Finally did it - a time-jumping session!

[RobbieTaylor]

I've always wanted to do a time-jumping session, where the players move back and forth between their own future and past, complete with changes in their abilities. I knew that to do this, I would need a system that had a fairly steady character progression system, and I would have to keep track of their earlier abilities, or do it quickly enough from the beginning of the campaign to where they would still be close to their starting abilities.

Well, I finally pulled it off!

Using Arcana Unearthed, a d20 variant, I had 6 2nd level characters that I moved between 6 different periods in their lives - 4 in the past, 2 in different periods of the future when they are 8th level. I took the character progression for each character class, worked out their various abilities, feats, magic items and so forth for 8th level, and wrote up a synopsis of what had happened to them between 2nd level and 8th.

For the past, I had the combat cards (HIGHLY recommended) from our previous sessions, which still had the information as to what they could do at 1st level, and what they had. I tended to pop them into the middle of battles that they had participated in, and so their positioning was different that what we had originally had, but I got away with that by just ignoring it. My rationale for the slight difference between the way it had been and the way we were recreating it was that they were being forced through this in an Akashic node (the universal memory), and memory isn't always accurate.

In each of the 6 periods they were transported to, 1 character retained memories of their present, and the NPC helping them would warn that character to tell all the others what was happening so that they could prevent a tragedy; the reason they needed to tell all the others was because the character who retained their memories was different in each time period, so they needed to be warned of what was happening so that they would be ready.

We played it 2 weeks ago, and it worked great! I'm planning right now to have a pure-future episode, where they have to give up something in the past in order for that future (a disastrous one) to not be the true future.

Whattaya think? Anybody else have some success stories about something they always wanted to do and finally managed to pull off?

[Simon W]

How are you handling the feeling (for the players) that they are being railroaded to a certain degree, or isn't this an issue for them?


Simon
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[RobbieTaylor]

I made it clear after the session that the character choices I made for them were only a possible future - that their own choices could help prevent that future from occurring. This is something they definitely want to change, since that future included two of them turning evil and the others dying - all of which were their choices, not ones I had made for them.

Also, this group didn't really have a problem with the possibility of railroading; they felt fairly comfortable with being able to make differences. I have always given them that freedom, so they were ready to trust me on this.