I recall that Paizo has said once or twice that they are hesitant to do timetravel plots for a number of reasons. One of which was doing design work for cultures/empires not present in the current version of Golarion that all their other books describe. If the players are not able to impact the events they'd encounter they wouldn't have much agency. If they do alter the cannon history then the result could be any number of Golarions that bear only passing resemblance to the iconic campaign setting they've carefully crafted for years. Leaving ancient history vague also ensures that they always have a vast reservoir of story hooks.
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If you go far enough into the past the players actions can't really affect the timeline. They would be like a pebble thrown in a mighty river. They might make ripples but the river isn't changing course.
Golarions recorded history is like 10,000 years. Send the pcs back that far and you don't have to worry about anything they do.
Yeah, the only way I could see a time travel AP working is if it was traveling to the future, and not the past.
i have always been dead set against time traveling Adventures, however with how good Rasputin Must Die! is and how awesome the APs have been* i say F+%~ it! bring it on!
or i'd be fine with Galt!
*story wise WotR is first class, and Mummy's Mask in my top five APs
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I'd love to see a time travel AP (for I am a patron of chaos, and in terms of things I love to add to fantasy adventures, it goes 1: robots, 2: space flight, 3: time travel), but I think things are still in the "close to zero" category. Now, that could change with enough fan clamoring, but I think time travel gets an even worse name than giving a fighter a laser gun. So I guess put me in the "fully support but don't expect to see" column.
That said, the folks at Paizo are clever, and if they decided the idea was worth it, they could come up with something pretty sweet, methinks. But it's a pretty large collection of spinning plates to balance. You want to set the campaign somewhere historically interesting, or else there's no real point in playing in the past. So late-era Azlant or Thassilon, or one of the old empires (Osirion, Jistka, Ninshabur- gah, I'd love for Casmaron to be the next region to be explored). Maybe just before, during, and after the death of Aroden.
Then we hit the problem that most of those had a big event that would be the obvious go-to in the timeline (just before Earthfall for Azlant/Thassilon, appearance of the tarrasque for Ninshabur, Aroden dying for... well, the death of Aroden). Clearly PCs will want to take a whack at stopping/futzing with the big calamity. And from there we end up with either an alternate timeline, or an impossible-to-change event that will make PCs feel their efforts are pointless.
I suggest a compromise instead of a full-on AP. I really liked the faux-time-travel in The Armageddon Echo, and that could make for a good example of how to take a time-travel detour in an AP. Same with one of the articles in one of Dragon's annual "old campaign" issues where the PCs get thrown into Istar a few days before the Cataclysm on a scavenger hunt. PCs who need to travel back into the past before some big event to get some magic item or lost lore can experience the culture of some long-distant realm for a time, and have plenty of reason to leave after they get what they need (and in fact will most likely be on a timer so they can get out before they become more dead things in the stream of history).
Actually, popping into a handful of different times to get McGuffins or whatever could make a fun AP. Sticking to just one time might be the problem, and popping to six different times might be the solution.
A time travel AP could be doable. The makings are there for it. I made a (half-jokey) post in the "Who is in secret a Veiled Master" thread about the background behind Durvin Gest's disappearance, the destruction of all copies of Pathfinder Chronicles Volume 5 [except the one reputed to be in the Grand Lodge Repository], and Volume 6 having Gest dismissing the powers of the Scepter of Ages. Clearly, Pathfinder Chronicles #6 could conceivably be a fabrication meant to act as a cover up for Gest's elimination, the errant Pathfinder Chronicles #5, AND the Scepter of Ages having huge cosmic powers.
There is a good way of allowing time travel into the past without breaking the established canon:
Send the players back in time to stop a villain from changing history.
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What if the Villains won and you have to go back in time to set things right.
I like how Second Darkness and Dark Souls 2 do "time travel". You instead inhabit a memory or a temporal echo of the past, which allows you to interact with the world without lasting consequences.
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I recall that Paizo has said once or twice that they are hesitant to do timetravel plots for a number of reasons. One of which was doing design work for cultures/empires not present in the current version of Golarion that all their other books describe. If the players are not able to impact the events they'd encounter they wouldn't have much agency. If they do alter the cannon history then the result could be any number of Golarions that bear only passing resemblance to the iconic campaign setting they've carefully crafted for years. Leaving ancient history vague also ensures that they always have a vast reservoir of story hooks.
Reign of Winter isnt "Time Trave; " per se...but you do getto go to a very cool place in book 5 :)
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While a few reasons we have not done (and don't currently plan to do) a time travel AP have been noted above, another one to consider are the number of deities that PCs might worship that weren't deities even a few thousand years in the past. What happens to a cleric of Cayden Cailean or Iomedae if they return to a time before their deity ascended?
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While a few reasons we have not done (and don't currently plan to do) a time travel AP have been noted above, another one to consider are the number of deities that PCs might worship that weren't deities even a few thousand years in the past. What happens to a cleric of Cayden Cailean or Iomedae if they return to a time before their deity ascended?
I think the simple answeris....they get F'd in the A?
Also: Just ask Jim Groves..He has an answer for anything. He will figure this Time Travel S**t out! :)
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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While a few reasons we have not done (and don't currently plan to do) a time travel AP have been noted above, another one to consider are the number of deities that PCs might worship that weren't deities even a few thousand years in the past. What happens to a cleric of Cayden Cailean or Iomedae if they return to a time before their deity ascended?
It wouldn't be too hard to come up with some handwavium ways around that. One that comes to mind is to make the time travel mechanism link the PCs to their origin time for such things. "Three days pass in the past is three days in the present," also works well with this approach and prevents the "try over and over til we get it right" problem.
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I hate time travel in almost every possible way...
... and then somebody has to go and mention Chrono Trigger.
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RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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I hate time travel in almost every possible way...
... and then somebody has to go and mention Chrono Trigger.
See, I agree that time travel done poorly can be really bad - but Chrono Trigger demonstrates that done well time travel can be amazing.
While a few reasons we have not done (and don't currently plan to do) a time travel AP have been noted above, another one to consider are the number of deities that PCs might worship that weren't deities even a few thousand years in the past. What happens to a cleric of Cayden Cailean or Iomedae if they return to a time before their deity ascended?
What lame excuse for a god can't give power to their followers before their own existence?
;)
I don't see any reason a time traveling AP would be a problem. All the APs that are currently out don't impact Glorian at all. For example what happens if the player failed Wrath of the Righteous. That changes a whole lot. Numeria wouldn't exist anymore, nor would Medev or Ustalav. The players success or failure never change the campaign setting. You reset to zero the next AP as if the last AP never happened. So you could time travel back in time and change what ever you want.
You could have a time-travel AP where, unknown to the players, success is contingent on a canonically key event occuring.
E.g.
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That's why Player's Guides get released with APs.
"The following deities are inappropriate for play in this AP." Then just list them.
Time Travel adventures would be hella fun. If by the end continuity in Golarion has changed that's no different to the World Wound being closed in some versions of Golarion because that group played through Wrath of the Righteous.
Erik Mona mentioned in the Know Direction podcast on Occult Adventures that he created a new plane called the Akashic Record. The way he describes it is "basically a psychic record of all history that's ever happened."
I wonder if it could be a method for creating a time travel adventure/adventure path for Pathfinder that wouldn't actually create some of the difficulties that the designers have otherwise mentioned that a "real" time travel AP would/could create.
God that sounds awesome.
I think the main difference between time travelling consequences and post-AP consequences is that for post AP, it's a bit easier to know how things will change since it isn't so far into the future and there isn't a second "timeline" to compare it to. For time-travelling, you have to think how the present changes, especially the further back you go.
I could definitely see time travelling in the style of Earthbound (Mother 2) or Final Fantasy 1, where you travel back in time briefly to fight the final boss. Or, perhaps a somewhat limited travelling like how Rasputin Must Die was a limited travel to Earth?
I like time travel to the past, but it can feel a bit railroady since history has to happen. I much prefer travelling to the future.
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From my own point of view, every time I run a game it's a reboot of Golarion. This has yet to really matter-- my Reign of Winter game has some of the same players from my Kingmaker game (which made it through book 3 before I moved), and what's going on with a random new kingdom up near Brevoy and Brevoy politics aren't too important to what happens in Reign of Winter. (Although if <REDACTED> had won in book 3, I suppose it could make things very different in Iobaria.)
I see an AP as an entire campaign. It's possible you might run one or two very high-level modules afterwards, but almost anything beyond that you're doing with your characters is going to be homebrew anyway. If you start a new AP, it's with a new set of characters -- so why not just reset the world? As such, world-changing results of any single AP aren't all that big a deal. For a time travelling AP, go ahead and change history! If the players know what Golarion was "supposed" to be like anyway, it just makes it that much more fun. If you manage to get all the way through the AP and start another one, just make it a new instantiation of Golarion.
Just thought of a really cool encounter that could be used in a theoretical time travel AP- the PCs run into... THEMSELVES! as their future counterparts travel back in time to stop their past selves from doing something that screws up the timeline in the future.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8
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Easy solution to several time travel issues:
Rather than have the PCs go back in time, have back in time come to the PCs. Pockets of the past are getting superimposed over the present, and famous historical figures are messing up the modern day. If you are inside the area when time gets superimposed, you remember what history was supposed to be, but outside the pocket, history gets rearranged to account for the change (I.e. The battle of Blargo was never fought because General so-and-so and his army disappeared he night before it was to take place, and because of the Andoran is a theocracy or whatever. Meanwhile you've got to deal with General Blargo and his men thinking you're enemy spies trying to interfere with his preparations for the battle)
The goal is to figure out who or what is doing this and undo the time travel. When you succeed, the time pocket pops and history goes back to normal. Since the past never actually got messed with, there's no concern over paradoxes or killing your own grandpa. Plus, since it still takes place in the modern day, clerics still get spells from modern gods.
The adventures have two flavors of fun--exploring little pieces of the past (an Azlanti wizard school, a Jitska Imperium fort, a famous battle, whatever) AND exploring alternate history versions of the modern day.
That's how I'd do a time travel AP anyway.
A time travel AP would be appropriate if/when Pathfinder ever goes the 'Version 2.0' route. The AP would be written as the last v1.0 AP...
You go back in time to save the world/catch the villain/whatever, and when you come back you find out things have changed...the very universe seems to operate by different rules :)
There has been quite a few books on time travel.
There are several views on the subject:
1) The PC's can dramatically rewrite history, changing events ( dm labor intensive to do the rewrite )
2 ) The PC's cant do anything to change the past... as they change things in the past.. they find out things aren't quite as they were ( Killing Ghengis Khan as a baby, turns out the person they killed was replaced by someone else claiming to be Ghengis Khan )
3 ) The Time Stream is mutable .. but has a plan.. as PC's change things.. the longer into the future you look the less impact the things they did has.
I think a time travel AP would be just Smurfin'