Time Travel

[J-H]

I sent my party back in time 1 day last session as part of exiting a fey circle they visited. They were impressed with it.
I have one other time travel spot up my sleeve that they might find.

Please give me your best D&D/RPG time travel stories.

I feel like a campaign could be built around time travel, but it'd take a good algorithm for tracking changes, as well as good pre-planning.

[McGarnagle]

No D&D-related time travel stories, but I played in a Star Trek campaign for five years in which there was the occasional time travel session. Of these my favorite would have to be the trip back to the Summer of Love. This one had Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead house, the whole shebang.

I was playing an engineer who was nominally assigned on the away team due to her technical expertise, but she did not get a lot of engineering done, instead availing herself of the local pharmacopia. I note here that our ship's XO, the supposed leader of the away team, also did this, which meant that the ship's Chief Medical Officer had to be the adult in the room :smallbiggrin:. The one roll my character aced was her Entertain (Guitar) test, within earshot of Jimi Hendrix, no less. This resulted in a hookup that eventually led to the birth of fraternal twins back in the in-game present. The in-game time for this session was the week before the Monterrey Pop Festival, which is where Hendrix debuted Little Wing, so my character claimed songwriting credit for it, and she also claimed to be the inspiration for the song Angel. Good times.

[Batcathat]

I feel like a good time travel story (especially an interactive one like you're talking about) need solid and satisfying answers to two questions:

What's stopping anyone from using time travel to undo any problems before they happen and/or go back and fix any unfortunate outcomes? It sounds like you might've already solved this one, if time travel is only possible in some places (as long as the party doesn't have access to them whenever they want to).
Can time travel change the future? The easiest option is probably to make it impossible to change the future (or just being able to spawn alternate futures) but that might be less satisfying from a player perspective. Your idea of having an algoritm tracking changes sounds interesting, if complicated.

[Roger_Druid]

Hi all!

Have you considered the accessory 9506 Chronomancer?

Roger Druid

[farothel]

No D&D-related time travel stories, but I played in a Star Trek campaign for five years in which there was the occasional time travel session. Of these my favorite would have to be the trip back to the Summer of Love. This one had Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead house, the whole shebang.

I was playing an engineer who was nominally assigned on the away team due to her technical expertise, but she did not get a lot of engineering done, instead availing herself of the local pharmacopia. I note here that our ship's XO, the supposed leader of the away team, also did this, which meant that the ship's Chief Medical Officer had to be the adult in the room :smallbiggrin:. The one roll my character aced was her Entertain (Guitar) test, within earshot of Jimi Hendrix, no less. This resulted in a hookup that eventually led to the birth of fraternal twins back in the in-game present. The in-game time for this session was the week before the Monterrey Pop Festival, which is where Hendrix debuted Little Wing, so my character claimed songwriting credit for it, and she also claimed to be the inspiration for the song Angel. Good times.

I had my players go back in time to Egypt. They had a rescue an NPC Caitian who was mistaken for the goddess Bastet. Quite a fun session. They used other Egyptian mythology to get through it (one of the players had a bunch of points put in history).

[Martin Greywolf]

Can time travel change the future? The easiest option is probably to make it impossible to change the future (or just being able to spawn alternate futures) but that might be less satisfying from a player perspective.


The best solution to this I found was in some old scifi story the name of which I can't recall. The rules are that you can't change the future, but only applies to the future you actually know about. This was, naturally, exploited in said story by looking away from events (a guy's... wife? love interest? friend? falling off of a cliff, IIRC) to make sure you will be able to come back in time and influence them later.

Alternatively, utilize Groundhog day loop, but with one other person/party that is also looping and whose goals are mutually exclusive to yours. This is still a time travel story, albeit of a different kind since you can't quite control the travel itself.

[DataNinja]

The best solution to this I found was in some old scifi story the name of which I can't recall. The rules are that you can't change the future, but only applies to the future you actually know about. This was, naturally, exploited in said story by looking away from events (a guy's... wife? love interest? friend? falling off of a cliff, IIRC) to make sure you will be able to come back in time and influence them later.

Yeah, that's similar to what I did for my campaign involving time travel. You can change the present, but time works to repair itself - so unless you shepherd it the entire way, events that are known will play out in much the same way. The people/details involved may be different, but the overarching events stay the same to influence things later.

The other rule was that objects and people couldn't be in temporal proximity to themselves, otherwise the newly arrived things began to quickly deteriorate/fall ill. That stops a bulk of trying to re-meddle. You get one shot to make things better.

(The safeguard to stop things from going off-the-rails entirely in my campaign was that the way to timetravel relied on a person with that innate ability, and it required a lot of a McGuffin to work. So that naturally led to anything that would throw things too far off being not particularly feasible. A little railroad-y, turning time travel into more of a vehicle to get from point (or time) A to B, but it worked out, and people had fun.)

[GentlemanVoodoo]

I sent my party back in time 1 day last session as part of exiting a fey circle they visited. They were impressed with it.
I have one other time travel spot up my sleeve that they might find.

Please give me your best D&D/RPG time travel stories.

I feel like a campaign could be built around time travel, but it'd take a good algorithm for tracking changes, as well as good pre-planning.

The last game I played with my normal game group (prior to COVID) involved the party being conscripted into a war. Things happen and we find out later that we are thrust into the future. The game was mostly dealing with finding a way to get back into the past and prevent the darker future from occurring. Only thing really we had to keep track of was just certain NPC's that were of importance. R

Really for time travel I would not complicate things and just write it as a normal adventure. But if you are able to access older sources here are a few that dealt with time travel in D&D you could draw from. I believe these are on the DM's Guild:

- Chronomancer (2nd edition accessory) *Probably the source on time travel related rules*
- Anvil of Time (Dungeon magazine issue #86)
- Legends of the Twins (3.5)
- Castle Forlorn (2nd edition Ravenloft)
- The Ravager of Time (1st edition)

[ATHATH]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Never ever ever ever ever introduce time travel into your setting if you want it to avoid turning it into a swiss cheese of plot holes (or, worse, make the entire setting vulnerable to being destroyed by some rando alien on some faraway planet).

Books can sometimes get away with just kind of looking the other way around those plot holes, inconsistencies, exploitable features, etc., but players in a game will usually do the opposite.

[Mutazoia]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Never ever ever ever ever introduce time travel into your setting if you want it to avoid turning it into a swiss cheese of plot holes (or, worse, make the entire setting vulnerable to being destroyed by some rando alien on some faraway planet).

Books can sometimes get away with just kind of looking the other way around those plot holes, inconsistencies, exploitable features, etc., but players in a game will usually do the opposite.

Meh.

It's easy enough to do if you enact one or more simple "Laws of Time Travel"

1. You can't visit a time that you are already in. Anne McCaffrey's "Pern" series did this. When a person time-traveled to a time they were already in, they rapidly started getting weaker and weaker and experienced extreme pain. Stay too long (a matter of minutes) and you die. In a D&D game for example, if the characters are going to suffer 1D6 Con damage every round, they will tend to avoid it like the plague (actually can't use that phrase anymore seeing how a lot of people are actively NOT avoiding an actual plague).

2. You cannot change certain events. In the novel "The Time Machine" the MC loses his wife. In his grief he invents a time machine so he may go back in time and save her life. But no matter how may times he tries, he always fails. Since her death was the direct cause for the creation of the time machine, he will forever be unable to save her life. If he saves her life, then he had no reason to invent the time machine. Since the time machine was never invented, he did not go back in time to save her life, so she dies. He then creates the time machine and goes back in time to save her life.... You get the picture. Dr. Who uses "Fixed points in time" to keep the Dr. from simply hopping in the TARDIS and fixing what broke.

3. "Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations, we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?" Time travel is dangerous. There is no real way of knowing if your landing area is going to be occupied when you get there. The further the jump in either direction, the greater the danger. A +10% chance per half-hour traveled for something to go seriously wrong should discourage players from abusing the mechanic. (Character turns into a baby or an old man, Character over-shoots the target time period by centuries, etc.)

4. "We Romans are rich. We've got a lot of gods. We've got a god for everything. The only thing we don't have a god for is premature ejaculation…but I hear that's coming quickly." Just because you can time travel, doesn't mean that you get to do so un-noticed. Perhaps there's a hitherto unknown god of time that doesn't take too kindly to mortals who think they can pee in the time stream. Maybe an advanced civilization has learned the catastrophic dangers of time travel first hand and works to keep lesser beings from causing a universe-ending paradox by blocking attempts to make big changes to history.

[Batcathat]

2. You cannot change certain events. In the novel "The Time Machine" the MC loses his wife. In his grief he invents a time machine so he may go back in time and save her life. But no matter how may times he tries, he always fails. Since her death was the direct cause for the creation of the time machine, he will forever be unable to save her life. If he saves her life, then he had no reason to invent the time machine. Since the time machine was never invented, he did not go back in time to save her life, so she dies. He then creates the time machine and goes back in time to save her life.... You get the picture. Dr. Who uses "Fixed points in time" to keep the Dr. from simply hopping in the TARDIS and fixing what broke.

I think this is very likely to feel arbitrary and railroady to the players. Not being able to cause paradoxes (such as the Time Machine example) might work, though it might be kind of hard to keep track of what would cause one for both players and the GM (especially since it should mean that the PCs can't actually intentionally change anything). The fixed points in time seem even worse. "No, you can't change this because reasons" isn't not an excuse I would easily accept as a player, especially if there wasn't some pattern to what I could change and what I couldn't.

[Mutazoia]

"No, you can't change this because reasons" isn't not an excuse I would easily accept as a player, especially if there wasn't some pattern to what I could change and what I couldn't.

Those "reasons" could very well be the destruction of the entire universe. That event serves as the lynchpin for a myriad of events and stopping that event would start a domino effect of paradox that would rip existence itself asunder.

For example, going back in time and killing Hitler before he rises to power. Assuming you stage his death sometime during WWI, you would negate the consequences, good or bad, of every action he took during the war. Sure, the Nazi party may not come to power, and millions of Jewish people won't die horrible deaths. But Volkswagon cars would never be invented, the Olympics would never get restarted, the science of rocketry would no doubt be delayed by decades as well. Or perhaps the Nazi party simply chooses a different frontman. One who is more competent and less prone to paranoia who actually wins WWII by ensuring the German nuclear energy project actually succeeded.

Either way, that one event would have such a wide range of effects on the world that the sheer number of paradoxes that could be created by so much of history rewriting itself would be incalculable. Such large-scale rewrites would tear the fabric of the game universe to shreds.

[Batcathat]

Either way, that one event would have such a wide range of effects on the world that the sheer number of paradoxes that could be created by so much of history rewriting itself would be incalculable. Such large-scale rewrites would tear the fabric of the game universe to shreds.

Sure, it's usually justified along those lines but I think it's still likely to feel arbitrary to the players. So killing Hitler is too big? Okay, so what about some random other guy in the 30s? What about ten guys? Would killing someone further back in time be less possible since they probably have more descendants?

Maybe it would be possible to create consistent rules for it that wouldn't also cause a massive headache for the GM and/or players but I wouldn't count on it (or want to try doing it).

I love the concept of time travel but I think using it, especially in an interactive story like an RPG, without creating plot holes and/or arbitrary limits is bordering on impossible.

[Satinavian]

If i were to include time travel, i would use a consistent model and stick with it. The result is unfortunately different from most fictional time travel because that fiction likes to relish in those inconsistencies and paradoxes. Some option were :

- 1) time travel as in general relativity. Every time travel is always already part of the past. The question "what would happen if those people didn't travel" is nonsense as it is a question for a completely independend universe. Also you can build a time machine, but not to travel to the past, but only to receive guests from the future. Also forget causality, it is not true anymore. Does prevent paradoxes.

- 2 ) universe evolves nondeterministically. The present has different possible futures and different possible pasts. Time travel just forms additional connections between universe-states. Does also prevent paradoxes.

- 3 ) there is no time travel, there are only paralel universes (i don't like this one as it dodges all important questions and raises new ones)

- 4 ) time generally heals itself. There are timelines that work as attractors during evolution and the distance between timelines in not fixed. This has some bad implications for cosmology but you can handwave those away. This also allows changes that don't heal themself if one jumps between one attractor and another as you are allowed more than one. Does allow paradoxes. But those just exist.

- 5) time is curated and only seems to flow normally because someone makes it happen. (Works best for fantasy with proper time gods)


To some extend thse can be combined. E.G. you can have "time heals itself" and still some time god who solves all paradoxes created by time travellers.

[Warder]

I like the Forgotten Realms take on time travel, where it's technically possible and means to travel through time do exist, but it is very limited both in scope and what you can bring with you back and forth in time, and there are powerful elements working against changes in the timeline, such as Mechanus and the Knights Paradoxical. That way the possibility of a time travelling adventure exists, but many of the problems associated with time travel stories are mitigated. Overall, I think that time travel has the potential to ruin any story unless it's properly figured out and structured beforehand. When you just inject it as a story beat without much thought you get messes like Warcraft's take where they just time travel haphazardly and borrow powerful artifacts from the past to solve issues in the present in one story, but then never talk about that as a possibility for other stories, etc.

[J-H]

Those "reasons" could very well be the destruction of the entire universe. That event serves as the lynchpin for a myriad of events and stopping that event would start a domino effect of paradox that would rip existence itself asunder.

For example, WWII

Either way, that one event would have such a wide range of effects on the world that the sheer number of paradoxes that could be created by so much of history rewriting itself would be incalculable. Such large-scale rewrites would tear the fabric of the game universe to shreds.

I think we're not supposed to reference RL history, although this is not a way that's likely to cause much debate.
In the C&C: Red Alert game series, here's how time travel plays out:
RA1: Einstein goes back in time to kill Mustache Guy. Soviet Union invades Allied Europe. Allies win.
RA2: Soviets rebuild with giant armored dirigibles and a mind control dude. Allies win.
RA2 Expansion: Mind control guy takes over the world. Both sides (whichever side you play) uses time travel to go back in time to kill him, after a diversion to the prehistoric era for tanks vs. dinosaurs. Mind control guy flees to the moon, is captured, and for some reason sent back in time to dinosaur era instead of killed.
RA3: Soviets have lost again/still. They try going back in time again, and eliminating Einstein, thus deleting ALL time travel tech. They return to their own time and face an invasion from the Empire of the Rising Sun, using Samurai-themed mechs and various "Future of the 1980s" weapons including mechs that shoot lasers from their eyes.

Every time the "protagonist" side goes back in time, things change in a way they don't expect or control, and they arrive back in "the present" clueless to the changes. Every step along the way is another chance to turn the "absurd cool" up two more notches until you have samurai gorilla mechs shooting lasers out of their eyes in a setting that was originally 1950s-1970s-era plausible technology (aside from Tesla weaponry).

[KillianHawkeye]

I think we're not supposed to reference RL history

We're not supposed to discuss IRL religion or politics, but general references to historical facts such as the existence World War 2 should be fine.

[MR_Anderson]

Interesting enough, one of the ideas I am making use of for time travel in my campaign was just used in the series about Loki in how they hid.

In a Spelljammer campaign there are explorers on a remote outpost who are using time travel to visit a destroyed planet in search for lost artifacts and knowledge.

Anything they do doesn’t upset the flow or balance, as everything is destroyed in an external cataclysmic event, and after a certain point no one was able to depart the planet. Therefore it remains a large window of free reign in time travel to and from that specific time/location.

[jjordan]

Put my players in a Groundhog Day-style time-loop that was slowly disappearing (NPCs and bits of locations vanishing) and they had to escape from it.

[Absol197]

In the solo campaign I'm running right now, time travel exists, but everyone who knows about it doesn't do it for two major reasons:

1. It's really dangerous;
2. It's basically useless.

How time travel works is when you travel to the past, it creates a quantum double of the universe. However, since there can only be one true history, one of the two superpositions will, by the end of the time traveling, collapse. For your new timeline to survive, your time travel spell needs to be strong enough to "lift" all of the history it changes, to make that superposition strong enough to become the new, real history.

Meaning either you need to not change much at all, or travel back only an extremely short distance.

Oh, and if you don't reach the present before your new timeline collapses? Well, where are you, then? You disappeared from the present, then the past you went back to collapsed. So now you're gone. You erased yourself, good job!

Which isn't to say it's entirely useless. My PC is going to use it to get a chance to have one final talk with and say goodbye to her deceased brother, who committed suicide before the adventure began. A nice way to get some closure, but not screw with the causality of events.

[ATHATH]

A nice way to get some closure, but not screw with the causality of events.
Unless, of course, they manage to talk them out of committing suicide (either on purpose or accidentally).

... Can you take things from the past home with you? If so, they could drop off a fake corpse of their brother in the past and bring their real brother to the present.

[Absol197]

Unless, of course, they manage to talk them out of committing suicide (either on purpose or accidentally).

... Can you take things from the past home with you? If so, they could drop off a fake corpse of their brother in the past and bring their real brother to the present.

Preventing him from committing suicide doesn't matter, because so much time has passed that no spell could ever overcome all the history in-between. She goes back knowing there's no way to save him, it's just a chance for closure, and maybe to find out why.

And no, she couldn't bring anything from the past back: once she jumps back to the present, the history where a time-traveler appeared and teleported him to the future collapsed (i.e. didn't happen), so where did the extra person come from?