[Adventure Idea] The Hammer Of Time

[Craig Oxbrow]

The Hammer Of Time

The travellers arrive in 21st Century Earth to find two space armadas fighting - future humans and Torlan warriors, who have come back in time to destroy Earth centuries before the war starts.

Inside the command ships, both sides have proud, hawkish commanders, but also people on both sides being killed and maimed in this final, desperate battle. The Torlan warlord wants to destroy humanity, while the future humans will see that this might be a problem and their admiral might be more willing to help. If not, fighters or civilians on either side might be more ready to assist.

Both sides have anti-laser defences they can use in case of boarding and in their short-range space fighters, which could be repurposed to force a ceasefire...


Things To Do: Save the Earth, and if at all possible stop this happening again.

Antagonists: Torlan warriors, and possibly future human soldiers as well.

Action Scenes: Escaping the middle of a space battle. Sabotaging the command ships of two armadas. Stopping the world-cracker drill on modern Earth. Shutting down an interplanetary war.

Visuals: Massive space battles with the travellers right in the middle. Their ship getting knocked around and clipped by passing fighters - taking a space battle and making it funny. Seven-foot alien warriors guarding a hole in the ground in a modern suburban street. Space fighters pursuing each other around modern London.

Problems: There's a lot of ground for the travellers to cover, with two warring factions to deal with and a planet full of innocent bystanders in danger.

Things To Prepare For: Maps of the flagships might be useful, and Torlan stats might be as well.

Continuing the Adventure: Where did the Torlan get the time-travel technology from?


And if you want to see how it plays, here is the actual play transcript.

[ugavine]

Sounds interesting. Personally I would keep the actual space battle as a background event. Keep doing Cut-Scenes to let the players know how the battle is going while they try and find a way to stop it.

How do you plan on resolving the conflict?

A couple of ideas;
1. Find evidence that the Torlans have used stolen technology so that the Shadow Proclomation can intervene.
2. If the Torlans are trying to change the future they could have a Paradox Machine. PCs need to find and destroy that to rubber-band everything back to normal.

[JohnK]

Hullo, Craig,

Apr 10, 2010 0:48:48 GMT Craig Oxbrow said:

The Hammer Of Time

The travellers arrive in 21st Century Earth to find two space armadas fighting - future humans and Torlan warriors, who have come back in time to destroy Earth centuries before the war starts.

<snip>

I rather like this adventure, Craig, but for me, the space battle is something that I would relegate to the background for the scenario, updating the characters at times about what's going on and all that. I think that if the player characters concentrate on the conflict in space itself, it lacks that personal element for the characters, unless one has the player characters attacked on the ship on which the TARDIS materializes.

That said, any chance of seeing game stats for the future human soldiers (and how you envision them) as well as the Torlans?

Anyway, excellent one-shot idea. Have some Karma.

[Craig Oxbrow]

See that line at the bottom with a link in it? That's how it was resolved in play.

Calling in the Shadow Proclamation (who if they ever turn up in my games will be an assembly of lots of species as originally written rather than two women in black and some Judoon as finally appearing on screen) would be one way, as would be the traditional invoking their authority to tell the invaders to go away.

And the battle was foregrounded by two of the one-shot PCs being fighter pilots.

I didn't stat the Torlan, because all they really do is Fight and so the PCs always go before them because the Talk, Run and Act.