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Time Travel in the Champions Universe


Steve

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"No one sits like Morphant, no one HITS like Morphant, no one spreads evil 'cross the whole land like Morphant..."

 

Great. I'm going to be hearing that all day now. :)

It gets better. One of the PCs is an actor in his civilian identity, so he challenged Morphant to single combat, and it ended up being a singing contest.

 

I can now picture some fawning lickspittle as one of Black Paladin's followers in this age.

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It gets better. One of the PCs is an actor in his civilian identity, so he challenged Morphant to single combat, and it ended up being a singing contest.

 

Please tell me you and the PC actually sang as part of roleplaying that contest.

 

Lie to me if you have to.

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In the 19th Century you have several possibilities that could have major effects on the future.

 

1812 Napoleon invading Russia. What if he was able to get the vast bulk of his army out before winter set in ? That would have a major effect on the battle of Leipzig or battle of nations in 1813.

 

1815 Suppose Napoleon defeats Wellington and Blucher before the Russians turn up and then defeats them ?

 

1836 Battle of the Alamo. What if this did not take place ? The new series Timeless covered an attempt to stop Colonel Travis's letter being sent or altered so that Texas never becomes a state or that it remains part of Mexico.

 

The unification of Italy and the unification of Germany both take place in the 19th century and that again could put things completely off kilter.

 

Before that

 

1789-99 the French revolution. Keeping the French monarchy in place or causing a more peaceful transition of power would have major effects on what follows especially the Russian revolution in 1917.

 

1781 Battle of Chesapeake Bay. Suppose the British win allowing their army to be resupplied or be moved ?

 

In the 17th century.

How about interfering in France and killing Louis XIV ? France was undefeated for years and was a major superpower. The king moved to his hunting lodge and had it built into a new palace Versailles. Derailing this could have major effects or altering various of Louis's policies.

In Britain altering the outcome of the English Civil War in the 1640s, the execution of Charles 1st, the restoration of the monarchy, the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire of London, the Monmouth Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution would have major effects on British history.

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You don't want World War II as a destination for Time Travel ? How about World War I.

 

Possibilities:-

you stop Lenin getting to Russia and taking Russia completely out of the war. The map of post war Europe changes.

America does not enter the war

The Battle of Jutland is decisive for either side.

The Germans knock the British army out in 1914.

Italy does not enter the war at all or does so on the side of Germany and Austria.

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BC 480 Either the stand at Thermopylae or the naval battle at Salamis that followed.

 

AD 325 Constantine does not convert to Christianity

 

AD 410 Rome is not sacked by the Goths

 

AD 732 Battle of Tours or Battle of Potiers. This stopped the Islam armies coming into France.

 

AD 1066 Battle of Hastings. Suppose Harald wins the battle and not William the Conqueror

 

AD 1241 Battles of Legnica and Mohi. The Mongols are victorious in both battles but then they do not go any further and retreat when Ogedei Khan dies. There is a series of books which look at aftermath of these battles called the Mongoliad. There is a crisis in Rome as the Pope dies and then there are two within a month.

 

AD 1312 The Templar order are disbanded when the heads are executed and the Pope sides with the king of France.

 

AD 1410. Battle of Grunwald when the Teutonic order was decisively defeated by the Polish and Lithuanians

 

AD 1453 Constantinople does not fall to the forces of Islam

 

AD 1510-26 Henry VIII has a son by Katherine of Aragon

During the same period Henry does not break with Rome 

 

AD 1517 Martin Luther does not break with the teachings of the Catholic church.

 

AD 1571 Battle of Lepanto when the Muslim navy was defeated by a combined Christian navy

 

AD 1683 Battle of Vienna when the Muslim army was defeated and driven back from Vienna

 

AD 1862 The European powers involve themselves in the American Civil War. They can either aid the South and get it victory or invade and take back the territory

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AD 1862 The European powers involve themselves in the American Civil War. They can either aid the South and get it victory or invade and take back the territory

 

In other words, "What if Special Order 191 had not been discovered by Union Scouts before the Battle of Antietam?"

 

In the bad old days of Usenet (late 1980's or so), the what-if newsgroup voted Special Order 191's discovery the historical incident most likely to have been caused by time travellers.

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That's different.

There were diplomatic efforts to get the European nations to help or recognise the Confederacy. There were also interested parties in Europe who saw an advantage in attacking either side. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made efforts to stop Britain getting involved.

 

From what I see Special Order 191 is specific to the South winning or losing on its own. Worthy of consideration on its own merits.

 

EDIT: And while I think about it. What if Columbus does not discover America in 1492 ?

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  • 3 weeks later...

The team continues their adventures through time in my campaign.

 

1777 AD: Arriving a few miles from Boston, they encounter Captain Chronos, who fanboys a bit over meeting them and accidentally gives them some spoilers for future events. He reveals that their travels and actions are repairing fracture points in time, changes made to the timeline by others before they ever made their first time jump. Shortly after this revelation, a hovering platform and a dozen of Dr. Destroyer's soldiers arrive in this time. In the ensuing fight, one of the characters severely damaged its power core, causing a twenty meter wide sphere of nothingness to engulf the time platform and killing all, leaving only half of one of Dr. Destroyer's soldiers, who was gorily bisected at the very edge of the implosion field. They then moved on to...

 

1963 AD: Arriving in Dallas on the day of the Kennedy assassination, they discover that JFK has been possessed by Menton, using his vast mental powers from an unknown point in the future to control the young president and planning to use him like a puppet to usher in an age of mutants in control of the world. The team also re-encountered the great-grandfather of one of the team (who was a Golden Age Batman expy called the Phantom), who they saved from his previous death in 1937 and who used information from the future to engineer other changes to the timeline. It looks like Kennedy must die in order to stop Menton's plan.

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You don't want World War II as a destination for Time Travel ? How about World War I.

 

Possibilities:-

you stop Lenin getting to Russia and taking Russia completely out of the war. The map of post war Europe changes.

America does not enter the war

The Battle of Jutland is decisive for either side.

The Germans knock the British army out in 1914.

Italy does not enter the war at all or does so on the side of Germany and Austria.

 

Actually, WWI isn't such a great destination for Time Travel either, due to a little something called Spanish Flu which was

going on around the same time. Any Time Travelers that wind up in this part of the timestream could potentially wind up

being infected with the bug without realizing it, and take the seeds for a new global pandemic with them -- one which

would spread even faster than the original did, due to the existence of jet travel in the modern day; all it takes is for one

infected person to expose someone about to take an overseas airline flight -- and for that person to infect the other

passengers on that flight -- and you've got an epidemiologist's worst nightmare.

 

 

Major Tom 2009 :shock:

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Actually, WWI isn't such a great destination for Time Travel either, due to a little something called Spanish Flu which was

going on around the same time. Any Time Travelers that wind up in this part of the timestream could potentially wind up

being infected with the bug without realizing it, and take the seeds for a new global pandemic with them -- one which

would spread even faster than the original did, due to the existence of jet travel in the modern day; all it takes is for one

infected person to expose someone about to take an overseas airline flight -- and for that person to infect the other

passengers on that flight -- and you've got an epidemiologist's worst nightmare.

 

That's just sick -- in more ways than one.

 

That's also an awesome supervillain plot.  Trick the heroes into thinking the villain is going to change something in late WW1 for the express purpose of making the heroes Patient Zero for a new Spanish Flu outbreak once they return to the present.

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That's just sick -- in more ways than one.

 

That's also an awesome supervillain plot. Trick the heroes into thinking the villain is going to change something in late WW1 for the express purpose of making the heroes Patient Zero for a new Spanish Flu outbreak once they return to the present.

Why not instead send them on a wild goose chase in the Middle Ages and hope they pick up The Black Plague?

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Why not instead send them on a wild goose chase in the Middle Ages and hope they pick up The Black Plague?

The plague would have been less threatening today as it is, I think, reasonably controllable with antibiotics. Viruses are so much ,ore scary than most bacteria in epidemiology terms. Until we run out of antibiotics that is....a possibility not too far distant when routine surgeries will once again become a game of Russian roulette and cancer treatments less efficacious as people on chemotherapy die from acquired infections...

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Am I wrong in thinking that anyone who can come up with a credible mass destruction plot requiring time travel as one of its elements probably has the resources to acquire pretty destructive weaponry or materials in the present day? I mean, it's got to be easier to steal Smallpox or Ebola samples from the CDC and weaponize them than to build a time tunnel and jump back to 1917.

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The great thing about traveling to the past (from a villainous plot perspective) is that with research you can learn exactly what happened, so you can anticipate all the factors that could affect your scheme ahead of time. It's like having precognition, except after the fact. Or is that retrocognition before the fact? :think:

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Am I wrong in thinking that anyone who can come up with a credible mass destruction plot requiring time travel as one of its elements probably has the resources to acquire pretty destructive weaponry or materials in the present day? I mean, it's got to be easier to steal Smallpox or Ebola samples from the CDC and weaponize them than to build a time tunnel and jump back to 1917.

 

But... but... Comic Book Plot Logic! :)

 

Snarky answer aside, enough samples of the original Spanish Flu genome exist in modern research labs that any supervillainous mad scientist worth his reputation could get enough to synthesize his own mass outbreak today.  That in itself would make a good Dark Champions plot, now that I type it.

 

You then, of course, lose the Rule of Cool factor involved with any Time Travel story, plus the "layers upon layers of misdirection" element behind the original idea...

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The great thing about traveling to the past (from a villainous plot perspective) is that with research you can learn exactly what happened, so you can anticipate all the factors that could affect your scheme ahead of time. It's like having precognition, except after the fact. Or is that retrocognition before the fact? :think:

That's kind of what Menton is doing in my campaign, using psychic projection into a puppet in the past. He's observing the present begin to change as he exerts his influence on the past. It's a little bit like how the movie Frequency worked when it came to changing history.

 

Unfortunately, he's got a group of randomly time-traveling superheroes who just happened to arrive right at the pivotal day of the scenario he's trying to affect and are meddling with it. What's a supervillain to do?

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