Pitch: Fracture in Time

Originally published September 8, 2014

Another post in my continuing series of campaign ideas. This week I am presenting more time travel ideas unified under a shared setting. Let me know if anything sounds like something you would like to hear more about.

Fracture In Time

System: TimeWatch plus a possible session of Microscope in the beginning to fill out the future history.

Inspirations: Sliders, Primeval, the less silly episodes of Doctor Who.

Reality consists of many branching worlds off a central timeline. Each branch point is a place where someone from another time or timeline made a change. Not all changes create new timelines. History resists major changes and minor alterations get drowned out in the flow of history. But strong changes or sufficiently subtle ones will cause it to split and fracture. Someone killing Hitler, saving an obscure member of a steppe tribe, or introducing anachronistic technology might alter history and create a new timeline.

The problem is each timeline generates its own set of time-travelers and each extra time-traveler increases the odds of creating a new timeline. What happens when the a critical mass is reached? What happens when the timelines propagate exponentially?

There are hints. Scarred timelines where nothing lives. Mysterious time-traveling reptile people descended from a history that never was. Strange figures that try to patrol the timelines and stop just such a disaster.

What will the PCs do when they discover the secret? Do they fix the timelines, eliminating the divergences, or will they exploit them? And what if the cost of fixing history involves erasing your own timeline?

In this shared world here are three separate campaign pitches:

Lost in Time

Through luck or long hours of work, the characters obtain a time machine. Maybe they find the wreckage in an abandoned military junkyard, like in My Science Project. Perhaps one of the characters invents it. In any case it is untested and glitchy.

Their first trip in time goes poorly and they need to leave in a hurry. Only afterwards they find that they can't return to their home time (or timeline!). In this combination of Sliders and the Time Tunnel, the characters find themselves lost in time and space. Each session they explore a new time or alternate history, trying to get back home and solving problems along the way.

Unlike those series, the option exists for them to gain control of the time machine. While temperamental, they soon learn that the machine can be set to specific coordinates to return to a time/world that they had previously visited. Perhaps with more work it can even be tuned to a specific year or timeline, allowing them to return home.

They can establish a base of operations if they wish, a world from which they can explore. Do they keep jumping, hoping to get home? Do they try to fix and improve the time machine so they can better control the destination? Do they give up on returning home and carve out an empire for themselves?

As they pursue these ideas, they have to deal with local troubles and other time travelers ranging from Nazi's using unethical fringe science, Reptiods from a destroyed timeline, cockroaches from a possible future, alien invaders and secret conspiracies seeded by all of the above throughout history.

Agents of Infinity

This setting borrows from the GURPS Infinite Worlds setting. Here the characters work for an organization nominally dedicated to protecting hundreds of parallel worlds. They manage humanitarian relief for Earths suffering from cataclysms (natural or man-made), work to suppress wars, and advance more "primitive" societies to the point where they can join Infinity, the timeline spanning government.

But are they protecting these worlds or exploiting them? When they sacrifice liberty for peace, is it the right choice?

Infinity in this setting is closer in form to Centrum in the Infinite Worlds setting (but with a less villainous name and more positive spin).

The PCs are elite troubleshooters, special forces and highly skilled social engineers in the service of Infinity. They start off well equipped and with lots of backup. But they also don't realize that time travel exists. According to their scientists, only dimension hopping, travel between alternate histories, is physically possible. Some of these dimensions mirror the history of known worlds and are called echoes.

But what if the echoes really are the past? What damage will be done when Infinity begins to exploit them?

Do the characters follow their orders? Even if it dooms whole worlds? And if they don't do they work within the system? Or go rogue and alter time itself?

Would Be Great Men and Women

In this scenario the characters find themselves captured in prison in some remote time and place (perhaps an island in the Cretaceous). Each of them has been snatched from a different time and place. Also each of them, whether they know it or not would have been an important, indeed pivotal, figure in history.

Their captors have replaced them with duplicates or simply made them disappear. Their goal is simple, to rewrite "true history” so that events arrive at a desired state in the future. That future? The alien invasion of Earth.

But placing that many potential world changers in one place is dangerous and the player characters escape. Can they stop the alien menace? Will they restore the true account of human history? Or will they exceed their original greatness?

Valid concepts are the great men (and women) of history as well as the ones that never were. Our version of history might not be the true account and indeed might be the one that leads to an easily subjugated humanity. PCs might be a cinematic version of Benjamin Franklin, a Mongol warrior who would have completed the work of Batu Khan in conquering Europe, or a more stable version of Tesla.

You are the best of humanity. Can you save it?