Timelines

[Sketchpad]

How many people use timelines in their game? Is it a good thing? Bad thing?

[Doug McCrae]

Re: Timelines

 

What do you mean? The history of your world? Like:

 

 

8 500 BC: Sinking of Atlantis

1776: First sighting of the Spirit of America

1938: First superhero, the Champion, appears in Toronto

1941: First superhero team formed - the Society of Vigilante Justice

[Sketchpad]

Re: Timelines

 

Basically .. yes Just wondering if people find them useful .. espcially as a player tool

[Theron]

Re: Timelines

 

Depends on the game. For a straight-up four color world, yes, I'll use them, because I tend to break the fourth wall quite a bit and treat the campaign as an ongoing comic and the players as the readership. So a timeline like that, full of stuff the characters might not know or bother to know is just added "fan service".

 

For a game like my upcoming Agents of IMPACT setting, I keep things a bit more vague. Everyone knows supers have been around since the 60s or so, but since so many of them are tied up in ongoing Cold War maneuvering, it's a shadowy history unknown by the general public or even the soldiers fighting the war.

[Evil Toki]

Re: Timelines

 

I use Timelines for my current game, Legacy Universe... it helps to keep things straight but with only ten years of divrgent history it in't too hard

[assault]

Re: Timelines

 

I find them useful as a world design tool.

 

They're also interesting to read, and write.

 

eg:

~2000 BC: glowing green meteorites fall on Atlantis....

~1650 BC: Atlantis destroyed. There are three groups of survivors....

 

I also often extend them into the future, too, for convenience in designing time travel scenarios.

[Ghost who Walks]

Re: Timelines

 

I found my secret timeline very useful, for when I started my campaign.

 

Basicly listed events for the past 50,000 years, so I could keep the campaign on course, and focused.

 

More recent events are usually kept track of by the players.

[Dust Raven]

Re: Timelines

 

I keep a timeline of sorts, but I have yet to actually write it out and put dates on it. It's one of the projects I'm currently working on. I was inspired to do so when I started getting confused as to when who did what in my worlds history. Even if my players are never gonna know any of this (and most they shouldn't), it helps to maintain internal concistance if I do.

[zornwil]

Re: Timelines

 

Yes, though I've written it up more as a narrative, and I really need to complete it.

[Acroyear]

Re: Timelines

 

My "eternally planned but never to see the light of day" campaign has a pretty extensive timeline (still in progress).

 

This was for many reasons:

 

1) I wanted to be able to establish a sense of "legacy" - sure, players could make up stuff on their own, but I wanted a clear example that's it's not bad, not entirely uncommon, to try to fill another man's shoes.

 

2) One of the "heavy hitter" villains is immortal and meddled in lots of places. He's also pursued by his opposite number. Their little ongoing war is why most major mystical artifacts are very lost or hard to find, even though civlizations may have once been built around them.

 

3) I wanted the campaign world to include what I consider essential aspects of history from various comic companies (so I kind of combined universes without using the specific characters, but the themes, and a liberal amount of seriel number filing).

 

4) I wanted the campaign to show that characters do age. Quick example, the Superman type guy who first appeared in the 30's died, uh, whenever Superman died in that Doomsday storyline. His invulnerability made autopsy impossible, they assume of "old age." The Batman style character is extra spooky in that he seems to be immortal (actually, he's more like the Phantom in that respect).

 

5) I wanted to also match up classic comic book/etc events with real world (and suspected) events to some degree.

 

6) The aging and matching up timelines went hand in hand with the legacy thing. Many of the published characters the players knew would be "too old for this sort of thing" (or dead or whatever) today. Thus, all the old greats did exist, but now it's mostly the players' turns.

 

The golden age happened in the golden age, the silver age in the silver, and so on. I admit, I cut out most of the image age stuff... it sort of exists as a self-destructive flash in the pan.

 

It would allow the group it was intended for to connect the campaign world with the various events and themes they were familiar with. It allowed them to know exactly what I mean when I talk about the Superman guy or the Captain America guy as heroes of heroes. Except for the speicifc names, it allowed them to know much of the history of the campaign world from the very first moment. I also wanted to have things straight for myself.

 

Anyway, whew, that's a very specific example. I think all campaigns need a bare bones timeline, at the least. When did supers first appear and any major events like alien invasion attempts. If you're planning a game in which superpowered beings first came about in the early 90's... your players need to know that before your submitted character sheets are an immortal elf from pre-history and the human fireball from WWII.

[Guest Worldmaker]

Re: Timelines

 

I think a timeline is a basic part of making a gameworld feel distinct, especially if the gameworld is "real world plus ", where the genre element could be anything from superheroes to invading aliens to a nuclear holocaust.

[death tribble]

Re: Timelines

 

I have used one before and it is useful as an aide memoire. In some ways you can set off a time bomb for the heroes later as the investigate certain things.

[Battlestaff]

Re: Timelines

 

I have two timelines. One is a handout in narrative form, and is intended to be given to the players so that they have an idea of how events in the real world occurred differently in the game world, and to help them when developing their characters.

 

I also have a basically year-by-year timeline of the 20th-21st century that I'm debating whether the show to the players. I have three listings on there: real world events (for putting things in context), real world events that occurred differently in the game world, and events that never happened in our world. I'm currently re-working my narrative handout (it was last updated in 1999) for a new campaign I'm planning.

 

Anyone who wants to see it just PM me.

[Mike W]

Re: Timelines

 

I think timelines are very useful when writing a character's history. It gives you a chance to see where the PC could fit into the world. It also helps you get a feel for the history of the world and how the NPC characters fit into. Who likes who, which heroes have rivalries and such. And so on.

[TheEmerged]

Re: Timelines

 

Yes, although mine is written as much for comedic reasons as gameplay Here's the first few entries of the timeline for the NeoChampions Universe...

 

A REALLY, REALLY LONG TIME AGO

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void.â€

 

NOT QUITE AS LONG AGO, BUT STILL ANYTHING BUT RECENTLY

In six days (and I mean literal “the sun goes up once and down once†days here), God turns the formless void Earth used to be into a world teaming with life. As part of this process, God creates an unbelievably beautiful garden and puts Adam & Eve in it. Side note: while I’m not a true proponent of the “gap theory†of Creationism, the possibility for a gap still exists.

 

AN INDETERMINATE AMOUNT OF TIME LATER (BUT THE SMART MONEY SAYS IT WASN’T ALL THAT LONG…)

Adam and Eve, for all tense and purposes, screw it up big time. I mean, God gave them only one rule. ONE, STINKING, LOUSY RULE! But could they keep it? No… They have to go and eat off of the one tree in the whole freaking garden God told them not to. It gets them kicked out of the Garden of Eden and causes all sorts of sundry problems for humanity.

 

ROUGHLY 2000 YEARS LATER (roughly 2000 BC)

Apparently ‘screwing up’ is humanity’s best talent, because by now only one man is worshiping God – a guy by the name of Noah. This leads to the Deluge, which kills off everyone on the planet except for Noah, his three sons, and their wives – for a total of 8 people. God promises to never again destroy the planet with water.

 

A PITIFULLY SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME LATER

Noah becomes the first documented drunk. Like I said, ‘screwing up’ seems to be humanity’s best talent.

[Doug McCrae]

Re: Timelines

 

I like doing the period flavour names - stuff like Phantomaster and Captain Atlantis in the Golden Age, Gorgoom son of Gorgg in the late 50s, the Adventure Five in the Silver Age, the Man-Creature in the Bronze Age, Darkfyre and Machine in the Iron Age.

[BishopofB&W]

Re: Timelines

 

I've found it helps as a springboard for campaign ideas, i.e. what happened in the past that caused this today. It is also great for flavor. For example, I decided that the events portrayed in the movie Young Sherlock Holmes (starring Nicholas Rowe) really happened but with sorcery. Watson never published the story but an aspiring American writer found Watson's school diary in a flea market and launched a successful writing career. The publisher (a member of an Evil Organization ) had him remove the more fantastic elements. The diary mysteriously vanished....

[ChuckB]

Re: Timelines

 

This is one of those things that players normally never care about, but recently one of our players (Hey James) is very interested in incorporating the official universe with the one we'd been playing in for 10+ years.

 

So, maybe that's changing.

[KawangaKid]

Re: Timelines

 

My "eternally planned but never to see the light of day" campaign has a pretty extensive timeline (still in progress).

 

This was for many reasons:

 

1) I wanted to be able to establish a sense of "legacy" - sure, players could make up stuff on their own, but I wanted a clear example that's it's not bad, not entirely uncommon, to try to fill another man's shoes.

 

I use a similar approach to the timelines, primarily because I need to establish (along with another document) what kind of origins are acceptable, and which are not.

 

For example, a player wanted to have his powered armor derived from the anime show Voltes V - the "Ultra-electromagnetic energy" weapons, miniaturized. I had to establish when exactly the Bozanian alien invasion took place...

 

I also like to keep the recent past more vague. Such as...

 

"Now, Superman patrols the skies again. No one knows if he's the original one, or his son who mysteriously disappeared in the 1990s..."

 

Serves to keep their presence there, and prevents the "I KNOW YOU'RE BRUCE WAYNE, Batman!" event down to a minimum.

[Guest Worldmaker]

Re: Timelines

 

I've found it helps as a springboard for campaign ideas' date=' i.e. what happened in the past that caused this today. It is also great for flavor. For example, I decided that the events portrayed in the movie [i']Young Sherlock Holmes[/i] (starring Nicholas Rowe) really happened but with sorcery. Watson never published the story but an aspiring American writer found Watson's school diary in a flea market and launched a successful writing career. The publisher (a member of an Evil Organization ) had him remove the more fantastic elements. The diary mysteriously vanished....

 

 

Do you have this on the web somewhere?

[Maelstrom]

Re: Timelines

 

Love the biblical time line.

 

I've never used time lines in Champions, but I do so all the time in Star Hero and Fantasy Hero campaigns.

[BishopofB&W]

Re: Timelines

 

Do you have this on the web somewhere?

No. It's a work in progress. I started by copying the main timeline distinctions in the official timeline and have been trying to fill it in as I have time. Most of my stuff is in the modern era because I decided that superpowers first come about in 1965 after a lich-to-be tried to use the energy resonance from the Los Alamos tests and the Japan bombing to open a gate for my campaign world's Cthulhu/Edom-inspired horrors. I'm trying to come up with ideas for earlier events to create more continuity. I also said that the first U.S. paranormal special ops team was secretly deployed in the Six Day War. Then there's my take on the Philadelphi Experiment and the Israeli bombing of the U.S.S. Liberty...

 

I'm in the same boat as Acroyear.

 

I'll try to post a sample tomorrow.

[BishopofB&W]

Re: Timelines

 

These entries are a little long but I find it easier to keep my notes straight in this form.

 

1794—The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel retires at the end of the Reign of Terror. Their final group of rescues includes a Duc d’Erlet, who demonstrates his gratitude by incapacitating his rescuers with an alchemical gas and attempting to sacrifice them in a summoning ritual. He hopes to bargain for new magical powers with a demon prince. Lord Blakeney revives just in time to stop him from killing anyone and runs d’Erlet through the heart with his rapier.

1866—Sherlock Holmes and John Watson meet for the first time at a London boarding school. They match wits with the school’s fencing master, Rathe. Thought to have drowned in a fight with Holmes, Rathe resurfaces years later as Professor James Moriarty. Watson never publishes the story of their adventure but in 1978, his diary ends up in the hands of an American who launches a successful writing career with the novel Young Sherlock Holmes. Eventually, Chris Columbus writes a film adaptation of it.

1887—The greater vampire Count Vlad Dracula, having sensed the increasing flow of the energies that sustained him in undeath, arrives in London and sets about establishing himself in his new home. Dr. Van Helsing and his companions discover him. They pursue him back to his Transylvanian castle and apparently destroy him.

1888—Jack the Ripper terrorizes London. Sherlock Holmes teams up with London occultist and Temple of the Silver City agent Simon Campion to stop him.

1892—Mycroft Holmes becomes the director of the British Secret Service. He (and his successors) is referred to as “Mâ€.

July 1943—The U.S. Navy conducts tests of a new stealth technology known as the Philadelphia Experiment. At first, everything seems to work perfectly. Then something goes wrong and several crewmembers either die or go insane. Eyewitness reports also place the ship for a few seconds in two different locations hundreds of miles apart at approximately the same time as the test.

August 9, 1965—Sorcerer Nerius Greene attempts to open a dimensional gate to the realms of Apophis in Middlebury, England. He is stopped by a group made up of third-generation descendants of late 19th- through early 20th-century adventurers, adepts of the Temple of the Silver City, and some of the world’s most unorthodox intelligence operatives. Greene dies in the ensuing battle.

April 18, 1966—A mysterious, inhuman creature murders several people in a rite to resurrect Greene as a lich. Greene takes the new name Father Qlippoth and is, if anything, even more evil than in his mortal life.

May 1967—With President Eisenhower’s approval, Vice President Nixon and Henry Kissinger form a plan to infiltrate the Army’s first paranormal covert ops unit, codenamed Team 19, into Israel in anticipation of the Six Day War. While confident the Israeli armed forces will prevail with the help of U.S. weapons and supplies, they both see a chance to simultaneously hedge their bet and test Team 19 in the field. The team works with Mossad operatives and successfully completes its objectives, destroying several cells of Soviet, Egyptian, and Syrian spies and saboteurs. They discover that their targets include some paranormals, as well. They are so successful that Eisenhower signs an order increasing funding to the Army’s paranormal asset program and encouraging the other military branches and intelligence agencies to develop their own.

June 8, 1967—The Six Day War is well underway. Believing all the bugs are worked out, the U.S. Navy tests the Philadelphia Experiment stealth technology under war conditions by sending the US Destroyer Liberty just outside of Israeli waters to invisibly observe the fighting. They observe an Israeli Special Forces unit attack and kill a mixed group of about eighty Arab soldiers and robed men who appear to be conducting some kind of ritual. The group is attempting to summon one of the demons supposedly imprisoned by King Solomon. The summoning fails, but the forces already unleashed interact with the time-space distortion that conceals the Liberty. The result is a small dimensional rift onboard and the possession of the crew and ship by energies and beings from the Apophic realms. The Israelis have no choice but to bomb the ship into scrap, killing all but a few of the crew. The survivors are too traumatized to remember what really happened and the U.S. and Israeli governments cover it up as a mistaken attack. The Philadelphia Experiment is shut down permanently.

September 11, 2001—Terrorists hijack four airliners and crash one of them into the World Trade Center in New York City. The second and third planes are prevented from hitting the WTC and the Pentagon and the passengers are rescued by the superhero Paladin and the government superteam Guardians of Liberty. The passengers on the fourth plane, led by Bernie Goldblum, an insurance investigator and low-level mutant brick, overpower the hijackers. Guardian II and Blackbird of the Guardians of Liberty rescue the passengers and land the plane safely. One tower of the WTC collapses. Total loss of life is estimated at 2,000 people. President George W. Bush declares a “War on Terrorâ€.

[Blue]

Re: Timelines

 

I did a simple "heroic" timeline to point out where the previous team and the building of the campaign city came in. I told my players when they were making characters, "No Time Travelers, No Aliens". So naturally I wound up with 2 Time travelers and an Alien.

 

With two time travelers added, I had to now add them and where they came from to the timeline. Then I started my craziness with time paradoxes, which meant building an elaborate time line that the players aren't even aware of.

 

So to the "Is it helpuful/Necessary" type of question, for me it's absolutely necessary in order to keep consistancy to my crazy universe, and it's helpful later on when I say, "What was the name of the inventor who made the android PC who lost his memory?" I can just flip to the timeline and see the note in the eara he came from.

[Guest Worldmaker]

Re: Timelines

 

I did a simple "heroic" timeline to point out where the previous team and the building of the campaign city came in. I told my players when they were making characters, "No Time Travelers, No Aliens". So naturally I wound up with 2 Time travelers and an Alien.

 

With two time travelers added, I had to now add them and where they came from to the timeline. Then I started my craziness with time paradoxes, which meant building an elaborate time line that the players aren't even aware of.

 

So to the "Is it helpuful/Necessary" type of question, for me it's absolutely necessary in order to keep consistancy to my crazy universe, and it's helpful later on when I say, "What was the name of the inventor who made the android PC who lost his memory?" I can just flip to the timeline and see the note in the eara he came from.

 

 

Just out of curiosity, why didn't you hand the characters back and say "I told you no, I meant no"?