I want to hear your Time Travel adventure stories

[Heinrich_Uberlich]

For ages I have been toying with the idea of running a session/campaign with time travel being a major plot device. For instance two seperate character groups played by the same players but one group is in the present and the other in the past. What ever the past group does influences the present group, sort of like that movie 'Frequency'.
Anyone ever tried this or any other form of Time Travel related adventures?
HU

 

[random user]

I've sort of just started my campaign (well, I guess depends on how you define start... Next week will be session 17, and we meet weekly for about 4 hours), but there is some time elements in it.

So far my players have been afflicted with group dreams every so often. There have been two types of dreams so far: one has them placed in a weird puzzle in an indeterminate time; the other placed them in other people's bodies in a city 5000 years ago, mere months before that city was destroyed.

I have more plans, but I fear that my players may read this, and I don't want to give anything away.

I guess the point of this is yes, my campaign has it, and it is executed through dream sequences of the past in the present (or the future, depending on your perspective).

 

[Driddle]

You already posted this topic next month, dude.

 

[Aeric]

The one experience I've had with time travel in gaming was in the first AD&D campaign I ever played in. Our characters were on a quest to stop the Lich King from becoming a god, especially since the material component for his ritual was the life-essence of about a million people. Our party had gotten sucked into Ravenloft for reasons I no longer remember, and we managed to escape somehow, but we wound up in the future after the Lich King won. We managed to find our own wizardly mentor who survived the holocaust, and he sent us back to our own time. Not much of a time travel adventure--I think it lasted a grand total of a single session--but it made for a good motivator for the PCs.

I've always wanted to run a portion of a campaign like that, in a dystopian future where the PCs get to witness firsthand the results of their failure. I think if I ran a game that incorporated more elements of time travel, I would have to go the route that The Butterfly Effect took. I really liked how that movie played itself out.

 

[EricNoah]

I so, so, so want to do one with Arcana Unearthed. I recently read a sci fi novel called The Chronoliths that just sparked my interest in time travel. I want a series of previously unknown structures (huge, monolithic buildings) to just start "showing up" around the landscape. I want the heroes to investigate these buildings and ultimately deal with the Diamond Throne setting's past (the dramojh invasion, the coming of the giants, etc.). Ugh, I just don't think I have it all together enough to do it well....

 

[Piratecat]

I was in one really good time-travel game where we chased an enemy back into time and ended up creating what was already one of our favorite magic items. It turns out that we had constructed our own temple (which we had found in ruins,) and in a huge fight we managed to create a lake that we had adventured in back at 2nd level. It was carried off beautifully by the DM.

 

[rgard]

For ages I have been toying with the idea of running a session/campaign with time travel being a major plot device. For instance two seperate character groups played by the same players but one group is in the present and the other in the past. What ever the past group does influences the present group, sort of like that movie 'Frequency'.
Anyone ever tried this or any other form of Time Travel related adventures?
HU

Way back while playing 1E, my Magic User found a copy of the Necronomicon that had a time travel spell in it. The DM had integrated some Cthulu stuff into the campaign.

Anyway, my MU was in need of an army and didn't have the $ to raise one. So using the spell he went back in time 300 years to an island on the opposite side of the planet taking several young male and female half-orcs with him.

The MU had presented himself to the young half-orcs as their god using a good disguise overlaid with several phantasmal force spells.

Prior to picking the island my MU did a Contact Other Plane and figured out that no sentient life was on the island nor would visit the island in the following 300 years.

Once at the island back in time, my MU went about clearing the island of any predators then helped the half-orcs build their settlement. The MU then had them build a temple to him and he installed a statue of himself in the temple (that looked as his disguise looked.)

The MU gave them his version of the ten commandments (be fruitful and multiply, etc.) and told them he would return in 300 years to judge them and lead them into a war to reclaim their homeland.

My MU then went back to the future, went to the island and rounded up his army.

It worked out ok. One of the few times the DM in question actually let my MU's plan work as planned.

 

[evildmguy]

GreetingS!

I am trying to do one in my overall campaign.

Background: I have created a timeline for my world, spanning over two millenia. I have the about eighteen campaigns planned out, in very general terms, in the story I want to tell. These are in very general terms and will be influenced by the player's actions. The first adventure, I am having the players play the character who will be the heroes of legend in later campaigns. They are very powerful. (Dare I say Uber?)

In my write ups, then, I knew that there are prophecies that the current PCs will help in defeating some very powerful bad guys, some of the millenia later. When a few of the players were gone, I had the others be pulled forward in time to fulfill those prophecies! (I can't wait until I play the campaign and start with those prophecies to see the look on the player's faces!) At other times, when players are missing, I have had their characters be displaced by "powerful temporal magic" that I either know when they went or I am leaving it open to use later.

I do understand it won't work perfectly and that I will probably end up with some errors in some ways but I am more going for the story and drama and to that end, I think it will work well.

I don't know if this will help you out but this is something that I am doing in my own campaign.

Have a good one! Take care!

edg

 

[Driddle]

Simple set-up example:

1. Patron sets party on mission to retrieve item from dangerous site.
2. Overcoming dangerous obstacles, the party reaches the goal ... only to see someone else grab it first and immediately disappear. Details at a distance are too vague to discern identity.
3. Patron is miffed at their failure. Arranges to send party back in time just far enough to beat the unknown competitors. The magic is very shortlived, and they cannot risk delays to confront the bad guys, so it's gotta be in and out as quickly as possible.
4. The party races through the site (again), reaches the item, grabs it and immediately disappears ... at the same moment their competitors round the corner and catch a glimpse of them leaving.

The more elaborate the history, the larger the possibility the PCs will branch out of the time loop just for fun (i.e. to watch the DM squirm to explain everything). Not that there's anything wrong with that -- but you'd better decide ahead of time (heh) whether you want a self-contained time loop or you can deal with a change in the contiuum on the fly. And you've got to know your players really well, too. Personally, I'd be very willing to play along with the GM and make sure our party did everything necessary to ensure our past selves were able to do what we already did. (Ala "Bill & Ted" ... Gotta remember to drop a bucket on the villain's head in the future.)

I'd like to have seen how Piratecat's team worked toward that end.

 

[Enkhidu]

We ended up on a Time Traveling jaunt in an old early 2e campaign where we ended up meeting a group of heroes gearing up for the final confrontation with a BEBG - the same BEBG that, it turns out, had in our own time made a big comeback. If it weren't for talking with the past history group as they geared up, we wouldn't have figured out the BEBG's weakness.

Pretty fun, that.