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This weekend was the big finish to the Zener Gate campaign (exactly on schedule). Guest starring the Governator and James Cameron and the Mythbusters duo, it involved the PCs trying to convince Xi Jinping that the Chinese temporal agency was attempting to replace him with a perfect duplicate in order to abort the program – before it sent certain anonymous communiques to James Comey that gave Donald Trump just enough of a wedge against Hilary Clinton that the 2016 Elections turned out very differently – all while they were becoming ghosts because a later action by that same organization had successfully assassinated the PCs long before they had even been recruited by the Zener Gate program!

For obvious reasons, then, time travel and altered history adventures have been on my mind for the last month or so, and so I thought that I would write about them today. If you’re not into that type of adventure, if it doesn’t fit your campaign, don’t fret; there are some general lessons that can be drawn from the topic that will apply outside of this context.

If all goes according to plan, this post will also be accompanied by a review of a Kickstarter or two that might appeal, but that’s looking extremely doubtful at the moment.

Sometime in the early hours of Saturday morning, someone physically tore my internet and telephone connection out of the ground.

The earliest that the connection can be restored is Monday Afternoon – and I’m not sure that this will leave me enough time to prep that additional content for inclusion.

In fact, if there’s any headache with the restoration process, I won’t even be able to post this article on schedule, but that’s a less likely outcome. I hope.

If this gets published on the 17th or 18th of October, all is well; if not, expect to see an update on the situation, and its impact over the next couple of weeks, at the end of the post!

1. Fundamental Premise

The basic premise at the heart of most time travel / alternate history plotlines is that someone has changed history; the PCs discover this and have to change it back or otherwise prevent the Villains from changing it in the first place.

1a. Variations

A number of variations are possible on this theme.

• Reversing the assumed temporal arrow can be fun. This means that someone from the past has traveled into the future from the PCs’ time to stage some sort of intervention which will impact the far future (relatively speaking). The PCs get wind of this and have to prevent it.
• Setting your alternate history on an alien world can be a useful variation to have up your sleeve. All you then need to do is get the PCs to intersect it on their travels. Of course, having such a parallel world arise accidentally is beyond improbable – there needs to be a very well-informed operation in back of this creation, and their motivations have to be bulletproof. It’s a lot of trouble to go to just to fake out the PCs or play head games….
• Alternate timelines are a relatively safe answer – you just need a way to get the PCs there (perhaps against their wills) and some challenge to be overcome before they are able to return. See the Star Trek episode “Mirror Mirror” and a number of sequels in Deep Space 9.

2. The Implications

The PCs need to have some means of recognizing that history has changed, and some way of tracking the change to its “source event”. That usually means that they have some sort of immunity or protection from being affected by the change.

I cannot stress enough how important this is to get right; the credibility of the whole adventure rests on it.

But there are a number of variations possible, which I’ll look at in section 5.

3. The Mechanism

I think that the place to start is always with the mechanism that is used by the Villain(s) to cause the change in history. How were they able to alter the past?

The answer – and there are many possible contenders – will define the Immunity mechanism.

4. Granting Immunity

In some campaigns, immunity to such things comes with the territory, either as a general principle (“Temporal Shielding”) or as some sort of protection against the mechanism in general (“We’re shielded against external Magic”).

When neither of these is the case, the “Protection” has to derive from some accidental circumstance that is unique to the PCs at the key moment. Have them blasted out of their natural space-time or something.

As a general rule, deciding on the mechanism tells you everything you need to know about how ‘immunity” is to be granted.

Depending on the circumstances and the mechanism chosen, you may need to have your temporal theory nailed down, hard. For example:

A temporal change results in some object traveling interstellar distances changing it’s destination or vector. As the change propagates forward down the timeline, it is instantaneously somewhere else from where it was at the moment the Change intersects it. Anyone with ‘immunity’ from the change on board will perceive this change in location occurring faster than the speed of light.

Unless the speed of light limit still applies, in which case the wave of change will propagate more slowly as it expands from the Event that has changed history,

I’m not going to go into huge amounts of detail on this aspect of the situation; this article is all about the creation of a time travel / altered history plotline. If you want more information on this sort of thing, see my earlier series on the “Physics” of Time travel, Time Travel in RPGs.

5. Immunity Variations

There are a few variations that are worth considering when it comes to immunity. Which one, if any, apply to this specific situation will depend on the intersection between Temporal Mechanics and the mechanism by which history has been changed.

5a. Temporary Immunity

Having some sort of a deadline before the “immunity” runs out can be lots of fun. This is particularly likely in situations in which some external force is furnishing the protection. It creates a deadline after which the PCs will be irrevocably reintegrated with the changed timeline.

5b. Restricted Immunity

It can be a lot harder to arrange for ALL the PCs to have “Protection”. Having a situation in which only ONE PC is protected and who has to convince his Integrated companions from the altered timeline to act can also be fun. This basically involves determining how the unprotected PCs will have changed because of the Temporal Intervention (either directly or indirectly) and letting those players use a “variation” of their usual characters.

This can involve a lot more prep work, so it’s not a perfect solution. And you need players who are capable of handling such curve-balls with some level of aplomb. In fiction, it’s much easier.

5c. Without Immunity

I’ve only seen this worked a few times. The PCs discover that the world that they are used to is the result of Temporal Meddling, and their own personal histories as they know them are also affected. They HAVE no immunity – but they have the opportunity to bootstrap themselves and their world back to the way things were supposed to be.

Ironically, under this scenario, those causing such changes to history may be naturally protected from them, depending on how you are working the temporal physics. So this can be a great way to reboot a campaign or start a new one, and obviates the usual campaign briefing!

6. Assigning A Target

The mechanism and the motivation of the Villain will identify the Target Event that is to be altered. It’s a lot more work to try and rationalize these things after the fact; it’s far better to have at least a general outline of how things changed and what the resulting dominoes were.

One of my favorite things to do is to have Changes as a result of a Temporal Intervention be largely and wildly unpredictable, no matter how obvious the outcomes might have appeared when planning the change. There will almost always be some factor that can’t be taken into account that will… complicate… the flow of events.

Any decision that was “inspired” or “made on a whim” is particularly vulnerable to such chaos. Knocking over a domino might lead to the change in history desired, but with unexpected repercussions; or those repercussions might completely undermine the desired change.

Having the villain show up on the PCs doorstep to announce “I did something, it only made things worse, I need your help to undo my mistake” is a different way of propelling the PCs into such an adventure!

7. Assigning An Enemy

If you know the Motivation, you have at least an inkling as to who’s responsible. Again, it’s a lot easier to work from the Desired change in history to a motivation to a villain identity than it is to work things in the other direction, even though the logic as presented to the PCs will almost certainly run “Villain to motivation to desired change”.

8. Discovery

How are the PCs who have immunity going to recognize that history has changed? How will the change manifest itself? What is the plot hook, and how can one or more PCs be persuaded to swallow it whole?

A lot of GMs (and some writers) give only superficial attention to this, and it shows. It’s not completely accurate, but I advise acting as though the credibility of the whole adventure is resting on this. It needs to be compelling and believable and completely seamlessly integrated into the normal course of events, nothing out of the ordinary at all.

If the conferring of “Immunity” is not the start of the adventure, this is.

9. Detective Work

How are the protected characters going to back-trace the falling dominoes to discover the instant of change? Again, plausibility needs to be absolute, but you also need to make both the process and the results interesting, even though not everyone is necessarily going to participate – and that can be challenging at the best of times..

10. Motivating Counter-intervention

One of the worst problems that a GM can encounter when running such an adventure is the PC or PCs who respond “I like the way things have changed, let’s leave them this way”. That is the source of the advice offered in section 6, which I now reiterate – no matter how appealing and stable the changes to history may appear to be, they should always rapidly spin out of control.

These negative impacts don’t have to be large and overt; they can be relatively small and targeted. Think of the wishes granted by a Monkey’s Paw; you may return a beloved child or spouse to life, at the cost of the lives of one or more parents and a criminal conviction of the character leading to a divorce and the loss of custody. Just because the child / spouse is still alive in this revised history does not mean that the character can be part of the life of the Intervener, and vice-versa.

No matter how positive the change might appear to be, superficially, there should always be some severely negative aspects to it, which will act to motivate the PCs to oppose the intervention that has changed history. It might be that the resulting world is a happy one for the Villain who has changed history, because he doesn’t care that the rest of the world has gone to hell in a hand-basket so long as all is rosy in his little bubble.

Some GMs may feel that this proposed “rule” should not apply when it’s a PC who is changing history (and there can be a case made in this respect when that’s the whole point of the campaign); but except in such cases, the GM should think long and hard before giving players that much control over the campaign world.

11. Counter-intervention

The second-worst thing that can happen is for the players to say the equivalent of “it’s too big / too complicated, I don’t know what to do”. While the specifics of a counter-intervention may not be obvious, the general strokes of ‘What Needs To Be Done’ should always be clear to even superficial analysis of the situation.

If more information or specificity is needed before such counter-intervention can be properly targeted, where the PC(s) have to go, and what they have to do, in order to gain the required intelligence should be as clear as possible to the players.

This is more challenging to the GM than it might seem, because there is very little to challenge the players in a genuinely follow-your-nose path to a solution; it gets very old, very fast.

What’s more, most solutions of this type are extremely short on character interactions – where’s the opportunity to roleplay? In fact, this can be a problem with this type of adventure in general!

The best resolution to such a problem is for the GM to be proactive in incorporating opportunities for roleplay into their adventure design in the first instance.

The last time this type of adventure came up in the Zenith-3 campaign, for example, the agency for counter-action had the PCs taking the place of their alternate-world selves who fully integrated into the divergent timeline (and horrible people, to boot). They needed< the resources available to these alternate-world versions of themselves in order to solve the problem and set history back on its rightful course, and that meant interacting with various subordinates and superiors. And, in concluding this section, let me again reiterate - while the ultimate solution might not be apparent in all it's specifics, a general description should always be possible, and the next step towards such specifics should always be patently clear.

12. Counter-Intervention Variations

There are four variations on the basic counter-intervention model, and the GM should employ them to create variety in the adventure.

12a. Target Yesterday

This is the default – the PCs ‘go to’ the scene of the historical changes and undo them. While this is the most obvious approach, it’s also easily mishandled; perhaps the most common failure is insufficient prep. The environment and population of the world around the change in history needs to be sufficiently detailed that the GM can adopt the roles of the various NPCs in a completely convincing manner.

All too often – and I’ve been guilty of this myself – the GM will have the attitude of knowing ‘generally’ who these NPCs are, and confident of being able to improv whatever is needed; but there are many more moving parts to this type of adventure than is usually the case. The result is that such efforts are almost always inadequate. Even a single line of description – names and personas – is better than nothing.

The flaw in the ‘Target Yesterday’ Basic model

The problem is that the GM is fully aware that all such prep is disposable, intended to be thrown away at the end of the adventure, and so there is a constant temptation to do the absolute minimum. At the same time, this type of adventure is essentially the creation of a new campaign world, however temporary, and so the prep demands are far higher than is normally the case; these two facts are clearly at odds with each other.

Solving the flaw

The best solution is to find a way to recycle or perpetuate the value of the prep into the future. For example, just as the PCs are “protected” from the change, so some of their enemies who have been overcome or bypassed in order to counter the Temporal Incursion might also be “protected” and seeking to revert the corrected timeline; they carry the adventure prep with them as character background.

This also achieves another important outcome: all too often, this sort of adventure ends in the entire premise being overcome, history being restored or whatever. Aside from the PCs memories – and possibly not even there – no lingering impacts remain at the end; whatever caused the adventure to occur in the first place has been undone and nothing remains. To all intents and purposes, the adventure might as well not have happened.

Taking what would be a disposable adventure and giving it some long-term impact within the campaign, however limited or subtle, makes the adventure itself important. This is also an opportunity to correct anything that isn’t quite right in the campaign background, revise anything that didn’t quite work the way you intended it to; subtle changes to characters and character backgrounds are only reasonable as a consequence of an imperfect solution to the problem posed to the PCs and actually enhance the plausibility of the adventure and campaign.

12b. Target Tomorrow

One variation is to target the ’embarkation point’ of whoever changed history – stop them from doing so by targeting the enemy’s circumstances before they even commit the deed.

It’s implicit in time-changing adventures that there be some connection from the consequences of the ‘true’ history to the changes made in the past. This variation subverts that association to create a different adventure.

You can further distance the adventure from the predictable cookie-cutter form by having the intervention that is to be undone occur sometime in the PCs futures, too. This makes the entire adventure an embodiment of a “Plan B” (see section 15, below), as though the PCs that were contemporary or post-contemporary to the change in history have already tried to reverse the changes to history and failed. These versions of the PCs, of course, have no memory of that, because it lies in a future that will never come into existence – if they are successful!

Yet another variation is in someone from the PCs “now” wreaking recurring havoc in a peaceful future, a future that reaches out to the PCs to act as counter-agents to the future-villain.

12c. Target Interception

Perhaps the most difficult variation to implement is the one in which the counter-intervention targets neither end of the loop in time (embarkation point or arrival point), but instead seeks to intervene somewhere in between the two.

The reason is that it can be exceptionally hard to target a time-traveler “in transit” in any plausible way. But this changes the environment in which the adventure takes place, and that in turn makes the adventure all aboutthe most interesting way to introduce such an expanded cosmology, by making it immediately relevant and demonstrating that relevance.

12d. Domino Theory

A variation on a variation? Why not?

A previous attempt at a time-travel campaign that I ran, some years back (using an early version of the Sixes System, as it happens) had as a dictum that once an Intervention was made, it could never be undone; all you could do was introduce some new timeline that corrected the effect of the changed history. For example, the Enemies might have prevented the death of a key figure in a car accident by diverting the vehicle that was supposed to cause the accident; the solution might be to cut the brake lines of the car being driven by the Key Figure Who Is Supposed To Die so that even without the other vehicle, the NPC still dies in a car accident.

That campaign concept was predicated on this variation being the only valid one. It also meant that once you detected a change to history, that change was permanent, that domino was always going to fall; you could never prevent it from happening, so that event was always there to be detected. So every adventure had a lingering effect on campaign continuity, including those by NPC groups!

This is, of course, a variation on the proposal offered up in 12c. It involves very different temporal mechanics, arguably more plausible ones but definitely more complicated. That can be both a good thing and a bad thing – they are going to be more original and less cookie-cutter, but they will be harder for players to wrap their heads around at the same time.

Domino Theory Advice

If time-travel is to be a central or frequently-recurring part of the campaign, it can bear such detailed scrutiny and still be relevant; if not, then a more accessible alternative might be a better option, under the circumstances.

Whatever you decide in this respect can have extremely durable consequences for the campaign, so don’t make this choice frivolously or capriciously. Make sure that you understand and can accept the consequences, implications, and ramifications of whatever you choose.

13. Logical Timelines

It’s very easy to tie yourself up in time-travel knots. These bind you implicitly and seem absolutely secure – until they come unraveled at the worst possible moment. I avoid this problem by implicitly tracking the logical timelines from the point of view of all the different participating characters of this sort of adventure.

(Truth be told, I recommend doing this anyway, even if it’s not for a time-travel / alternate history adventure).

Everything that a character does, or is supposed to do (in the course of an adventure) should make complete sense from their perspective, knowing what they know at the time.

In an ordinary adventure, this is relatively straightforward, simply a matter of bearing in mind what different characters know and presume at the point of any decision being made (but sometimes it can get overlooked, anyway).

In a time travel / alternate history adventure, in which effects can and do precede causes (from some points of view), it becomes absolutely critical.

My Process

As you outline the course of events within the adventure, you will be writing that adventure / plotline from the perspective of the PCs and their players. This is the simplest and most elegant solution to the plotting problems of such an adventure, or so many people seem to think.

The ‘knots’ come into existence when this leads you to have an NPC – be it the Enemy, or whoever is providing the PCs with “Protection” from historical changes, or past versions of the PCs that never actually appear in-game, or whoever – are required to act on knowledge that they do not have at the time.

I prefer to plot the ‘Intervention’ from the point of view of the NPC committing the act of intervention, then any external source of information who is recruiting the PCs to stage a counter-intervention (if any) from the point of view of that source, and then actually writing the adventure and the proposed resolution to the events from the perspective of the PCs. And then it’s back to the NPC actor’s perspective for any reactions or responses to what the PCs are expected to (possibly) do – just to keep all the continuities straight.

14. Outcomes – Success, Failure, and points in between

The GM creating this sort of plotline should always have a clear idea of what the next step for the PCs is supposed to be, all the way through to a resolution of the adventure – and should strive to make that ‘next step’ abundantly obvious, even if multiple alternatives are to be presented or possible, and this should continue all the way through to the possible outcomes of the adventure.

In general, these outcomes come in three basic flavors.

14a. Success

What does success look like, and what are its ramifications? What’s the ideal outcome and what compromises may need to be made in order to succeed in dealing with the adventure?

As indicated earlier, it’s all too easy to have the resolution be ‘it never happened’, but that throws away a lot of prep work, which in turn discourages the GM from doing that prep to an adequate standard. That’s “sub-optimal” to use some Neo-militaristic jargon. And it’s never ,em>really the case, anyway; even in such an outcome, the players are forever-after aware that a “Time War” can happen.

Even if the effort itself is automatically condemned to failure by the Temporal Mechanics of the campaign, you can’t assume that every NPC will always know and respect this reality; there will always be those who think they have a loophole, or can create one, or who are simply ignorant or overconfident.

Time travel always opens up a can of worms – if you are prepared for that and willing to accept it, that’s fine. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that the PCs can be ‘walled off’ from the expanded reality around them – they can’t. Use it once, and Time Travel will always be a part of the game universe.

14b. Failure

Equally, you need to know what failure looks like, and be prepared to live with the consequences. I’ll speak further to this point in section 15, below, but the bottom line remains.

If you aren’t prepared to accept the consequences of failure on the part of the PCs who are attempting to correct the course of history, then you are setting yourself up for one (or both) of two possible problems:

• 1. Plot railroading, in which you manipulate events to orchestrate the outcome that is most desirable from a campaign perspective; and/or
• 2. Making the PCs fifth wheels to a dues-ex-machina that solves the problem for them.

Neither of these is an acceptable resolution, so it follows that you need to have a third option prepped and ready to go – just in case.

14c. Mixed Results

But my favorite choice is to avoid either of these extremes. The PCs may be 99% successful, but there remains just a little divergence from established history. Or they may be 99% unsuccessful, but with room left for hope.

Not only does this feel more realistic, but it means that the adventure will have lingering consequences. They may not manifest often, and certainly may not rub the player’s noses in the outcome, but they will still be there every now and then.

This creates an opportunity to rejig any campaign elements that have grown stale, to wallpaper over any continuity cracks and plot holes, and – in general – to revise anything that is either not working or has come to the end of it’s useful life within the campaign.

In fact, that can often be the whole point of running such an adventure – for its’ metagame repercussions.

Of course, this is not a card that can be played frequently or even regularly. That’s part of the challenge of a campaign that’s explicitly about time-travel. Once a year may be too often, even if you are playing almost every week.

15. Have a Plan ‘B’

Granting the possibility that the PCs will fail – making room within the adventure for that to happen – generally implies the existence of a ‘Plan B’, a way for the PCs to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (perhaps after a taste of the defeat).

If you permit a deus-ex-machina to provide the PCs with a second chance, this is easy to do. But that’s bad writing in the literary world, and not much better in the RPG sphere.

Plan B’s don’t happen by accident. They need to be carefully constructed and implicitly placed within the continuity of events while being completely hidden from player awareness until needed.

That usually means that they need to be subtle, and sophisticated, and very carefully prepared.

Sidebar: An example

One of my favorite plots of this type deliberately made it almost impossible for the players to succeed in stopping the Event – but included, as an inobvious inevitability, the seeds of the Villain’s defeat at the hands of parallel-world versions of the PCs. The flaw in the villain’s plans was a small one, essentially unnoticeable until it became a crashing reality to first the players and then the PCs – by undoing an unwanted victory on the part of the PCs, he also undid a subsequent victory that was required in order for him to have time-travel capabilities in the first place.

History, in that game universe, abhors a paradox; the consequence was that his intervention would be undone so that he could gain the ability to intervene again, with history oscillating back-and-forth repeatedly until some extremely low-probability coincidence arose by random chance to give the PCs one final shot at stabilizing the situation.

The actual adventure proceeded from that low-probability event; the PCs affected (and their players) were completely unaware of the failed attempt to intervene. It was only when they found a way to send information from one temporal ‘loop’ into the next that they could start to make progress, bootstrapping themselves out of the paradox – but with consequences, to wit a Dalek invasion of Korea – or maybe it was Thailand, I’m not sure anymore.

The key point is that this enabled the PCs to try various things that would fail, but to learn from those mistakes until they finally found a solution that “ticked all the boxes”.

Those with a lot of sci-fi in their personal backgrounds might recognize this as the basic premise of a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” plotline, but I also threw in some ideas from the original Terminator trilogy and some bits from Doctor Who, to make the whole thing more original.

16. Reflecting A Changed Reality

Something that I’ve only done twice, but that worked quite well both times, is to reflect the changed reality by using a completely different game system. On the first of these occasions, I went so far as to parachute in a ‘guest GM’ (while sticking around to act as a continuity advisor).

Picture the scene: I run the adventure up to the point where the character (who was ‘protected’ from the change by subsequent events) becomes aware of reality running like water around him. I then rise from my seat and the guest GM (who has been lurking somewhere nearby unobtrusively) sits down and hands the player a version of his PC that has been ‘translated’ into a completely different game system, while I pull up a chair to one side. Without explanation, the new GM then starts describing what the PC sees around him…

That’s A Wrap

Having reached the end of the article, I now have an update. The Broadband technician has come, and gone, and made arrangements for a proper repair to my telephone and internet – but it will still be two or three days before it’s working again. The intent at the moment is therefore to post this on Thursday – either using my own (restored) connection, or by means of an internet cafe. Either way, I won’t get to look at those Kickstarters that I mentioned at the head of this post – they will have to wait until next week.

I guess I’m fortunate in that I didn’t need to do a lot of research for this article, that I could pretty much just type (having already drafted the sequence of sections). Hopefully, the seams (and the interruptions) don’t show too badly.

It should be observed that this was going to be the subject of choice, anyway. It’s just a useful coincidence that it was on the agenda when circumstances permitted no other option!

UPDATE October 20:

So, still no internet connection (or telephone) and the latest word is that it will be restored ‘on or before’ November 7th. I’l do my best to post regularly, but all schedules are shot to hell and no commitments are certain. That includes promised Kickstarter reviews (apologies to the creators and publishers affected), and means that interaction between myself and the November 2022 Blog Carnival will be disrupted, at least at first (I should still have enough time to prep and publish an anchor post, though it might not have the depth of content I originally intended).

As soon as the connection is restored, which could be as soon as tomorrow (but probably won? be), things will start getting back to normal, but if the original internet issues also return, even that might be a protracted process.

It’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Sorry, folks!