Time Travel adventure

[Omegaxicor]

This campaign seems to generate more and more new things for me as the DM, which is part of the fun I suppose, but I wondered has anyone tried a Time Travel adventure?

I am thinking that the party encounter a village that has been destroyed and everyone there is dead, they are cast back in time (how and by who are obvious but not worth going in to) and find the villagers alive and well, they discover the village is about to be attacked by an Orc tribe due to a misunderstanding during the last trade mission. The party can either stay in the village and fight, in which case they return to the present and find the village only partially destroyed, or they attack or negotiate with the Orcs and either succeed and the village survives or fail and the village is destroyed.

Then they are sent into the future and see the village turned into a city whose leader rules the area badly and have to decide what to do, best to go to the present and do something rather than risk being killed by the thousands of guardsmen but that's up to the player's.

This is all rough and I am curious if anyone has tried something similar and has any advice on running the game or avoiding obvious pitfalls (well obvious in hindsight)

 

[pemerton]

I ran a time travel scenario once - here is the link to my write up of the session.

As far as they know, the players in my scenario didn't change the past or the future. But the past they experienced did come back to haunt them - as explained here, a young woman whom they helped in the past turned out to be a mysterious figure in the gameworld's present.

I am hoping that, as my campaign moves into the epic tier, the players will want their PCs to journey back in time "into deep myth" (as The Plane Above calls it), and actually try and change the present by changing the foundational myths of the world.

I did once play in a campaign in which the GM decided, without input from the players, that all the PCs time-travelled 100 years into the future. The effect of this was that basicaly all the relationships we had built up and lore we had accumulated over a year or two and 8 or so levels of play became meaningless. It sucked, and I left the campaign not long after.

So one bit of advice would be - don't use time travel to invalidate/marginalise the players' investment in their PCs and in the gameworld!

 

[Omegaxicor]

I would like to say that was obvious but I guess not, I would hate that forget about the players, that would be the equivalent of starting a new campaign. The Time Travel would be temporary, or part of a plot that the players have to unravel to return to their Time shortly after.

I am going to read through your two links now.

EDIT: wow, I really like the scenario you came up with...I want the party to encounter a Goblin Leader and some witches JUST so I can run this scenario. It just wouldn't fit into my campaign as easy as that...I have got some ideas from the scenario, Thanks for that

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=95351]Omegaxicor[/MENTION], thanks, I'm glad you liked it and found it helpful.

 

[Ramar]

I ran a time travel campaign years ago in 3.0. It was based upon the Forgotten Realms Arcane Age: Netheril box set. In researching what I wanted to do I looked at several different systems: (1) Arcane Age rules [pass through a gate and you spend one year in the past and one month passes in the present]; (2) 2nd ed Chronomancer rules [more complicated but one caveat is that you can never be in the same place twice]; (3) Rolemaster system [time travel is relative so if you change the past then you have to stay in the past to see the effects]; or (4) "Legacy of Kain" rules where you can't change history. I ended up going with Arcane Age rules with a "Legacy of Kain" rules: the time travel was in one year jumps but pcs couldn't change the past. If you are looking for the change the time stream kind of feel, I would check out Chronomancer. The other side of the time travel campaign that I loved was the parallel worlds idea where changes still exist in other time streams. All in all, the game can be great but you want to make sure that your players are on board before hurling them through too many years.

 

[Omegaxicor]

it won't be so much of a campaign as a single or double adventure but 2 questions 1) In Legacy of Kain you change the timeline several times IIRC, 2) I like the sound of the Rolemaster system, the party are motivated NOT to change anything but a) How would the party learn the rules of Time Travel and b) How would the party know what is the right path...

I will have a look at the systems and see which I like more

EDIT: rereading it it isn't as obvious as it sounds in my head, a) and b) are rhetorical questions...
and I never asked question 2) "I like the sound of the Rolemaster system, the party are motivated NOT to change anything, where is the information on it?" was supposed to be there

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I once tried an adventure based on Time Cube, but all the players failed their SAN checks ...

 

[Ramar]

In "legacy of kain" one can only change history it two incarnations of the soulreaver (artifact) are present at the same moment (otherwise you can't change history; exception, not rule). I'll have to look for the rolemaster reference, all I remember was that it was written by Monte Cook and was based upon some scientific theory. Ultimately, discovery the rules of time travel were a part of the campaign.

 

[Sunseeker]

Time travel is tricky.

IMO, it's boring if it's fixed. If you know the future outcome is largely irrelevent of you actions, ie: the "evil king" comes to power if you save even a fraction of the city, what's the point in trying to change it? If not trying to save the city guarantees that it is destroyed and a few people die instead of many under an evil overlord, best choice if to let it be destroyed.

An unfixed future is fun. Give them a vague warning about an evil overlord, maybe a reference to a certain profession, a strange hair/eye color or a family name. Let the players try to work out if the Evil Tyrant is actually one of those people, or if one of them is the "chosen one" who might overthrow the king!

As an aside: if you have even a single player who is a Doctor Who or Star Trek fan, expect some wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey BS and some serious headcrunching.

 

[Omegaxicor]

@shidaku if you reread the posts above I said that I like the system where if the future you come from is changed for better or worse then the future you left no longer exists and so you cannot return, if you have travelled back a few weeks to avert a single disaster then no problem but if you have travelled back several thousand years then you are totally screwed not to mention that minor changes thousands of years ago affect the present in dramatic ways...

@Ramar yea sorry that was my confusion, the only people to travel back in time were the protagonists and Moebius and he needed the protagonists to change anything.