Nettlekid
2013-09-02, 05:10 PM
So this is just the seed of a campaign idea, but my group of friends is always trying to get more campaigns going, so I'm brainstorming to put stuff together.
My first thought is, BBEG: Phane. Superpowered Phane who cheats like the bad guy in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, by doing stuff like starting his temporal regression, watching the PCs use their best attacks, rewinding time, and stating that "After this battle I'll go back in time and put an item which counters that in this bag" at which point he pulls out the item (or uses the prepared spell or who knows what) and makes the offense moot. (Obviously it'll be a little fancier than that, but that's the gist.)
The main plot will involve the Phane's power source. In a special perfected form of his Stasis Touch, he has imprisoned a full city/country/something big inside a personal bubble on the Temporal Energy Plane (one of those looping bubbles). The city has three stages. A stage of technology, populated by Warforged. A stage of the wild, populated by Killoren. And a parallel stage of the mind, populated by Elan. These ageless races retain their consciousness in the stasis, but cannot interact with the outside. They may not even know that they're in a stasis where a year for them is a second for the outside world. Because they're ageless they don't die, but somehow the society will crumble and the next will take over.
What I want the PCs to do is have a Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time-style adventure, by which they travel back and forth to the various times (I think I want the Warforged city first, then the Elan city, and then the Killoren city), manipulating the past to affect the future and whatnot. There can be subplots and mini-villains in the various cities (a Body Leech in the Elan city for example, or some sub-Lord of Blades in the Warforged) but I'd love it if they can interact with the time travel to get their goals. Just not sure how to make it clever, beyond the obvious kind of "There's a disease in the future, and they make a seed that can grow into a cure-all fruit, but needs 1000 years to grow, so the PCs plant it in the past and go back to the future to harvest the now-grown fruit" kind of thing.
Also, I like the idea of changing the future with the past, but that can make paradoxes, which I like, but I need to know how to deal with them. For example, in the above seed->fruit thing, the future people would never get the disease in the first place because they have the curing fruit. So, do I let the PCs just do that, or do I make them plant the seed somewhere it won't be found so that the future people still don't have the fruit, so there's no paradox?
Finally, now, I've never played Majora's Mask, so I don't really get how it works with Link resetting every three days and things that were changed stay changed. But is there a way I could incorporate that into the time bubble? Like, once the party fixes some problems, they wait for the time bubble to loop, changing the setting of the world to one without those problems, and once it's all fixed then the time loop doesn't reset and the Phane loses his power source. Or something. Like I said, very preliminary idea. Suggestions welcome!
My first thought is, BBEG: Phane. Superpowered Phane who cheats like the bad guy in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, by doing stuff like starting his temporal regression, watching the PCs use their best attacks, rewinding time, and stating that "After this battle I'll go back in time and put an item which counters that in this bag" at which point he pulls out the item (or uses the prepared spell or who knows what) and makes the offense moot. (Obviously it'll be a little fancier than that, but that's the gist.)
The main plot will involve the Phane's power source. In a special perfected form of his Stasis Touch, he has imprisoned a full city/country/something big inside a personal bubble on the Temporal Energy Plane (one of those looping bubbles). The city has three stages. A stage of technology, populated by Warforged. A stage of the wild, populated by Killoren. And a parallel stage of the mind, populated by Elan. These ageless races retain their consciousness in the stasis, but cannot interact with the outside. They may not even know that they're in a stasis where a year for them is a second for the outside world. Because they're ageless they don't die, but somehow the society will crumble and the next will take over.
What I want the PCs to do is have a Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time-style adventure, by which they travel back and forth to the various times (I think I want the Warforged city first, then the Elan city, and then the Killoren city), manipulating the past to affect the future and whatnot. There can be subplots and mini-villains in the various cities (a Body Leech in the Elan city for example, or some sub-Lord of Blades in the Warforged) but I'd love it if they can interact with the time travel to get their goals. Just not sure how to make it clever, beyond the obvious kind of "There's a disease in the future, and they make a seed that can grow into a cure-all fruit, but needs 1000 years to grow, so the PCs plant it in the past and go back to the future to harvest the now-grown fruit" kind of thing.
Also, I like the idea of changing the future with the past, but that can make paradoxes, which I like, but I need to know how to deal with them. For example, in the above seed->fruit thing, the future people would never get the disease in the first place because they have the curing fruit. So, do I let the PCs just do that, or do I make them plant the seed somewhere it won't be found so that the future people still don't have the fruit, so there's no paradox?
Finally, now, I've never played Majora's Mask, so I don't really get how it works with Link resetting every three days and things that were changed stay changed. But is there a way I could incorporate that into the time bubble? Like, once the party fixes some problems, they wait for the time bubble to loop, changing the setting of the world to one without those problems, and once it's all fixed then the time loop doesn't reset and the Phane loses his power source. Or something. Like I said, very preliminary idea. Suggestions welcome!