Lords of Olympus and Time Machines

[Evermasterx]

I'm currently playing a campaign with 3 players. They started in modern Earth, 1938, as gifted people ignoring their true origins.

Now they have reached a steampunk world where, aboard a zeppelin, they met Apollo in disguises who tells them about their nature and that one of the rules Zeus imposed to the Gods was that no time machine may be built, nowhere, for no reason.

Such a device could alter the past even for the Gods?

On the same zeppelin there are a scientist specialized on time travel AND a time machine almost ready in the hold. So their mission is easy to see, but maybe others do not agree... like Cronos?

What do you think about it?

[jibbajibba]

Time travel is tricky in fiction it's even harder in RPGs.

I am currently running timetravel in my M&M game.
Set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (ish) the party arrive at a Sheild base to prevent a Chituari team headed by the mutant Inferna stealing and unknown device.
After overpowering the Chitauri holding the roof the team faffed about too long and the unknown device was enabled. they hadn't bothered to try and find out what it was so ....

Anyway time changes they are back in New York being sent to try and destroy the Chitauri bridgehead established in New York (owing to the lack of any Avengers).
they do so by hijacking a Chitauri ship and crashing it into Grand Central station which is now a Chitauri base. But the Chitauri are already spreading and Washington is under attack.
They try to chase down Inferna in this new timeline and "remember" that all mutants are now accepted by society after mutants ended the Cuban Missile Crisis and saved President Kennedy as wel as winnign the Vietnam war for the US.
Anyway Inferna is now somethign of a celebrity living in the Bahamas. The party head down there and infiltrate a party of famous celebrities (Pitt, Cluny, etc etc) who are watching the destruction of Washington at some sort of bizarre party. they don;t bother to find out what is going on but infiltrate a secret lab and steal a modified time travel device now much smaller and powered by an Arc Reactor.
turns out that Inferna took the large device back to Howard stark who modified it with increasingly small versions until they reached something the size of a laptop. Before Howard and his family died in a car crach in 1975.

Anyway then time changes again and they find themselves back in New York being yelled out by Nick fury as he briefs them on their mission to resuce the President from the White House under attack from Chitauri (next session on Sunday)

So Fluff aside the trouble with time travel is

i) If you add it to the world it will be used
ii) You need to define some good rules.I used
   a) Para-memory - the party can remember the previous unaltered timeline. I actually make this a DC15 Wis chaeck for them withteh DC increasing as they put more and more steps between them and that time line.Only the party and the bad guys get thsi power (and maybe some high power magic and psyke types)
   b) Conservation of Energy - you can't add or subtract energy from the universe. E=MC^2 means that a person going back in times adds a shit load of energy so you need to sheild that energy somehow or subtract a similar chuck (this is really for my settign might not fit a LoO type deal)
   c) How do the new timelines form? - wave moving forward from the intersect, instant bifucation, multiple universes? Just pick one and stick to it consistently
   d) Cause and effect - you can't go forward in time and find out how you solved something until you solve it
iii) in LoO and other multiverse games doesn't time travel just effect a "shadow" or does it affect the master time line.
iv) Armies of PCs - if you don't have a rule like Conservation of Energy then how do you stop PCs setting up a loop by which multiple versions of themselves from along the timestream hop back to form an army of themselves?

Anyway I love time travel so hope it works out cool

[Evermasterx]

Thank you JibbaJibba for your post.
I know that there are a whole lot of problems with time travel and in fact I don't want it. That's why Zeus strongly forbids it. Some god could use it to change the past, like the titanomachy. So I think that Zeus uses agents and magic to prevent it to happen. He can even erase the world where time travel could work, let alone where a time machine is almost ready!
So the focuses for my PCs are
* obedience to Zeus (or not?) and a way to gain Immortality or World Walking
* moral demurs for killing the mortals linked with the making of the time machine
* a powerful enemy (Cronos?) who could hate them for spoiling his plans, without them even knowing who he is
* maybe use of the time machine ignoring Zeus' orders.
This particular time machine is a vehicle that moves in time instead of space. Everything inside moves with the machine.
If it moves in a time where the machine already exists, the two objects merge in one, so it can move even in space in that case.
Passengers can't leave the vehicle, or they go back to the starting time, unless they hold a special device, looking like a stop-watch: if they lose contact with it,  they go back to the starting time.

[finarvyn]

Evermasterx, I love the concept and would love to hear more about this campaign.

While I agree that time travel can be tricky, so can shadow walking. Seems like the basic ADRP/LoO mechanic is flexible enough to handle any setting so the big stumbling block would be that of plot, and with some care hopefully you can work around that.

Anyway, I love the notion of "modern day" characters who discover their hidden past. Sort of a "Percy Jackson" thing, and a great way to bring characters into a high-powered universe without them having to have all that knowledge beforehand.

[Evermasterx]

Sure, finarvyn,
the 3 players started in London, 1938.

a) Helen Driscoll, a Scotland Yard detective. She has an older brother, Michael, a priest, who doesn't have any power, but spent his life protecting Helen. Their father is unknown and their mother was killed a terrible night many year ago, when someone forced his way in their house, with the intent to destroy the family; someone else intervened, with a furious fight, permitting them to escape. So they moved to two different cities, with new names, trying to hide from those who want them dead.
She is a mistress in EGO and Scrying.

b) Patty Kelvin, is a coloured jazz singer, performing in a famous night club. She dreams of a brilliant career as a singer, like Billie Holiday and the like. Her divine origin comes from a father grandmother. His father is a white piano player and his mother is a coloured nurse.
They always taught her to keep her powers hidden.
She's a mistress in PROWESS and owns an ancient leather armour with a primitive but devastating mace.

c) Lord Winston Nelson-Floyd is a powerfull and rich man, member of the House of the Lords, personal friend of Winston Churchill, owner of a whisky distillery. Her divine origin comes from a father grandmother too.
His father his a businessman at the teshold of retirement.
He despises those who are not noble like him.
He's a master in MIGHT and Glamour.

They didn't know each other at the beginning of the game.

Someone the started an intrigue to push them toward their fate.

A letter was sent to each of them. Together they will form: "ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ", Know Thyself.

A murder in the night club where Patty was singing and Winston was  drinking, then Scotland Yard send Helen to interrogate evaryone, even a  Lord...

A rare and precious handwritten book, the "Codex Viae Deorum", is discovered and exhibited in the British Museum: it contains the ritual to open a Promethean Road.

A powerful organization, the "Rosacroce", is in search of the book, but soon discovers that there are 3 Olympians alive: they must be send away from the Earth, or  the Christian Faith could be in danger.

So a Rosicrucian powerful agent, Abbot Baldassare Busoni, from Rome, kidnaps Patty's mother and succeds in sending the 3 Olympians away, letting them perform the ritual in the book. The player really hated Busoni!

The book contains the keys to other worlds, but must be decodified, and the key is only available in the next world...

So they reach a frozen sci-fi world, Terminal Frost IX, where miners are in danger in their station, because digging have found an alien robot who have killed many of them.

Our heroes destroy the powerful robot who brings on its shoulders the key to the next world, a steampunk world, where the campaign actually is going on.

Hope it is not boring!

[finarvyn]

Not boring at all, at least to me.

Coming up with a decent mega-plotline like this is hard for me sometimes. I tend to focus on the "here and now" instead of looking more globally. While I know that a good campaign ought to have various factions, each with their own plans and schemes, I tend to ignore this part and "wing it" too much.

I have some players who would enjoy a campaign like this and I may steal some of your ideas.

[Evermasterx]

You're welcome!
My inspiration came from Nephilim, where factions try to capture/destroy the Nephilims and from the TV serial "Zero Hour".

You can add also factions trying to help the heroes, some focused on the blood of Zeus, other on Poseidon's children and so on. And you can use them as a help in the darkest hour.
The PC have great powers: feeling that are forces unknown, powerful and possibly against them is a good coolin' for their hubrys.

[finarvyn]

My inspiration came from Nephilim, where factions try to capture/destroy the Nephilims and from the TV serial "Zero Hour".

Wow. I actually know nothing about either one of these.

Nephilim sounds familar ... maybe an RPG?

Never heard of Zero Hour.

[Evermasterx]

Yes, it's Chaosium RPG.

[RPGPundit]

I believe Nephilim was originally a French RPG?

[RPGPundit]

Anyways, apologies for not getting to this thread sooner; I've been quite busy lately with a number of things and have cut down a bit on my posting here.

In any case, I would handle Time Travel in a few different ways:

1) Time travel could be entirely impossible.  Not my favorite option, because it's boring.

2) Time Travel is possible, but not in places of absolute reality; only in the lesser worlds and realms; and then only in places where the technology or magic rules could theoretically allow it, and even then it doesn't actually work as time-travel. What it does is shift the time-traveler to an alternate world, a neighbouring world, that is extremely similar to the original but at a different point in its history.
SO someone using time travel in one of the infinite earths, set in 1887, who uses a steampunk-tardis to try to travel to the year 2434 would actually shift into a nearby earth set in the year 2434.
This means 'time travel' is actually non-functioning as real time travel (you can change things in the new world you've gone to but your own world will remain unchanged); but it would in fact work as a method of world-travel.  This would also explain the real reason why Zeus would be against it (like the Promethean road; it would break his monopoly).

3) Time travel is possible, and real. Again, I'd make it work only in the lesser worlds, not Olympus, Hades or Atlantis; and it would only work in those worlds where the laws allowed it. However, the actual way it would work is by turning all the time in that world backward or forward.  The rest of the multiverse would stay the same.
For example, you're in an Earth set in 1985, and use a time-travelling delorean to go to the year 1958.  What REALLY happens is that you stay exactly the same inside the delorean while the rest of that entire world changes around you, resetting 'backward' to 1958.  For someone in a neighbouring world, nothing would change.

If you decided to go with the idea that Time Travel is real and actually moves back or forward in time, it would mean you would be able to go backward or forward in the entire Multiverse, and that would be potentially universe-shattering.

It might be an exciting choice, but I don't know if you'd want to go that way, because it could break your entire campaign pretty quickly.

[Evermasterx]

I believe Nephilim was originally a French RPG?

Correct.

[Evermasterx]

If you decided to go with the idea that Time Travel is real and actually  moves back or forward in time, it would mean you would be able to go  backward or forward in the entire Multiverse, and that would be  potentially universe-shattering.

It might be an exciting choice, but I don't know if you'd want to go  that way, because it could break your entire campaign pretty quickly.

Your suggestions are interesting. I understand the risks of REAL time travel. But what can limit the danger is:
1) worlds where time travel could work are very, very, very few.
2) Zeus have already erased those discovered in the past.
3) Zeus have a special team of agents dedicated to discover worlds where time travel is possible. In fact, in my case, on the same dirigible where the PCs are, there is Apollo, instructing them about Zeus' will regarding time machines. In fact the PCs are already talking about killing every person linked to the costruction (they see things no more from a human perspective...). They could be invited to join the team... The Cronoclastics?
4) Other forces can try and oppose Zeus' will, and it's good opportunity for the sake of the game. In my case, Prometheus is at work to prevent the time machine to be destroyed. It can be a source of conflict and long lasting hatred.