Time Travel..

[Beazel]

I believe in only two brands of time travel and only one of them works easily in an RPG. This is not to say you can’t do other things with LOTS of preparation on the part of the DM, but my method is foolproof.

First, let me say what the first brand of time travel is that’s hard to pull off in an RPG — “Everything that has happened will happen, and if you go back in time to change something you’re only fulfilling history because actually you have already BEEN back in time. You just don’t know it yet.” This method is very hard to pull off and takes a lot of planning by the DM. You have to set up situations like having a PC find a picture of himself in an ancient tome, or a bard-sung history of some events that took place a long time ago, but are actually a recounting of the PC’s expected actions in a post-time-travel encounter coming later in the adventure/session. The DM has to do everything possible to not allow history to change, AND everything possible to railroad the action into the form described by history. The bard’s song must come out the same. The reason the PC’s picture was in the ancient tome needs to be revealed, and so on. Hard stuff.

The second brand of time travel that I subscribe to is the best choice for a DM with no time (heh) to prepare. This is a little harder to describe, but if you understand quantum mechanics then you are half way to understanding. Basically the idea is that it’s impossible to even travel back in time without changing something. There is a saying in science that you cannot observe something without changing it. By going back in time and just standing still you are making all manner of changes just by displacing air particles, standing on the ground, changing the concentration of oxygen in the air by breathing, and so on. Once you actually start moving around doing things, killing creatures, and taking items, forget it! Also, in quantum mechanics everything that can happen has happened, creating infinite parallel universes.

Ok, so now we know you can’t travel back in time without making a change by your very presence in the past. So what? The next step is to understand that you don’t need to let it matter. Each time you travel back in time, you are creating a split in the timeline. It’s sort of like being able to leap to one of the alternate universe described by quantum mechanics. Everything you did in the past before traveling backward has still happened; it has just happened to a different timeline now.

To express this on paper, get a pencil. Draw a long straight line and label it with times. This is your group’s world’s timeline. Have a point far right on the line be present day. Pick a point in the past that you want to travel back to. Place your pencil on that point and pull down a little line, then start drawing a parallel line with the original timeline. The rules are: (1) You can always travel backward in time. Each time you go backward in time you do what I described above. You pull down a new parallel line to represent the new timeline. (2) You can always move forward in time. Each time you do, you’re on the NEW timeline. You cannot experience the same events that transpired on the previous timeline. (3) You can never travel up a branch that has been left behind. Every backward step creates a new branch. All forward steps move on the new branch. The reason all previously experiences branches are taboo is that you can never reproduce the infinite set of exact events that created that branch. The slightest change in one molecule bars you from experiencing the same timeline ever again. There is always SOMETHING that is different.

Using the method I have described means that you can go back and kill yourself in your past and nothing changes except that in the NEW timeline you never existed. You have not created a paradox because in the timeline where you came from you still existed (up until you traveled backward). You have created two parallel timelines where in one you exist and in the other you don’t. If you move forward in time you will see the future as it would have been without you. If you move backward in time you will create yet another parallel timeline. In this method the DM doesn’t have to do anything extra. The players can act freely. Easy stuff.

—Bob

 

[Wraith Form]

I believe in only two brands of time travel and only one of them works easily in an RPG. This is not to say you can’t do other things with LOTS of preparation on the part of the DM, but my method is foolproof. *SNIP* In this method the DM doesn’t have to do anything extra. The players can act freely. Easy stuff.

Hunh. Yeah. I get it! That's pretty cool--time travel isn't so daunting in an RPG.

I'm feelin' you, Bob!

 

[Templetroll]

When I started my homebrew in '79 I had in the history the "Decline of Magic", a worldwide mystic calamity to explain why there were so many lost artifacts and such from the old Empire. Back then they had magic of 10th level and higher and now it is maxed out at 9th. They had armies fully outfitted in magic gear and when the magic declined most of gear went inert and the Empire collapsed. No one knew what had caused magic to decline but it was known to have been a specific event.

I had a phrase, "Where the Boney Horseman rides, is Death." He was supposed to be a harbinger of war. He had been a general of the old Empire.

The first gaming group in my world had found a deserted castle that was the stronghold of a barony of the fallen Empire. The leader of that group was granted the land as the second Baron of Crossfell. The first had disappeared around the time of the "Decline of Magic".

About five years later my second group in the world finally got into an adventure to make use of it.

They were travelling home and saw an undead knight on a nightmare. One of the players recalled the phrase and they knew he was on the road to their home town. He was ignoring them until the LG Ranger decided to challange him. During the battle the heroic fellow stood against the knight and the rest of the party battled the nightmare.

the party finally finished off the steed and looked towards the ongoing duel. The ranger fought well and then hubris got the better of him, since the evil one had taken grievous wounds. He sneered and said, "You'll serve me in hell." as he swung and struck a mighty blow! The dark one staggered beneath his blade, whispered, "Truer words have never been spoken." thrust his blade through the ranger's torso and crumbled into dust!

The shocked expressions on the players's faces mirrored their characters' reactions. They gathered around the ranger to look at the glowing green blade stuck through his body and wondered why he wasn't dead yet. An OOC observation was death was not nasty enough for me. This led to in-character ideas that the sword would slowly poison or kill the soul of the ranger. The wizard decided to teleport the ranger to the castle to get him help as quickly as possible.

The wizard was very familiar with the great hall of the castle and that it was lightly used during the day so it was safe to teleport there. When they came in from the teleport the room was opulently furnished, torches lit and minstrels playing. Many finely dressed folk were dancing and eating. No one noticed them... except the fellow sitting on a throne at the end of the hall. He looked at them, they looked at him and his eyes widened as he spied the sword and paled. The scene shimmered and the wizard and ranger found themselves in the Great Hall they expected - nearly empty and not so opulent anymore. The one thing they did recall from the "vision" was the standard and throne of the first Baron, that was he that they saw.

They got the sword out of the ranger, put it in a chest boound with chains and placed in the vault of the castle. Everyone healed up except for the one wound on the ranger; although he regained all his hit points. They checked the sword and the chest had a coating of wet blood on the bottom of the chest. They sought help from bards and were directed to a Ki-Rin.

The Ki-Rin was willing to help them by giving them the first portion of the Staff of Life which had been shattered into seven pieces at some time in the past. The only restriction was that the party had to accept a geas to not kill anyone while on the quest! They could defend themselves but not slay anyone. The party agreed.

The journey took them on a trans-planar adventure through the worlds I liked that TSR had material on. Greyhawk, FR, Lankhmar etc and time travel in my own world. Finally, I get on the topic of the thread! During their travels the ranger began to feel weak, but did not lose strength or hit points. One rogue also found that his sleep poison had been altered during a planar jump into a deadly poison and he was sickened and dieing because it had killed a foe. The party was working to save two lives now.

The party knew the Emperor was a lich and still active; he would summon PCs of the players who were absent just to chat wihtthem; no one knew why. While the players believed this Emperor to be a lich he looked quite the normal and urbane wizardly ruler to those who met him. There were a couple of PCs, however, who reported encounters with an ultimate undead fiend who was skeletal, wore tattered robes similar to those seen on the Emperor and was missing an arm. Those encounters always took place near where a battle was occuring.

the group appeared at the ruined city of the Emperor and saw the location of the battle nearby. The staff led them to a hallway where time ran riot. The area of the hall seemed to slip through time, the party spied debris on the floor that would changed from time to time along with creatures appearing and disappearing. They moved down the hall, fought some creatures, including a dragon, and found a piece of the staff. this led them to a blue teleportation cabinet..... The next stop was off tot he side of a huge mystic construction chamber; the magic users felt the tingle of magic on their skin as they stepped from the cabinet.

Before them they saw this huge contraption and the Emperor they recognized with a familiar but complete staff in hand. The Emperor was chanting and as he stuck the slender tip, the only missing piece, into the device it hummed with mystic power. The bearer of the staff rushed forward and touched the tip of his staff to the staff in the device causing a massive explosion!

When they recovered from the stunning effects they noticed that there was no longer a tingle on their skin, the very structure was badly damaged and they could hear all sorts of uproar outside the chamber; explosions and the roaring of monsters predominated. The Emperor seemed to be getting up in a bad mood so they ran for the blue box and departed. Their travel was bumpy and they arrived back in their own time and place and agreed that the time box had used up all its charges.

Finally, someone did also realize that THEY had just caused the "Decline of Magic"!!!! They were smiling about that for a while.

I never did get to use the "vision" of the first Baron, but the wizard is my wife's character so it is still a possibility even now, fifteen+ years later. .

 

[Henry]

Yeah, but barring railroading the PCs, how do you do this and retain a metagame suspension of disbelief and/or "realism"?

There are two ways:

(1) The same way you make prophecy come true: You leave the specifics of the event vague enough that you can map what happens to the event. In other words, if "the ruler fell to the Raven" in the old legends, then regardless of whether the PC's defend the king or fail to, later, after they leave or are otherwise distracted, an assassin with a raven tattoo comes to claim him.


(2) Introduce Aetherco's concept of Frag to the system. Namely, you experience "Frag" then it is your destiny to accomplish something, but you heven't done it yet. Those who experience Frag can feel it, and as they wait longer and longer, their "being" splits more and more as their destiny fragments. It's a little more complicated than that, but should work well for this concept.