Running a Time Travel Game w/o a Time Lord

[Kit]

I've been asked to put together a DW game without a Time Lord. There would be six player characters. They want to travel in time and space but not have a Time Lord as PC or NPC.

Most likely, this will be six characters from different points in time and space brought together by some circumstance. The standard seems to be damaged TARDIS.

One idea would be that a lost, damaged, and lonely TARDIS has had six people from various points in time and space walk through its doors and dematerialized with them inside. It would be random chance that these six people from their six times and places are on board.

Another idea is that the TARDIS gathered six particular people together for a specific purpose-be its new crew perhaps.

A really crazy idea is that these six people gathered from time and space are, in fact, segments of the Key to Time. Perhaps finding the Key to Time was the mission the Tardis was on when its crew was killed in the Time War.

Thoughts and ideas?

[Craig Oxbrow]

Those could all work. (I use the specific-purpose idea in a playtest game, for one. Every PC brought something the TARDIS needed to carry on the good fight.)

So, I think, could a non-TARDIS method of time travel. It's less directly Whovian, but other kinds of time machines, or non-mechanical methods like the Rift could be used as well.

A Vortex Manipulator might be a rough ride, especially for more than one or two extra passengers, but it's as unreliable and therefore prone to throwing travellers into adventures as the old Type 40.

It could be something specific to the PCs - maybe they're all cast adrift in time, and move through it with little or no control over it, vanishing from one time and place and reappearing in the next. (Dean Stockwell providing exposition wearing a hideous shiny suit optional.)

Finding out why they're travelling in time could be a part of the ongoing story.

[Curufea]

You could also have characters gathered as a result of fallout from one of the Time Wars. The Torchwood Rift is merely one of the rips created by the recent Time War.

[misterharry]

I like the idea of the six characters being segments of the Key to Time. If they work out what they are, then they'll presumably not be too pleased at the prospect of effectively dying when they're converted back into segments. It provides scope for them being pursued by agents of both Black and White Guardians, so recurring villains, etc. I think there's potential for a great campaign there.

[Kit]

Nov 5, 2010 8:16:04 GMT misterharry said:

I like the idea of the six characters being segments of the Key to Time. If they work out what they are, then they'll presumably not be too pleased at the prospect of effectively dying when they're converted back into segments. It provides scope for them being pursued by agents of both Black and White Guardians, so recurring villains, etc. I think there's potential for a great campaign there.

Thanks. I'm really fond of the idea, but putting Its slow going putting it together. Would you combine it with the damaged TARDIS idea? The idea being that the TARDIS is trying to complete a quest for the Key to Time? It does explain why the TARDIS grabbed these six people and why it might try to protect them. Or would you find some other method for the characters to be moving in time and space?

[starkllr]

This is exactly the game I'm currently running.

I went with the damaged TARDIS route. My premise was that the TARDIS escaped from Gallifrey just at the very end of the Time War, damaging itself in the process. It knows the War is over now, and that Gallifrey is gone, but it still wants to carry on what it sees as the mission of the Time Lords - protecting causality, preventing paradoxes, stopping time-active micreants from causing chaos, etc.

The TARDIS crashed on Earth and spent thousands of years repairing itself, and at the same time seeking a crew to help it in its mission. I believe the exact phrase I used was that the players were "unknowing ground troops in the TARDIS' lonely vendetta against the former enemies of Gallifrey."

I let the players come up with any concept they liked, and had them each describe something weird, paranormal, or otherwise out of the ordinary that had happened to their character at some point in their backstory, and then I figured out how the TARDIS could be responsible for that - either as a way of preparing the character for their destiny as future crew, or simply as an indication that the character WAS good crew material.

[misterharry]

Nov 5, 2010 14:30:46 GMT Kit said:

Thanks. I'm really fond of the idea, but putting Its slow going putting it together. Would you combine it with the damaged TARDIS idea? The idea being that the TARDIS is trying to complete a quest for the Key to Time? It does explain why the TARDIS grabbed these six people and why it might try to protect them. Or would you find some other method for the characters to be moving in time and space?

If they're segments of the Key to Time, then it would be easy to come up with an alternative method of them travelling through time - perhaps they just need to all join hands in a circle, but they don't have much control over where they'll end up. But you'd need to think through the implications. Would it require all six of them for this to work? What happens if one of them is separated or killed - how would they manage then? In fact, what happens if one of them dies period? Would they revert to being the segment or be whisked off into the Vortex to take on another disguise, etc?

To avoid some of these complications, it may be best to let them have a damaged TARDIS.