Designing a Time Travel Game

Among my various geekdoms is a passion for tabletop gaming. About nine months ago several of my friends roped me into (re)starting a campaign that had ended abruptly due to a work schedule change on my part. The game, set in a modified Eberron Campaign Setting, featured a party of five player characters that were attempting to thwart the efforts of a primary antagonist and his two lackeys.

The truly frustrating thing for me (and my players) was that the schedule change came at a very bad time in the story: right before the final push. All the pieces were in place for a final confrontation with the antagonists in the Ash Cauldrons of Xen'drik. The party had just survived an encounter with one of the two lackeys aboard their airship while en route to Stormreach and were getting set to go into the jungle.

The whole thing was very unfinished. Over a year passed, but the way that the campaign left had been on my mind from time to time and when three of my friends approached me and asked me to restart my game, I sat down to come up with a scenario that would allow them to finish their fight with the antagonist while having them start as new characters.

One of the earliest ideas that I had was the possibility that the old party had simply vanished, as if plucked out of time and space. The events that they would have completed (i.e. killing the antagonist) would never have happened. This became the founding idea for my campaign Eberron: Days of Ruin which is set two years after the events of the previous campaign.

Anyone who has attempted to run a game that involved both time travel and a sense of realism has run into several challenges. I wanted to give the players the ability to traverse back in time and correct events in the past that would lead to the antagonist's defeat in the present. I also wanted to allow the players to see what would have become of their previous characters had the campaign not ended.

The first of the questions that I needed to answer from a storyline perspective was, "Why did the party vanish in the first place?"

The answer to that one came in the form of a new antagonist which will take the role as the staring villain in the next campaign. His name is Malice, he has a connection to the current party and for whatever reason he seems intent on altering the events of the timeline to attain a specific goal.

This also solved a serious challenge that I had to overcome in that I didn't want the players to simply go back in time and kill the parents of the current villain or [insert other paradox here]. That would have created a serious headache for me, but if Malice needed the current villain to remain alive for his purposes then Malice would serve as my watch dog to prevent the party from taking the cheap route. If the party hops somewhere in the past with the intent of skewing history off its rails (horribly in their favor) Malice would show up and make them regret the attempt.

The second question that I needed to answer was pretty clear cut: What exactly was the current villain doing that Malice needed him around for? This was not an easy question to answer. It would both be the event that the players were trying to stop and the reason that history had been altered in the first place. As I tried to come up with the answer to this, I fell back to two story telling tenets that I dearly love:

1. Everything happens for a reason.
2. "All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again." as made popular by Battlestar Galactica.

I looked at the briefe history of Eberron as presented in the books and found a recurring theme. Every time a race rose to considerable power, they were wiped out. First the dragons, then the demons, followed by the giants and now here we are in the current age. Since the book doesn't get into the specifics of why each race was destroyed, it left me with a lot of room to insert my own details as to the how and why.

So why were the dragons destroyed? Well, the book states that Khyber and Syberis made war between themselves and that Eberron ultimately sealed Khyber away and reshaped the world. This was over ten million years ago. I forget exactly why the demons were wiped out, but the giants rose to power and eventually severed Dal Quor, the plane of dreams from the rest of the world to prevent invasion from the Quori. The dragons saw their level of power and then wiped them out.

Dragons were the repeating theme throughout history. So with that in mind, I set Malice as a follower of Chronepsis. Bahamut is the son of Syberis and Tiamat is the daughter of Khyber so that really left only one choice for Chronepsis: the son of Eberron. But that wasn't enough for me. I have never believed in true neutrality as the books imply Chronepsis to be. In my world, I wanted the gods to be flawed as well. So I changed Chronepsis to better fit in.

In my world, Chronepsis is the first living construct, created by Eberron. The cause of the first great war was Chronepsis himself. He sought the death of his peers, Tiamat and Bahamut and was partially successful but as the world died around them, the lesser dragons bound the soul of Tiamat into an obsidian altar and the sould of Bahamut into a gleaming sword. With both gods severely weakened, my piece was added to the creation legend.

Malice is helping the villain resurrect the soul of Tiamat for the purposes of the villain's ascendancy. That was cast as the event that the players need to stop. I know why Malice is doing this, but since my players don't know yet I can't go into that topic now. With that in mind, I sat down and began to develope not one, but four seperate time lines with the differences clearly marked and the events that could cause the party to jump from one timeline to another.

...but what of Bahamut? Surely Bahamut wouldn't just sit idly by while his arch enemy was resurrected. Enter Bane: Malice's rival and the wielder of the Sword of Bahamut. He is an NPC that would serve as a guide for the party, giving them hints as to where they could go next. In essence, he was the GM personified. To keep Bane from out-shining the party, I only pull him out at times when I want to reveal story elements to the party. I have yet to put him in actual combat and it will be unlikely that I do so. The party members are the heroes, not an overpowered NPC.

This formula has, for the most part, worked really well. Whenever I need to add something to the game to make the campaign more interesting, I try to adhere to the two tenets mentioned above. I remain consistent in my decisions and while the campaign is at times very difficult for the players, I continue to receive positive feedback from most of my players who have just entered into the fifth chapter of the story.