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Dralnu
2015-06-07, 02:02 PM
Here's the premise I have for a gaming session: the PCs are locked in a wizard's tower. The wizard was fiddling around with wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. The PCs have 3 hours to figure out how to escape the tower before Something Bad Happens.

The PCs can hop to a point back in time and hop back to the present. They will have to solve puzzles by jumping back and forth through time. Some ideas include:

- watering a seed in the past so it grows into a plant in the present, the PCs need its leaves to concoct a potion
- repairing a broken robot/thing in the past with items from the present, order the robot to build something so it will be ready in the present to pick up
- plugging a hole in the wall in the past so a creature, possibly a rust monster, doesn't come and eat something the PCs need in the present
- taking an letter from the past that can only be read in the moonlight, to the present where there is moonlight

Any suggestions for these types of puzzles? Or just the where/what/why to bring context? Any good adventure modules (or books, videogames) that I can look at for inspiration?

Comet
2015-06-07, 04:37 PM
The ideal thing to do would be to have an actual environment that can be manipulated through time travel rather than a linear set of puzzles with set solutions.

With that in mind, there's a published adventure called Thulian Echoes out there. In it the players find a journal depicting an adventuring party's journey into an open-ended dungeon in search of treasure. The twist is that the players are allowed to play out this adventure in the past. Then, when the players' own characters arrive at that dungeon in the present, the DM is given very clear and clever instructions on how their past actions may have altered the environment in the present day. This all done through seemingly simple if/then switches that the DM can easily juggle to see how things affect each other in what are ultimately pretty complex and interesting ways. Definitely a cool system to keep track of these kinds of things.

Also, in my experience, time travel = shenanigans. Somehow, no matter how well you limit their access to jumping back and forth, the players will find a way to do amazing and awful things that might shatter your brain. I think this is a plus. For an exhaustive, and exhausting, look into the terrible world of time travel look up the roleplaying game Continuum or the OSR adventure Monolith from Beyond Space and Time.

Studoku
2015-06-07, 05:05 PM
A large amount of the plot of Dark Chronicle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Chronicle) revolves around doing this.

TurboGhast
2015-06-08, 04:26 PM
You need to be a good GM to be able to use time travel at all and not have the game spiral into nonsense and confusion, because given something as powerful as time travel, the players will probably try to do some crazy, and possibly gamewrecking, stuff like:

- Duplicate stuff, up to and including themselves.
- Kill the BBEG's parents, or prevent them from meeting.
- Kill the past self of the BBEG.
- Warn their past selves about hazards.
- Destroy the entire past dungeon, so no present dungeon exists.

LokiRagnarok
2015-06-11, 09:53 AM
You may want to play the flash game "Cube Escape: Seasons". In the last part of it, you do precisely what you have in mind, jumping betweent four different times - it may serve as an inspiration to you and takes roughly 20 minutes.

Maglubiyet
2015-06-11, 05:49 PM
Go back in time, divert a downspout outside of the window so that it drips behind a wall. Seal the wall up so that it's water tight. Come back to the present and they have a cistern full of water behind the wall.

Attract a bird to the tower. Kill it and animate its body. Cap its beak with a metal/diamond tip. Take it back in time and order it peck a hole through the stone/brick.

Go back, murder one of the group, brick his body up behind a wall. Back in the present he's a skeleton. Make a decorative wind chime out of the bones. Give it as a gift to the wizard.

JAL_1138
2015-06-11, 06:49 PM
"By changing the thing you went back in time to change, you had no reason to go back in time, and thus didn't, but then the thing wouldn't have been changed, and so you would have, and the universe implodes."

"By meeting yourself in the past, you remember having heard yourself saying and doing the things you're now saying and doing, including remembering seeing yourself remember these things, and the overlaying of these new memories over both the old memories and your current thoughts and actions actions creates a mental feedback loop and drives you hopelessly insane. You are fated to spend the rest of your life as a gibbering wreck, which you cannot avoid by taking a different action in the present, because time travel means that either the future is deterministic or the universe implodes in a paradox."

Ettina
2015-06-11, 11:08 PM
Check out Chronotron (http://www.kongregate.com/games/scarybug/chronotron). Basic premise is a time-travelling robot solves puzzles with the help of its past selves.