My new time travel RPG: TimeWatch!

[Piratecat]

At the ENW Boston Gameday yesterday I ran the 3rd playtest session of TimeWatch, my in-progress time travel GUMSHOE game I'm developing for Pelgrane. While at this point I'll avoid discussing rules elements extensively (I'm about 20K words into a 60K manuscript, and lots is subject to change), it may be fun to talk about how the game went. Thanks to folks who have expressed interest; I'll welcome feedback.

Background: The PCs are effectively time cops, fixing problems in history, and can be from any point in time -- for these characters we had:
- a drunken and deadly Spartan warrior
- a stuffy Victorian physician
- an aggressive '60's rock drummer
- a sneaky, nervous far-future telepathic street person
- an entitled, educated near-future moon base technician.

The most amusing time travel tricks?
- The PCs let themselves know about whether a meeting was a trap by having their future selves travel back in time and leave a message to their past selves.
- After being ambushed by an unknown enemy, the PCs traveled back in time and arranged the ambush on themselves, just to impress someone with the veracity of their fake oracular predictions (and so they knew no one else was out to get them.)
- In order to succeed spectacularly at saving the timeline, they chose to run a 17 year long con on a Mongol Khan (The Khan Con?)

Long story short? I think the idea and the rules behind TimeWatch are working. Adventure prep took less than 45 minutes, awesome time travel twists stirred up the adventure, and there wasn't anything yet the rules mechanics couldn't handle. That's a good sign. I've also gotten gorgeous character sheets designed by Hypersmurf, the same person who designed the NBA pre-gen sheets. The game is better for them.

Actual adventure detail for the playtest adventure will be in the first comment. Potential future spoilers, etc. I'll be yammering on about the game here occasionally, so ask questions if you're curious to know more.

 

[Piratecat]

In four hours of play, here's how the adventure went:

Scene 1: TimeWatch Citadel. The PCs feel a chronal shock pass through them, almost causing the drummer to fade away. The Spartan warrior is unaffected. As they look around, they realize that almost every non-Asian in the Citadel has disappeared from existence. Awkward. Picking up some anomalous readings from time-based sensors, they head on their time machines to western North America around the year 1400.

Scene 2: Nothing unusual shows up. Speeding forward through time, they catch a glimpse of a huge ship out in the Pacific around 1427. They identity it as one of the Golden Fleet, the massive diplomatic treasure ships sent out by the Chinese emperor starting in 1405 and (supposedly) ending in 1425. Apparently in this timeline, not only did the fleet not rot at anchor, they discovered the Pacific gyre and encountered North America.

Scene 3: The PCs skip forward in time a thousand years to learn that the Chinese have completely dominated North America, with a small remaining nation of indigenous population. There is no European influence whatsoever, and Aztec descendents dominate South America. Checking an encyclopedia ("what do you mean the internet isn't invented yet?"), they learn that a Chinese Empress took the treasure ships and fled mainland China with as many craftsmen as possible when Beijing was dismantled by the Mongols in the early 1400s. Apparently they had far more resources than the Mongols the PCs knew, and so were able to defeat China. The PCs pop back to 1427 to talk to someone.

Scene 4: The Chinese have settled in the harbor where San Francisco once will be. Moving through the fledgling town they see a poster with their portraits on it, inviting anyone who sees them to invite them to the Empress's palace.

They suspect a trap. One PC says "Later, I'm going to write on the back of that poster whether or not this is an ambush. If there's nothing written there, I'll know it is and we didn't survive." He pays a point of the appropriate Investigative Ability, checks, and his own handwriting says "It's totally safe." Mollified, they head to the palace. The GM congratulates the players on their cunning.

Scene 5: The Empress greets them as old friends, and is extremely grateful, even though they've never met her before. Hedging a bit, they discover that years ago they delivered a scroll to her (the players note they should remember to do this). Now, she wants to give them a scroll before they depart. They sneak a peek at the scroll; it's a message from herself to herself, telling her younger self that she believes these messengers of the Gods fly through time. She tells herself to save the Chinese people by fleeing the mainland, or all will be lost, and she gives herself navigation instructions.

The PCs bid her goodbye, slightly irked that apparently their interference somehow caused the Chinese to settle North America, and go back a few years to fulfill their part of the time loop. There's a paradox there, not unusual when larger disruptions occur.

Scene 6. The PCs realize what happened. The western Mongol army did not turn back from the gates of Vienna, as they did in real history when they received word of genial, drunken Ogedai (Genghis's son) Khan's death through alcoholism. Instead, the mongols swept right through western Europe and dismantled it, leaving grassland and mountains of millions of skulls behind. With these additional resources and slaves, they were eventually able to successfully sweep east through China 200 years later. Bitchin'. They study historical records of Ogedai Khan's advisers and match one to Shen Jun, a 25th century Asian nationalist and terrorist who disappeared. Deciding to warn Ogedai Khan, they time travel to 1229 (right before Ogedai is made Khan) to poison the future Khan against Shen Jun.

Scene 7: They are ambushed upon arrival by someone who told the mongols that demons would arrive at that time and place. They sneak away into the shadows, barely escaping with their lives. "Crap, how is Shen Jun already here? How did he know when we would arrive?" They flee to a point 5 years prior in 1224.

Scene 8: Safe and healed up, camping on the Steppes, they realize that they can use this to their advantage. They don't KNOW that Shen Jun ambushed them; they only know that they got ambushed. Thus, they resolve to befriend the young Ogedai Khan, prove their oracular powers by *telling him where five demons will appear*, and thus proving their bona fides as reliable advisers.

Yep. They have THEMSELVES ambushed to make sure their enemy doesn't do it instead.

The GM rewards all the players for extreme cleverness.

Scene 8: In order to impress young Ogedai, the Spartan warrior (in disguise) throws himself on a venomous snake, taking the bite so that Ogedai does not. Mind you, the PCs first time traveled, found a snake, milked the poison out, gave the PC a shot of anti-venom, and hid the snake in Ogedai's path. Convoluted but effective. Ogedai slaps the warrior and invites him to come drink, as he'll be painfully dead in hours. Heck, for saving the man's life Ogedai ceremonially makes him the commander of 10,000 mongol troops. Everyone but the PCs is surprised when the Spartan doesn't die in the morning, but by then he and Ogedai are fast friends.

Scene 9: T-17 years until Shen Jun is fated to arrive, save Ogedai's life, and disrupt time. Most of the PCs skip forward, reappearing to learn about notable happenings and then predict the future for the new Khan. The Spartan, however, loves it here and chooses to live out the time the long way.

"Wait a minute. I've heard of long cons, but 17 YEARS LONG?"

Scene 10: By the time Shen Jun arrives, sure that his plan will succeed, Ogedai has been warned of his false counsel and is ready for him. Shen Jun tries to ingratiate himself; Ogedai has him seized. Shen Jun tries to rat out the PCs as time travelers. Ogedai laughs in his face, pointing out that the Spartan has been by his side for almost two decades. Shen Jun is spirited away by the TimeWatch agents instead of being executed.

Ogedai and the Spartan drink in celebration of the false prophet's destruction. Ogedai dies exactly at the right time of the night of debauchery, just as he did in the real timeline, and history snaps back into its normal path. All the future is saved.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I once inspired you to lament that you could not play in my Supers 1900 game.

You have officially returned the favor.

 

[Piratecat]

High praise. Never fear, I'll holler when it comes up for playtesting!

I thought about keeping this under my hat for a while longer, and have decided a much bigger risk than "someone might steal my precious ideas" is "no one has heard of this." So I'm going to be excited if people play it early and often, offer advice, talk about it here and elsewhere, and generally find out if it's something they'll love. I'm hoping it will be.

 

[Henry]

This concept is a dead ringer for the old Aetherco Continuum game, a game very near and dear to my heart -- but with a more awesome backbone of a rule system behind it. I would kill Hitler to get a change to playtest this someday in the future (in my Yet?), and can't wait until this becomes a finished product under Pelgrane.

 

[RangerWickett]

Did the '45 minutes of prep' include researching history, or just making foes?

Can I just pay you now to get the playtest rules? I was going to try to run a time travel D&D Next mini-campaign, albeit a little more Chrono Trigger with a limit to how much the PCs can jump around. But wibbly wobbliness sounds so much more fun.

You have me intrigued.

 

[Cor Azer]

I wanna see this movie

 

[Morrus]

This does look really, really, really fun! How does the time travel work (in-story, not rules-wise)? Do the PCs have a time machine, or an innate ability? Do they have control of the time travel themselves?

 

[Piratecat]

Henry, I've heard great things about Continuum but have never played. Now I need to find someone with a copy... We came up with TimeWatch after considering Pacesetter's game Timemaster and thinking "Man, I loved every bit of that game except for the rules." GUMSHOE turns out to be a really good fit for time travel.

RW, making foes took me quite literally a minute and a half. My generic Mongol stat block for unnamed characters looks something like: Seasoned Mongol warriors: Hit threshold 4, Athletics 6, Shoot 6, Scuffle 6 (2-2-2), Health 4. If using the spreadsheet so that I don't have to count build points, I'd say making a PC takes about 10-15 minutes. The hard part of building a PC is avoiding analysis paralysis; with every profession and all of time and Earth to choose from, I think it's always better to have a strong concept going in. I'll have a much easier time making "Roman spy for Emperor Caligula" than I will "some guy. A Roman, maybe?"

The 45 minutes of game prep was spent trolling Wikipedia, writing down the bad guy's plan and figuring out the relevant dates and facts that surround it. I will eventually do some of this work for the GM, but I wanted to make sure I had a rough understanding of how things should have gone so that I knew what would happen when they screwed up. It's interesting to note that if we'd had more time to play, capturing the bad guy wouldn't have initially solved the problem because *before* he encountered the PCs he probably went and killed the messengers sent to warn the western army about the great Khan's death. As a result, if the PCs had captured/killed him and allowed the Khan to die normally, the western army still wouldn't have heard for another year or two and would have sacked western Europe anyways!

History is a little simplified here; for instance, the Mongols did manage to rule China for about 100 years before plague and in-fighting did a number on them. My scenario predicated that Ogedai would have solved the "let's carve the empire into many pieces" problem, and would have resulted in a more genocidal army. I'm definitely not shooting for a simulation here. GMs want enough history and alt-history for an adventure to be fun and plausible, not necessarily for it to be precisely accurate. When a game starts feeling like a history lesson instead of an adventure, it's strayed too far.

Interestingly, my initial playtest limited how much fuel the PCs had for their time machines (which at the moment look a little bit like the light cycles from TRON 2: a single person rod which generates a coherent sphere of light and hyper-time around them.) I've tossed the fuel limit. In the game detailed above, the PCs jumped in time probably 15 times or more, and that just made the game cooler. It'd be a shame to limit strategies based on an arbitrary amount of fuel, unless I want to encourage turtling down to figure out a strategic plan that they then finally head off to carry out ("the Shadowrun method"). That's actually the approach I don't want, because it's boring for half the game and always falls apart anyways.

Russ, I think I'm going with the "the farther in time you travel, the less accurate your arrival location is," with the PCs having precise control of the arrival time and date. Pcs have control of their time machines. Although the time machines (right now) are single person occupancy, I have a mechanic in place to allow PCs to (say) capture the T-Rex that somehow ended up at the Battle of Waterloo, or to chase someone fleeing through time.

 

[Henry]

Sadly, I lost my Continuum main book a while back during a house move -- I'd love to find it again myself! (For under $50, that is -- people are charging outrageous prices for it because it's hard to get now). But it sounds like you have most of the fun bits. The focus was on the flavor, and the rules system was actually about 40 pages long, but it was not very good. I spoke to one of the designers on their forums about 7 years ago, trying to convince them to at least ride the d20 wave back then to get the game some more exposure, but they were adamant on the game standing for itself. In the end, I don't see them selling new product for it at all any more.

The most important bits were the terminology, which they had worked out pretty well to avoid the confusion that inevitably happens in a time travel game; the different Bill-and-Ted style tricks that one could do as a time agent (including the fact that time travel also includes space travel by its nature); and the natural progression that comes from being a more powerful traveller from local threats to millenium-wide threats at the highest power level. (As a "span 1" you were travelling max 1 year per 24 hours of your day, and stopping local threats, and at span 5 you were travelling up to 10,000 years in your day's time span, and playing enormous long-games with other travellers and threats to all civilization.)

In Continuum, there was no machine to travel (unless you count the nanite-based technology they explain in the DM guide *spoiler*!) -- just a limiter placed until the bigwigs think you can handle the responsibility of having all creation to travel in. You could zip back and forth, as long as the total added to max of X years for the day, or a max of Y miles in one jump. One session my players played in involved two hours of inventing a skyboarding game involving who would chicken out and not teleport first to safety. The drama wasn't in the limits, as you found; it was in the figuring out how to fix the problem, and also not fragmenting their own existences by accident trying to fix the problem. ("Frag" is a big deal in that game, explained by your conscious mind trying to be in two continuums at once to reconcile multiple inputs, and it sounds like you have something similar going on.)

Also, they give you like $50,000,000 dollars on your initiation to remove the money temptation that time travel naturally brings to most people.

Anyway, sounds like you're already firing on most of those cylinders, so can't wait to see more.