[Campaign] Time Agents of the 51st Century

[Kit]

I'm going to be starting a DW:AiTaS game to replace my concluding 4 year BUFFY game. One idea my players have mentioned is a Time Agent game. Has anyone here ran one of these yet? Anyone have ideas/suggestions on running one?

[olegrand]

Jul 27, 2010 8:16:48 GMT Kit said:

I'm going to be starting a DW:AiTaS game to replace my concluding 4 year BUFFY game. One idea my players have mentioned is a Time Agent game. Has anyone here ran one of these yet? Anyone have ideas/suggestions on running one?

You should read the whole TIME PATROL cycle by Poul Anderson; I think it can reasonably be considered as the original source of the Time Agent concept (plus it has many interesting adventure ideas for such characters). The Time Patrol stories were developed over 40 years or so (hey, it's a bit like DW !); the first stories were written in the 1950s and have a charmingly "retro" spirit to them but the final ones (which were written in the 90s) are in a darker vein, with more complex moral and psychological elements. From a GMing perspective, this evolution is especially interesting because it shows how a Time Agent campaign could evolve from pretty classic & heroic mission-type adventures to scenarios where the characters finally admit that they are manipulated by so-called higher powers who treat them like playing pieces on a cosmic chessboard and whose ethics and goals may not be as clear as they seemed to be when you first enlisted...

I think this general orientation could be especially relevant in the case of DW's Time Agency, since the little we know about them seem to imply the following facts and interesting questions.

1) The Agency did not last very long. It was apparently disbanded and its agents "called back" - or were they liquidated ? Why ? What higher powers led to its creation and what events caused its demise ?

2) The Agency apparently had the ability (and the habits ?) to wipe entire episodes of their own agents' memories. This adds a "conspiracy / paranoia" element to the picture but could also give us a hint as to the methods used by the Agency to prepare its agents for missions which require some immersion or infiltration in a given time period - I'd say a lot of psychoconditioning and hypno-tuition (as in the Time Patrol), so that Agents can speak like natives of a given time period and learn all that they should know without having to follow months of "cultural training"; cyberpunk-like brainchips may also be a possibility (this is, after all, the 51st century).

[Craig Oxbrow]

Time Agents' remit mostly covers human history, so they have a good excuse for lots of Earth-based episodes, but can extend beyond this as events in another part of space threaten humanity. Anyway, there are plenty of time-travelling threats in the Whoniverse targeting Earth, from classic monsters trying to destroy it before humanity spreads to the stars to criminals (and indeed rogue agents) scamming buyers with out-of-time terchnology and anachronistic artefacts.

Pointing to another company's game material, GURPS Time Travel devotes a lot of space to campaign ideas about policing time travel. The most developed group is concerned with stopping a rival agency from a nightmarish parallel Earth from changing history so that their world becomes real. Another, smaller setting has military personnel from throughout history shanghaied at the point of death to fight across time for unknown purposes.

The former idea could be used pretty directly - maybe the Time Agency was shut down because of interference by a parallel time - while the latter points to the format including PCs from other eras pressed into service by the Agency or dragged along for the ride.

Of course, the only Time Agents we've ever seen on-screen have been rogues, so the Agency might just have shut down operations to rethink their recruitment policy... ;D This would actually give you an excuse to alter the format a bit, so that Vortex Manipulators can be recalled to home base, and Agents work with partners, to discourage PC Agents going totally rogue.

I believe Pacesetter's Timemaster RPG was about time police as well, protecting history from alien invaders who want to unmake humanity. Unfortunately it hasn't been picked up by another company, unlike several of their other games, or its adventures could possibly be useful.

Someone or something at Agency HQ being able to detect time distortions (Feel The Turn Of The Universe) would be essential, although the PCs need not necessarily be the ones. They can be fired into history with somewhat sketchy information and unreliable timey-wimey detectors to replicate the classic step-out-of-the-TARDIS-into-trouble setup of standard Doctor Who or given more to work with (but still not a complete picture) if you want a more mission-oriented game.

And for added moral complexity... what about orders to alter history for humanity's benefit?

Just curious, how did the Buffy game go?

[Craig Oxbrow]

Jul 27, 2010 13:12:11 GMT Craig Oxbrow said:

I believe Pacesetter's Timemaster RPG was about time police as well, protecting history from alien invaders who want to unmake humanity. Unfortunately it hasn't been picked up by another company, unlike several of their other games, or its adventures could possibly be useful.

Correction: Apparently almost the entire run is on DriveThruRPG. One adventure book, "Time Storm" is listed on the company's site as "no longer available". (Naturally it sounds the most interesting. D'oh!)

[themyth]

Watch the 1980s action show Voyagers! for another take on a potential "Time Agent" campaign.

[Kit]

Thanks for the replies. VOYAGERS is high on the list of sources I want to avoid. i'll dust off my old time Patrol books. Plus, Simon Hawke's very cool Time Wars series.

Craig, i'll be running the series ending finale in late August. i guess i'll know how it went then. Short version: the game was set at Miskatonic university. The characters began as college freshmen stumbling into weirdness. I ran it for four years/seasons and the game built up a huge cast of NPCs and tons of complicated relationships and backstory. While that is very cool, the weight of the continuity is pretty heavy sometimes. In game, graduation day is approaching and a final battle with the Arkham witch cult is in the works..

[Craig Oxbrow]

Good luck with the finale!

(I contacted the publisher of Timemaster and he confirmed that they'd sold the rights to "Time Storm" to a third party.)