I've had this game in the works for quite a while now, and it feels like it just might be too much story for me to handle.
The jist is as follows: each character receives an item/message/clue from a mysterious stranger that leads them to a location where they will be able to travel back in time to a specific date.
Around that time, terrible thing X happens.
If they stop X from occurring, Y happens instead.
The meat of the game will be discovering/dealing with various butterfly effect-type stuff, going back to the same point in time, etc.
There will hopefully be a significant moral quandary where they realize that terrible thing X really prevents more terrible thing Z.
And I will try and throw in a powerful organization that's aware of X, Y, Z and so on--is probably responsible for a lot of the stuff in motion--and the PC's ability to travel through time.
So...how would you begin to plan out this sort of thing? I want to make a flow chart, but I'm struggling to even know where to begin.
I think I need to start with various events and alternate timeline versions of those events and connect them with the different avenues the players will most likely take.
What do you think?
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I guess I'd start with figuring out how to make the adventure visible to the players. They need to know the limits and the stakes to move forward.
If you take each of the characters from a different potential future timeline, they'd be able to compare notes about cause and effect before making a choice. Give them a few major events that they know ended differently for each of them.
Things like
-Major ritual spell cast in different countries
-significant NPC dies in different places
-battle won by different side
This gives them time sensitive plot hooks that can be selectively addressed and even if each event doesn't actually matter, you can include more relevant clues at each event.
Tell them they are the heroes that came closest to success in each time line as your group selection hook. Maybe mystery guy just went back and killed people to see who had the biggest impact by not existing and assumed it worked the other way. That'd be sort of entertaining since each player would be meeting the group thinking all the others were already dead.
As a system for managing cause and effect, I recommend grouping npcs and factions by likelihood to fulfill a role within the story. So you'd have something like:
The [king, queen, crown prince, crown princess, general] was assassinated by the [head of government, head of military, foreign assassin] so that certain events are maintained contextually. If an event continues to happen despite intervention, the players will know that the motivating force and their objective haven't yet been influenced.
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remember to add the band-aid time loop when needed.
it goes like this.
in normal time travel. say they are sent back to prevent X from happening by killing Z.
they go back do the deed and X is prevented. now if they go to their own time x never happened. but then..there was no reason to go back in time to prevent x. so they are not sent and x happen in the end (and start the loop again, they are sent to kill z. etc etc etc)
- the on\off time loop.
so how to fix this?
here comes the band-aid time loop into action. when told to go back in time to fix x by killing Z. they are also told to leave a massage for themselves (or their operator) in which are the instruction to send them back in time to kill Z (no matter why) AND that they must leave a massage to do so - with the same instructions. (the massage should be left before killing Z, just in case of instant butterfly effect)
if done right, the first time they go back in time to kill Z is to prevent X. but after that every time the time comes to get rid of Z they go back not to fix X but to follow the instructions they got, which are still there since they also leave them for their future selves.
problem solved.
Maybe if I offered up some more specific information:
- each character will have a mysterious something or other from a mysterious somebody. This will bring them all to an abandoned underground complex in the woods.
- one of the features of this complex are several large psychotropic mushroom gardens. It is the consumption of these fungi that allow someone to travel in time, but only to a specific date in the recent past, and at a cumulative cost to the traveler.
- something bad happened on that day in the past, which has something to do with preventing something even worse in the future.
- the meat of the game will be attempting to prevent the bad thing, understand the worse thing and avoid the vague and ominous forces at work.
I hope that helps provide a little more direction.
so, not going into ideas of what the x bad thing and z worse thing that might happen.
id just thought id put my 2 cents on an side idea i have. have the mushroom they eat actually take part of history - in that they started sprouting at the moment in time that they send people to. so they must also be tended to and kept in good health from that moment in which they sprout until right before use.
this add the whole 'Ming vase' objective into the game - the players would have to take extra care not to let anything happen to the fragile shrooms ('Ming vase' refer to a a state of gaming where something very expensive and fragile is right in the middle of the combat area, and the combatant need to take care not to let it drop and shatter, maybe even need to leap and try and catch it if it falls)
...('Ming vase' refer to a a state of gaming where something very expensive and fragile is right in the middle of the combat area, and the combatant need to take care not to let it drop and shatter, maybe even need to leap and try and catch it if it falls)
I like that. That will definitely feature in here.
Some more info on what I've got so far:
- each character received a padded manilla envelope containing an ominous letter and a key. The key has a paper tag with 1-9-8-2 written on it. The
- the letter helps the characters find an old radio station in the woods. There's a tunnel/secret underground complex (elements of a bomb shelter and a green house sort of mashed together) nearby. Each key opens one of the doors inside.
Some of the rooms look like abandoned fungi grow projects. Others look like old barracks, but they've been abandoned in the damp dark for long enough they're resembling mushroom gardens as well.
- the numbers station is the U.S.'s attempt to replicate a code that was used during WWII, but not for communication with Army Intelligence. There are a few bare snippets of information that suggest someone had broadcasted a signal (off-planet? Through time? Into another reality?), and that *something* had replied.
- investigating into the radio station will quickly reveal that it's still under surveillance by at least one branch of the government. At least, they seem like a branch of the government.
- there is *something* in the woods. The result of a government project gone wrong. Some kind of carnivorous, parasitic fungus?
Or maybe that radio broadcast was received by something from another world. And it answered.
Or maybe the tunnel was too deep and unearthed something that was sleeping in the dark earth.
- the mushrooms look like they could maybe be part of some MKULtra spinoff. Unlock the true potential of the human mind, Stoned Ape theory, connecting to the collective consciousness of the natural world, etc.
Or something from another world? Something drawn by the signals or through the tunnel, or something that manipulated humanity into sending/digging said things to allow it to come here?
- consuming a certain type of mushroom within the tunnel results in an intense psychotropic experience. Lucid dreams and hallucinations and something that certainly feels like time travel.
The characters travel to different dates in 1982. Different rooms lead to different dates.
- using the mushrooms to travel through time allows the fungus to release spores into the character's brain. The effects are almost unnoticeable at first, but eventually lead to severe mental and physical health issues. And possibly becoming unstuck in time.
- on March 13, the station sent out a reply to a complex coded message from an unknown source.
On March 15, a child went missing during a bad storm. The search party racked up hundreds of man hours over the next two weeks, but no one ever found anything. Not a body, not a scrap of clothing, not a single hair.
- if the players prevent the child from being stolen, the present is worse. More children go missing at a later date, or a huge storm destroyed most of the area, the whole town is made up of fungi-infected zombie-people?
The response sent out on the short waves somehow set all of this in motion. If they can just figure out what it is or what it means..
- there are more effigy mounds in Wisconsin than anywhere else in the U.S. Uncovered from one were a few shards of pottery, possibly containing the missing pieces of the code.
- one of the places where I'm struggling is that I don't want to give them too many definitive answers. I want to keep that "incomprehensible, unknown horror" sort of thing intact as much as possible. But the more I lean that way, the harder it is for me to form any kind of meaningful cause/effect relationships for the players to interact with.
I really want this one to be something that might give you a migraine if you think about it for too long. But I also want to to be clear what the goal is and what the options are in terms of achieving it.
Time travel, unless done by an absolute lunatic like the Joker, just logically fails to grip my attention.
If you go back in time to stop "X"... and you succeed... then there wouldn't be a reason for you to have ever went back and stopped "X"... you would never leave, or need/want to leave, in the first place.
Or... these eddies in the flow of time are self-correcting... and you ultimately accomplish nothing.
The only way to test any of it would be to go back to the point where time travel was invented, and kill that mofo... just to see what happens.
If you go back in time to stop "X"... and you succeed... then there wouldn't be a reason for you to have ever went back and stopped "X"... you would never leave, or need/want to leave, in the first place.
Or... these eddies in the flow of time are self-correcting... and you ultimately accomplish nothing.
Or the act of going back somehow removes you from the time-stream as you sort of undo one of the forces anchoring you to reality and begin to drift between dimensions as your brain starts to slowly break down while you experience things the human mind was never meant to.
...or whatever. I don't know. I don't get the whole thought exercise of "why time travel doesn't work" when it comes to fiction. It's *fiction*. I completely fail to comprehend how people can suspend their disbelief that someone may be able to travel through time, but not that time travel could make sense within a fictional universe.
Plus, with the focus on "unknowable, inconceivable horror", not checking every single box of "why this" or "how that" is actually necessary. I think there will be enough strange mysteries and weirdness going down to keep the players busy and content.
I think the game will have to start somewhat near the date of the event back in '82, to offer up some kind of explanation as to why they were given the keys and such at this specific time.
That's sort of why it helps to bring people from slightly different timelines and for them to determine their own path based on the reports of the others once they get there. If one person has no reason to do something, you still have the others within the group with motivation from their own experiences. And they're all in a fresh timeline so none of them are inspired by the new results.
I didn't mean to be condescending. My bad. And apologies if I was discouraging.
I am the last person to dissuade creativity.
As long as it is done in an interesting manner that doesn't remove the consequences of the party's actions or choices, I fully support the idea. Just don't remove player agency by messing with the timeline TOO much, or by supplying an alternate timeline that softens or otherwise mitigates what they chose to do.
Are they going to go back in levels when they go back in time? It would be an interesting way to multiclass a character based on different decisions when they were in the alpha timeline, between jumps going back... unless there is no alpha timeline they are repairing or whatever...
Maybe they are fracturing the timeline intentially, splitting/branching the timeline further and further from the original. This is a seldom explored possibility with time travel... it is why I originally brought up a lunatic like the Joker that just wants to watch the world burn.
I would opt for watching/making the world burn if the other option was some twisted Groundhog Day paradox or BS dream sequence... and the record skips... and the record skips.. and the reco
Time travel, unless done by an absolute lunatic like the Joker, just logically fails to grip my attention.
If you go back in time to stop "X"... and you succeed... then there wouldn't be a reason for you to have ever went back and stopped "X"... you would never leave, or need/want to leave, in the first place.
...
hence my post about the time loop band-aid. it's a way to get past this on\off time loop. (some call it the side loop, as the first time travel is not repeated after the 2nd travel which follows the orders in the message instead of prevent X reasons)
I don't think I can change things around to the point where they're all initially from different timelines. The game will start with the discovery of time travel, so they all need to be together at that point.
No one's experience point total will change during the trip. They won't be rewinding the tape so much as ejecting it to put in a new one.
I think my initial question has gotten lost in the shuffle. I'm really not worried about the logistics of time travel. I don't care about any of that. In a game with a focus on unknowable horror and otherworldly schemes of such a grand and intricate scale that they seem nonsensical to us, I don't think I need to try *that* hard to make everything make perfect sense. That's really not where I'm struggling.
It's how to go about mapping out and planning the game, and how to achieve that level of seeming complexity without actually driving myself crazy.
One obvious assumption to be made is that the PCs cannot be personally affected by anything like the grandfather paradox, even if the world they live in was drastically changed. So if someone goes back in time and kills an ancestor before he had children, he would return to a world where he never existed -- but he himself would still exist and still remember the old timeline.
It would be up to the GM as to what to do if he simply leaves himself with no reason to travel back in time. Upon his return, he could replace the version of himself that never went back in time, or there could simply be two versions of him present, as the GM prefers. In the latter case, the PCs might just find it most useful to stay out of their own way while both versions are in the same area.
The rules of time travel can be set as the GM prefers.
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I prefer time travel stories where the time travel always happened. The results are just left to exploration. For example, sending the party after some artifact in the past needed to defeat some big enemy in the present. The party is sent back to a time around when the artifact went missing anyway, so the time stream won't miss it. But ultimately, why did the artifact go missing? Was it because the party brought it back or because the party destroyed it for yet to be revealed reasons. Or maybe a third party took it and hid it away to be discovered in the future.
Of course, that's just an example. Your own story could feature similar time travel. You just have to keep details vague to be determined later by the party.
Well, like any good story draft I would recommend starting with the ending and working backwards from there. A bit like time traveling heh.
The biggest hurdle in a game like this is making things seem like they're logically consistent. Like Melkiador said, I personally prefer it if Time Travel is the "Stable Time Loop" scenario vs multi-verse.
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I’ve done time travel in an RPG campaign.
I used a variation of the Novikov self consistency principle for how time travel into the past works. This is the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle
The principle states that only self consistent time loops are allowed by the laws of physics. I guess it is similar to other scientific principles like you can’t travel faster than light.
That principle is hard to enforce in a RPG setting so I changed it slightly. My variation states that to an outside observer the time loop must appear self consistent. For the time travellers themselves personal histories do not need to make sense, indeed they definitely won’t make sense, that is part of the benefit (and curse) of being time travellers. This resolved the issue of time paradoxes and player knowledge vs character knowledge (since they were effectively the same).
How this worked in my game is that the time travel event happened somewhere in the middle of the campaign. So the first half ran like any normal campaign and I carefully recorded everything that happened up to the point they travelled back in time.
The second part of the campaign is where things got interesting. The PCs jumped back in time and of course started changing history. Whenever they changed something important in one gaming session they would mentally “jump” into a scene they had previously played in the first half of the campaign for the next gaming session, only now things were/are different and they were using their current character not their former character that was in the scene originally. So for instance say they were 4th level during a scene in the first half of the campaign but now their character was 6th level, it was their 6th level character that repeated the scene not the old 4th level character. This reflected the fact that the time travelling PCs remembered events that were yet to happen (or never happened in some cases) and gained the knowledge and experience from remembering. Once the session was over they mentally “jumped” back to the actual past (their personal present) often finding that the present was different too.
The PCs mentally “jumped” back and forth about half a dozen times until the players were totally confused as to what was going on and I was satisfied that to an outside observer there was definitely one coherent timeline. I also wrote up some alternate histories that contradicted events that happened at the gaming table and sent them to individual players saying you also remember this happening. Basically the idea was to confuse the players so they could never be quite sure what exactly happened. Along the way the characters were hit with insanity checks that got progressively worse every time they mentally “jumped”. This was to encourage the players not to make drastic changes.
We had all kinds of strange things happen during the campaign. NPCs they had never met seemed to know all about them. NPCs they knew well had no idea who they were. New threats emerged out of nowhere and others strangely vanished. The PCs gave themselves a note in the past that they returned to themselves in the future. That was cool. One PC had a follower that vanished never to be seen again. We had the PCs invent histories for events that happened in the first half of the campaign that I hadn’t fully fleshed out yet. So that became the new official history. And the weirdest one. We had an PC die only to come back to life later in the campaign (about a year later in real time). That was really weird because when their character died the player adopted an NPC as a replacement character and had played it for over a year. When the timeline changed and the scene was replayed the exact opposite happened and the NPC died instead. That was really spooky actually. When the old character was revived I leveled them up to match the other PCs and created yet another alternate history.
To summarise: I found that handling time travel like this allowed us to explore all the weird confusing fun of time travel without the problem of time paradoxes, separating player knowledge from character knowledge or players losing agency.
Self consistency is more of an issue with science fiction. For fantasy you can just say a wizard did it.
Self consistency is more of an issue with science fiction. For fantasy you can just say a wizard did it.
My campaign was a science fiction game not classic fantasy.
However the self consistency principle can still apply to a Pathfinder game because it deals with logical inconsistencies around cause and effect which are still applicable to some fantasy games.
Self consistency “can” apply to fantasy, but there isn’t any particular reason for it to do so, other than taste. Any paradox or logical inconsistency can be covered by “magic”.
Boomerang Nebula, I like the "cut-scenes" reliving/revisiting events from earlier in the campaign. That is an interesting mechanic.
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Self consistency “can” apply to fantasy, but there isn’t any particular reason for it to do so, other than taste. Any paradox or logical inconsistency can be covered by “magic”.
I disagree.
There are some basic principles that need to be consistent for anyone to have any fun. Cause and effect needs to make sense and basic arithmetic needs to work. If you don’t have these basic things your game becomes entirely arbitrary based on GM whim which will quickly become frustrating for the players.