Agents of Change: The Time Travel RPG

[bigeshu]

Yeah, wish me luck on that! A forum and a .com for the game would be sweet!

 

[Piratecat]

So this looks really interesting, but I don't know much about it. How are you handling the ripple effect? I loved TimeMaster, but holy crap on a stick, modules were complicated; you needed to research the particular era, choose something that the bad guys would change, and think about all the ramifications of that change throughout history. Crazy complex, and I've never seen anyone get around it convincingly.

 

[bigeshu]

That is actually the hardest part of it. To handle the characters effects on their own lives we decided that those who can project (hijacking past people's bodies), are outside of time. So they can never be directly affected except by paradox fluxes and such. For adventures we write beyond the playtest, we're thinking of playing connect the dots and what-if. Basically the best of quantum leap and sliders. We were thinking that the worst paradox effects, basically rewriting a person's direct history, could be handled by chart, but we decided not to include that in the main book because dicking with temporal upstarts shouldn't be relegated to a chart that could never feel complete enough. But, examples will be had.

 

[Piratecat]

I'll be really interested to see how it comes out. The only other good time travel game I know of is Epidiah Ravachol's Time & Temp, the game about low-paid incompetent temporary workers solving time travel problems.

My favorite TimeMaster scenario: "Miss Him, Miss Him," where aliens kill Paul McCartney and replace him with a duplicate that steers the Beatles away from drugs and protest music. The popular anti-war protests never occur, America never bails out of Vietnam, nuclear weapons end up being used, and half of America is irradiated by the early 70's. Your job? Go back in time and make sure that the Abby Road "Paul is dead" rumors never have a basis in fact.

 

[bigeshu]

Oooh I think I'll have to look up TimeMaster. But it's that kind of scenario that this game is intended for.

 

[Piratecat]

I think old adventures (which definitely have some flaws) can be found at https://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?cPath=2033_6388&.

 

[bigeshu]

Thanks I'll pick them up and flip through them.

 

[Lwaxy]

I've done lots of time travel games, and I never found it so difficult to change the timeline accordingly. But then I have a weird brain.

Also, it's a game, doesn't have to be 100% accurate.

 

[Piratecat]

Lwaxy, that's kind of the point, right? It doesn't have to be perfect, but most of the joy in any kind of an alternate history game is following the cause and effect of history's linchpins. I find that takes more research than any of my non-time-travel games do. That's not a bad thing, but I like to take it into account.

An interesting article: The Big Question: What day most changed the course of history? (some dumb answers, some great ones.)

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/the-big-question/309238/

 

[Lwaxy]

Indeed, that's the point.

My players have already taken the base idea of the game and modified the setting (without seeing the book yet lol) to fit into one of our worlds. Probably means I'll get the books eventually.