[L.J.Steele]

Cool. Good to hear from the Author.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!

We played it yesterday with 4 characters, they and I are new to Timewatch (which posed some issues).

I ended up changing the briefing officer, which is minor. The PCs had some discussion about how best to disguise Rogo, Quill, and Ochoa for 15th C. Florence. I had realized that the standard issue PaciFists would be useless against anything with Unfeeling, so hinted that they might want to equip with guns, but they decided that would be anachronistic.

I had moved the first scene to Florence, 1478 (eve of the Pazzi conspiracy). Had the PCs interacted more with Florence, there was the potential for them to thwart (or abet) the assassination of Lorenzo di Medici and his brother. (Which would have given Jean someone to duel) The PCs bypassed that by coming in near Pisa, seeing the clock-punk leaning tower, and getting enough information on the road to skip going into Florence. :(

They got hijacked to 1966 as expected. If I ran this again, I'd have a pregenerated list of 6-12 possible items that one could find in the pit, with difficulty numbers for each. Other stuff would be possible, but it would give newbie to the system some immediately available options. Quill got the teleportation function going again before they got shot up, and they went to a desolate beach to gather their wits and clear their gear.

I had a couple of options for the next scene. Florence circa 1101 or Canossa in 1077 (the Investiture controversy). They went to Canossa about a month before the big event, passed themselves off as emissaries from Prester John's African kingdom (along with the wise talking ape, Rogo), made friends, and prepared a forged ComicSans bible that was badly translated and had heritical bits. They ambushed Santo Beneficio, timebat-d him 6 days ahead (taking a round of grey goo damage in the process), and left the forged, heretical tome and the idea of ComicSans as the devil's letters.

Having timebat'd Beneficio, they could dig a pit for his return, questioned him a bit, and shot him up. They found out about Ochoa, went back to 900. As things were flagging, I let them EMP the Breen-bots and not go looking for the source.

Had they gone to stop Breen from going aback, my backstory was that Breen had been fought in 1994, escaped into the creator of Microsoft Bob/Comic San's computer, gotten stuck there when he shut it down, and then re-emerged in 2044, when the computer was rebooted for the 50th anniversary celebration. It then moved to a prepared body and time machine on a Japanese automated whaler (to work in the cover art t-shirt) armed to protect itself from activists. Sadly, we didn't get to that scene.

Question: Scene 6 takes place in the true-history, which is an alternate from their perspective. If it only takes a point of Timecraft per character to get there (and presumably another point to get back), why is the timeline wiping out timetravel such a huge issue. It seems like the PCs could jump back to their home line, get re-enforcements, and then come back after BREEN in the alternate time-line in force.

Overall, the players had fun. Some confusion over the system on all parts. We liked the adventure.