There's few rules on time travel mainly because it gives headaches to both GMs and players alike. Also, to model time travel mechanically would require some very game breaking stuff. After all, the three major time alteration spells -- haste, slow, and time stop -- are among the best in the game.
Also, there's many ways time travel can work in fiction. I've seen iterations where each moment of time is essentially its own plane. I've seen a setting where dinosaurs rule the past abandoned by creatures living in the present. The Strange by Monte Cook is basically D&D Doctor Who using Numenera's rule set. I've seen some settings imply that the First World and the Shadow Plane are actually the past and future of the Material Plane, which is why they look similar. There's tons of ways to do time travel. It's better a GM decides how time travel works than have Paizo give a concrete explanation. I suppose they could make a campaign setting book that proposes many possible systems.
Also, they already made a book on the planes. They do touch a bit on the time plane.
From D&D and Pathfinder canon, if you were going to use dimensions to represent planar location, you need at least 2 (the 2 dimensional alignment graph and the 2 dimensional elemental relations) and probably 3 (otherwise representing the Inner and Outer Planes separately becomes convoluted).
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think the whole mess would be best avoided, but if you simply must use time travel in your game I recommend Austin Powers style (or Bill & Ted).
That sounds pretty cool. Maybe your time travel could be tied to planar travel. That would make it impossible for your party to be in two places on the same plane at once.
What I meant by my comment is that time travel would have very serious ramifications if it were possible. Some movies take it very seriously - though even then usually not as seriously as they should. Some movies take it less seriously and let "realism" take a back seat to the story, or in the case of my two example it takes a back seat to humor. I guess my point is that working out neat details like have is cool, but don't let adherance to "reality" ruin a good story.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I tried to post about 10 dimensional space, but nobody wanted to touch on it.
To try again, in an unearthly child, the doctor's granddaughter wouldn't solve a puzzle about the 3 dimensions without the next 2. She said 4 was time and 5 was space. I interpreted that as space being where alternate timelines are.
In the 5th dimension, there are other timelines, and empty areas where a timeline self destructed. When you go back in time and change things, you start a new main river bed, while the moment you left becomes a dry river bed. In the DC comics shows, you can still have remnants who come before they were erased in the dry timeline. Alternately, the GM can have the gods take the dry section, and create a new timeline from the section.
Some timelines, such as one where the undead wiped out the living, die out completely, again unless someone like The Wormlord salvages it. They could create for them rivers of blood and trees with human flesh growing on them.
Where an orb of oblivion dumps out into the 5th dimension, you have a ground up slurry that other timelines draw on to power spells and miracles. The soul of someone thus destroyed may end up being the summoned owlbear that dies over and over again.
The 6th dimension has many planes where the natural laws are so different that they are not even alternate timelines. Oz and Narnia are in different places in the 6th dimension. Reality and Golarion are mutually exclusive. It obviously touches on the ethereal because Demiplanes that grow enough end up vibrationally adjacent. Where's the evil universe where every guy wears a goatee and every girl wears an eyepatch? About a half mile over in the 6th dimension.
The 7th dimension would be elemental. It runs from a mix of all the elements, like in 4th edition, but less demons. At the other extreme, you have the periodic elements where every different atomic number has their own semi infinite plane. Plane shift just takes you to the fire, air, water, earth point on the elemental spectrum.
The 8th dimension is from the deep astral to the alignment planes. Once again, plane shift will only take you certain places.
The 9th dimension is called the thought forms plane and you can travel there in dreams or imagination. Some bodiless gods and horrors spend most of their time there, at the pure thought end. You need to bring a bubble of your own existence or your matter will dissolve on a quantum level. Be careful an illip doesn't follow you back home.
The tenth dimension is oneness at one end and complete separation at the other. Your one god is there. The oneness has sent copies of small facets of it to the far end to try to figure out what it is. Thus you get the divine sparks in souls, the power of gods, and meddling energy balls.
Some scientists are now trying to say there is an 11th dimension. I think that's existence to non existance. They should leave Imara alone. Possibly matter at one end and antimatter at the other.
The astral, ethereal, and shadow are all ten dimensional. They are interpenetrating planes, not dimentions.
At whatever point I lose you, just ignore that part. Also, you can rearrange the order somewhat.
You could have phase spiders spinning webs between the timelines, keeping them from crashing into each other. They enter timelines, usually when they are hungry.
You could have phase spiders spinning webs between the timelines, keeping them from crashing into each other. They enter timelines, usually when they are hungry.
In the far far future of Brian Aldiss' Hothouse, giant spiders were spinning a web connecting the Earth to the Moon.
Watching the current season of the Flash! is an ample demonstration of the pitfalls of making time travel part of your games.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I compare everything to "Enterprise" to keep my standards low.
Time travel usually works best if you make the whole campaign all about it. Time travel just tossed in into a story seldom works out unless it's a comedy.
Heck, Prisoner of Azkaban is among the best work of the Harry Potter series, and the time travel was rather entertaining and remarkably well done in isolation. Yet, the Time-Turner created one of the biggest plot holes in the entire series that was so bad that the author later wrote an article regretting its inclusion and made a retcon that all Time Turners in the universe were conveniently destroyed.
I compare everything to "Enterprise" to keep my standards low.
I used to use Voyager for this purpose . . . .
I compare everything to "Enterprise" to keep my standards low.I used to use Voyager for this purpose . . . .
Galactica 1980 is my goto for this purpose.
If you've ever played Chrono Trigger, to me that feels the most satisfying time traveling.
The Winter's Heart AP did some time travel.
The Winter's Heart AP did some time travel.
** spoiler omitted **
That's not time travel. The Golarion timeline matches that period, not ours.
Time travel is pretty much DM fiat. And planar travel, for that matter. What consequences an intervention in the past can have on some alternate present begin to boggle the mind. And fiction offers a wide gamut of contingent causality, anything from disruptions smoothing themselves out over the ensuing decades or centuries (last week's "Timeless" series saw Cornwallis killed in passing, long before he can surrender to Washington, "one Redcoat is much like another"), to stepping on a single butterfly upsetting the evolutionary pyramid - as in Bradbury's "A sound of thunder".
Planar travel depends so much on how you conceive of your cosmology and multiple universes. Seems to me that a quasi-infinite multiverse fits most fantasy worlds better than any notion of a singular and unique "prime material plane".
Any attempt to quantify and set up rules to govern the eight or ten (or however many) dimensions of this multiverse seem doomed to failure. Players have to simply accept the DM's railroad and do their thing in whatever corner of some new plane or time, and hope things will somehow "work out" in the end.
This said, there are many excursions into other planes and some into other times in existing Pathfinder scenarios and APs. As long as the potential destinations are kept limited, it can work.
In my games time travel doesn't exist, per se. Instead, any potential "Time Travelers" simply travel to an alternate dimension/universe that's identical to their own, except at a different point of its timeline.
Not a complete timeline in both cases I hope. You run the risk of a later group going the other way and affecting the first group.
That's why I like "Time is a river". Also, you can go forward in time, then later redirect the river. Of course, having two different memories of the same period of time can harm character's minds. You can handle that by giving characters multiple answers. "The duke is dead, or alive." "They have 10 or 12 charges in their wand."
Pathfinder doesn't like multiple versions of a character at the same time. Look at the clone spell. Time travel spells will likewise overwrite past you with future you. A temporary trip into the past will put past you into a timeless, extra dimensional space till you go home to your time. That idea can be used for trips into the near future, and other timelines.
Galactica 1980 is my goto for this purpose.I compare everything to "Enterprise" to keep my standards low.I used to use Voyager for this purpose . . . .
That works too. Even has a cheesy time travel section.
There are reasons, why they avoided to write those rules :)
Timetravel is best avoided at all cost, except as plot device under very restricted conditions. The way time portals work in "The Anubis Gates" (by Tim Powers) is a feasible method, because it allows a timetravel plot, but keeps players from meddling.
We had that in 1E, when you had time differentials between planes and time elementals, both of which could be used to timetravel around the place. The less it is used the better :)
("Let's go and throttle Iuz in his cradle and save Greyhawk a lot of grief. And us.")