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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 8038126" data-attributes="member: 72555">Destructive 2 dimensional time travel.When you travel back in time, your original time line is destroyed at or around the point you leave.  (the same technology that allows time travel lets you sustain it for a non-zero period of time; this is actually the hard part, because otherwise when the first iota of contact you make with the past happens, your time line ends).The act of time travel successfully requires you to disconnect your timeline branch at the point where you are going, push matter back to before that disconnect, and stabalize your time line long enough to send back what you want to send back.After the stabalized period, your entire universe falls apart and ends, without foundation.The time between the point of disconnect, and the time you travel, remains "in existence", and is a valid target for time travel.Interestingly, going forward in time is easier (after all, we do it all the time).  Reaching one of those dead branches is not easier, because there is no "flow of time" you can follow to reach it.[code]-------------PCs--x-...-x---x---x---MF Empire------MF Time travel                  |     |   |   \- Invasion 1                  |     |   \- Invasion 2                  |     \- Invasion 3                  \- Invasion N-1[/code]each of those x is a cut in the timeline.  The Mind Flayers eat the universe in each Invasion, then go back in time to a reachable point and eat another universe.At the moment the MFs invade, there is already an invasion later on in that time line.  It is still there.  And if you beat this invasion, that later invasion still happens.  And if that one is beat?  Another one happens.  All the way to the end of time.  And once they win, they roll back through time and continue their invasion.  So the MF victory is inevitable, unless you cheat.Having a unified elder brain is important to maintaining identity here.  As each elder brain sent back in time is an earlier-time copy of the ones that arrived earlier, it is prepared to integrate with it if it exists, and then this 'patches' all of the MFs that arrive.This permits a small number of MFs and troops to be sent back in a 'cluster'; the last wave sent first, then another duplicate wave sent just before it in the newly spawned timeline, etc.  So sending back 1 piece of elder brain, a handful of MF, and a handful of troops and supplies... repeated 1000s of times over 1000s of duplicate timelines results in an invasion force that reassembles.  Once large enough, it consumes reality (and magic), then leapfrogs back a bit further, sending a scouting party, then reinforcing it each and every cycle of universe destruction.The Elder Brain at the end of this process has continuity of awareness since the end of time, going back over each invasion.  It has lived every moment of time from now until the end of the universe repeatedly.  It has literally seen all that there is to happen.Which leads to how the PCs win.They can, and should, win in their time line.  They should sacrifice everything -- I mean, they should be building bombs out of gods.  It should be scorched earth, and involve using weapons they cannot duplicate, and it should be by the skin of their teeth.Then have a new invasion occur.  All fresh troops.  The PCs are naughty word.But they have a time travel device, and some key informatoin.  So they can bop back in time to the start of the initial invasion (just them and a few macguffins), meeting their younger selves at the start of the campaign.  They do a strike on the initial MF invasion in this timeline, getting the coordinates for the "end of time".Then they invade the end of time, the start of the MF horde, and win.  This erases themselves and the entire MF invasion, and possibly time travel itself (as maybe it is fueled by a unique artifact or event, which the PCs destroy as part of their plan).  As a last step, they send back something that ends the mind flayer empire in their own time somehow, rewriting all of history from the start of the campaign on?I'd suggest a box, with a big button on it.  And a message, from themselves, to "go to location X, push this button, then run as far as you can for 24 hours".  It contains a weapon that calls down a beam that smashes through the earth, forming a volcano, and kills the elder brain of the mind flayers.  Or something similar -- this "god weapon" should be related to one of the weapons they use to defeat the first mind flayer invasion.Or something like that.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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