[Timestream] Sweet, Sweet Actual Play

[Nathan P.]

Finally, at long last, I pulled a group together to play Timestream. Brief overview, its a story (standard meaning)-oriented take on time travel, low on paradox and high on player/GM collaboration and participation.

I have three players, two of whom I've played with before. Can (pronounced John) is the most experienced, with a lot of GURPS and D&D style experiened. Dmitri is pretty new to table-top, though he's played console RPGs. His first experience was in a short-lived game of my fantasy heartbreaker. Jon is entirely new to RPing, as far as I know.

Here's some background/context, so that the actual play part makes sense...

I wanted to share an insight I had, and some thoughts springing from it.

Basically, theres nothing in Timestream that encourages the characters to
form a "party" - in fact, its very much the opposite. In encouraging
extremely open-ended character creation, it encourages you to make wildly divergent characters in terms of timeframe, if nothing else. Which is great, but it creates tension when trying to bring the characters "together".

So heres's my thought - the play in timestream concerns, not the characters working together as a group, but the common themes and threads that arise from each characters pursuit of their Goals. Which means that we need to concentrate much less on common backgrounds for characters, and much more on related Goals.

So basically, when we get together to do chargen proper, I'll probably be
rubberstamping your character background and concept, and concentrating much more on his Goals and Obstacles.

This train of thought also helped me crystallize a concept I've been bouncing around in my head - "Anchors". Basically, everyone chooses at least one person thats related to their character, and their relationship to that person. It can be good, bad, amorous, whatever. When we do chargen, we'll go around and everyone will choose at least one other persons anchor as another anchor of their own, and defines a different relationship.

For example. Bobs player decides that his Anchor is his grandmother, Alice. During chargen, Abe's player decides that Alic is Abe's sister.

Once everyone has anchors, everyone creates one more Goal that relates to an Anchor in some way. Boom. Instant interweiving of storylines, at least in theory.

We started off on a downnote. It turned out that Jon couldn't come, and we had to track down Can, because he hadn't received my emails about the meeting itself. Once he showed up, we decided to proceed with chargen and fit Jon in later.

Chargen basically broke down into two section: stats, and R-map development. Both went remarkably smoothly. I basically made up the R-map procedure as we went along. It took awhile, but it was really, really engaging for all of us.

Basically, each player statted up his character. I then asked them to develop two Goal/Obstacle pairs (a goal the character has, and the obstacle that keeps it from being realized). Then, we came up with 2 Anchors each - essentially, people that the character has a relationship with and that the player wants to see come into play. Then, each player chooses an Anchor tied to a different character, and develops a relationship there. Then we looked back at it and made other obvious or cool connections, between characters and NPC's alike.

It was really cool. Even missing one character, the R-map came together really nicely, and we came up with some fantastic connections. I'll do another post with a summary, if there's interest.

Can created Edward Catuna, a young chemist who got sucked into the Vietnam war (native timeframe 1969). An unconscious Temporal Manipulator (can affect time as it moves around him), he's an incredibly effective solder who just wants to go home, but can't - the red tape won't let him leave, because he does so well in the field.

Dmitri created Soren Zahid Bremer, an invesment banker (native timeframe 1990). A Thrall (someone who's time-affecting powers are controlled by an exterior force of some kind), he has slowly been realizing all the wierd and unconfortable things in his life, and wants to find out what the hell is going on.

Jon and I had talked about a 50s/60s era travelling salesman with schizophrenia, but that may or may not happen...

A couple things were very interesting to me. First, all three players independently came up with characters that were not aware of or couldn't control their powers. Secondly, I've never done an R-map before, and it was awesome. The players were way into it, which was fine with me. I stressed that I wanted to run with whatever they gave me, and they gave me a ton. It was very kitbitz-y.

The Anchors turned out work intially as I'd hoped, both to relate the characters to each other and to make fun time-hopping stuff happen. One example: Edward's superior officer from before he got shipped out has a daughter that's infatuated with him, in the 1960s. In the 1980s, that same woman is a close co-worker of Sorens, and they treat each other as confidants. I anticipate some really interesting stuff happening with this character.

I guess thats enough for now. I'm really pumped - the whole Anchor/R-map thing really pulled the game together for me, conceptually. Essentially, we're going to pursue each characters individual story, involving their anchors and such, and see how they inter-relate. We also have a strong thematic crossover with the whole awakening-to-power thing.

Questions and comments are more than welcome.

[Bill Cook]

Congratulations on garnering some playtest. When its your baby, that can be like receiving a glass of water in the desert.

Using group chargen, R-maps and in-play goals is the new thing. I take a similiar approach in a design project of my own, and after Sorcerer, I use this approach to start each campaign, regardless of system. Our TROS Seneschal uses an R-map, also; he just does it in private.

It sounds like time travel is the technicality that distinguishes your game.