TimeWatch, my new GUMSHOE time travel RPG -- bloggage aplenty!

[Piratecat]

My lord, "bloggage" is a horrible word.

Regardless, I've been writing a series of blog posts about my new game for Pelgrane Press (the folks who publish 13th Age and Trail of Cthulhu), and I'm been a slacker for not posting them here as well. Time to fix that! I'll gradually post ones already written, and write new ones here as well. We're Kickstarting the game in January, and I figured it'd be fun to BS about it first. To be notified when the Kickstarter goes live, click http://bit.ly/1hSd99K

So with that in mind, I'd like to present "Battle of Antietam," the cover art for my GUMSHOE investigative time travel game TimeWatch. Those are three of the iconic agents: Kelfala, 23rd century West African starship pilot; Skegg, psychic velociraptor from an alternate timeline; and Altani, daughter of Genghis Khan.

Heh heh. Psychic velociraptor.

 

[Piratecat]

TimeWatch, Preparedness, and You (or "why was there a rocket launcher in that broom closet?")

One of my favorite things about GUMSHOE games is the Preparedness ability. It's an ability that's designed to eliminate gearing-up at the beginning of the play session. Instead of trying to guess at what weaponry, gear, explosives and devices you're going to need for the mission, you're assumed to bring a bunch of things with you that you can use on the fly. When you need an item, make a Preparedness test. If you're successful, you pull the item out of your kit and you're ready to go.

I love this because it rewards improvisational creativity. My friend Cerebral Paladin drove this home when, as noted in the p. 184 sidebar in Kenneth Hite 's Night's Black Agents, CP's character produced a rocket launcher and blew my escaping bad guy's helicopter right out of the sky. Bastard.

In TimeWatch, this conventional use of Preparedness still holds true, but hey -- it's a time travel game! That means you have carte blanche for Bill-and-Ted-style tactics. Sitting at a table in a restaurant when being confronted by an adversary, it's perfectly legitimate to say "When this mission is over, I'm going to time travel back here in disguise and strap a pistol to the underside of this table." Spend a few points, make your Preparedness test, and the pistol's just where you expect it should be.

That's true, at least, as long as you haven't previously looked at the underside of that table. If you had, paradox would have prevented this trick from working. That makes a closed door a TimeWatch agent's best friend, because until that door is open, your team could use Preparedness to put whatever they need on the other side. Once you've seen what's there, though, you'll have to be creative to get new items into that scene.

This ability has gotten used extensively in playtest, mostly because it's a classic time travel trick and because it's so much freakin' fun to create weapons and tools on the fly. If you have 8 or more points of Preparedness, your character also has the Flashback booster, which lets you state that this sort of countermeasure is already in place. "Oh, he's running from us down the beach? Later, remind me to travel back here and bury a few neural disruption landmines under the sand over there." (roll, roll, WHOOMP.) "Ah, there they go now."

The other reason I like Preparedness is because TimeWatch is a game where you may be jumping forwards and backwards in time during the same mission, and the disruptor rifle you need in the 24th century won't be tremendously popular back in the witch trials of colonial Salem. If you want to get a chronomorphic weapon instead (a weapon that changes shape to match the time period), or a local weapon, no problem; make a Preparedness test. Just try not to get accused of witchcraft in the process.

 

[RangerWickett]

It's about time you posted these here.

Or should I say, about space?

 

[Piratecat]

Well, it's sort of a wibbly-wobbley, timey-wimey thing. Ahem.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

I've seen this post before somewhere else, but good to see it up here!

 

[Piratecat]

Yup, this will be partially redundant with the G+ page.

Hey, I wrote about investigative spends!

TimeWatch investigative spends tend to be more powerful than investigative spends in other GUMSHOE games, and time travel definitely makes for some unexpected possibilities. For instance, here's the rules text for a sample spend in Forgery.

Forgery sample spend: A one-point spend could make a forged identity completely legitimate by actually going back in time to establish your bona fides years in the past. A one-point spend could allow you to create art forgeries without access to the original work by "borrowing" it from the future or past to use as an example. Alternatively, a one-point spend, along with spending a point of Paradox Prevention, might allow you to avoid extra work by simply stealing the artwork from a parallel dimension that's unlikely to miss it.

There's definitely a TimeWatch mission in someone stealing masterpieces from alternate timelines, and then selling them as the real McCoy.

This is true for other abilities as well.

Anthropology sample spend: Spending one or more points of Anthropology may get you an isolated ancient civilization that worships you like a god, but does so in a way that doesn't ripple through the timeline. You can take refuge there to heal or recover without fear of being betrayed, and for two points (and a point in Military Science) you might briefly recruit its citizens to act as cannon fodder for your own personal army.

If you're thinking, "man, Kevin read way too much Amber as a kid," you're probably right. I love the idea of time travelers reappearing to ancient civilizations as gods, and all the plot hooks that creates.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Oh wow.

I am buying this.

 

[Mallus]

#1 - this sounds great!

#2 - [MENTION=2]Piratecat[/MENTION], ever read Jeff Smith's RASL? It's a great comic, and the "stealing artworks from parallel dimensions" made me think of it.

#3 - how much is setting/campaign baked in? My gaming group was joking one night about a time-travel campaign as a break from D&D. It started, around midnight, riffing about our AD&D game.

"You did fight dinosaurs once. On the coast. They floated in on icebergs made of time."
"Don't you mean timebergs?"
"Oh, I know the Timebergs. Lovely people. Herb and Miriam".
"As a matter of fact, Herb Timeberg is my dentist."
"Isn't he a time traveler?"
"No, he's a dentist... who happens to travel through time."
"I know them, too. They've got this great little summer place in the Mesozoic."
"In the Saber-tooth Catskills? I've been there!..."

After about 15 minutes of this, and the creation of various other bits, like Joel and Ethel Timeberg, their cousins the time-traveling spies, we looked at each other and said, "OK, so when do play this?".

 

[Piratecat]

I haven't heard of RASL -- I'll track it down!

The setting is utterly fluid. There's an assumed default setting, but that's easily jettisoned; the time travel mechanics are far more important. The only thing to keep in mind is that, especially if used for an investigative adventure (which is what GUMSHOE really shines at), the PCs are presumed to be highly competent. I don't think TimeWatch would work as well for a game like Time and Temp, where the PCs are incompetent temporary workers. Other than that, though? You could model Sliders, Terminator, Continuum, Time Patrol, Simon Hawke's Time Wars books, and far more. Heck, I'm working on a Quantum Leap-like solo setting where your knowledge stays the same each game, but your General abilities change as you jump from body to body. The Timebergs would fit right in.

 

[Piratecat]

TimeWatch and Paradox (or "what to do when you accidentally shoot your own ancestor.")

One of the big questions for time travel games is "how does it deal with paradox?" For TimeWatch, my answer was "if I can't come back in time to help myself in a fight, how do I even know I'm in a time travel game?" Stupid time tricks were a must, and that meant finding a solution that was easy, memorable, and consistent with GUMSHOE mechanics. I hate referring to rule books during play, so whatever I decided on had to be something you could keep in your head and easily remember.

The answer came from the classic GUMSHOE ability "Stability," used with great success in horror games like Trail of Cthulhu and Esoterrorists. It's traditionally a sanity stand-in, measuring your ability to keep it together when horrible things are happening around you. In a horror movie, when the protagonist starts to scream or twitch or unload their revolver at the shadows, they've probably failed a Stability test.

In TimeWatch this has been hacked into the General ability Chronal Stability, which measures the degree to which you're anchored in time. When Marty McFly starts fading at the end of Back to the Future, his Chronal Stability has dropped below 0. Drop too far and the universe can erase you from ever existing, or can subsume you and give you a history and personality from whatever time period you're currently in. Time travel risks a little bit of chronal stability, as does paradox. If you do something impossible, like your future self coming back to help you in a fight, you'll be making a Chronal Stability test to weather the paradox. The worse the paradox, the more difficult the test. If you're playing a goofy game, tests are made less severe; if your game is particularly dangerous or punishing to casual paradox, the tests can become more severe.

These points are restored by the Reality Anchor ability, where your allies remind you of who you are and why you're there. An agent with a good Reality Anchor skill can keep the rest of their team nicely grounded, and keep them out of danger as they clock in and out of time.

One Investigative ability addresses paradox as well. Paradox Prevention is an ability that tells you when things have gone wrong in time. Spending these points can give +3 on a Chronal Stability test, sure, but they let affect reality to a certain extent. This occasionally allows you to bypass paradox and pull wacky stuff out of your hat. If you want to try a cool time trick and the GM thinks it is overpowered, she may allow you if you spend one or more Paradox Prevention points. They're a resource that only renews after each mission completes, so they allow a certain amount of clever time tricks without overbalancing the game.

If your game has parallel timelines, Paradox Prevention points are also spent to travel from one timeline to another parallel world. Some timelines are more difficult to access than others. For instance, TimeWatch foes are usually exiled to a prison parallel that requires one point to enter but 10 to leave. Send a villain there, and it's unlikely you'll ever see them again.

The result? Agents who are cautious and aware of chronal stability throughout the main part of the investigation, but who have the resources to pull out all the stops and use dirty time tricks when the crap hits the fan and their investigation gets messy. Frankly, that's just the way I want it.

TimeWatch is an upcoming Pelgrane Press GUMSHOE RPG about time cops, by Kevin Kulp, due to be Kickstarted in January 2014. Stay in touch on Twitter at @ Timewatchrpg. To be notified when the Kickstarter goes live, click http://bit.ly/1hSd99K