Summer 2021 Pitches: A Fracture In Time

You find yourselves unstuck in time, pulled through the decades by forces unleashed one summer night in 1984 as kids. Now you are pulled back to that era and thrust into new ones. Perhaps if you can unravel the mystery of what happened that night you can stop it - or gain control over this power. Do you rewrite your childhood? Undo regrets and avert personal tragedies? Or use your abilities to improve your "present"?

Meanwhile you need to deal with paradoxes, men in black and black helicopters, and stranger stuff. Was that an alien back there? What is up with all of the roaches?

Setting: The story begins in a suburban town in NY in the 1980s but quickly expands into other times from the 1940s and the Victorian Era to WWIII and the Jurassic.

Themes: What If? at both a personal and global level, starting with the Cold War.

Mood: Pulp. Mixing two fisted action with mystery, the PCs are experts and a match for any government agent or time travelling monster.

System: TimeWatch with some modifications to account for a lack of Time Agent training (so you can play a super spy or even a scientist working on time travel but you don't have a full understanding of time travel starting off)

Variations:

• No (or Not Just) Kids: If playing kids (for a bit) doesn't appeal we can open up the possibilities to older folk.
• Don't Worry We Are From The Government: We can instead play the other side of things as FTB agents (work out that acronym for yourself) trying to figure out why everything went wrong, dealing with pesky temporal anomalies and making do with only half of a time machine.

Review: Einstein’s Dreams

More summer reading I hoped to adapt for my games. This book however was not very useful or good.

Einstein’s Dreams

By Alan Lightman

This novel consists of a collection of idea stories about time contained within an overarching story about Einstein's struggle to work out his theory of time in 1905. The premise is that these visions are the dreams he has during the spring and early summer of that year.

The stories describe worlds where time works differently than our own. Earths where time runs backwards, where people can move through time, with branching time, and so forth.

So far so good.

This book fails to consideration of consequences of these variant laws of time, both the prosaic concerns and interesting twists. As an example, the author casually equates slowing the earth’s rotation to equal a human lifetime with speeding up humanity’s perception of time so that a life passes in a day. However the first would lead to a planet alternatingly blasted and frozen by the its exposure (or lack thereof) by the sun. The second idea leads to interesting situations like the experience of subjective months passing while the bath water warms up. Instead the author simply looks at the experience of living half of one’s life in the dark verse the light.

It's not just hard science that the author disregards in these stories. In a world where humans have no sense of the future, he proposes a class of people paralyzed by choice. But how can someone be paralyzed by choice if they can’t weigh the value of one choice relative to the other. If I have two buttons and I don’t know what either will do (and how could I? There is no subjective future) why are am I going to agonize over the decision. That requires at least some thought to what comes next. Which invalidates the premise. More practically a character in that story has a pastry. But in a world where people can’t think of the future how do things get baked? I guess we can lump basic cooking into ideas ignored by the author.

Conclusion

I wanted a book of interesting ideas for use in time travel games. Instead I got a grab bag of unexamined poorly thought out concepts. I was left with the impression I could write something better. Maybe I should.

Undeath of History: Mechanics of Time Travel

We return again to my TimeWatch setting, the Undeath of History. This was originally be a discussion of the Patchworks, the intertemporal set of ruins that allows access to all times and many doomed versions of Earth. But I ran behind and the mechanics of time travel in this setting alone is enough to fill a column. So here we are.

The Mechanics of Time Travel

The Setup

First the basics. By entering into the Patchworks, a traveller can travel back and forth in time. Traversing the Patchworks takes some time (often hours, sometimes minutes or days) but with the right know how you can arrive almost anywhen (surviving is another story).

Changing history (or an alternate history) isn’t difficult in most cases. One life in the flow of time is an invisible ripple in a raging river. Large scale changes (like saving a world) however are much much harder. The timeline resists changes that work against the downward pull of the future. Only careful and sustained effort can alter that dark destiny.

In rare instances the timeline can branch (usually when major temporal disaster occurs). New (and often equally doomed) histories instantly appear.

Paradoxes in this setting can occur but have no additional effect on the timeline. Murdering your past self, making objects with closed timelines, and other head scratchers just work. The consequences for the traveler however are severe. They risk dislocation from the stream of time (and the source of vitality in the world) and becoming one of the Undead.

Rules

Entrance: entering the Patchworks is an investigative use of the Patchworks, Architecture or Occult Studies abilities. The traveller picks out the right spot in the local architecture, waits for the shadows to fall just right and then pass through into the ruins between history. Typically this does not need a spend unless there is some time pressure or otherwise complicating circumstance. For example, it may cost a point of the relevant skill to find an entrance before the radioactive mutants find you or within the windswept (and structure-less) plains of prehuman Siberia.

The Chill Winds of History: entering the Patchworks immediately inflicts 2 points of damage to Temporal Stability. This amount may be higher if the traveler is entering from a particularly distant period. Entering the Patchworks from a doomed alternate timeline imposes a Temporal Stability test Difficulty 4 (5 if right at the apocalypse). Failure inflicts 3 points of Temporal Stability. Add additional difficulty if the time period exists post- or pre-human.

Time spent within the Patchworks can also be dangerous. Each day exposed to the temporal winds (which is everywhere outside of certain protected regions like the Bone Market, the Last Citadel, or the Necropolis) imposes the risk of losing Temporal Stability. The Difficulty for this test is 3 and inflicts 2 Temporal Stability.

If camping down for a long period (where the PCs can be recovering general pools regularly) just have the PCs roll a Difficulty 5 check (+1 for a week, +2 for a month, +3 for a year, and so on) to see if they suffer any significant loss. If they fail they lose 5 Temporal Stability upon the beginning of the next scene.

Exit: Finding the right exit from the Patchworks uses the same skills as Entering with the same spend requirement (i.e. no cost unless the user is under time pressure or wishes to exit at a very specific time and/or place). Exiting the Patchworks has no negative effect on Temporal Stability.

Otherwise the normal rules for paradoxes apply. Within the Patchworks all Temporal Stability checks are at +1 difficulty (accounted for above). Also most time travelers in this setting will be outside of their home timeline frequently and suffer the same increased difficulty.

Undeath of History: Organizations

One weakness of the Undeath of History as I originally pitched it was that it failed to answer one basic question: who are the PCs? Obviously they are time travelers but why do they work together? What organization binds them together? What common goals propel them forward?

In this installment we’ll examine some possible answers.

PC Factions and Organizations

The Watchers

(a.k.a. Time Lords, Time Masters, TimeWatch, the Watch)

Probably not as evil as these guys...

The chaos of the Patchworks means that eventually something or someone will try to impose order on time travel. That force for now is the Watch. An order of skilled time travellers, they survey the Patchworks, fight back the encroaching forces of the Undead, curb the damage done by other time travellers, punish those who willfully alter history, and catalogue alternate timelines.

An intensely conservative group, they work to maintain the timeline as it currently stands, despite its eventual doom. Rival time travelers are seen at best reckless and at worst threats to be extinguished. Travel long enough they say and the winds of time will warp you into the soulless undead. Better a doomed future than no future at all.

Operating from the Last Citadel, a post-human moon base perched at the far end of the Patchworks, the Watch claim to be the first time travelers, or at oldest to retain their humanity. Their earliest records hint that once they too tried to change humanity’s destiny. The ultimate failure of this mission has been erased from the archives. Now they simply try to allow humanity to make the most of its time before the inevitable end.

This faction is the Undeath of History’s equivalent of TimeWatch (with obviously a more grim cast to its operations). PCs receive missions, uncover and restore altered timelines, defeat time thieves, and fight Undead remains of fellow travelers.

The Resurrectionists

(a.k.a. the Rebels, the Rabble, the Meddlers)

Like these guys but with a plan

Then there are the hopeful and hopeless who dare to change the future. For the Resurrectionists history isn’t set, merely heavy with inertia. Working in cells they pool resources, research the flow of history, and coordinate changes to timelines, all in the hopes of averting one or more apocalypses. They also share information of secret pathways through the Patchworks, warn each other about the Watch and other threats, and occasionally help out when a larger shift is needed.

Their goals set them directly against the Watch, the forces of the Eternal Egypt, and undead in general. Their strength comes from flexibility. Where their enemies share common education and methods (at least within each faction), the Resurrectionists have a diverse makeup: romantic Victorians rub shoulders with Bronze Age conquerors, 21st century hacktivists mix with Taoist Alchemists. The organization is replete with people with unconventional ideas or impossible dreams.

This diversity is also their greatest weakness. A considerable amount of time is spent bickering with other members to determine how best to alter time. When minds align however, rapid change is possible and the Watch and other groups must scramble to have a hope of stopping the Resurrectionists.

Stories for PC Resurrecitonists would focus on these rare moments when the fate of time itself hangs in the balance and the organization struggles against the forces of entropy and stasis arrayed against it. Tales of being the hunted or rebel faction would also feature prominently.

The Graverobbers

(a.k.a. The Thieves, Time Thieves, Time Bandits)

But much less goofy

And then there are the thieves. Not so much an organization than a purpose, these independent gangs grudgingly share secret routes through the Patchworks and teach the tricks of the trade. But when it comes to the big score, everyone is on their own.

The Graverobbers specialize in pilfering dead worlds for artifacts that they can sell on those that remain. Mona Lisa’s from not-so-Little Ice Age Renaissance, scavenged future tech from burnt out shells of worlds, live megafauna from a world where humanity was aborted before escaping Africa. All are lucrative conquests for a cunning time thief.

Besides who or whatever holds their prize, their major threats is the Watch and the unnatural hazards of the Patchworks. The Watch is only human however and can be bargained with, tricked or outrun. The ancient undead pose a more serious and terminal threat. Without the resources of the Watchers or the Resurrectionists the winds of time are also a greater hazard. Haunt the Patchworks too long and a thief risks becoming the next guardian to a tomb they sought to rob.

A PC group of Graverobbers would focus on heists and the occasional run from the “law” of the Watch.

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?

Pitch: The Undeath of History

Originally published August 25, 2014

Mondays are when I typically post a series on different items, characters, or something else from my games. I can't decide what to write at the moment so I am going to pitch several of the campaign ideas floating in my head over the next several weeks. Let me know if anything interests you and I'll write more about it.

The Undeath of History

The future is change, fluid and transformative. The past is stasis, constant and dead.

Between the instants of time lie the patchworks: a realm of forgotten worlds, shattered fragments of what might have been and decaying shreds of what was. Haunted by "ghosts", "vampires" and the "living dead", this realm can be used by time travelers to traverse time or access one of the many dead ends, parallel timelines where something went wrong and the world died.

Entering the patchworks is as simple of finding a part of the world touched by entropy: a cemetery, a decaying building, a dying circle of trees. Wait until darkness is greatest and take the right turn or the correct door. Once through you enter a world of decaying ruins snatched from across time. Navigate to a spot that resembles the era you seek and reverse the process to enter the past or future.

But a chill wind blows through the patchworks, an icy breeze that digs into the bones of all who pass through. The wind of time changes a time traveler, shredding their attachment to the normal flow of time, isolating them and turning into something not truly alive.

Traveling through time is inimically opposed to life. Those who travel the patchworks come back colder, immune to aging, no longer needing to breath, or even worn down to incorporeality. They become the monsters that haunt the patchworks. They see history as it is: a moth-eaten veil hiding the bloated corpses of worlds that died and a fragile dying heart of time itself.

Some seek to save the world, steering time away from uncounted apocalypses. Others seek power and the immortality that time travel brings them. Others simply hope to forestall the plans of the elder dead, things from ages far beyond human ken, monsters that belong to societies that were never human.

Some of the divergent timelines include:

• Land of the Pharaohs: the ancient pharaohs of Egypt discovered the secret of the patchworks and used the necropoli to unnaturally extend their lives. Now they control an empire that spans Europe and Africa that threatens to bring all under their dominion.
• Grim Discovery: This timeline saw a much more urbanized civilization develop in the Americas, roughly on par with Europe. When the two discovered each other there was a cultural exchange...of diseases. Now both sides of the Atlantic are dying of the plagues unleashed.
• Not So Little Ice Age: an alternate 18th century Europe is slowly being ground down by ever-growing glaciers as the planet slowly cools and freezes.
• The Second Pacific War: an incursion by forces unknown infested the Pacific with giant sea monsters whose poisonous blood has destroyed the Pacific basin and threatens to kill off all natural sea life. The nations of the Pacific Rim seek to repel the horrors before humanity and perhaps all sea life perish.
• Black Rain: After a nuclear war between the USSR and USA, a radioactive Europe is ruled by a secret cabal of time travelers who feed off the survivor's temporal energies.
• Age of Rust: after a devastating war between humanity and the AIs, a few mutated and increasingly sterile survivors hide from rusting killbots.

Themes:

• The River of Time. Time is a vast river, slow and meandering. Despite this sluggishness, it is hard to divert and will crush anything in its path, changing and transforming it. Its many branches drain in salty lakes of death.
• Life and Death. Just as the many horrors of time reflect the death of timelines, the main timeline can bring new life. The heroes can shift time and restore dead timelines.

Mood: Bleak Twilight. Time travel is inherently hazardous and will eventually turn you into an immortal undead thing. Worse history seems doomed, every branch leading to literal dead ends. But is the twilight the sign of approaching darkness or a new day? Can the heroes rise up and change history for the better?

System: TimeWatch (i.e. the GUMSHOE system). One major alteration would be to alter the consequences for failed Chronal Stability rolls. When you reach a Chronal Stability pool of 0 or less, you are pulled out time and your body and soul transformed. Choose one of the following options:

• You are unaffected by the passage of time for the purposes of aging. You never grow a day older naturally, though further exposure to temporal paradox can cause you to age in strange ways.
• You no longer have basic metabolic needs like blinking, eating, or breathing. You cannot starve or suffocate. Rolls to hide your inhuman nature are at +1 difficulty.
• You become unnaturally aged as if you were well over a century old. This does not affect your skills though it does affect NPC reactions.
• You can take this option again but you become a wasted, clearly dead thing.
• Your wounds no longer visibly heal. While your Health pool recovers the damage remains visible.
• You become partially out of phase from reality. All general abilities suffer +1 difficulty but your Hit Threshold also increased by 2.

If your Chronal Stability reaches -6 or lower the aspect becomes permanent. If you reach -12 you are pulled fully out of time and flung through the time stream. Your character experiences millions of years passing while paralyzed leaving them hopelessly insane. They might return later as one of the undead horrors of the setting.

Commentary

This idea bubbled up into my mind one wet fall day as I sat in my local Starbucks. As I watched the rain smear my view of the street, I was struck by the mixture of death (Autumn) and change (Water). The concept of water washing away the old world and leaving an unknown unformed future seemed very appealing. It was at once bleak and timeless and full of change and renewal. Also I love rain and miss living somewhere other than the dryness of northern California.

There are many ties between water, life and death. The west bank of Nile was once the land of the dead, according to myth vampires can't cross rivers, the primordial tidal pools may have been the origin spots of life, and modern sea life is still tied to the tides just as the flooding of rivers fertilize future harvests. When water ebbs away it brings death to those things left stranded.

This game is about facing change and risking being changed by it. The PCs can try to profit and rule reality but that way lies inhumanity. Or they can risk it all to save the world.

Review: Looper

Originally published October 4, 2012

I went to see Looper last weekend and was pleasantly surprised to find a science fiction film that did not have glaringly bad science.For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, Looper stars Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a Sci-Fi thriller about time travel. In the film, Loopers are specialized assassins in the year 2044 who kill people sent back in time from 30 years in the future. They dispose of the body so that the criminal cartels of the future can get away with murder.

Things go bad when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character Joe find that he has to "close his loop", meaning kill his future version. Besides the moral implications of this act, his future self is Bruce Willis which means he isn't going to have an easy time of it anyway.

Spoiler Warning!

What keeps this movie from being just a run of the mill action movie is the entire second plot. Older Joe has come back in time for a reason. There is someone he needs to kill in 2044 to save someone he loves in the future. And nothing is going to stop him. That doesn't just include himself and the criminal cartel that wants him dead but his own ethical code. Because his target is currently just a child.

An additional element of the movie that was interesting was the widespread but nicely underplayed telekinesis. Basically 10% of the population has pretty feeble levels of telekinesis. I like how it was genuinely portrayed as crap ability which only becomes relevant when the child, Joe's target, turns out to be the Rainmaker, the most powerful telekinetic the world has ever seen.

End spoilers.

I think they do an excellent job of portraying the conflicted natures of both older and younger Joe. Both are deadly killers but at the same time there are lines they don't want to cross, lines they painfully do through the film. There is a real question of how far will you go for what you want or the ones you love.

All in all I would heartily recommend this movie. There is action, drama, believable characters, and cool special effects. If you want to learn more scientific stuff about the movie you can read my other blog over at Wolfram|Alpha.