CHRONOMANCER: WotC's new meta-setting?

Polyhedral Columbia said:

Well said. Time travel has been an especially big feature of Dragonlance. Raistlin's time travel was a key element of the Dragonlance saga. There was a whole 3.5E sourcebook about time-travel in Krynn: Legends of the Twins: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/3252/Legends-of-the-Twins-35?affiliate_id=2126

Mystara has the Comeback Inn - a time machine which takes the characters to and from the Age of Blackmoor. And also The Nexus from the CM6 module, whereby the party can visit any time or alternate world.

Timetravel is, or could be, a prominent meta-setting for the D&D Multiverse.

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Dragonlance is a good example, as it did introduce time travel rather early in its life as a setting theme with the Legends trilogy, and there was a short story collection that included several "what if" alternate timeline scenarios. Dragonlance did a good job using time travel as world-building in the novel series, although I'm not sure how well it was ever used in the RPG books.

The Comeback Inn from Mystara, however, is an awful example. This macguffin allows the party to travel back in time from their medieval fantasy world called Mystara to the ancient, distant past medieval fantasy world called Blackmoor. It's like traveling back in time from Greyhawk to the Forgotten Realms. I'm a huge Mystara fan, and I hated the ridiculous shoehorning in of Blackmoor into Mystara's "ancient past". Once you get past the stupid time travel element, the adventures were interesting on their own however.

The Mystara Hollow World RPG supplements at some point touched on time travel, although I don't remember much about it. I do remember the "plane of time" being described as a green river, somewhat differently than Chronomancer described it.

I liked the Chronomancer supplement from back in the day, and I can see working a time travel element into a specific adventure idea. But having time travel be a "meta-setting" or the main shtick for a campaign? No thanks. I don't think that's what Wizards is hinting at here at all, and I'd be disappointed if they were.

[MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] #9 Exactly this, i once did Castle Forlorn, a small ravenloft domain campaign, with very forgiving Players thankfully where the Players could not know history of the place and ran into lots of Trouble:

Potential Spoiler:

The Castle has 3 different states in 3 different times, as well as the arch Nemesis of the Setting who has 3 different forms at each Point in time. All of that is well explained if you read it and makes sense, but here comes the Twist:

So you got your map with the Castle layout which alters depending on which year you are in, and on several points you switch the time you are in. Of course the Players do not know about this and do not notice, unless they very carefully map the whole thing themselves and make notes. The adventure suggests such things as clues to the Players like when the Players fight something in one room and cast a fireball the walls might be scorched black in two of the dungeons points in time but perfectly shiny in the past.

So you basically need three different maps and need to somehow Switch secretely which map you are on, and communicate the info to the Players without spoiling to much.


Sounds quite cool and mystery and chilling on the first glance but: The amount of bookkeeping by the DM is ridicolous, basically he got to make notes of every small detail in each of the felt thousand rooms and note when the Players change something, so he can provide them with clues that time travel is going on.

Fazit:

Without failsafes you easily run into paradoxes if your timetravelling is something more complex than e.g. just a single jump to the past and when something is resolved there eventually back to the presence again.

Dire Bare said:

Dragonlance is a good example, as it did introduce time travel rather early in its life as a setting theme with the Legends trilogy, and there was a short story collection that included several "what if" alternate timeline scenarios. Dragonlance did a good job using time travel as world-building in the novel series, although I'm not sure how well it was ever used in the RPG books.

The Comeback Inn from Mystara, however, is an awful example. This macguffin allows the party to travel back in time from their medieval fantasy world called Mystara to the ancient, distant past medieval fantasy world called Blackmoor. It's like traveling back in time from Greyhawk to the Forgotten Realms. I'm a huge Mystara fan, and I hated the ridiculous shoehorning in of Blackmoor into Mystara's "ancient past". Once you get past the stupid time travel element, the adventures were interesting on their own however.

The Mystara Hollow World RPG supplements at some point touched on time travel, although I don't remember much about it. I do remember the "plane of time" being described as a green river, somewhat differently than Chronomancer described it.

I liked the Chronomancer supplement from back in the day, and I can see working a time travel element into a specific adventure idea. But having time travel be a "meta-setting" or the main shtick for a campaign? No thanks. I don't think that's what Wizards is hinting at here at all, and I'd be disappointed if they were.

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Thanks to the research of my fellow ENWorld scientists, it looks like "-(r)omancer" isn't Chronomancer, but probably Necromancer. And "time machine" probably refers to the mistaken date on the first teaser. My hypothesis is almost certainly mistaken.

In any case, I've never suggested a single, standalone Chronomancer meta-setting for 5E, but rather that Chronomancer aspects be incorporated into the entire Planescape+Spelljammer meta-setting for 5E. I mean, those are the canonical meta-settings of the D&D Multiverse: plane travel, space travel, and time travel.

Polyhedral Columbia said:

Thanks to the research of my fellow ENWorld scientists, it looks like "-(r)omancer" isn't Chronomancer, but probably Necromancer. And "time machine" probably refers to the mistaken date on the first teaser. My hypothesis is almost certainly mistaken.

In any case, I've never suggested a single, standalone Chronomancer meta-setting for 5E, but rather that Chronomancer aspects be incorporated into the entire Planescape+Spelljammer meta-setting for 5E. I mean, those are the canonical meta-settings of the D&D Multiverse: plane travel, space travel, and time travel.

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What do you think they will call that metasetting?

Polyhedral Columbia said:

Well said. Time travel has been an especially big feature of Dragonlance. Raistlin's time travel was a key element of the Dragonlance saga. There was a whole 3.5E sourcebook about time-travel in Krynn: Legends of the Twins: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/3252/Legends-of-the-Twins-35?affiliate_id=2126

Mystara has the Comeback Inn - a time machine which takes the characters to and from the Age of Blackmoor. And also The Nexus from the CM6 module, whereby the party can visit any time or alternate world.

Timetravel is, or could be, a prominent meta-setting for the D&D Multiverse.

Click to expand...

Dire Bare said:

Dragonlance is a good example, as it did introduce time travel rather early in its life as a setting theme with the Legends trilogy, and there was a short story collection that included several "what if" alternate timeline scenarios. Dragonlance did a good job using time travel as world-building in the novel series, although I'm not sure how well it was ever used in the RPG books.

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I liked the Legends books overall tone, more than Chronicles, however the time travel plot didn't really do it for me. In fact it kind of killed the series for me.

I think I had a lingering fear that Tasselhoff would spring into any new book.

Sunseeker said:

Ugh, time travel. It's like, the 2nd worst plot device for anything except Doctor Who.

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And the first two Back to the Future movies. Everything else I've seen with time travel in it usually makes a mess of things. Just look at the Star Trek series Enterprise. They had a good idea there and some solid episodes, if only they didn't do that Temporal Cold War crap.

MechaPilot said:

And the first two Back to the Future movies. Everything else I've seen with time travel in it usually makes a mess of things. Just look at the Star Trek series Enterprise. They had a good idea there and some solid episodes, if only they didn't do that Temporal Cold War crap.

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Oh man, that was just...terrible. I mean maybe as a foundation for why the "Mirror Universe" is evil I can accept but otherwise it was just...bad.

Doctor Who succeeds at time travel because of "wibbly wobbly wimey wimey". Time trends towards either what was first established or what is most likely to be the outcome. Minor alterations are largely meaningless. "Fixed moments" are unchangable. That and The Doctor often travels to seemingly random moments throughout time and thanks to the "fixed moments" rule, even if he travels to an important moment, there is little he, or anyone, can do about it. Without these rules, if we applied logic to Doctor Who's travels, he'd be seriously mucking up the universe.

Back to the Future succeeds on a similar note, the future is more or less the same without some major screwing around (see Biff). Major alterations create alternate timelines and you can't travel "back to the future" in the timeline you came from. There are rules...but they're soft rules.

The problem is that most people fail to establish general rules about how time travel works in the universe. Does time slowly correct itsself? Does time branch off into other variants? Does time get re-written (see: The Butterfly Effect), and how do the individual time travelers get affected by this? They usually address time travel after the travel has already happened, when they're half-way through mucking up "the future".

Sunseeker said:

Oh man, that was just...terrible. I mean maybe as a foundation for why the "Mirror Universe" is evil I can accept but otherwise it was just...bad.

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Really? I thought Enterprise had a lot of good episodes. The cogenitor episode, the doctor's pen pals episode, the vulcan monastery episode, the Xindi arc (if you ignore or change the time travelers manipulating the war to start piece of it), etc.

MechaPilot said:

Really? I thought Enterprise had a lot of good episodes. The cogenitor episode, the doctor's pen pals episode, the vulcan monastery episode, the Xindi arc (if you ignore or change the time travelers manipulating the war to start piece of it), etc.

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No no, I just mean the time-travel part. I enjoyed the rest of Enterprise.

gyor said:

What do you think they will call that metasetting?

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I think they'll call it the "D&D Multiverse." Seriously, 5E is staying away from branding books with anything other than "D&D." Not even a "Forgotten Realms" logo on the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, so no "Planescape" or "Spelljammer" (or "Chronomancer") logos. So no special moniker is necessary.

It's just like: here's how to travel through the Planes of Existence via planar travel, here's how to travel from one D&D World to another via astral skiff, spelljammer, or airship, and here's how to timetravel via the Temporal Prime (aka the Demiplane of Time). Here are the organizations which are active in interplanar travel, space travel, and timetravel. And here are some iconic places you can visit (Sigil, Rock of Bral, Blackmoor.) Now we'll show you Eberron, Oerth, Athas, Aebrynis, Nerath, and Mystara. It's all the D&D Multiverse.