Time Hero

[quozaxx]

In the book Star Hero, another book is mentioned: Time Hero.

 

I personally love time travel stories, movies, and television. But I figure that if Time Hero ever is to be a reality, it may take a long long time before we see a physical copy of this book

 

(considering it has to be written, and then sent to Kickstarter, then it has to have a high enough bid to be printed, and then it has to be sent to Kickstarter supporters, and then (and only then), would it be available to the general public.)

 

Well, that's too long of a wait for me, so I thought I'd start a thread discussing the subject of Time Travel.

 

So first question: Has your character ever time traveled in a game? If so; details please.

[Major Tom 2009]

Re: Time Hero

 

I don't know if this counts as time travel, but the origin of my Champions character

Powerstar had him getting his powers as a result of being trapped in the event horizon

of a white hole in 1946, and eventually returning to Earth in 2006.

 

As for time travel, does being transported to an alternate timeline -- same year, but an

entirely different history -- count at all?

 

 

 

Major Tom 2009

[Christopher]

Re: Time Hero

 

As for time travel, does being transported to an alternate timeline -- same year, but an

entirely different history -- count at all?

I would think that just counts as "Alternate Reality" travel, unless it is a side effect of time travel itself (what happened in back to the Future).

[Manic Typist]

Re: Time Hero

 

Fantasy character went back two weeks (by accident), but I was out in the middle of nowhere so it didn't really make a difference. Just returned to the city a little sooner than expected.

[Zen Archer]

Re: Time Hero

 

So first question: Has your character ever time traveled in a game? If so; details please.

 

Had a '30s pulp avenger-style character transported to "today" for a mini-campaign, but that was more a plot device than a time-travel adventure.

 

In a Star Trek game, we had the obligatory time travel back to a past Earth. This was to save Zefram Cochrane from being murdered before he makes his famous flight (this was run before the Star Trek movie with a similar plot).

[Christopher]

Re: Time Hero

 

So first question: Has your character ever time traveled in a game? If so; details please.

Overlooked that part. The Origin story of Grey Angel is exactly that: Time Travel from bad timeline to change the course of history but that was a Plot device.

 

I decided to not give her active time Travel Power, so I went with that:

In her original timeline the rest of humanity (about 2 Million) fled the solar system through an acient alien portal found in the outer soalr system*, to a new Planet caleld "New Eden" (it beat the partially Terraformed Mars of that time).

After a few decades or so the found out that they could send someone back in time using those portals - but only one person and the portal in Sol would blow up.**

So they did it. "Have fun preventing WW3 and the other stuff without knowing anything about what went wrong when in our timeline."

 

*It was really well hidden in one of the asteroid fields and inactive for thousands of years.

 

**One of the time travel theories says that you can't travel further back in time than to the point where the time machine existed (was compelted). Using an ancient portal (and destroyign it) means this needs little definition on the area of how time travel works. It could be that it just applies to her way of time travel, or it could always require some acient alien artifact.

[quozaxx]

Re: Time Hero

 

Next question: What is (or was) your favorite time travel show / episode?

 

Please note the show the episode refers to.

 

As for my favorite: Dr. Who. Nothing beats him, in my opinion. Followed closely by Quantum Leap (until the last season. I was really hooked on that show up to the point where they leaped him into a chimp.)

 

As for my favorite episode of Dr. Who.... "The Keys to Time" series of episodes.

[quozaxx]

Re: Time Hero

 

No wait, I forgot another favorite Dr. Who episode... The Five Doctors.

 

Yup, a classic.

[Christopher]

Re: Time Hero

 

Next question: What is (or was) your favorite time travel show / episode?

 

Please note the show the episode refers to.

I really liked the ones they did later in Star Trek Voyager:

Timeless had a very strong visual/emotional picture and was a good character episode. Also a example for minimal Invasive Timetravel.

The two Parter "Year of Hell". It shows that trying to play around with the timeline never works out. Also, it has an irony: The bad boss could have corrected his entire mistake by just erasing his time ship.

 

But propably the best was Relativity. They created and destroyed about half a dozen timelines thanks to a chase across the voyager that spanned multiple timelines.

Seven of Nien was just cool. She (who afaik never used timetravel before) acted as if it was the most normal thing in the unvierse, while Janeway almost got a headache over just thinking about it.

The episode had such funny one-liners as "Seven of Nine to Seven of Nine, what is your Status?". But the best part was that they choose Seven in part because they feared Janeways interference. That didn't turned out so well:

 

 

So they send Janeway to Capture Braxton and she gave her one of the best one-liners: "Long time no see." While make a almost flawless change of history.

[Zen Archer]

Re: Time Hero

 

Next question: What is (or was) your favorite time travel show / episode?

 

Favorite show: Doctor Who

 

Favorite epsiode: Star Trek's "City on the Edge of Forever".

[Major Tom 2009]

Re: Time Hero

 

How about adding your favorite method of time travel (like, for example, the seemingly

suicidal way that it was done in Timecop -- riding a rocket-boosted sled at high speed

toward a solid wall, only to pass through the temporal wall between the present and the

past)?

 

 

 

Major Tom 2009

[quozaxx]

Re: Time Hero

 

Favorite method of time travel: Flux capacitor and 88 miles per hour!

[wcw43921]

Re: Time Hero

 

I'd have to say my favorite time machine would be the "Time-Transporter" I came up with when I was about eight, nine years old. It was a big metal cabinet that contained the machinery and controls, connected by a conduit to a glass booth. The traveler would stand inside the booth while the operator would set the time and destination, then pull the lever to "time-transport" the traveler.

 

It was not unlike Peabody's Wayback Machine with Time Tunnel-like special effects. I had fun drawing it.

[Ockham's Spoon]

Re: Time Hero

 

Time travel in stories can be really cool the way everything ties together and works out, but RPG's are generally too chaotic to have tidy endings like that and you end up with a bunch of causality problems. I have only ever run one successful time loop scenario in which a group of Fantasy Hero characters found their own dead bodies at the bottom of a canyon. Later they ended up traveling back in time to the point when they would have been killed and found themselves at the canyon again. They were attacked by a band of magically created duplicates, which they managed to defeat, hence the dead bodies. But as well as that worked out, it required a little fudging on my part to make the number of bodies in the canyon match in both time settings.

 

A better use for time travel in my mind is just to allow heroes to explore past/future civilizations, and either have them fixing temporal problems caused by other time travellers or just assuming that a small group of people can't seriously impact history enough to create causality issues. Either that or allow for lots of timelines, but even that can cause problems (so we killed the master villain here, but there are 500 other timelines where he kills us? How many of us are there?)

[quozaxx]

Re: Time Hero

 

I'd have to say my favorite time machine would be the "Time-Transporter" I came up with when I was about eight, nine years old. It was a big metal cabinet that contained the machinery and controls, connected by a conduit to a glass booth. The traveler would stand inside the booth while the operator would set the time and destination, then pull the lever to "time-transport" the traveler.

 

It was not unlike Peabody's Wayback Machine with Time Tunnel-like special effects. I had fun drawing it.

 

You've been time traveling since you were 9???? What time are you really from anyways?

[Manic Typist]

Re: Time Hero

 

Well, we are all time travelers heading into the future, really...

[Midas]

Re: Time Hero

 

Brisco County Jr.

The whole background story was about people in the 50th century feeling sorry for the primitives, and sending "stuff" back to advance them. Essentially, they sent three sets of Character Points back in the hopes of improving the lives of people in the late 19th century - Things Did Not Go Well. Brisco eventually had to go back in time and give himself advice on how to deal with an upcoming problem.

 

Added to that was the villain being from the 25th century and wanting the CP boost for himself.

[Scott Baker]

Re: Time Hero

 

Brisco County Jr.

The whole background story was about people in the 50th century feeling sorry for the primitives, and sending "stuff" back to advance them. Essentially, they sent three sets of Character Points back in the hopes of improving the lives of people in the late 19th century - Things Did Not Go Well. Brisco eventually had to go back in time and give himself advice on how to deal with an upcoming problem.

 

Added to that was the villain being from the 25th century and wanting the CP boost for himself.

 

I loved Briscoe County Jr.

[Cancer]

Re: Time Hero

 

The Shadowfist canon campaign setting was explicitly set in a universe where factions based at different times were fighting each other, and there could be lots of time travel for the PCs. Didn't have to be, but could be. I was a part-time player in that campaign (most of it happened while I was living out of town) but I co-ran a session or two where we tried to make the most out of the time travel aspect of the setting.

[quozaxx]

Re: Time Hero

 

Do you think that if you decided to run a campaign that hops from time zone to time zone; that you would need a good grasp of history?

[Christopher]

Re: Time Hero

 

Do you think that if you decided to run a campaign that hops from time zone to time zone; that you would need a good grasp of history?

In a world where time travel is a reality, there is no need to be precise with the History. In many aspects it's just a variant of the "Rome World", "Dinosaur Land", "Stoneage World" Dimension travel.

 

Just make certain that you can't make mini-jumps (a few years) and don't run into paradoxes regulary (can't travel to a moment where you already exist).

 

I also seriously doubt our common interpreation of what happened in any ancient time. We have little to no written Information, the dating is at best a guess (it was counted with "Year of Ruler X", with some years or decades jumped over because of "bad luck").

For virtually any person or place of mythic relevance you can say "if he even existed". There is simply to much loss of information, distortion, translation errors to rely on any written source older than a century.

[Cancer]

Re: Time Hero

 

Do you think that if you decided to run a campaign that hops from time zone to time zone; that you would need a good grasp of history?

 

I think that depends on how closely you intend to mesh the PCs' actions into real-world history. If you're going to have them prevent the assassination of Lincoln, then probably you need a pretty solid grip on America in 1865-66. But if they're trying to prevent monkey business with the timestream, then not so much.

 

Something that is essential for you game is to figure out what happens if the PCs refute their own existence (that is, they alter history in a way so that they can no longer exist). Without that they don't know if they've messed themselves up, and how urgently they need to try fixing it. I'll see if I can find my old posts about this stuff and edit links in.