in their past that they wish they could undo/change. In fact, several of the younger versions were rather shocked at what had happened to themselves.
The wizard in the party had spent all of his pre-adventuring life cooped up in a tower learning his art. He wished he had spent some of that time and gotten married/had a family. After talking to himself, at the end of the time-stream abnormality, he found himself with a set of little prayer figures representing a wife and children.
One of the warriors was horrifically scarred from some earlier incident and, as such, always kept her face hidden. Apparently she must have told herself what to avoid as, at the end of the adventure/encounter, she pulled back the mask to reveal an unmarred face.
There are others but those are the ones that stuck with me – I can’t remember the rest.
.-= Sam Erwin´s last blog ..My New Campaign, or “We are the Champions” =-.
That’s good examples of the impact of Time Traveling in a RPG. I never ended up playing a Time traveling RPG as my players are more versed in the trope than I am. 🙂