88 Miles an Hour Down Campaign Lane

Art by J3 Concepts

So I’m back on my incomprehensible concept bullshit, this time it’s TIME TRAVEL. What would it look like to expand the ideas from last post into a campaign? Well, if we’re loosening up the constraint of being locked inside one building, we need to put in a lot more somewhere else. A GM’s sanity is the most important thing. To that end, let’s add some laws of time travel:

River of Fate. The universe at large has a strong current guiding it. The timeline is strong, and self correcting. Think of this as the opposite of the butterfly effect. Most things you change in the past will have local effects, but the river of fate will ensure the greater timeline is more or less the same. If you kill baby hitler, another person will take his role, and so on. This effect is most obvious in…

Individual Stability. It is impossible to prevent a person from being born. If you kill a person’s parents, that person will still be born to different parents, with the same given name and the same rough personality and life trajectory. They may have a different appearance, but they will have the same soul. You could even kill your own parents with no negative effects to you (except likely trauma).

True Love. You can’t separate people in love by changing the past. They’ll always find each other throughout time, somehow. 

Timeline Fulcrum. These are the moments where the timeline is most fragile. These are the moments you can branch the timeline, make real substantive changes. The biggest historical events. The murder of Ceasar, that kind of thing. These can be fairly wide bands of time, like WWII, but an action needs to majorly change the course of the event to shift timelines.

It doesn’t matter for the purpose of a campaign, but I imagine these as still being local, just to a much bigger local. They tessellate somewhat. The fulcrums of a nation, of a continent, of a planet, etc. For us, the largest one still contained within the scope of the campaign is the only one that matters. Everything else is a local fulcrum. 

Local Fulcrum. On the smaller level, cities, countries, and even towns have defining moments. For simplicity, unless there is good reason, only make one fulcrum for each local area. These are the side quests of a time campaign that you fill in as you learn where players are travelling. The changes made here don’t branch the timeline, they just change this location. 

Personal Fulcrum. The same is true for people. For each major character, choose a moment in their past. Batman’s parents’ murder. This moment can be used to make major changes to a character (while maintaining their essential soul). This only affects that person, as someone else will do whatever they did in their old life. 

The Law of Time To Write. By some strange alchemy, sessions always end right after Timeline Fulcrums are changed. No one knows why this happens, but GMs are thankful for the time to invent all the changes that happen because of it.

The Timeline Map

This is a map that looks exactly like you imagine a timeline map should look. Like a big tree going to the right. The dots on the map are to show the timeline fulcrums. Start with a line, the history of your world, your Prime Timeline. Put in the fulcrum points, the important moments. Mark the present with a line.

A good map needs boundaries. Choose the earliest moment that you want to be interactable. This is the far left boundary of the map. Pick an amount of time into the future to be a right boundary. Write some loose notes about what this future will be like, knowing that it will change. 

For the top and bottom boundaries, we make two more timelines. Go back to that earliest point and choose two other ways it could have gone. Write a paragraph about each of these new timelines. You can flesh it out more if players ever go there. One of these timelines is the North Prime Timeline, and one is the South. This gives us some meat to work with, if we need alternate universe characters, or the players start to push at the boundaries. These aren’t hard borders, but going to a new Prime Timeline should mark a massive change in the campaign.

Example

In order to build or parse one of these, you need to have a strong grasp on a fictional world. That’s fine for writing campaigns at home, but obviously tricky for an example on a blog. So I will be using a fictional world most of us feel comfortable in: Star Wars. I hope using a beloved property as an example shows how compelling this concept can be when applied to a world that you’re invested in (As we all hope our players are).

The first step is to identify the fulcrums. Make your list, but be flexible. If the players suggest a moment in time and you think, “oh yeah, that should have made the list”, then add it on the fly. Let’s assume we’re playing the original trilogy as a campaign. Here’s what I chose: 

• Palpatine chooses Anakin as the target for his machinations
• The Blockade of Naboo
  • Palpatine’s election to chancellor and Qui-Gon’s death
• Order 66 and the Fall of the Jedi
• The Duel on Mustafar
• The creation of the Death Star

The creation of the Clone Army is intentionally omitted. That army is fated to appear from somewhere, by the law of individual stability.

We’ve already built the past. So now on to the future. To keep it simple, we make two possible futures. The good guys win, and the future is as portrayed in the movie. Or the bad guys win, and the empire rules with an iron fist and big death star. These stay vague and change with player actions. 

Second, we should build in our boundary timelines. For our example, I’ll say Palpatine targets Padme or Obi Wan instead. 

Now our timeline should look like a trident, with our main one in the middle.

• Empress Padme. Palpatine goes for the political victory, but he is killed by Mace Windu. His secret ally Evil Padme executes his plan instead. She is well beloved by the jedi, and is not discovered until it is far too late. Anakin and Obi Wan escape with Leia and raise her on Tattoine. Luke is the imperial prince. 
• Darth Vader. Palpatine turns Anakin to the dark side, and together they destroy the Jedi. Obi Wan and Anakin have their fated duel, and he becomes Darth Vader. Leia goes to Alderaan as a princess, and Luke is hidden on Tatooine. 
• Darth Obi Wan. After the death of Satine, his beloved, Obi Wan’s fall to the dark side is complete. He and Anakin duel on Mustafar, and Anakin is badly wounded. Padme and him escape to Tattoine to raise their twins together. 

See how there are some consistent throughlines? This lightens the workload of inventing new timelines. They’re noticeably different, but you can always say, “Oh, the bits with Glup Shitto? Those happened the same way but with Obi Wan instead of Anakin”. This is crucial, because it’ll be impossible to write an impeccably detailed history.

Our completed timeline before we begin play

Build the Characters. Each player should choose their personal fulcrum while making their character. Your Luke player chooses, “Owen and Beru’s murder by stormtroopers”, Leia’s player chooses, “Joining the Rebel Alliance as a teen”, and Han’s player chooses, “Getting the Millenium Falcon”. You make them for the NPCs, but make sure to choose one that’s not a larger fulcrum. Obi Wan has “Satine’s Death”, Darth Vader has, “The death of his mother and the murder of the tusken raiders”. 

Play. That’s the bulk of the timeline creation done. As you play, you’ll have to note down more fulcrums. Some local (Alderaan goes boom), and some global (Death Star goes boom). As you go to unexpected planets, you’ll need to build in local fulcrums the same way you’ll need to build in local quests. And, of course, you’ll have to build new timelines as they change the past.

The Time Travel

The actual mechanics of time travel have to be simple. You can only travel to fulcrums, and you always travel back to the important location. The exception is travelling to the present, which drops you off at the time and location you left from. You can travel to any fulcrum you know about on your timeline, including personal and local fulcrums, and you can travel to the present in any timeline.

To keep the time stream from getting too messed up, time travel needs costs and consequences. 

The Method. The actual method of time travel is up to you as you build the campaign. The option I like is portals that can be opened by those in the know, but only at specific locations marked with strange symbols. They appear near each fulcrum. This method means you enter and leave any time period at the same location. If that location has enemies, or you’re far away from it and the clock is ticking, that’s drama. It’s also not too easy to just bail when things go wrong.

Resources. The resource and exact amounts you use to time travel will vary from campaign to campaign, but we’ll say the most basic trip consumes one Time Crystal for the example. The cost is based on the amount of timeline fulcrums you need to pass through to get to your destination. Simply trace along the line from your current location to your destination, and count the dots. Then, square that number. The minimum cost is 1. (Remember, only count the Timeline Fulcrums, not personal or local ones)

To travel to the present in another timeline, count how many timeline fulcrums are between where they split and the present (including the one at the split) and square that number. 

Time Sickness. You cannot time travel more than once per twenty four hours, from your own perspective. If you do, you will get an incurable disease known as time sickness. It ages you about 10% of your natural life span and removes 20% of your maximum hp each time it happens. It’s visually apparent, as your movements become jittery, fingers speeding and slowing unpredictably.

The Arrow of Time. Whenever you are in the present in any timeline, the present advances in every timeline. If you spend a month in the present of an alternate timeline, a month will have passed at home.

Fulcrum Lock. Just like you can only travel into fulcrums and the present, you can only travel out of fulcrums and the present. If you remain in the past beyond the fulcrum event, you will be trapped there and become part of that new timeline. There is generous time to escape after changing things, so this typically only happens willingly or if you’re incapacitated in the past. 

Revisiting Fulcrums. You cannot revisit any section of a fulcrum you have already visited. You must either leave before you arrive or arrive after you left. If you attempt to overlap the visit, you will be annihilated. 

Some Side Notes and Final Thoughts

Puddle Jumping. Travelling far into the past or into distant timelines is very costly due to the exponential growth. So some travellers will do lots of short trips to save Time Crystals. This costs another resource though: time. The combination of the Time Sickness and Revisiting Fulcrums rules means that you’re consuming 24 hours of each fulcrum you’re using as a layover. Plus, most fulcrums are naturally dangerous times of upheaval, so you could be killed while waiting.

Other Travelers. A staple of time travel movies is a character from a dark future arriving to try and prevent their world from falling to some apocalypse. Think Trunks from Dragon Ball Z or Kyle Reese from Terminator. These characters can come from what I refer to in the next section as future midpoints. You can also have these travellers come from alternate timelines, especially the boundary timelines. This can add some weight and flavor to the large timeline map you’ve built.

Back to the Future. Travelling into the future (beyond the present) is a strange proposition, because it is inherently unstable. The GM should keep a vague plan for the future in each timeline, but when players want to travel into it it will need to be fleshed out. The GM should have an idea of the major future moments, likely battles with the big bad, or other huge turning points. Those become future fulcrums. Travel forward then works much like travel backwards.

The players won’t know all of these future events when they make the choice to travel, so the future part of your map will have to be a little more complicated. In between each fulcrum, add a midpoint. These are the world in the aftermath of the last fulcrum. When a player jumps forward without naming a specific fulcrum, put them in whichever midpoint they’re closest to. This will allow them to see what the world is like “If the Evil Empire wins” or “If we don’t stop the bombs”.

This is a little more complex, but the ever shifting nature of the future makes it easier to travel into than the past. Plus it allows for time travel tropes like a hero from the desolate post-apocalypse. The apocalypse is the fulcrum, but the post-apocalypse is interesting in its own right.

The future never branches. Changes you make in the present or future simply change the future of the current timeline.

Beyond the Borderlands. If your players want to get really crazy, they can try to travel beyond the North or South primes. There are additional Prime timelines, but they are harder and harder to reach. To get to the next prime, you have to go to an even earlier fulcrum. This obviously costs even more Time Crystals, and is getting into murkier, more legendary history. Of course, the changes to the world are even more drastic.

If your players express a desire to do this, you’ll have to extend your world’s history back a little further from your first fulcrum. Add in 2-3 more fulcrums before it, the earliest of which becomes the branching point for these new primes. 

If this goes back far enough, you’ll get into fulcrums in the era of creation and myth. These alternate timelines will have wild differences, in physics, types of life forms, magic. But somehow all the same souls are present and recognizable. Maybe your best friend is a talking mushroom or sentient stormcloud in this timeline.