Okay, so writing an adventure and I thought up an NPC that starts the entire adventure.
Basically something happens years into the future(monsters take over the world) and an NPC travels via Time Dragon to rewrite history. He helps the NPCs but I wanted him to be a messenger not an all powerful DMPC so I made the rule that the Time Dragon cannot take him to when he already exists. Also he wants to not muck up causality enough so that he'd never be born (otherwise he wouldn't exist to help the PCs in the first place) So he can only go back so far. Also this puts a time limit on what he can do being that he'll be born by the end of the campaign.
How do I write this so that this character reasonably needs to orchestrate the PCs to stop the monsters and how he'd interact with him.
I figured that sometime later in the campaign the NPC meets them for the 'first' time for him and remembers them and whatever they have to say about him from the 'future' including the time near the middle of the campaign they encounter the oldest version of him who dies leading him to decide that it's their destiny to stop the crisis not him since he dies trying to stop things in the first place.
Does that make sense?
Why does the NPC need to stay with the PCs?
Why does the NPC need to stay with the PCs?
He does not. I assumed that he was an NPC that shows up about once every three levels and disappears within thirty minutes.
Why does the NPC need to stay with the PCs?or better yet, does he really need to survive giving his message?
I thought it would be cool if the PCs could meet an NPC in the wrong order.
I'd say that he shows up once, does a cryptic exposition, and then dies. If you give the players just enough information that they just have to go to a new location to find a bread trail you won't need the NPC to keep popping back in. Reign of Winter does a pretty good job in the first book of "NPC who gives you your mission and then dies."
Okay, there's several ways you can go about this. This could be like 12 Monkeys where the NPC does not have all the information about the catathrope. It could also work like the Androids Saga in Dragon Ball Z where his information is inaccurate because something he hasn't foreseen has changed the timeline, which becomes part of the mystery.
You mean like River Song who died when The Doctor first met her?I thought it would be cool if the PCs could meet an NPC in the wrong order.Why does the NPC need to stay with the PCs?or better yet, does he really need to survive giving his message?
Now that I think of it, yes, I guess so. Dies early on to make sure they don't die so that he can meet them in the future (his past).
Changing timelines could be a factor. Logically the NPC would only have historical knowledge about what happened and wouuld need to meet the PCs in order to piece together what really happened.
What you have to do is think along story arc terms. Think of how your campaign begins, procedes, and ends. In those terms you draw the timline of your story NPC. I'd say get rid of the time dragon and use one of those famously unreliable artifacts instead as Hickman did in "Time of the Twins".
If push comes to shove I may reintroduce the dragon if I need to simplify things. If I think of the story as beginning, middle and end the Time Dragons have limit of 3 time jumps. Or I can make the NPC a Draconic bloodline Sorcerer and make it a bloodline power just for him.
I only went with Time Dragon because it was the thing that I know of that in the rules does time travel. Also space is involved even though not directly.
Dot for later.
hey. if i may, let me give you some time travling tip-off.
i had a time trevling npc go around messing aobut sending my players to difrent kinds of tesks in my game.(it started with me gaming for two groups with brothers in each of them,who talked about the games, and using the same dungeon for each aprty. only later on did they find out one was actuly doing it 500 years after the other party did. so doors the first one broke were gone by the time the 2nd party came etc.that led to the two parties meeting the same npc (the travler) who was jumping all over time trying to make sure the world won't go down the way it did in his time.
anywya. the points:
1:paradox ruling:
- the "self destroy paradox".this is a simple rule, but as the gm you must decide how to work with it.my rule was that anything that will involve a paradox happening to the one who started it(edit,which would prevent him from starting siad paradox) does not acure. since time is one complete thing the fact that in the present you exist mean that anything that you did when you went to the past and changed it didn't include anything that will prevent you to goto the past and change it.
- this bring the why change paradox. also known as "if i go change something bad and succid,then it won't happen and i won't have a reason to go back and change it so then it will acure and we have a loop". this can be fixed by the forming of a side loop.(stole it from the comics dragon mango where a gnome use the fastest rollercoast in the universe.you actly get off it before you go on it) it goes like this. you first go back to the past to change what ever need changing ,but before you do, you leave in the past specific instruction to yourslef (that will last till you get them) to go and do this change,no matter why!!
thos the 1st one to go cahnge it does it to prevent something from happening(the side loop) ,the rest do it becuase they were told to.(of course said instruction should include:" and leave yourslef these exect instructions"
2: the orders. in my game magic didn't go well through time. and the guy giving the tasks to the party was kind of a fugitive from the law. on the run form the "time police' from his time. so he had ot find a way to "talk" to the pc's. this was done simply by using a notebook. he had the earlier and futore version of it,the party had the "present" book. he wrote in the past book stuff they needed to read. and they wrote in the present to talk back and he would read the foture book to know what they said.this of course made the book super importent. since they had ot keep it safe to last till the end so they can put it where the npc would find it .and of course it had to be stolen at some part for a side quest ;)
3: the fine detail. one of the nice things to pull is give a fact that in the futore something is known to happen.( a war lost. a party of thivies got away etc). and then pull out the finer details that was never mantioned. like in my case a squad of time cops go back to arrest the travler,and since they cheked before how the arrest will go and saw no casulties on their side they were overconfident. thing is with the party's help they were taken down alive.
same can be done with having deeds tha perty do have a hugh effect latter on.(saving a lone goblin who later on went and built an empire named after his rule model- the parties paladin etc)
I have a question: Assuming this NPC gets the PCs to stop the 'bad future' he would not exist to tell them about it. Should I make this a part of how things develop or should I go with the idea that he is purposely creating a new timeline and abandoning his own? Should he be effectively killing himself in order for others to not have a horrifying timeline? Should he want to preserve some things about the timeline so that the disaster can still exist but his timeline can have the means to end it in the future.
What you have to do is think along story arc terms. Think of how your campaign begins, procedes, and ends. In those terms you draw the timline of your story NPC. I'd say get rid of the time dragon and use one of those famously unreliable artifacts instead as Hickman did in "Time of the Twins".If push comes to shove I may reintroduce the dragon if I need to simplify things. If I think of the story as beginning, middle and end the Time Dragons have limit of 3 time jumps. Or I can make the NPC a Draconic bloodline Sorcerer and make it a bloodline power just for him.
I only went with Time Dragon because it was the thing that I know of that in the rules does time travel. Also space is involved even though not directly.
Time traveling is the kind of thing you don't bother with rules for. And the Time Dragon entry really only uses Time for exotic combat maneuvers.
The rules aren't important. It's an NPC, just make it work the way you want it to. If ti's an artifact, it's one that only he makes work, and it shatters after the last scripted jump. You're giving a ton of thought to one aspect that's better spent in working out other kinks in your campaign.
I understand, and I'm mostly just attached because when seeing formians and time dragons in bestiary 4 is where the campaign started. If its narratively better I dispense of the time dragon and make it an artifact. Originally the NPC was going to BE a time dragon that takes the PCs to the future to see what they have to stop and them puts them back where they were. That seemed too simple and not as interesting as meeting a man in the wrong order of time so I picked up on the time guy from Ben 10 and went from there.
Oh, one thing to add.
I just watched an episode of Community where the characters had counterparts from a timeline that got dark. One reason to get rid of the time dragon is to allow for dark future PCs. Before I had evil versions of the party: One previously extracted from a PC who was possessed by an evil spirit, joined by two others who 'purified' themselves of revenge and didn't properly dispose of the byproduct, that was fun and I'd jump at the opportunity to do it again. They could be transformed Half-Formian versions of them from the future. (Formians discovered psionics and took over the future) Narratively this is messy though, so I have some reluctance.
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You can do all kinds of stuff. Someone suggested that your time traveler show up, deliver the message, then die. That's fine... and then he can show up again later. Because maybe the appearance when he died was the last one for him, but who says he was visiting the PCs in chronological order? He can have visited them later first.
Or handle it a-la Prince of Darkness, where he's not physically back, he's just projecting. So he can fade in and out, parts of his message can be garbled.
Or maybe the longer he's back - either physically or as just a projection - the more temporal disturbances are caused, motivating quick visits.
I also love 12 Monkeys where the time traveler doesn't have all the information so he can only reveal partial or flawed info about the future.
Fun idea!