Happy Leap Year!

All things temporal in both fiction and real life get pretty complicated very quickly. Ever watch Dr Who? They make it look simple on there. Star Trek? Sometimes they come close to showing how sticky it is.

I have never been a fan of time travel in the TTRPG space. I’ve done it once successfully during a session and several very ugly flops. Time travel magic tends to break the game or just bog it down.

“I cast Slow Time. Every character but mine loses one action and my character gains one action for each affected person or creature, so 9 more actions.”

Then the Wizard becomes the Flash and runs amok on his while everyone else wonders what happened to their turn. Even the basic Haste spell is kinda messy sometimes, at it’s a basic spell for a lot of d20 games. Monsters with these types of abilities are just as messy.

To be succinct, I tend to disallow time travel, temporal magic, temporal magic items, and I don’t use timey-wimey monsters in my fantasy games. Seriously, I’d rather allow mecha, kaiju, firearms, death magic, kung fu moves, and let one character be a Tiefling Barista for a rival Shi’arbucks. Nothing makes me yearn for Old School Essentials more than getting timey-wimey in a fantasy game.

We all know there’s a “but” coming.

Why would I go into all of this if I don’t want the players doing temporal stuff? Because there are still plenty of opportunities to do time travel adjacent adventures without giving the group the power to bend time. I’d also still work with time travel in superhero and sci-fi games. I still love all of the time traveler tropes, just not in the hands of the players in a way that ultimately disrupts the game.

I dropped a hint earlier talking about mecha, guns, etc in the game. One of the oldest TTRPG modules ever written involved a downed spacecraft. Dungeon Crawl Classics did something similar before Mutant Crawl Classics became a thing. I’m talking about building a dungeon centered around a crashed flying saucer. That’s how we get robots, laser guns, and funky aliens into a fantasy TTRPG.

The same can be done bringing any era of the game world or alternate timeline into the current fantasy era. Imagine if someone from the Federation of United Planets broke the Prime-type Directive and gave Orcs access to lasers and computer guided mortars. What if goblins went through a portal and came back in WW2 era tanks?

It can also be done in reverse. Maybe the characters stumble upon a portal to the future of their world. What if they got stuck? Imagine a dungeon party tripping over a time machine with a mind of its own. Imagine being able to make contact with older civilizations from the same world.

But isn’t that dangerous? No. Because power packs run down. Ammo runs out. Technology eventually breaks down. So, let them have their “Wand of Lightning” until it runs out of juice. Will the group find a battery in time to make it useful again?

Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate you.