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View Full Version : Adventure Planning Help (Time Travel)



Earthwalker
2013-05-22, 04:54 AM
Some time soon my PCs are going to be doing a dungeon crawl.
The dungeon is a former prison that has been swallowed by a glacier. Under the prison is a temple to an acient god of ice and cold. The PCs have a good reason for trying to get to the temple.My plan for the prison is for it to be haunted by former guests, as well as the odd Ice elemental.

Now one of the PCs has a magic book that allows time travel. Of course the time travel is limited to when the book thinks it is needed and usually involves a mission. The plan I have so far is this.

The PCs climb down the ice into the top of the prison breaking into the wardens office. This office is completely locked up with an insanly secure door. Once they have had a chance to look around the room and examplin the door, the book comes up with a mission in the past. The mission will be to save a prisoners life, one that the book tells them will be killed in a prison riot. So they accept the mission (I have no reason to believe they wont) and go back and put right what once went wrong (You know there is a TV program in this). From then on the plan is, if they manage to quell the riot then the warden was never attacked in his office and so is less paranoid and the door to the office is easier to get past.

Of course they may lose in the past and I will need to come up with what next.

What I am here asking for is other things that may be improved by them meddling in the past. I was thinking of changing the nature of the creatures haunting the prison depending on how they acted in the past.
Going back in time is going to give them a view of the prison from the outside, as well as a way to learn the lay out. It will be good when its compared to its ruined state.

So can anyone else think of any time shenigans that will help the players ?

AntiTrust
2013-05-22, 07:00 AM
Perhaps by offering a prayer in the temple to the ice god some of the areas that will have been completely frozen solid (perhaps a place with some valuables) might be opened up or the ice elementals won't attack on sight, but instead only if the party attacks them first

TheStranger
2013-05-22, 09:03 AM
The party goes back in time and gives Tim Robbins a prisoner a rock hammer; they then use the escape tunnel (not as well-blocked-off as it should be) to bypass an encounter in the present.

I'd be more worried about the shenanigans your players get up to without your help, though. Once you put them in the past, they may or may not go completely off the rails trying to rearrange the present to their liking. For instance, they might try to solve the door problem by inciting the riot rather than quelling it, causing the prison to be burned down and abandoned, so then none of the doors will be locked in the present. Or maybe they'll sneak down to the temple and preemptively desecrate it to try to stop the glaciation. Or they'll walk out of the prison, overthrow the government that's sending prisoners there... does the magic book have a way to yank them back to the present if they piss it off?

Earthwalker
2013-05-23, 03:10 AM
The players are going back a few hundred years, the temple was desecrated only 5 years ago. So any messing with the temple when they travel back to the past will not help. The Glacification in the present is caused by something other than the temple.

Generally my players are more than happy to just go alot withthe plot and will not see traveling back in time 300 years as a way to rule the future. For me this is a good thing.

I think they may be able to hide a key or two somewhere they can get to it in the future.