Need help with a campaign idea


Advice


So I haven't actually written anything in quite some time, I've been running AP's for my group, and I feel like getting back into the swing of things. But I come to the community because I need help. The inspiration of this comes from one of the worst games I've ever played in and I want to fix that. The setting is Golarion pretty simple, probably somewhere in the Inner Sea possibly Varisia don't need help with the area, I need help with a few mechanics and I will explain.

The concept is that an ancient cyclops (cyclops Time Oracle 20) is trying to bring the Ghol Ghan empire to the current world to take over. Time travel will be one of the recurring things, and useful knowledges would be History and possibly Engineering for certain things. Every arc of the campaign would be a setup to attacking a large fortress, when the party reaches the innermost chamber they run into a temporal field and are suddenly teleported (forced through time) to a different location. When the party finishes whatever major task is involved they rejoin the fight for the fortress at a different part of the fortress, and must move along, unlocking doors, moving larger threats etc out of the way of their previous selves all while not getting caught. Eventually they come to the inner most chamber again and hit a different level of the temporal shield and repeat. I think starting as Pathfinder Core and every time the group hits the temporal shields giving them a free retraining for anything is something I would like, but what kind of penalties would I use if the party catches themselves or fails to remove a challenge or threat?


So, essentially you're having them portal through time in the same fortress, potentially crossing paths with themselves, and having to remove threats over and over, not reaching their goal until it suits the story to do so? That seems... challenging and possibly even a bit frustrating.

You asked though about penalties of temporal crossover. Well, at the very least loss of potential XP. There's also the idea of bestowing a negative level that might become permanent if not saved against in 24 hours. Of course the greatest threat would be death. How that death occurs however would be up to you as the GM. Have them slowly fade McFly style, or simply have a heart attack and drop on the spot in Time Cop mode; whatever you decide.


That's actually along the lines of what I was thinking. The whole go back in time would at first send them to the right point in time to remove a layer of this temporal shield. I'm no Dr. Who fan but the whole he appears where and when he needs to is the general idea, solve that problem, go through the fortress in a different route do certain things or negative levels. I'll have to pick a few random points in Golarion history to alter or have the pc's fix as part of my adventure. It does seem like something frustrating, but I feel like it's a good theme that hasn't been done for my group in a while. Not since we played Deadlands and Deadlands: The Wasted West with a previous gm.


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so, time travel. wow, you really don't want to make this easy on yourself do you? :)

my first advice is: don't do it. but that's not what you're here for so ...

An interesting way to do it might be:
place your BBEG in a location where he is doing his summoning or spell or whatever the mcguffin is.

then the first time have the party travel to his location (while fighting and kicking ass. (or hell, make them fail miserably, then when the magic backlash hits them they get a do-over)

and through the whole quest keep saying things like "it's blocked, you have to go around." "it's a dead end." etc.
when the heroes finally reach him it's to late and they get engulfed by an energy blast as the magic starts.

when the heroes come to they are in a different time and now they can go about figuring out how to remove any of those obstacles you have been throwing at them.

so ... you're going to need a map over the whole fortress, a big one, with details. this is mostly for yourself.
everytimke the characters do something in the fortress or travel somwhere in it you must make a note on it. maybe having a different coloured pen for each time jump and literally tracing their paths as the go about messing with history?

you will probably also need the complete history of the fortress since it was built: the original blueprints, what has been added throughout generations, forgotten rooms walled off, damage from weather or enemies and so on.

it sounds a bit daunting to me, but if you pull it off you can make it like a large scale puzzle with them going through this place in several time periods, fighting invaders from the north 500 years ago one day, then the next they are trying to influence the lord of the keep 200 years later into making an extra hallway, or maybe sabotaging the place themselves to make a fast route (or a secret entrance) for themselves the next time they travel this way.

in the process they get to meet many important ancestors, get to see weddings and funerals, save heirs or topple corrupted rulers, and maybe become a part of the place themselves as their items, actions and liknesses are kept or recorded at different times

and maybe each time they return, they are at the start of the battle, and they get to see the results of their manipulations, and if they fail the next time they have a new idea of whatn stopped them this time ...

throwing some unexpected curveballs their way could be fun, but don't make iut into a neverending story where no matter what day do they never win. nobody likes that.

those are my cents ...

-and I just realized that my idea is pretty much the fantasy version of the movie edge of tomorrow ... oh well.

-LO


Oh I know the entire campaign should not be a run through the fortress and run hit the wall and do it again. That would be terrible. Over an entire campaign (I'm thinking 1-17 or so) do that 6 times. Starting out with just core and opening up a wider and wider selection of books to the players based on what they accomplished or their background. Like the first time they should probably be around level 3 and I open up the APG, UC, and UM, the second time between 5-6 I ask if they love their culture, their race, their homeland, or their religion and start allowing books such as the region books, different deity based books, races of and arg, and other kinds of books. I just have to get to writing and planning because it's going to be a lot of work.


That sounds awesome; I'd play the heck out of that on either side of the screen.

Sounds like you'd have some places where the higher level versions of the PCs are supporting the unsuspecting lower-level versions in the same timeline, but there's also a whole lot of opportunity for helping their past selves by going to a prior point in the timeline to get things set up correctly, make sure items are set up in the right locations, etc.

Whether from temporal overlap or paradox or just a consequence of time slippage, perhaps consider imposing some change on the character and then letting them retrain the rest to adjust. Requires good notekeeping and prior consent from the players, but would be fun to have the occasional point where you run a flash-forward cutscene and show how a character's actions just created a paradox on themselves, and now they've suddenly become a (roll on reincarnation table) bugbear.

Time travel's also a way to justify bringing back thought-to-be-dead characters from elsewhere in the timeline, whether PCs, big bads, or PCs-who-have-become-big-bads.

Again, setting expectations and getting permission from your players is a big part of making this work -- this campaign doesn't sound like something that works well with players who see the GM/campaign as background to making their cahracters "just so".


Example of how something might go directly in the fortress.

2-3 lvl pcs - DM: You come to a door that refuses to budge, possibly barred from the other side, the door is made of iron and sized for a giant. The sounds of combat from the other side suddenly stop, you hear what could be a few murmurs. Suddenly the barring on the door is undone. As you enter the room the only sights you see is the bloody corpses of 2 cyclops and several large crates.

Lvl 6 pc's - DM: After your battle with the 2 cyclops in the room give me a knowledge engineering check (relatively low DC). Okay This is a room you've encountered before, the dead creatures are positioned in a way that you remember, in a few moments that door across the way will become unbarred and you walk through. You never saw yourself before, so how do you do it? There are plenty of large crates to create a hiding place or are you more creative?

If pc's don't hide maybe I write up a paradox table or have the party suffer a negative level. I'm still working on a lot of things, but this is something I really want to write up for my group.


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Have you played time splitters? This concept seems to be very much in the same vein. If you haven't, look it up. Great game, and could be worth a wealth of ideas for you.


"Time to split!"

Such an amusing game.


So, if I am getting this right, the game will look kinda like this:

Heroes assault the castle. While they were expecting massively powerful creatures inside- things that would wipe the party without blinking- the trek through the castle to is heart was only tough for their level.

Once entering the heart, they step through a portal, appearing in another part of the, about a day before they arrived. They work their way through the castle along a new path, slaying monsters and going up in power. Sometimes, they cross their first path, slaying a monster that wasn't there on their first trip (which was yesterday). They are kept from certain areas by obstacles or monsters they cannot defeat. Eventually, they arrive back at the portal room and step in.

Again, they appear in another part of the castle, a day prior to the last trip (two days before the original trip in). They take a new path through, defeating new monsters in the path that wasn't there two days ago, and get through several new obstacles. THey cross over both paths they took before, and remove monsters, traps, and obstacles that weren't there before (or when their first selves went through). They reach the portal, and step through.

The process repeats until all of the characters are 17th level, and when they step through the portal, they are transported to the evil bad guy's "I-fight-heroes-here room".

That about right? Cuz that sounds cool.

If you made each of the trips a level, you would have about 17 different paths. It can get confusing to make, if they don't all cross once, and in order. I suggest starting with the original path (simple sketch would work), filling it full of 17 levels of monsters to be defeated by the "previous" heroes. Then build the each path that crosses them.

Should one of the characters die, have the room go dark, a cloud come up, a few seconds or minutes go by, and then, when the lights come up, the dead hero has been raised. Later, the party gets the opportunity to lower the lights and raise their previous fallen comrade. This would be hilarious if the cleric has to raise himself.


Groundhog Day


Not quite groundhog day. Go through castle fight stuff for your level, get teleported to some point in time (could be 50 years before and you get to meet your grandfather and can influence who you are now to a few hundred years before, to a few thousand where you can even influence things like an entire dwarven clan or more) deal with some problem that the cyclops time oracle created there (I have to do more than make an entire campaign about a single castle) and then back through the castle. Basically fix things to re stabilize the time stream to stop the big bad guy then when you mess up all of his plans and his contingencies you fight him. I would only make it about 6 trips through the castle, I have to work out a possible paradox table in case of things like the cleric raising themselves, because that's not right so something should happen, it could be bad, it could be good, or it could be something as simple as your skin changes color kind of deal.

Grand Lodge

So you want to have it so when the characters go back in time they are stopping something the BBEG has send to a certain time period to mess things up for the locals and the PCs have to stop it? All the while they get to certain parts and are "blocked" from entering until a "cut scene" has passed?

I would so play that, are you going to have them make a few of the same PC but at different levels?


Less Groundhog Day, more Samurai Jack.

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