What makes a good time-travel story?

[red_eagle123]

I run a game with a fairly low-powered crowd of supers (With experience they're just starting to reach the 250 mark). And for this crowd I'm thinking of throwing them into a time travel story.

 

What I'm wondering is, what makes a good time travel story? Anyone got any anecdotes or ideas they wish to share?

[Yogzilla]

Paranoia.

 

My players are pretty fanatic about not changing the past (even though my concept of time travel *does* allow for that without threatening your own existence).

 

Of course, one of them did, and now the other 'heroes' blame him for the new timeline they currently reside in.

 

-Yogzilla

[Mavnn]

The last time I ran a time travel game, the characters themselves never time travelled - but they were the result of someone else's time travel. Some of them were given training and equipment by a mysterious benefactor (who knew what they were going to do from his history books, and so what they needed to be provided with for history to work out correct) while one of them was his own daughter!

 

Basically, he had been testing a new starship (insert ad ala Heart of Gold here) when he all went wrong. He assumed he'd been thrown through space with no way to get back, and so married a local and had a daughter who he named after his childhood historical heroine. Only later did he work out that he'd been thrown back he time and that she _was_ his childhood heroine - and that the reason all psychics were decended from her was because she was decended from him (he came from a time when they'd become common).

 

Then he found out that he had lived back through to his own time, come back again and that an older, more cynical him was trying to manipulate both him and the PCs. Meanwhile, the PCs were starting to find all this out in various ways.

 

Great game which I _really_ didn't expect to work, but carried by great players who actually got and appreciated what was going on. (Although Saskia did balk slightly about being her own ancestor ).

 

Michael

[Big Willy]

The tying up of loose ends.

 

Look at Donnie Darko, The Invisibles or The Anubis Gates. However sprawling and convoluted the plot gets, every single thread eventually gets resolved - somehow. The philosophical tangles of trying to run a game this way can be nightmarish, though.

[winterhawk]

I had a GM have the group made unlimited point versions of the PCs and then send us forward in time to meet our 'future selves'. He did the old Future Dystopia with our future selves as facist leaders of the world as a cautionary tale. It was pretty cool.

[Acroyear]

I think something absolutely essential to a time travel story is time travel. Anything else and it's just some nutjob yelling "I'm from the 24th century! Spare some change?"

 

Evidence is key. Either the presentation or lack of it. "Wow, this guy might be on the up and up" or "That's a pretty wild story, pal."

 

The consequences. It's ok to leave a few loose ends... but make sure they get addressed at some point. The nice part about this is your players don't have to figure them out right away... but a few games later (or even months or a year) BING they come across something that is a direct result of the time meddling. Players love connecting dots. Heck, you can even use loose ends you make up later for plots, but don't go too far or you'll end up being called "That Claremont Hack."

 

And if you really want to add some drama... do that City on the Edge of Forever thing... where if a life is to be saved (especially by a code vs killing type guy) it will result in absolute disaster. Time Traveler #1 comes back to get help saving this important person... but Time Traveler #2 comes back to say "no wait, if this person lives... disaster X will happen."

 

Time Traveler #2 can even be the SAME guy from the new timeline... or might not approach the heroes and, instead, go to a villain (since the heroes were involved in saving the person last time) or some mercs.

 

If they still save the gal, you can zip them off to a future timeline thing were they have to battle the "horrible future" or something... keep the story rolling. Aint that fun?

[MisterVimes]

I don't wqant to give away too much because my players are in the middle of a time travel storyline right now. The best inspiration (in my opinion) comes from the Avengers KANG. Good reading material for this is "The Celestial Madonna" storyline, "The Kang Dynasty " and "Avengers Forever".

 

All three are available in Trade Paperback for about $12 a piece.

 

The thing about Kang is that during his life he has ahd many identities and each time he has travelled in time he has created divergent realities, Thus at any given time there are multiple versions of Kang (and his alternate identities: Immortus, Rama Tut and the Scarlet Centurion) running around.

 

There are three good ways to handle a lord of time.

1) Heroes travel through time chasing the time based villain until they finally pin him down and go home.

2) The time lord invades the 21st century. Since he has to transport his troops (and may be limited because of energy expenditures) his resources are not infinite. This is a basic invasion storyline.

3) Villain sits back and tosses time-displaced perils (dinosaurs, etc) at the heroes until they track him to his lair at the end of time/beginning of time/house in bermuda.

[Evil Steve]

First answer this: how does Time (as a concept) deal with Paradox (eg killing your grandfather)? With a solid solution to temporal Paradox (it doesn't have to be good, it just has to work) you'll be able to avoid some pitfalls.

 

Next, time travel on short hops to the past create the fewest problems. Very few things can go cripplingly wrong in one session if you plan in right. With PC survival and influence limited by one session, you can drop a present day surprise on them that shows they did something before they were born.

 

The other way to avoid big problems is to send them back so far in time that their influences will eventually become legend and myth, thus blurring out the paradoxes they may create.

 

I've never sent anyone forward in time, so I'm no help there, but I would love to hear how it works out for you.

[Ghost Archer]

Hey, Red Eagle, glad to see you are still alive and GMing. Raven says "Hi". Have you upgraded Red Eagle to 5th yet? If so, would you like me to update him on The Seattle Hunt pages?

[red_eagle123]

Time Travel

 

The idea I'm currently toying with is to make use of the Wings of the Valkyrie supplement, with some heavy modification.

 

Specifically I plan on having the players present at a demonstration of some new technology (Which for reasons I haven't fully fleshed out yet the researchers don't know isn't a time machine device, thinking maybe alien tech or something). Just as the demonstration commences, refugees from the future arrive begging the players for asylum. Moments later an alien/military shockforce arrive, hijinks ensue and Big Brawl A breaks out.

 

During the brawl, some of the supposed refugees flee further back into time, wind up killing Hitler and changing the present day drastically. I can already see how killing Hitler would make for some drastic historical changes (IE: Germany wins WW2 because they take longer to start it, thus developing jet engines and nuclear power first, America and Russia never have the cold war, etc etc etc).

 

Anyhow, it's about here that I plan on throwing Wings of the Valkyrie at the players. Or some derivative thereof. I still want to check with the players to make sure they're willing to have a game dealing with such subjects (I mean, c'mon, saving Hitler? That's really mean....).

 

 

P.S. Heya Ghost, seen you bouncing around. Yeah I have a FREd version of Red Eagle if you want to update him, but I'm playing him in a local f2f game, with him just starting out his career. Same kooky loony bin that he was though.

[keithcurtis]

I would say plot your adventure very carefully and only allow limited breakpoints. In other words, make it very clear that "Event X" can result in "Future A" or "Future B". Make Future B really, really unpleasant (Sentinels take over, Nazi-world, etc.) so that they players are motivated to prevent it.

 

I did an adventure where the players failed to prevent a time traveller from changing the outcome of WWII. The next adventure had non-super-powered versions of their characters from the new timeline being contacted by a second time traveller who remembered the original timeline. Eventually, these nascent heroes came to realize that they could change the horror of their world and found a way to un-reverse the event so that the better of two alternatives could come to be.

 

Keith "Why couldn't I travel back in time to kill my own Grandfather? Because it wouldn't be NICE!" Curtis

[Prometheus]

I guess if I could distill it down to one idea, I'd say that "actions have consequences" is a pretty vital part of a good time travel story. Whether it's subtle or blatant, in the past or future, avoidable or inevitable, if you do "A", then "B" will occur.

 

You can twist that around alot, but I think no matter what you do to it, it's a staple.

[Trebuchet]

I ran a scenario once where our hero team, after barely winning a tough fight on the moon, jumped in the trusty alien teleportion machine to return home to their secret HQ in San Francisco. But when they got there, they got quite a shock: Their HQ was a now memorial museum, and out front of the building on a pedestal was a life sized bronze sculpture of the team! On the base was a bronze plaque that read:

 

In memory of the Sentinels, who together fell in battle on the Moon defending Earth. June 6, 1986

 

(Which was that day's date!)

 

Below that was a listing of each of the 7 heroes' names, along with their Secret IDs.

 

Worse, with the fall of the Sentinels, radical elements in the US Government, aided by the Minuteman robots, had seized control of America and converted it into a police state, where all paranormals were illegal unless they were government agents. The team was promptly attacked by a half dozen Minutemen, and only the fact that all data on the "dead" Sentinels had been erased from the Minutemen's electronic memory banks enabled our heroes to triumph in that fight. The Golden Avenger was now Dictator (...er, President), and along with his six regional governors, the Silver Avengers, ruled America with an iron hand. Our heroes had to find out where all the other supers were being held, rescue them, and then find out how to get back to their own universe.

 

I do so love alien "teleporters". Nobody really understands how they work, so you can do anything with 'em. (Witness Stargate SG-1)

[Acroyear II]

Time travel stories can be fun, but require a lot of planning by the GM. I've run one or two major stories so far, with more to come.

 

In the first time travel story, Time Master sends the villain Omega back to 1985 to recruit the heroes to stop the future Master Control, who is experimenting with time travel. Omega, a villain the heroes have never seen before, is successful in recruiting them, and takes them back to 1993 where they attack Master Control's secret base in the Colorado mountains. The heroes meet a team from this future era, who call themselves Steel Justice. Steel Justice was formed to honor the PC hero team when they were destroyed by the villain Omega in the early 1990s (a fact which Omega neglected to tell them when he recruited them). Omega seeks to stop Master Control as well as his past is somehow threatened by Master Control's time traveling into the past. The heroes and Omega manage to defeat Master Control and destroy his time machine in the end. During the course of the story, the heroes learn things about their futures to come (two are believed dead by 1993, one has a daughter with a villain(?!?), one is married, one has a terrible accident, and of course, the whole team is disbanded/defeated by Omega, etc). The heroes are returned safely to 1985, wondering if they can avoid their destined futures.

 

Since I ran that story, I've worked hard to work in each of the futures revealed for each of the heroes. So far, it's worked well. The heroes think they can alter their futures and avoid their destinies, but in the end, Fate always steps in and surprises them with their fortold future becoming a reality. The current time of the campaign is 1988, and thus far most of the heroes have had their fortold futures come true to some degree. Oh, and Omega has finally made his first appearance in the current continutity of the campaign by sending his emissaries to battle the heroes. Trust me, the heroes are worried that Omega really will be the end of them.

 

Another story involving time travel that I have run involved the daughter of one heroine and a villain (see above - her perdicted future came true!). The villain stole the child and used a time machine to return to the early 1960s. The heroes could not follow back in time, but decided to track down the present day version of this villain. Well, it turns out, he was killed when struck by a car in 1963. They investigated what happened to his daugther after he died, but could not find out who raised her since 1963. It's now 25 years later, and the daughter is a grown woman. The players don't know it yet, but the daughter is actually a woman villain they have fought several times during the course of the campaign; a villain who has done unspeakable things and they loathe her! Wait till they find out the missing daughter is actually one of their most hated foes! I'm so evil!

(Note: some of you may recognize part of this story as similar to a plot used during the 6th season of Xena. Well, let me tell you something, I came up with this story a whole year before the Xena writers did! Bastards stole my story! )

 

Acroyear II

[Hermit]

If you're looking for a good Time Travel Adventure, may I reccomend the one in "Champions Presents" #1?

[Peregrine]

I had a time travel scenario once (never finished running it) where the PCs started in an alternate timeline, one where JFK was never assassinated. Yup, you guessed it - they found evidence of tampering and had to go back and thwart the tampering - by ensuring that JFK was assassinated 'on schedule'. I had it set up where one of the PCs might have had to be the assassin.

[Doug McCrae]

Originally posted by Trebuchet

Worse, with the fall of the Sentinels, radical elements in the US Government, aided by the Minuteman robots, had seized control of America and converted it into a police state, where all paranormals were illegal unless they were government agents.

Why are so many alternate timelines ruled by fascist dictatorships?

[Trebuchet]

Originally posted by Doug McCrae

Why are so many alternate timelines ruled by fascist dictatorships?

 

It's an official rule. Section 426b, Paragraph 211, of the Science Fiction and Comics Writers Code clearly states that "All alternate realities are a priori assumed to be inferior to the real world, and thus those parallel realities must always be fascist or communist dictatorships."

 

Amendments B & C of Paragraph 211 added Islamic fascism and corporate fascism as acceptable alternatives.

 

Paragraph 212 requires that environmental fascism will always be initially portrayed as a utopia, although it must always have a hidden dark side. (See "Logan's Run", et al.)

 

[Superskrull]

Originally posted by Doug McCrae

Why are so many alternate timelines ruled by fascist dictatorships?

 

Usually because of two reasons. Fighting fascism is a feel-good story. It gives heroes a clear-cut sense of 'this is wrong and I can fix it with X' and makes for a fun time as they try to succeed against black-hearted fiends and well-meaning dupes.

 

The second reason is that it's quite disheartening to learn that if it wasn't for your own actions things would be better.

[Superskrull]

Ah, I love time travel. I've used it in several games in various ways. In my off-the-cuff game where I was trying to survive running a game containing Con-El and Phaeton, it generates a scenario they will break a sweat worrying about stopping, since temporal tampering bypasses invulnerability. It also lets me generate evil clones and mulptiple coppies of things during the story to cloud the plot.

 

In my normal Champions game, where I actually do plan things, it makes for a fun story as they spot the evidence and launch themselves on a course that will pull together a lot of plot threads and last for several sessions of action, investigation and (my favorite) meaningless debate over time-travel physics by characters and players who seem to miss the whole point by taking the stance that time-travel is impossible. Nice thought, but that's like trying to disprove your own existance. It's also fun to work in time travel as a new thing to the PCs and then have them discover that the WWII era characters (for example) have 'been there, done that' and aren't fazed by it in the least.

 

It's also fun to work in some time-travel where they don't know about it. I ran a throwaway game before set in the Golden Age where they PCs had to rescue Dr Temple from Nazis as in the Champions Presents time travel story only with the PCs being local heroes who saved him while the time-traveling future hero (currently an NPC) watched from the shadows as his timeline was changed trapping him in this now alternate past. The hapless former PC also narrowly avoided being roasted by the triggerhappy radioactive hero Captain Freedom as the teenage ninja from the future snuck out of the tree right before it was vaporized by the 'good' Captain who had spotted 'something' and opened fire.

 

Later heroes in the campaign wound up in this alternate timeline temporarily as they looked for the time-lost prior PCs. It's a wierd feeling to know you've kept the actions of multiple player groups in continuity and let their actions influence each other without anyone but you knowing.

[Mayday]

Vanguard...

 

went after a time machine guy reputed to be on a huge oil tanker sailing the Gulf of Mexico. They snuck on board at night and made their way to the hold where they detected a monster power source operating. They entered a large metal room and disabled a bomb or something there then turned to go.

 

When they opened the door, the outer room was not there, just a wall of white. One stuck a sword into it and the blade disappeared. They shot at it with energy blasts, threw shuriken but nothing damaged it. Then, it disappeared.

 

They left the room, the ship was gone and nothing but Jurassic forests for miles. The whole thing was a ruse to get them there to be gotten rid of.

 

Luckily one was an immortal Egyptian God of the moon, another Batman the gadgeteer, and yet another a lightning Energy Blaster with Scientist skills. Between them they rigged up a battery, mined metals and forged parts that had burnt out, scavenged their gear and rebuilt the Time Machine.

 

The game actually ended with them in the past and they spent weeks plotting how to get out of that fix cause the GM wouldnt run them until they found a way. Very motivated players :-)

[zornwil]

We had a time traveller/time elemental so we had several of these back in my former campaign.

 

Some of the storylines high level included:

 

- fixing the past when someone else messed it up; in particular, because the past was different the supers had a somewhat different relationship, so I told them that and they roleplayed accordingly, it was fun as a quick 1-shot change

 

- going into the future, changing the future so it affects the past unexpectedly (affects someone else who would time travel from the future to the past)

 

- going into the past and knowing you shouldn't change it but watching something horrible happening - was a good emotional episode

 

- going into the past to solve a current mystery, with partial information

[Blue]

Got one Time Traveller coming into the new campaign (Not sure if he reads the boards so I can't say too much). The campaign city is doomed, prophecies claim. He is from the future, returning from moments before "the end" in order to stop the catastrophe from taking place. He's got only some of the facts from knowledge he studied about our time period. Of course, history in books is seldom exactly right.

 

The other characters only know of the prophecies and the general population view them as ridiculous.

 

I expect paradoxes to be very interesting. Especially since I'd already built into the campaign a group of "time cops" to keep an eye on anomalies. The great conflict of time travel has always been "I can interfere, but should I?" There will be a lot of that.

[Trebuchet]

Originally posted by Superskrull

It's a wierd feeling to know you've kept the actions of multiple player groups in continuity and let their actions influence each other without anyone but you knowing.

 

You, sir, are an evil and twisted fiend. I salute you.

[BNakagawa]

Like all good stories, a good time travel story needs a good beginning, middle, prelude, broken ending, pre-ending, repeat middle and ending hinting at possibly dangling plotlines.