Seeking: Timetwisters!

[CrosshairCollie]

Hello again. Well, my wife is starting up a Champs campaign (I finally get to PLAY!), and we're getting a suitably odd group together. One character is an Avalonian knight with Elemental magic along with enchanted sword and armor. Another is a tweak/gestalt of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy who works as a tabloid writer (I'm almost tempted to post his nearly-completed character sheet up here as a lark, I'm rather proud of it).

 

Now, my character is kind of the 'crux' of the group: He's from the future, and he's a Time Variance Investigator (think shows/movies like Time Cop, Time TRAX, or possibly even Power Rangers Time Force). Cybered up the yahoo, all that jazz, complete with a holoflage disguise unit so he doesn't freak out the mundanes.

 

What I'm looking for is time-warping/time-travelling/time-twisting characters to investigate in the 5E Champs Universe. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Captain Chronos, and possibly (if one defines things loosely) the Mistress of a Billion Dimensions Whose Name I Can't Remember Right Now (V'han?) and Tesseract (even more of a stretch). Anybody know if Timemaster is still around? Kiwi help me, I might have to break out that clock-making guy from European Enemies and update him ... *shiver*

[Vex]

You can make him time stuck like Bishop from the Xmen. I would go with the non-returnable mission instead of having to create an entire group of villians. Maybe go with some "far" off goal that he has to stop (think 12 Monkeys or Terminator), but he doesn't necessarily know what causes the catastrophe. You can even go so far as to have a list of things that the future ruling council wants to ensure doesn't happen so you have new missions and story hooks throughout the campaign.

 

One of the missions could be to go back in time and make sure that Star Trek: Enterprise never gets on the air because it is giving actual details on the future Temporal Wars...... =]

[Supreme Serpent]

Even if someone doesn't travel through time (except at the normal, forward, 1/1 rate ) they can represent a threat to the "correct" future (depending on your theory of divergent timestreams, etc etc). Dr. Destroyer, Mechanon, and others with suitably large-scale schemes could be classed into a "must stop" category.

 

The future villain with mysterious past is good too. Some guy with very unusual name (Like Xavier Ichabod Omniplatzus)causes big problems in the future, but almost nothing is known about his past, origins, etc. Character flipping through paper notices bit about baby being born with this name - what will the PC do? It would be interesting to know how many "Adolf Hitler"s were born in Central Europe in the late 1800's...

[freakboy6117]

why not just send him a letter from a future version of him self from the past ( joys of time travel) a villain is trying to kill him buy killing one of his family members in the past. the villian is a shape shifting super weapon (yes t2)

 

the future self wants him to go back in time and protect the family line fron danger otherwise something terrible will happen in the future

of course the future version was seriously injured thwarting one attempt with no idea if he will make it.

 

so he arranged for a letter to be sent to the future by lawyers or western union (see back to teh future 3) and thus summoned your earlier version to the past to continue the work.

[Redmenace]

I'd think Argent and Dr Destroyer might pursue time travelling tech either by capturing a Time Variance operative or on their own. I'd think that they might come looking for you.

 

Galactic Champions will have better ideas for who survives to the future and in what shape, but any of who do could try and reverse their historical defeat.

 

The Doctor has been thwarted by super humans before so there is no reason he might not send a message back from the future to his past self with the details about how he was defeated and how to make sure it doesn't happen in the first place.

[Lord Liaden]

I wasn't clear from your intitial post as to whether you were looking for ideas on time-travel scenarios and complications, or time-travelling characters who have been written up for Champions/HERO. Since you seem to be getting good ideas from everyone for the former, I thought I might offer a survey of the latter.

 

I'm afraid Timemaster is no longer in the "official" CU, but you could certainly use him if you wanted to; one of the nice things about time-travelling characters from the future is that they're easy to drop into your campaign at any point. Now if as you suggest you're thinking of updating the Clockmaker (Swiss clock villain) from European Enemies, you'd probably get help from the "debugged" version of the character that Michael Surbrook has up on his website.

 

The 4E adventure trilogy book Champions Presents has a dandy time-travel adventure, "Menace Out Of Time," featuring a villain calling himself Tempus, Master of Time. In the course of his plans Tempus draws people and creatures from the future and past to bedevil the heroes, and sends the heroes themselves into the 1930's and all the way back to the Ice Age. The activities of Tempus could easily attract the attention of your Time Variance Investigator. The adventure also includes an appendix with some useful "principles" of time travel which help keep such scenarios manageable.

 

There's always the classic 3E Champs adventure Wings of the Valkyrie, featuring a plot by diverse supers to travel to pre-WW II Germany to assassinate Adolf Hitler and the other high-ranking Nazi party members so as to prevent the Holocaust. This results in a majorly (and grimly) divergent timeline. This adventure book is extremely rare, though, and usually very expensive.

 

Gold Rush Games's Champions city campaign setting, San Angelo: City of Heroes describes a couple of time-travellers: the retired Golden Age super-thief Clockwork, who seeks ways to atone for his criminal past; and Ren Westlake, refugee from a dystopian Earth of 2063, who is building a power base with which to stage a world coup so as to prevent that future from happening.

 

I hope some of these are of use to you.

[Ghost who Walks]

I created my own time Travel Characters, you are welcome to use them:

 

Omegans: A race of ancient aliens who learned to travel in time about a million years ago. Reduced to the status of myth, they 'patrol the time stream', searching for threats. The reason they do this is because their own time line is so convoluted...they have to make sure no one else discovers time travel (and screws them up even worse.) We are talking about people who are pretty mcuh their own ancestors here. Rogue/junior members of their race sometimes help other time travellers out of pity. They also rescue time travellers who get "lost", returning them to their own time stream.

 

Melinda (Parakeet) DeBovay: The inventor of the DeBovay Chronal Conveyor, a time travelling vehicle. A semi-retired superheroine, she discovered temporal technology when she was wounded by another time traveller, forcing her future self to come back in time to save her. As the injury was to her brain, her future self 'copied' over information from her own mind to save her. A mutant who doesn't age, other versions look identical to her...except they wear different clothes, as fashions change. IMC, her future self creates the equivalent of the 'Time Cops'. Its uncertain if that future will change now that her past self has created the chronal conveyor 20 years early. Keeps her invention a secret for now, using it for research and vacations.

 

Kronos: A former superhero who went back in time, and founded the Greek Pantheon. Firend;y with a rogue Omegan who helps him travel to other timelines cannot on his own). Obsessed with preventing a future alien invasion, his most common tactic is to recruit people from the past, to help him in the present. The number of changes these time-displaced people due is mindboggling. Powers are electrical in nature, can call upon his Greek Pantheon descendents occasionally. Future Time Cops often come back to stop him, sent by (future) Melinda DeBovay.

 

Choppers: An organization created by Kronos in the 1920s, in a project to destroy DEMON, with the assistantance of the Chicago Mob. Today, they are an all black gang operating out of Chicago, with an impressive array of firepower. Show up whenever Kronos sends them a message to intervene in some place/point. Carry automatic weapons, swords, wear duster coats, and talk like actors in the Matrix. Their leadership believes they are working for a prophet of Allah. Choppers from the future occasionally come back in their time travelling submarines, Cesnas, and sports cars.

 

The Alien Invaders: At some point in the future, an alien ship that regards Earth as an enemy gets into orbit. They release several dozen timeships into Earth's Past, on one-way missions to alter the future of humanity. Useful to use as opponents should a player be in the past, for whatever reason.

 

The Infant Regan: Daugter of a PC, IMC. Timemaster regards her as his greatest enemy, and has come back several times to try and kill her as a child. This of course, causes her future self to come back and rescue herself. The adult Regan is a brick genius with around 80 str. She is constantly watched by Melinda DeBovay, who is a friend of her mothers and thinks the teenager may have "gone bad".

 

There is also Patsi, from normals unbound.

[AlHazred]

FWIW, I've found a couple of good sites for info on Time Travel; some of these ideas might be of use to you.

 

This site reviews movies with Time Travel themes and does a good job untwisting them. Mind you, comic book time travel is a lot less rigorous than this guy, but your campaign might be more "realistic" in which case it's a good reference.

 

Time War is a game that will be coming out this year from Argent Games. I first ran across it a year or so ago, when the author had the whole system on the Web. Obviously, since then, he's found a publisher. I remember he had really good "mechanics" for describing time travel and its complications. Sadly, that material's no longer available, at least until it's published...

[wcw43921]

If you could get your hands on Atlas Games' Foxbat Unhinged--I imagine it's long out-of-print--you'll discover Yves Norris, a time traveler from a utopian future made possible by time-travel technology (by enabling people to see the future consequences of present-day actions). His mission is to contact the heroes so that they can get the parents of time-travel's inventor together, so that the technology will come to exist. There is a complication, of course--the potential mother is being courted by Freddy Foswell--who is, of course, Foxbat.

[freakboy6117]

or even worse the potential father is Freddy Foswell

 

foxbat vixenbat and Foxbat Junior super genius

together they commit crime