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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 5033659" data-attributes="member: 8835">The idea has some merit.  Here's how I'd approach it.Have the PCs start at 1st level.  Run a few sessions.  Ask them "where do they see themselves in 25 years".  Don't tell them to make a 20th level PC yet.  Get them the artifact.  Perhaps make it one they all have to use together (thus they all must shift timeframes).Shifting a time frame moves their conciousness to the future and their future bodies that have improved physically and their neural networks have advanced enough to enable casting the higher level spells.Thus, the PCs are "low levels" occupying the bodies of high levels, but getting access to the high level's capabilities.  Neural networks and muscle memory basically is the pseudo-science to explain why in the future they can cast high level spells, and in the past, they cannot.This also explains why if the high-levels shifted to the past, the lack of muscle memory and neural network patterns prevents the use of advanced abilities.  The key is you can only use the abilities of the PC from that timeframe.Now to solve the "changing events causes paradoxes" problem, aka killing your grandfather before your dad is concieved causes complications.First off, nothing the PCs in the future is going to affect the past.  At least not in the direct sense (beyond "let's go back to the past and change it!").  The key problem is what happens when the PCs in the past change something that we already know the state of in the future.In old school time travel, when things in the past changes, everybody's memories change to contain the new version of history.However, quantum theory, and some other stuff changed the way we look at time travel.  Oddly enough, season 5 of Lost actually touched on that in a conversation Hurley and Miles had.Consider time travel from the perspective of the traveller.  To them, their memories are static, fixed, unchanging.  When they change history, they remember the original version as they experienced it (or from history class).  If they jump back to the present, they will NOT know what happened in the new timeline, because they did not live in the new timeline.Here's an example:In your origin timeline it's December 19th 2009, you travel back to 1963 to stop the JFK assassination.  For non-travellers in the origin 2009, they probably wonder where you went as weeks go by.  You remember learning about JFK dying in school and think that's where America went wrong, so you're committed to this plan.  You save JFK and verify it by waiting a week to see the news.  Nothing bad happens.  You even take a newspaper showing that JFK survived an assasination attempt.  You then return to December 19th 2009 (perhaps a few minutes after you left).  At this point, for non-travellers, you were never missing.  All non-travellers have no memory of JFK dying, there's no conspiracy theories about anything.  You have no knowledge of the invasion of China after we dropped a Nuke on Saigon, nor do you know that Ronald Reagon was never president.  When you come out of your secret lab, whatever changes happened in the world may be very disorienting to you.  If you only made a minor change, then you probably won't notice any difference, or only have small moments where you encounter a difference in what you remember, versus what has now "actually" happened.If you're just moving your conciousness, things can be as simple as that.  There's no you to run into, because you never physically moved.  If you physically move, things can get a little more interesting.Sticking with our JFK example, if saving JFK prevented the invention of your time machine (but you still get born and are alive on December 19th 2009), when you get back you can effectively find yourself.  The one who time travelled will be older, by however long he spent travelling (which in our example, was about a week).  If your change in the past prevented your birth (or you died before December 19th 2009), then you will return to a world that doesn't know you.Basically, approach things from the perspective that the PC's mind is from the past version. So when they jump to the future, they are "surprised" by the environment they find themselves in, and will have to deal with seeming confused or odd when they run into changes.Now if a PC dies in the future, no problem.  Bounce them back to the past (perhaps the entire party, or freeze their game time until the party returns to the past).  Now the party has an excellent mission in the past, which is to change something so the PC won't die in the future.  If a PC dies in the past, that causes big changes in the future.  Basically, with 1 PC dead, if the party goes to the future, the see the big changes that happened.  Make them negative, and the PCs will hop back to the past to raise the fallen PC.  Thus making "yet another quest" for the PCs.</blockquote>

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