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Old 01-25-2020, 01:30 PM   #2
PTTG
 
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Default Re: Cross-time Adventure Seeds

The Punxsutawney Phenomenon:

A trace-mana worldline largely resembling an echo of 1962 (or some other year with no particular catastrophe going on). This worldline appeared, at first, to be totally ordinary, with no preexisting crosstime activity whatsoever, and some minor research opportunities. Alternatively, this crosstime dimension has some subtle Centrum experiment that will soon go wrong. For whatever reason, the PCs are sent in with fairly minor expectations.

However, when the player party arrives, they set off what we might term a "supercritical phase change" -- though they do not notice this at first. Though the world seems totally normal, the timeline "decrystalizes" and reforms in an earlier state: specifically, the moment the heroes arrived. This results in a closed loop of time where the party arrives, performs their mission, and discovers too late that their attempts to leave or defeat the Centrum party or what have you resets the timestream.

However, this recrystalization allows for subtle stochastic artifacts to remain. This is not enough to allow someone to remember the previous iterations, but it does mean that there are subtle changes from iteration to iteration. Clouds differ, coin flips might go one way or the other, and so on.

What this means is that while this is a slow trap and the PCs usually do not know they are in it, they do not perform the mission the same way each time.

This would be extremely boring in most cases, since escaping requires noticing the time loop almost immediately, figuring out a plan to stop Centrum/the time wedgie, and then putting it into practice while dealing with unexpected interference.

But, this is a tabletop roleplaying game, and so the GM openly fudges things as so: This loop is the last loop. No matter what the players do, they are Destined to succeed... though there are two costs:

First, whatever happens in this iteration doesn't get reset. PCs get injured or killed permanently, since this iteration is Destined to be the last one.

Second, the more unlikely success is, the more previous attempts are assumed to have happened. If the PC that's bad at driving had to drive one-handed through a blizzard during a gunfight, and that's the only way the plan would have worked, that player would have to roll a 4 or something to succeed. That means that if, at the table, the player did indeed roll a 4, the GM assumes that there were hundreds previous iterations where the PCs did not succeed.

The PCs, once they figure out the problem and that they can fix it, should also know that long odds like that will compound -- a PC with an appropriate skill can tell them that, or a decrypted message found next to their conveyor on arrival if that's impossible. (In that case, Homeline figured it out and sent them a message that could help them, but wouldn't aid the Centrum team.)

When it's all said and done, the PCs return to Homeline... but the time loops were entirely local. If they had a very smart crosstime physicist with them and had a good plan for pulling the MacGuffin out of the Centrum Time Blender with time to spare, then maybe it only took four or five iterations. The PCs show up at headquarters a week late, but able to explain the situation.

If, on the other hand, it required a lot of GM intervention to make sure that Serendipity-type events occurred to push the players to victory at only the very last second... or if the players only realized what was happening right before, and just stumbled on it and buffooned their way to victory... then it might have taken hundreds or even thousands of iterations for circumstances to be just right. In which case, they might have been gone for months or years!

Ways to soften this situation:
1: "fixing" the loop allows it to restart one more time, resurrecting any PCs (or foes) who died, but now allowing it to play out "for keeps," with the PCs already having lived through it once.
2: The "recrystalization" process was semi-instantaneous. When the PCs succeed, there's no or little actual time loss.
3: The stochastic artifacts now include outtimer's memories. Maybe this changed due to Homeline or Centrum targeting the worldine with their projectors somehow, so even though hundreds of iterations have gone through, you only just now remember the last two or three. In other words, if the players screw up so bad that there's no way to salvage it, they get another try.

This is designed to be quite vague. The phenomena that sets off the decrystalization can be natural or artifical; Centrumite, Homeline, Cabalist, or even Swagmani. It's worth considering that the loop may have been continuing for some time -- this could be a Centrum experiment from the early days that was considered lost, in which case rescuing the Centrumites from their predicament might give some useful intel.

Particular events, such as the Cherenobyl meltdown or Tunguska impact, might provide a useful time limit and background.

Finally, the GM really needs to remain in control of this. They can use this situation to send PCs into the future of their campaign if they want to, or just have them skip out on a week or a month. Don't feel too compelled to get actuarial over if a particular action would take months or years of re-tries to get completely perfect. After all, heroes are prone to beating the odds anyway.

Last edited by PTTG; 01-25-2020 at 01:35 PM.
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