Any good sources for time travel adventures?

I tried-ish to write a time travel campaign once. My conceit was sort of like Myst, where different books led to different Ages. You could explore the Age, but you couldn't break your own timeline. The plan was that a high-level adventure would unleash magic that did cause the book's changes to alter your current time period, and it would be the only way to avert the end of the world. You only get to unlock the ability to cause paradoxes after you already care about the characters in each time period.

So, +1,000,000 to Chrono Trigger.

Chrono Cross was also great - just different.

As for a campaign, haven't done it myself (though have read Anvil adventure and the Dragonlance Legends books). But I thnk one of the keys to maintain continuity is to take thr Chrono Trigger track:

Portals to specific periods, synced with the present. So if you spend 10 days in 500AD, 10 days pass in the present. You cannot undo and rewind.

Keep the eras separated by enough years such that paradoxes aren't as much an issue.

The fun part to time travel is making changes that propogate into the present. Plan for this to happen, and even roll with player ideas.

If the PCs try something drastic that might cause a paradox, use it as a story hook. Don't outright invalidate it, but describe how theirs a twist in the present or the PC doesnçt know what they thought they did.

Their ancestor isn't actually related to them.

The town is rebuilt, but different.

The villain rises again, but with a different plan.

Remember, Fun > Realism

Castle Forlorn a 2nd ed ravenloft boxed set is a heck of a time travelling adventure if you want to invest a lot of preparing time.

Spoiler do not read any further if you wanna Play in this adventure:


Big Part of the adventure takes place in the Castle, which exists in 3 different Versions, but the PCs have to find out themselves that they constantly shift between times while exploring it. Also the darklord has 3 different forms: if i can remember correctly as a living being a Vampire and a ghost, depending on the timezone he is encountered in.

The downside of it is you gotta produce 3 different maps somehow, since the map in this set covers all, and it is hard to Keep book of everything. (Details which are given by the adventure as well as Details which might be created by the PC e.g. furniture damaged by them in an early timezone has to apear that way in all later timezones.

It is not exactly time travel but I8 The Ravager of Time (1st edition module) has an interesting twist where the PCs are aged by magic and have confront (now) younger versions of themselves. I ran it ages ago and it was a lot of fun back in the day. It was a big adventure from memory.

My suggestion is to avoid paradoxes by time traveller the gods and other supreme powers created "time spheres", something like the hollow world within Mystara, like a cosmic backup in the space-time continium. When a timeline is changed by crononauts or time-travellers, this doesn't dissappear really, but it become a different demiplane, a dream or nightmare realm, where fay power are stronger. A nightmare realm would be something close to the demiplane of Dread(Ravenloft). Usually when anybody isn't born because their ancestors' past was changed, he become a special mixture of petitioner, fay and deathless soul. (deathless is a undead healed by positive energy and hurt by necrotic damage, rebuked and commanded by good clerics but turned or destroyed by evil ones). Sometimes the chronomancers in the time spheres may cause accidental retcons in the supposedly original timeline, only little but strange details most of times. Other times these nightmares realms are created by no-evil powers to punish criminals and sinners' souls, to living in a timeloop (do you remember the movies "Groundhog Day", "Edge of Tomorrow", "Happy Death Day" or "Run Lola Run"?) where they suffer a life in a dystopian and later a apocalypse.