THE TOP 5 TIME TRAVEL RPGS Charles counts down the top RPGs to facilitate your time travel narratives will be returning to us in 2014...
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ricky proposition, this list. I have been considering what to include in it and it isn’t as easy as you might think. While there aren’t that many time travel RPGs overall, there are far more than you would expect. There are also quite a few RPGs with time travel bits in them that in themselves aren’t mainly about time travel. So a bit of pruning is needed. On top of that, I need to be quite strict in my definition of time travel RPGs. If your RPG deals with the paradoxes and minutiae and actual conundrums around the sheer madness that is time travel rather than just being a deus ex machina for visiting alternate worlds and bits of interesting history, then you are likely to be higher up the list as far as I am concerned. Of course, I DO want the alternate history and so on too but it can’t just be a saunter around eating cake from various plates in history. Anyway, let’s get this show on the road.
5. Timestream
So I start off this little list with the game that promises us cinematic time travel without all the headache inducing paranoia of having possibly erased Plato due to attending an Athenian bathing house while feeling slightly sick. Timestream deals with all
manner of bouncing through time like the proverbial Time Bandits but its strengths lie with its use of Emergent Story, wherein the players have connections that they can weave together to pull the narrative of the game in certain ways and indeed control the flow of time itself even beyond merely travelling through it. If you are going to pick up Timestream then this is the way I’d recommend you play it, as the other options seem more intent on fantasy and wish fulfilment than actual genuine gaming.
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Charles Dunne Charles Dunne has been frequently described as insane, immortal, invincible and sleepless. He is none of these things, preferring as he does a nice snooze of an evening with a copy of The Strand magazine and a slipper of good tobacco. The other slipper he wears as an odd type of shoulder ornament.
...little to no presence or weight on the rubber sheet of history...”
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4. Time and Temp
Pretty much does exactly what it says in the title. Brown Chronometric Engineering have dragged your temping ass from Marigold Staffing and flung you into the temporal void, there to stop the gibbering chaos of paradox unravelling everything and destroying the universe as we know it. Seems to work as the universe is still here. A pretty little premise. Temps, while surely delightful people with nice habits and lovely teeth, have little to no presence or weight on the rubber sheet of history and can therefore act with some degree of impunity when righting wrongs and so on. Paradoxes are dealt with and the matrix (not that one) of synchronicity allows you to really bend reality around yourself. A great pick up and play game that is also capable of greater depth and longevity.
engineered Lucifer (not that one) the players have to deal with the fallout from the destruction of Lucifer’s (and their own) makers; the Designers. Oh the wonders of uplifting evolutionary deification! Giving the lie to my earlier statement about paradoxes, this game doesn’t do them. Everything gets spun off to a parallel and you have to remember which one is “your” one and even how to get to it. This game promises a lot of fun and delivers when you put in the ground work. It will need either the EABA or CORPS generic rules in addition to the Timelords core book.
is no bad thing, I feel, but is lighter on the mechanics of time travel than I would like. Nevertheless AITAS has a quality that really gets across the feel and tone of the TV series, and that is a concentration on using one’s intelligence to solve problems rather than relying on combat. Too few games do this and it is to be commended. Go climb into your TARDIS now and have fun.
1. Continuum
2. Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space
3. Timelords (EABA or CORPS)
Right, I’ll get this out of the way first. This entire game is based around being insanely paranoid that an already dead super villain (or their possibly dead murderer) and their cohorts (or their murderer’s cohorts) will murder you and/ or destroy reality. Because they can. Descendants of a genetically
I really wanted this game to be higher on the list. I have been a fan of Doctor Who for quite a long time now and can annoy people yards away with random trivia about the show. However, we clock in at number two here because while the good Doctor’s game deals with timey-wimey paradoxes and the entire rewriting of everything via the Last Great Time War, it seems to concentrate more on the movable feast that is visiting historical eras and thwarting the machinations of other time travellers and then heading home in time for tea. This THE GAZEBO 12 days of Christmas
If anyone knows anything about time travel RPGs then they already knew that this would be number one. Continuum is where it is at when it comes to actually having a time travel RPG. It addresses the concept that if time travel exists then there will be societies of such people (not that one, Doctor Who fans). Having come into existence, they will almost immediately span all history, though remain hidden to most of it. We’re including future history too, despite the incongruity of that term. Continuum’s time travellers learn to travel as an innate skill rather than relying upon machinery or technology, and as such each one has far more freedom and power than you would expect. Yes, we’re heading into the “with great power comes great stupidity and/
or greed” motif and tied into that motif is a fundamental building block of Continuum: perception of time when you’re a time traveller. The players, being the protagonists, are recruited into a society that seeks to protect and preserve the one true timeline. That’s a big job. Their opposites quite literally don’t see it that way. To them there is no one true timeline but a series of parallels that are created when different choices are made. Which one is right? Well, that is ultimately up to you as the GM, but the starting position always lies with the protagonists. Perception is about information. Information is power and power is responsibility and sometimes it is better to not know something than to know it. This is a game that needs playing. It is hard to find copies of it these days but if you CAN find one then play it and when it clicks you get that big grin of having solved the problem. Wonderful game.
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With great power comes great stupidity and/or greed”
Bubbling under:
GURPS Time Travel from GURPS 3rd Edition, sadly this has now morphed into a part of GURPS Infinite Earths and really isn’t what it used to be but if you can find the old edition it is worth a look. Chronosaurus, a German RPG from several years ago involving sentient time travelling dinosaurs. I know, mad.
CREDITS EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Anita Murray & Noirin Curran DESIGN & LAYOUT
Wayne O Connor PROOF-READERS
Anita Murray & Rachel Scanlon
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