Roleplayer #27, February, 1992
How To Research, And When To Stop
by Paul Paquet
Putting together a solid, long-term time travel campaign takes a good
deal more care and ingenuity than most other roleplaying campaigns. Game-masters
need to continually create new and exciting environments for their players,
while players must define personae for characters who change identities
at a drop of a hat. And without familiar people and places, campaigns risk
becoming sterile and lifeless, a problem aggravated by the unavailability
of some of the more interesting disadvantages.
But fear not. With a little tinkering, even the wildest time travel campaigns
can come alive. There are just three simple rules. Do a little research,
give the PCs lots of recurring NPCs, and let them loose.
Research
As anyone who has labored through a term paper can tell you, research can
be dull. But creating an adventure is supposed to be a lot more fun than
writing a term paper -- and it will be, if you remember that the GM is supposed
to be an entertainer first. Do the best you can, but don't lose sleep if
you can't fill in every detail. Nobody expects you to know everything about
the time frame you have picked . . . and when in doubt, make it interesting!
Besides, so much of what we know as history is either unknown, untrue or
uncorroborated, your "error" may have been the historical truth
after all! And if you do let slip a minor anachronism, don't expect the
Historical Police to come knocking.
With that load off your mind, you can begin designing adventures. Plan for
periods that are well-documented and interesting, and therefore easy to
research. Colonial America would qualify. Fifth-century Poland would not.
Once you have picked a time-frame, see if there is a GURPS
supplement. If there is, start by reading it!
The next step is to visit your local library, find a book that gives a good
overview, and try to get the big picture. Even a good encyclopedia article
can get you started. Before you work out an adventure, you'll need to be
straight on the surrounding timeline. Minor anachronisms are one thing,
but having Julius Caesar throw Christians to the lions would be embarrassing.
(Julius died several decades before Christ was born).
Once you have a basic outline, flesh it out with the sights, sounds and
smells the players would encounter. Remember that you don't want to load
your game down with lots of unnecessary detail. Telling players what it's
like to fly high in a rickety World War I fighter plane will be far more
interesting than a discourse on early German industrial techniques.
Ask the reference librarian for general books about your topic, preferably
ones about daily life at the time. Avoid weighty academic tomes. Illustrated
books are best for two reasons; they are generally easier to read, and you
can use the maps, photos and pictures as visual aids for the players. This
is especially valuable for costumes, terrain and architecture.
Get about a half-dozen books and skim them for more detail. Keep an eye
out for information about law enforcement, medicine, available weapons,
the political status of nearby countries and general technological development,
particularly in transportation and communication. This is the kind of information
that players tend to ask about.
Inevitably, though, unless you become a genuine expert in the period, the
players will ask questions about the background that you may not be able
to answer. What's a poor GM to do?
Why, cheat, of course. After all, if the players don't know, and you don't
know, what difference does it make if you roll randomly to find out whether
they had local anesthesia in Victorian England? And if the players' lives
depend on the answer, does it hurt to make assumptions in their favor?
Of course, if you're near the end of the evening's session, you can break,
research the question, and get the right answer . . . or ask one of the
players to do it. It all depends on the amount of detail you and your players
want in the campaign.
NPCs
In real life, familiarity may breed contempt, but in roleplaying it creates
context, and that makes for good gaming. Over time in most campaigns, the
GM can weave a rich web of intrigues, enmities and alliances that can be
plucked whenever the action is slowing down, or whenever new ideas are needed
to juice things along. But time travelers never get to build up the kind
of relationships with NPCs that breathe warmth and reality into a campaign.
Another epoch, another batch of faceless NPCs. Yawn.
But take heed. It doesn't have to be that way.
One way to provide more NPCs is to have longer, mini-campaigns in different
periods, or to keep coming back to favorite periods over and over again.
Sure, you may have kept Custer from winning at Little Big Horn, but that
same year Wild Bill Hickok was killed in Deadwood, just across state lines.
And over in Philadelphia, Alexander Graham Bell was showing off his new
"telephone."
Not only does this allow favorite NPCs to interact more often with players,
but it greatly reduces the amount of time GMs have to spend researching
new periods. Find out what the players like and give them more of it! There's
no point bouncing around in the ancient world if all the players prefer
20th-century adventures.
Another good idea is to let the PCs spend more time in their "native"
periods. This allows them to interact with family, friends, and enemies.
They can even have regular, full-time jobs completely separate from their
secret time-traveling lives. With a little cleverness, you can mix adventures
in the base period with time travel adventures. For example, the players
hear of a flood of rhino horns coming from India, even though the Indian
rhinoceros is near extinction. They travel to India, and discover that Stopwatch
has set itself up during the Raj, and is poaching there on a wide scale.
But even a footloose campaign can have plenty of continuity. If the PCs
aren't the only time travelers, they'll run into many of the same people
over and over again. For example, nothing spices up a campaign like an evil
master-mind who works through legions of subordinates. Every plot traces
back to this nefarious individual, who only seems to show up in person when
his foes are captured and helpless. And when the PCs turn the tables, just
when they have their hands around his throat -- blam! -- he clocks out.
Recurring characters don't all have to be villains, of course. What would
the players do with a renegade time traveler on a crusade to exorcise history
of evil? What would they do, for example, with an Israeli trying to kill
Hitler?
And there are all sorts of people who might time travel for purely personal
reasons. Merchants, thieves and collectors might be moving through time
looking for rare finds. In one campaign I was in, I played a time-traveling
tourist who liked getting himself photographed with historical figures.
Dependents and Enemies are another source of continuity. A PC might be in
love with another agent, or may have incurred the special wrath of one of
the opposition. Let your imagination run wild. Suppose a character's daughter
had been kidnapped, and was being hustled from era to era, just one step
ahead of the rescuers.
Then there are the amateurs. Set up situations where people accidentally
travel through time. Did the players really enjoy that bumbling prison guard
they escaped from in Tudor England? Well, imagine their surprise when he
shows up again in Victorian London, full of wonder at his newfound surroundings.
And, it should be added, back in the same line of work.
One very interesting, very weird, alternative is to have your characters
interact with immortals, or to have multiple adventures within a single
person's lifetime. If the characters keep going back in time, they can meet
the same people again and again, for the first time each time. But be warned:
this is a situation that breeds paradoxes.
Let 'Em Loose
Let's be honest. What's the fun about visiting 19th-century Germany if you
can't give Beethoven a few pointers about that pesky Ninth Symphony he's
trying to write? Sure, it creates anachronisms. Sure, it creates paradoxes.
But it's soooo much fun.
Time travel campaigns really excel when players feel as though they are
fully part of the history around them. They have tea with Genghis Khan and
beat Napoleon at chess. They attend the fanciest balls at Versailles and
dance the night away at the most exclusive clubs in modern Manhattan. Let
them rise to the occasion. It would be silly to find yourself at Sherwood
Forest and not get a chance to shoot an arrow at the Sheriff. If you have
a Wild West adventure, end it with a shootout.
One immediate difficulty with this approach, and with time travel in general,
is that characters must be able to function with a variety of skills at
a variety of tech levels. The skills needed to survive in cyberpunk Los
Angeles are decidedly different from the ones needed in ancient Sparta.
As a result, players are tempted to pick a disparate range of skills, rather
than a set that matches character conception.
There are two ways around this. First, you can use a system of time travel
where PCs can "borrow" skills. Examples of this include psionic
time travel, and campaigns where players have access to cyberpunk implant
chips.
Another possibility would be drastically increasing the number of points
allowed for beginning. This has the draw-back of requiring an artificial
limit on the number of points that can be put into characteristics, but
if you like cinematic campaigns, this solution would be ideal.
In fact, if you really want to let your players loose, a cinematic campaign
may be your best bet. After all, paradoxes are easier to work around if
everybody's tongues are planted firmly in their cheeks. Cinematic time travel
campaigns, especially ones that allow martial arts, psionics or cyberwear,
are buckets of fun.
And that's the whole point!
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