Introducing a time-loop plot

[ksbsnowowl]

Warning: If you are playing in a game with Tainted magic where most of the gods are dead, are based in a city named Purity, and have a Half-Giant Psychic Warrior/Crusader in your party that "you wouldn't like him if he's angry," do not read this post.

Suppose you were running a game in a homebrew setting where most of the gods are dead, and suppose that a means exists in this setting (though the PC's don't know about it, and likely no one else* really knows about it either) to travel back in time...

Dealing in the deaths of gods, and time travel... the Varakhut and Quarut Inevitables might just start getting involved with the PC's...

My plan is that a Varakhut (defenders of the deities) that met the future PC's long in the past (before the gods' deaths) got enough of their story to piece together some points where it might be able to encounter them in the future, before they travel back in time. As it is quite concerned about the possible (and in this timeline, already occurred) deaths of the gods, it wants to ensure that things are going "on track" for the PC's. It knows it shouldn't meddle with them or their progress, but it just wants to check in, and make sure they are fulfilling the events their future selves have already told it about.

In plans of doing so, it needed to ascertain the exact date, according to local time-reconing methods. So several years prior to current events, it visited the city the PC's are based out of, to ensure it had calibrated its "internal clock" to the local counting of the calendar. Unbeknownst to it, the mere act of doing this caused a butterfly effect through the years, which has already mucked with the PC's timeline. Not much, but it caused them to meet a ship and crew that got them across an ocean just a little bit faster than they were supposed to.

The PC's are currently assaulting a location the Varakhut knows about (from the stories of the future PC's), but they arrived there a day early. Chances are they will retreat for the day (expended spell slots, etc), and will return to assault/investigate more tomorrow. But, having already been there, they will just teleport in, rather than approach from afar, where the Varakhut is expecting to observe them.

When the PC's "don't show," the Varakhut will start to freak out (as much as an Inevitable would), and might notice the sounds of battle from inside the location. He ends up going in to confront/observe the PC's, and try to determine what "went wrong." In doing so, he tips his hand that he has met the future PC's before.

This act draws the attention of a Quarut Inevitable, since it will invariably alter the course of the PC's actions, pointing them (generally) in the direction of looking for a means to travel back in time. A Quarut shows up on scene (a Quarut that knows the future PC's from also encountering them [and possibly the Varakhut] in the past), and the Varakhut really freaks out, concerned for the safety of the PC's, and evacuates them via a Limited Wish-derived Teleport. Once safe he starts panicking, (broken record of "No, no, no... it is ruined.") before the PC's draw out of him a bare sketch of the details... the Varakhut has met them before, centuries ago, and that the PC's arrived at the one specific adventuring location too early, and the timeline is ruined.

The general idea behind this whole scenario, since it will be completely new information to the PC's, is that there are two versions of history, happening in a repeated infinite loop. In one version, the PC's go about their adventuring careers unmolested, happening to meet a Varakhut along the way when they travel back in time and prevent the deaths of the gods. In the other version, the version my group will be playing through, the Varakhut unintentionally causes a butterfly effect which then causes him to more directly intervene, and the timeline will be composed of him (with as light a hand as possible, trying not to inflict more damage on the timeline) trying to get the PC's back on the right track, and protecting them from the Quaruts that have now taken notice of both the Varakhut and the PC's.

Does this work, for a campaign plot arc? Any suggestions on making it better?

*Obviously, the Varakhut has at least some inkling of the means by which the PC's travel back in time, but he's trying to take a "hands off" approach to fixing a timeline that he doesn't truly understand, all with the goal of getting the PC's to the right time and place to prevent the deaths of the gods.

[BowStreetRunner]

It sounds like your story centers not on a traditional temporal loop, but more of a temporal Möbius strip or possibly even a temporal trefoil knot. Normally I would caution any DM running a time travel campaign of the serious danger of too many 'spoilers'. Players tend to be anti-deterministic in nature and are likely to really mess up anything that smells even remotely of railroading. Vague hints that leave lots of room for interpretation allow plenty of options open to both players and DM. Specific, clear descriptions of unalterable events can fall prey to any number of disasters along the way, including even something like a player needing to withdraw from the game. But if the history of your world is not contained within a single loop, but rather takes two or more loops to resolve, that leaves the players free to 'mess things up' in their relative timeline and not worry. So that seems good.

If things go completely awry - like the players deciding to take out both the Inevitables and go off on some other quest entirely - you can always fall back on the multiverse concept (e.g. Star Trek, Sliders, et al) and just have their timeline break away from the base timeline entirely. Then all you need to do is have them run into duplicates of themselves (but with goatees).

[InterstellarPro]

Time loops can be dangerous. Make sure your players are aware of what will happen before you go forward with them. I was lucky that it all worked out when I used them in my campaign. I am including my experience with them, if you want to read about it. Not terribly pertinent to your story, but I had a lot of fun with it.

I DM'd an evil campaign a while back where I employed my favorite looping mechanism. Two of the party members where having a difficult time figuring out why they were evil. They were used to playing good characters. So, they decided to start off good and gradually work their way to evil. I gave them lots of opportunities. I tried to entice them with power. I offered them all sorts of ways to descend into darkness. When I think of evil, I think of characters willing to go out of their way to cause harm if it will benefit them. These two characters kept trying to think of alternative solutions that would not cause others harm. They kept justifying it that keeping allies would be good in the long term, and causing direct harm was counterproductive.

Two of the truly evil party members were getting frustrated at having "goodie two shoes" characters in the party. Ordinarily, I like to let situations like that resolve on their own. But, this time, the players asked for my help. They wanted some justification for why their characters would descend into full evil (they had gotten to neutral, but were having trouble making the final jump to evil). At the time, they were being controlled by an entity they had never met, but who used slave rings to command them. Little did they know that the entity controlling them was a Pit Fiend. The Pit Fiend wanted them to recover a diabolic sword in the possession of a Horned Devil who was the lieutenant of a rival Infernal faction. In this setting, there are demons and devils living among the common races. I added the Alternate Form ability to most of them to change into humanoid forms. This particular devil took the guise of a local lord.

So, the two evil party members decide to go to steal the sword, killing anyone that got in their way. The two neutral members decided they wanted one shot to try to blackmail the lord (in hopes of avoiding killing innocent people), and if that didn't work, they would participate in stealing it. The two evil party members agreed, but wanted nothing to do with the plan (they called out the two, saying the blackmail sounded good, but avoiding killing people not so much. The evil characters were murder-hobos). So, I told the party that I would run one or two separate sessions for the two neutral members. They tried their best to blackmail the lord, but they had no idea what they were in for. He imprisoned them, and planned to torture them to death, extracting liquid pain, then trapping their souls to sell as they died.

The two evil party members had run into an Abyssal salesman, who was quite invested in the soul trade. The salesman had left them a talisman to summon him if they wanted to trade. I remembered that one of the two neutral party members had the talisman, so I suggested they might reach out to someone who could possibly help. They summon the demon. It offers them escape, but the price would be flesh. They did rock-paper-scissors, and one of them decided to give up the necessary flesh. The demon clamped down on the character's shoulder as bone cracked and sinew tore. The character was now completely missing her shoulder, and her arm was useless. I gave her 8 points of Constitution drain. The demon used the flesh to power a Mindrape spell (from Book of Vile Darkness). I allowed him to cast on both of them simultaneously. He altered their memories. They remember escaping from the dungeon. They remember going to another plane where they were tortured for hundreds of years. They recall being trained in necromancy, and taught to augment their spells by crushing the souls of their enemies. They recall being forced to perform horrors upon the bodies of the dying to harness their souls. This was not the clean process of trapping the soul for use later. This was messy. Much of the soul was lost in the process. It was a grisly and ultimately not terribly useful process, but they were forced to perform it over and over again, increasing their taint.

When they awoke, they knew without question that they were just subjected to a mindrape spell and that the demon altered every memory they ever had. They could no longer trust anything about their memories. But, they were still trapped. The payment of flesh was to release them! The demon explained that the area was a dimensional sink (similar to a dimensional lock, but dimensional travel only works in, not out). The demon could not help them escape unless the dimensional sink were suppressed. They would need to help the demon escape the prison so he could bring them several of the lord's servants down. The characters could use their new knowledge of crushing souls to power a dispel magic that would allow them to escape. One of the characters had a way of escaping, so all she had to do was provide the means to the demon. Instead, she escaped herself, and refused to leave without her sister (they were playing sisters). I explained there was no way to get her sister out. She was still stuck in the force cage. She tried going herself to find the lord's servants to crush their souls, but she was quickly caught and then locked up again.

Only, moments later, she was just waking up from the original mindrape spell. That entire sequence was part of the implanted memories. Thinking the demon more clever than anticipated, she released the demon instead of herself. This time, the demon simply escapes and leaves the two to rot for all eternity. After an eternity, they wake up, realizing that sequence, too, was the original mindrape spell. Time after time, they remember resetting back in the force cage. Sometimes, they both escape, living full and complete lives only to wind up back in the force cage. Sometimes one escapes. Sometimes neither of them do. Until this time. Now, after who knows how many loops, they all escape. They meet up with the rest of the party, fully evil. They now have no qualms about hurting innocent people. They do not even believe they really exist anymore. They are convinced they are still in that cell and this is a false memory being implanted in their brains. The other two party members had no idea. For the rest of the campaign, I kept passing them notes, like they have vague memories of a previous life where something happened that would be useful. Perhaps a magic item that they thought to discard, I offered them a vague memory of how they put it to good use in one life they had lived.

By the time the campaign ended, we didn't really bring up the force cage much anymore. Of course, at the end, I passed them a note saying, "And you find yourselves back in the force cage". The end.

Anyway, that was a blast. The two players who had started evil loved it because the two characters who had started as neutral came out profoundly changed. They were truly ready to embrace evil. The campaign went to epic levels, and it was a ton of fun.

[ksbsnowowl]

It sounds like your story centers not on a traditional temporal loop, but more of a temporal Möbius strip or possibly even a temporal trefoil knot. ... But if the history of your world is not contained within a single loop, but rather takes two or more loops to resolve, that leaves the players free to 'mess things up' in their relative timeline and not worry. So that seems good.Yeah, a trefoil knot is a better description of what I'm going for. The PC's will experience and influence one timeline, but they will only get information about the previous timeline second-hand, and in very sparse bits of info. Yes, their actions can influence future events (in the third timeline), but they will have no contact with anyone who has experienced that timeline, so it is completely off-screen, and can account for any discrepancies that would otherwise arise in a single loop or double loop/Möbius strip.


If things go completely awry - like the players deciding to take out both the Inevitables and go off on some other quest entirely - you can always fall back on the multiverse concept (e.g. Star Trek, Sliders, et al) and just have their timeline break away from the base timeline entirely. Then all you need to do is have them run into duplicates of themselves (but with goatees).

That actually brings me to the crux of the matter. They are effectively stuck in a series of loops that seemingly never resolve the deaths of the deities, and right that wrong. [WARNING: Spoilers ahead. My players best not read this.] Basically, no matter what they do, when they go back in time, the Varakhut encounters them. Just meeting them alters its actions. They may give it information that it later acts on, or doesn't act on, but contemplates, which prevents it from taking some other action, that in butterfly effect-fashion results in the gods dying. Even it just witnessing the PC's arrival in the past, assuming they ignore the Varakhut entirely, causes it to contemplate who they are, how they arrived, and leads to it investigating what exactly that device is and what it does (again, altering its course of actions through time). The big answer to ending the loop and preventing the deaths of the gods is to remove the Varakhut from the equation soon after the PC's arrive in the past. As it oversees the safety of the gods from those who would see them dead, this solution is unacceptable to the Varakhut; it sees as its duty to oversee events and make sure they turn out as they "should," with the gods safely alive. However, if the Varakhut is removed from the equation, then it can't adversely influence events in the future (it's also not doing things it should, which does present a bit of a continuity problem, but perhaps a new Varakhut will have been created to replace it, taking on the duties it otherwise would have performed).

That whole solution just came to me in the last hour, so it's not set in stone, and I'm going to play around with the idea a bunch yet.

[martixy]

I'd like to put in a vote of not dealing with time travel shenanigans ever.

It is literally logically impossible to make it work.

[Buufreak]

I DM'd an evil campaign a while back where I employed my favorite looping mechanism. Two of the party members where having a difficult time figuring out why they were evil. They were used to playing good characters. So, they decided to start off good and gradually work their way to evil. I gave them lots of opportunities. I tried to entice them with power. I offered them all sorts of ways to descend into darkness. When I think of evil, I think of characters willing to go out of their way to cause harm if it will benefit them. These two characters kept trying to think of alternative solutions that would not cause others harm. They kept justifying it that keeping allies would be good in the long term, and causing direct harm was counterproductive.

Two of the truly evil party members were getting frustrated at having "goodie two shoes" characters in the party. Ordinarily, I like to let situations like that resolve on their own. But, this time, the players asked for my help. They wanted some justification for why their characters would descend into full evil (they had gotten to neutral, but were having trouble making the final jump to evil). At the time, they were being controlled by an entity they had never met, but who used slave rings to command them. Little did they know that the entity controlling them was a Pit Fiend. The Pit Fiend wanted them to recover a diabolic sword in the possession of a Horned Devil who was the lieutenant of a rival Infernal faction. In this setting, there are demons and devils living among the common races. I added the Alternate Form ability to most of them to change into humanoid forms. This particular devil took the guise of a local lord.

So, the two evil party members decide to go to steal the sword, killing anyone that got in their way. The two neutral members decided they wanted one shot to try to blackmail the lord (in hopes of avoiding killing innocent people), and if that didn't work, they would participate in stealing it. The two evil party members agreed, but wanted nothing to do with the plan (they called out the two, saying the blackmail sounded good, but avoiding killing people not so much. The evil characters were murder-hobos). So, I told the party that I would run one or two separate sessions for the two neutral members. They tried their best to blackmail the lord, but they had no idea what they were in for. He imprisoned them, and planned to torture them to death, extracting liquid pain, then trapping their souls to sell as they died.

The two evil party members had run into an Abyssal salesman, who was quite invested in the soul trade. The salesman had left them a talisman to summon him if they wanted to trade. I remembered that one of the two neutral party members had the talisman, so I suggested they might reach out to someone who could possibly help. They summon the demon. It offers them escape, but the price would be flesh. They did rock-paper-scissors, and one of them decided to give up the necessary flesh. The demon clamped down on the character's shoulder as bone cracked and sinew tore. The character was now completely missing her shoulder, and her arm was useless. I gave her 8 points of Constitution drain. The demon used the flesh to power a Mindrape spell (from Book of Vile Darkness). I allowed him to cast on both of them simultaneously. He altered their memories. They remember escaping from the dungeon. They remember going to another plane where they were tortured for hundreds of years. They recall being trained in necromancy, and taught to augment their spells by crushing the souls of their enemies. They recall being forced to perform horrors upon the bodies of the dying to harness their souls. This was not the clean process of trapping the soul for use later. This was messy. Much of the soul was lost in the process. It was a grisly and ultimately not terribly useful process, but they were forced to perform it over and over again, increasing their taint.

When they awoke, they knew without question that they were just subjected to a mindrape spell and that the demon altered every memory they ever had. They could no longer trust anything about their memories. But, they were still trapped. The payment of flesh was to release them! The demon explained that the area was a dimensional sink (similar to a dimensional lock, but dimensional travel only works in, not out). The demon could not help them escape unless the dimensional sink were suppressed. They would need to help the demon escape the prison so he could bring them several of the lord's servants down. The characters could use their new knowledge of crushing souls to power a dispel magic that would allow them to escape. One of the characters had a way of escaping, so all she had to do was provide the means to the demon. Instead, she escaped herself, and refused to leave without her sister (they were playing sisters). I explained there was no way to get her sister out. She was still stuck in the force cage. She tried going herself to find the lord's servants to crush their souls, but she was quickly caught and then locked up again.

Only, moments later, she was just waking up from the original mindrape spell. That entire sequence was part of the implanted memories. Thinking the demon more clever than anticipated, she released the demon instead of herself. This time, the demon simply escapes and leaves the two to rot for all eternity. After an eternity, they wake up, realizing that sequence, too, was the original mindrape spell. Time after time, they remember resetting back in the force cage. Sometimes, they both escape, living full and complete lives only to wind up back in the force cage. Sometimes one escapes. Sometimes neither of them do. Until this time. Now, after who knows how many loops, they all escape. They meet up with the rest of the party, fully evil. They now have no qualms about hurting innocent people. They do not even believe they really exist anymore. They are convinced they are still in that cell and this is a false memory being implanted in their brains. The other two party members had no idea. For the rest of the campaign, I kept passing them notes, like they have vague memories of a previous life where something happened that would be useful. Perhaps a magic item that they thought to discard, I offered them a vague memory of how they put it to good use in one life they had lived.

By the time the campaign ended, we didn't really bring up the force cage much anymore. Of course, at the end, I passed them a note saying, "And you find yourselves back in the force cage". The end.

Anyway, that was a blast. The two players who had started evil loved it because the two characters who had started as neutral came out profoundly changed. They were truly ready to embrace evil. The campaign went to epic levels, and it was a ton of fun.

I love this take on timeloop. That is one hell of a mind-boning. Kinda reminds me of a certain anime with some kookie eyes.


I'd like to put in a vote of not dealing with time travel shenanigans ever.

It is literally logically impossible to make it work.

That, on the otherhand, is just kinda down. Its a game, mate, why wouldn't it work? Time paradox and alternate timeline are just other names for a continued plot.

As to the OP, how impactful of a time loop are you wanting to make? Are we talking that this is the lone detail that gets changed due to this 24hr discrepancy, or are we looking for something like butterfly effect, where the slightest thing blows everything out of control?

Missed your second post. Seems legit enough. I'd roll with it, and just see what the PCs do with it. They might put the pieces together, they might ride out the loop a couple million more times.

[ATHATH]

Repeat after me: Never, EVER try to pull off a time travel plot. It rarely works well, and it ALWAYS comes with plot holes.

Seriously, I dare you to tell me ONE time travel plot that doesn't contain plot holes.

[weckar]

EdIt: Whoa wrong thread!

[ATHATH]

What are you going to do if one PC, for whatever reason, stays behind in the future or goes to a different time than the rest of the PCs go to?

What if the PCs decide to go only 2 days or so into the past, grab/talk to the 2-days-ago versions of themselves, and bring them along with them on their journey to the distant past to save the gods?

If the PCs fail to save the gods, what's stopping them from just going back in time again and trying to do the whole "saving the gods" thing over again?

What if the PCs decide to go into the future instead of the past?

What if the PCs try to dupe their items/gold/infinity+1 swords with the time travel machine/device/whatever?

After the whole god thing is resolved, what's to stop them from using time travel to fix any problem they'll have later in the campaign with time travel (is this the last arc of your campaign)?

Does one of the PCs have a tragic backstory? What's stopping them from trying to fix it?

Even if the time machine "only works once" and "can only go back exactly 2000 years", there are still more abuses that they can pull.

If you really "gotta have" a "time travel" plot, I prefer the "time travel is actually dimensional travel to another dimension that is exactly like your own, but which came into existence X years earlier/later than your dimension did" approach. You still get the item-duping problem and still have some of the abuses, but you lose some of the paradoxes and stopping a villain before he starts his plan in another dimension won't fix the rampage that he's performing in your home dimension (unless, of course, PCs from ANOTHER dimension try to help fix your dimension... But since THEIR world was altered by OTHER time travellers, maybe they'll fail where the "true" PCs did not).

[martixy]

That, on the otherhand, is just kinda down. Its a game, mate, why wouldn't it work? Time paradox and alternate timeline are just other names for a continued plot.

For the reasons @ATHATH noted. Also the trivially provable literal impossibility.

[InterstellarPro]

What are you going to do if one PC, for whatever reason, stays behind in the future or goes to a different time than the rest of the PCs go to?

What if the PCs decide to go only 2 days or so into the past, grab/talk to the 2-days-ago versions of themselves, and bring them along with them on their journey to the distant past to save the gods?

If the PCs fail to save the gods, what's stopping them from just going back in time again and trying to do the whole "saving the gods" thing over again?

What if the PCs decide to go into the future instead of the past?

What if the PCs try to dupe their items/gold/infinity+1 swords with the time travel machine/device/whatever?

After the whole god thing is resolved, what's to stop them from using time travel to fix any problem they'll have later in the campaign with time travel (is this the last arc of your campaign)?

Does one of the PCs have a tragic backstory? What's stopping them from trying to fix it?

Even if the time machine "only works once" and "can only go back exactly 2000 years", there are still more abuses that they can pull.

If you really "gotta have" a "time travel" plot, I prefer the "time travel is actually dimensional travel to another dimension that is exactly like your own, but which came into existence X years earlier/later than your dimension did" approach. You still get the item-duping problem and still have some of the abuses, but you lose some of the paradoxes and stopping a villain before he starts his plan in another dimension won't fix the rampage that he's performing in your home dimension (unless, of course, PCs from ANOTHER dimension try to help fix your dimension... But since THEIR world was altered by OTHER time travellers, maybe they'll fail where the "true" PCs did not).

Quarut Inevitables are part of the checks and balances against these types of situations. Futurama had awesome ideas for confronting these issues, as well. Paradoxes can rip apart the fabric of space-time. So, they invented a paradox-solving time machine that would automatically fix any paradoxes before they could harm the space-time continuum. It frequently happened in the most comical way possible. It could be a ton of fun having a paradox-correcting time machine in D&D.


For the reasons @ATHATH noted. Also the trivially provable literal impossibility.

Time travel is not literally impossible. So, it is certainly not trivially provable to be so. What is provable is that Newtonian mechanics cannot accommodate nonlinear time, but there are plenty of alternative mechanics that can.

[ksbsnowowl]

What are you going to do if one PC, for whatever reason, stays behind in the future or goes to a different time than the rest of the PCs go to?

What if the PCs decide to go only 2 days or so into the past, grab/talk to the 2-days-ago versions of themselves, and bring them along with them on their journey to the distant past to save the gods?The means of time travel will be much less controllable and precise than this. Think along the lines of "a portal will open at Stonehenge when a lunar eclipse happens while Mars is in Virgo," but much more complicated and less understood than that.

If a PC stays in the present (future) time, and does not go back with the rest of the party, that can be explained by the third leg of the trefoil knot, which none of the PC's will have direct impact upon, and from which the Varakhut got its information.


If the PCs fail to save the gods, what's stopping them from just going back in time again and trying to do the whole "saving the gods" thing over again?See above. The means of time travel isn't exact. Also, it won't be the PC's themselves that actually perform the act that directly saves the gods; rather, it will be them providing information to one of the deities, changing how that god approaches a future event. Think along the lines of the PC's going back to ancient Faerûn and warning Mystryl of Karsus's Folly. (It's not that, but it gives you an idea of what I'm talking about.)


What if the PCs decide to go into the future instead of the past?Who said the device is even capable of that?


What if the PCs try to dupe their items/gold/infinity+1 swords with the time travel machine/device/whatever?They'll likely have died of old age before that is even a possibility.


After the whole god thing is resolved, what's to stop them from using time travel to fix any problem they'll have later in the campaign with time travel (is this the last arc of your campaign)?Again, it's not like punching in "November 7, 1955" into a DeLorean. They're basically only going to get the one chance to go back in time.
Edit: Also, yes, resolving this point in the past would basically resolve the big campaign plot arcs of the campaign.
Also, it should be noted that the PC's have a ways to go yet before they will get the opportunity to utilize time travel. The side arc with the inevitables just foreshadows where they might expect to end up; the Varakhut isn't going to tell them much of what it knows, and how the PC's eventually end up at the time device will be 95% of the remainder of the campaign.


Does one of the PCs have a tragic backstory? What's stopping them from trying to fix it?See above.


Even if the time machine "only works once" and "can only go back exactly 2000 years", there are still more abuses that they can pull.I'd love to hear them.