Campaign Toybox
The Story: So it turns out time travel is possible, but only in a very limited way. Through manipulating the spin of electrons you can send energy back through time, but not matter – not without the power of a few suns, anyway. But light’s a start. Especially if you create a three-dimensional hologram and project that back in time. And luckily, it’s two way, so it someone were to say, be controlling that hologram through a virtual reality suite, they’d feel like they were in the time period, and to the people of the past, look like a real person moving around. The catch is they can’t touch anything. Although they can change how they appear, since they’re just a hologram. And they can walk through walls, and send waves of static electricity, know personal information about people nobody could know ... in short, kind of act like ghosts.
It might just be, in fact, that most of the documented sightings of ghosts were people from the future, projecting images of themselves back. The historical knowledge isn’t perfect, and neither is the technology, which is why ghosts are often seen wearing inappropriate clothing. Sound travels slowly, since it’s coming by radio, making ghosts appear silent and talk funny. And yes, they often look like your relatives, because what better way to get somebody to trust you?
And that’s the key. Because history is fragile and easily disturbed. Somebody has to go back in time and make sure it all happens as it should. Somebody needs to convince Archimedes to take a bath, Caesar to conquer Brittain and Washington to cross the Delaware. Great men often reported seeing spirits before defining moments in their lives. Those spirits were you – or will be. If you’re willing to accept the burden of history, that is, and step into the machine…
PCs and NPCs: Anyone with the tech to do this is probably going to be a super-secret government (or shadow-government) agency, and they’ll be recruiting experts, so your standard PCs will be technogeeks, history experts and jet-setting superspies. There’s a twist though: since the characters can’t touch things in the past, combat and physical skills are useless. Everything depends on social abilities: blending in with the locals, finding out where your target is, getting in to see him and then convincing him of what he needs to do. Historical knowledge is also extremely helpful, but for once you can make your players roleplay and literally throw away all the combat rules. It just can’t come up.
Super-secret government agencies have plenty of NPCs too, from the chief of the operation, to his boss, to nosy military types and the techno-geeks who work the machines. But the real fun NPCs are the historical types. The GM gets to pick his favourite historical heroes and bring them to life, in all their glory and with all their human foibles. Players get to meet their greatest heroes, have reputations confounded and discover the inner humanity of the man behind the legend. It doesn’t get more awesome than that.
Plots and Villains: Ghostly heroes have their drawbacks for a GM trying to plot things. Locks and doors can’t keep them out of anything. They can sneak anywhere because they can become invisible, and they can fly, or at least hover (“Jimmy, can you raise my hologram projection up four feet?”). And no amount of force can hurt them. Players will quickly get cocky and start throwing their weight around (“Wooo! We’re big scary ghosts! Now do what we say!”) rather than being sneaky history infiltrators. There is a threat to stop them doing this: they can’t rewrite history without editing themselves out of existence. You may even want to have a mechanic tracking this: every time they reveal themselves as ghosts in a dramatic way, remove a chip. Run out of chips and history re-writes, erasing them for good.
But that still doesn’t provide villains they can hate and try to vanquish. Individual foes will come from each plot – making sure the Jackal misses De Gaule or that the hawks don’t convince JFK to invade Cuba – and are ubiquitous. Meanwhile, big, arc-spanning foes come from the present or even the future: those who have also mastered time travel. There’s nothing quite so disconcerting as thinking all you have to do is convince FDR to sign the loan-lease act and then realising that someone else invisible is whispering in his OTHER ear. If they come from the future, they might have better technology too, and secret knowledge. They may know that the big boss of the agency is evil or will become evil, hence consider the PCs enemies. They may even BE the PCs future selves, having changed allegiance once they discovered the “truth”…nothing allows for mind-messing quite like espionage or time travel – combining the two is like having all your Christmases come at once, and Santa’s bringing plot.
Sources: Let’s take as read all the episodes of Star Trek where they go back in time and move straight on to Quantum Leap, which features both time travel and invisible holograms. Then there’s Time Trax, a too-oft-forgotten show about catching criminals from the future in our time, which also had a hologram personality. Still in TV Land we have Sliders, which wasn’t about repairing time but did have a lot of fun interacting with various histories. Someone who was repairing history was Mr Peabody from Rocky and Bulwinkle, who used his Wayback Machine to make sure historic events happened as they should. Repairing history of a personal kind was the central feature of the Back to the Future trilogy, and its third instalment in particular offers some useful lessons on blending into the past. For something that doesn’t involve time travel but does have an awesome secret agency using sf tech to handle special situations, there’s Joss Whedon’s brand new show The Dollhouse. Joss has already produced one of the most gameable settings in history in Buffy, so any GM should be watching this new show and taking notes.
RPGs: We don’t have a Dollhouse RPG yet but the Buffy or Angel RPGs will do this quite well, especially if you add some of the historical and future tech options in The Slayer’s Handbook. GURPS Time Travel is a fantastic source on all elements of time travel, and the GURPS history books will serve you very well for whatever period you choose. Any generic system which covers multiple time-frames – GURPS, Basic Roleplaying, D20, D6, Savage Worlds – will also be your buddy. Esoterrorists has nothing to do with time travel but it has an extreme focus on non-physical skills, particularly investigative ones, and its idea of dropping agents in and out with total cover identities fits well with dropping in and out of history. As a fun experiment, you could change systems for each new historical period, emphasising to the players their strange new world, and allowing you to waltz through everything from Og to Fvlminata to Ars Magica to Godlike to etc etc etc
