Time travel splat books

[haplot]

Are there any books out there that cover time travel?

I was thinking that one of the settings covered it, but I can't seem to find anything.

Thank you in advance for any replies

[Kelb_Panthera]

There's an old WotC web article (look for a web archive) with some stuff and an article in dragon 350. That's pretty much it for time manipulation outside of a few psionic powers.

Full on time travel is pretty much just the web article.

Gotta ask, are you -sure- you want to go down that road? Adjudicating the effects of time travel on the world is a major headache. If you just want it as a one-off plot device, you're better off just making something up. Real mechanics put it in the hands of players and... just... *shudders in horror*

[haplot]

thank you for getting back to me so quick

I'll look up the info now.

As for whether I really do want to go down that path? Probably not to be honest. I syuppose its a idle thought as I saw there was a ad&d version. Just wondered if it was updated for 3.x

[Kelb_Panthera]

Never played any of the older versions. Before my time, ya understand.

I probably ought to admit to a bit of bias on this subject. I -loathe- time travel as a narrative device. It almost invariably opens up plot-holes and begs questions for which there are no satisfactory answers.

You can go around it a couple ways to make it inoffensive.

Multiverse theory is one, in which case it's as much dimensional travel as anything and has no bearing on the traveler's world.

One-way travel is another, but that leaves the traveler unable to ever return home unless he's immortal and he went backwards in time. Even then "home" probably won't be recognizable with him butterflying everything up for a huge period.

Destiny is still one more, in which case the traveller is helpless to actually affect change.

Lastly, you can lean into the absurdist curve of the whole problem and just pull a "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."

Of those, I find the last to be the most tolerable; simply embracing the idea that it doesn't actually make any reasonable sense and just goofing on the concept.

[Aotrs Commander]

Rolemaster did a whole sourcebook on it, called Time Riders (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/88179/Time-Riders). It's not got a huge amount of mechanical Rolemaster crunch in it, which means it's reasonably system agonostic. It's still available in PDF form (see link) for merely $8. While it does bend a bit more towards the sci-fi end (it's leaning more towards a sort of Doctor Who-ish sort of thing (thee's even an NPC called "the professor" in that it assumes technological, rather than magical means as the method in which time-travel is accomplished (so obviously it won't help with time-travel crunch mechanics for D&D), the principles and ideas are extremely worth it. I found it invaluable when I did the time-travel campaign in RM many years ago. I would strongly recommend it as being worth a read, especially given it's fairly cheap.

[haplot]

Cheers.

You guys are diamonds.

Hat off to you all

[unseenmage]

My apologies that I cant remember where but there is an old 3.x Dragon mag article covering time travel too but IIRC it mostly says, 'Don't.'

[Troacctid]

Forge of War has a bit about traveling back in time.

EDIT: It's on pp145–149. Includes how to do it, how to handle changing history, possible campaign arcs, and other advice.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

There's not much, but 3.0's Manual of the Planes has the Transitive Plane of Time. You go there, struggle upwards against the current of the storm carrying the entropic sands of time, and then when you leave, you've traveled backwards in time from the PoV of the plane you left.

[Erik the Green]

It's not 3.P but the GURPS supplement Time Travel by Steve Jackson and the late (sorely missed) John M Ford is a pretty comprehensive look at the different ramifications of what time-traveling adventure could be like, depending on what rules you set. The time mercenaries campaign could be most easily adapted to D & D, I think, eg. time hopping through all the ages of the world with characters from different times who were saved from just before they would have died by some mysterious organization, then sent out to save, kill, retrieve, destroy, etc. Saving something or someone from the Invoked Devastation or the Fall of Netheril would be a fun finale for a high-level campaign. Or, the real goal of the party might eventually be to try to figure out Who, Why, and perhaps How Do We Get Out of This Chicken Outfit? The book is used on Amazon for $7.5 and up, FWIW.
E

[OrbanSirgen]

I forget which one, but one of the Dragonlance sourcebooks dealt with time travel, mostly about the results of Tas doing so...

[Thurbane]

2E, but there was the Chronomancer (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17442/Chronomancer-2e) splat book. Would require a lot of conversion for the crunch, but there may be some ideas and fluff worth looking at.

[tiercel]

Heh, the only time I’ve actually played time travel in D&D is the 2e Ravenloft Grand Conjunction series, with the adventure that starts with a TPK, only for the party to wake up as heads in boxes and being sent back in time to mess about with the origin of Ravenloft so Grand Conjunction so multiverse gets overrun by Ravenloft everywhere....

....memorable and epic and oh sweet merciless Dark Powers talk about on rails....

If a time travel plot isn’t largely on rails, your sandbox campaign is going to look more like what happens to a playful cheerful little sandbox that’s hit by a tornado, carried through a crack in the multiverse through a TARDIS and swirled into a Sahara Desert while the planet is slowly being engulfed by the red giant phase of its local star.

[haplot]

Thank you guys and gals.

Its very much appreciated.

You guys are the definition of brilliant.

And yes, I'd probably won't be using time travel as per you guys pointing out the obvious :D

[Aotrs Commander]

Time-travel is actually relatively easy to handle - and why I suggested Time Riders, because it's the apporach Rolemaster took - as if you just don't let time be mutable. If you make it so that, for instance, you just CAN'T go back in time and shoot your own grandfather (if you try, everything that can go wrong WILL go wrong (in ways you just CANNOT avoid) to prevent you)1. So the only way to "change" history is to have to the changes be unobserved and unrecorded. Time Riders introduces a group of bad guys, for instance, called the Revisionists, whose end-goal is to have it turn out, at their current time, that in reality of all of recorded history be a lie, and the Revisionists have secret being ruling everything until that one day in recorded history when they throw off the mask and go "ahaha, but it was us, the Revisionists all along!." (A bit like Hydra's reveal in the MCU, only much wider in scope).

It means the PCs actually have to be clever, they can't just go around doing things as they like and hoping for the best, they have to be careful.

Like I say Time Riders goes into a lot of detail on all this sort of thing, and if full of REALLY GOOD ideas.

(E.g., have the PCs do a week of downtime (in great detail), and have them have to go back in time to defeat a load of bad guys operating in the same area and time WHILE NOT CHANGING the week that just was, which means their past selves cannot notice anything was wrong.)

(Doctor Who also skirts a little bit around this issue - especially with Fixed Points in Time - a little loosely at times, but they always put history back into the shape it was before (at least to the outside perception, which is the most important thing( at the end.)



Now, if you're just planning to do something like, say the X-Men Days of Future Past (pick any incarnation of that story), which is explictly about changing The Bad Future, then it's also relatively easy to handle, because you the DM will have set up what will happen pretty much all in advance - and in that sort of scenario, the time-travel is almost always controlled narratively to basically be between only a couple of points in time..

But if you're going to give the PCs a time-machine and let them loose, non-mutable time is by far the better option, since it minimises YOUR amount of work, and maximises THEIR thinking effort, since they can't go fracking around for jollies, they have to be deliberate.



1This also works both ways, so if you get actual knowledge of the future (like, not just a prediction or prophecy), you can't change THAT either.

[OrbanSirgen]

There are a couple different results of time travel...
1. The actions you make by going back in time were already done because you already went back in time and did them... (Kind of like Harry Potter)
2. Your actions in the past diverts the timeline, causing the timeline to split... (The Ancient One explained it better in Avengers Endgame)
3. There is only one timeline, and your actons in the past immediately affect you as though you were from the altered future... (Kind of like Back to the Future)

[farothel]

Alternity has a Tangent (alternate reality) sourcebook. This isn't really time travel, but time goes different in different tangents, so you could use it as such (it has information about this somewhere in the book).

[StSword]

Might want to check out Chronomancer: Time Travel for Everyone, a third party book for a time traveling DnD game.

[crystal_entity]

I forget which one, but one of the Dragonlance sourcebooks dealt with time travel, mostly about the results of Tas doing so...

Sovereign Press's Legends of the Twins has a chapter on Time Travel (specifically in the Dragonlance setting). It also covers a number of different historical eras and a few alternate-history versions of Krynn. It is reasonably tied to Dragonlance and its interpretation of time travel, but it might still be an interesting read.

[Tvtyrant]

The Lost Empires of Magic books from 2nd edition had the original Teleport Through Time spell and the rules (like losing spell knowledge, items, etc.)