photo credit: PopCultureGeek.com
One of the tropes I find myself using over and over again in my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns is time travel. I’m sure part of it comes from watching Back to the Future about 5,000 times before I reached the age of 21, but there’s also something inherently interesting about the concept inside and outside of D&D.
Think, for a minute, about some of the time travel stories in literature and pop culture. There’s Dr. Who and the TARDIS, of course; there are movies like 12 Monkeys and the Butterfly Effect that explore time moving backwards and forwards. Even Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure hones in on the idea. It’s no wonder it winds up in our Dungeons & Dragons games.
The trick with using time travel in your D&D game is to do it in such a way that the players can see and appreciate your unique take.
Here are some of the ways you can play around with time in your D&D campaign:
- Run a Groundhog Day-like session where the party has to keep reliving a day, an encounter, or an entire adventure over and over until they get it right.
- Create an entire campaign or campaign arc focussed on fixing multiple temporal problems, ala Dr. Who.
- Send the characters backward in time where they can fiddle with their own pasts, or where they can chaange/witness the world-shaking events of your campaign’s history.
- Send them forward in time to get a glimpse of where their current path might lead.
- Design an episodic campaign, in which you don’t play through the 30 levels, but rather spend a few sessions at interval levels : 1st, 5th, 9th, 11th, etc. This is an especially good choice if yours is only an occasional game, but you want to experience gameplay throughout the tiers.
My current campaign uses that last idea a little bit. We wanted to play a paragon-tier game, but didn’t want to have to start out at 11th level cold, with no history or play experience. So, I ran several “flashback” sessions at key levels throughout heroic tier, and filled in the details in-between. We’re now at 11th level and we’ll continue with normal progression.
So, what about you? What are some ways you have used time travel in your game? Are there ideas you’ve been wanting to try, but haven’t yet?
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I have been DMing a 1-30 game for about two years now, and it is soon wrapping up. It takes place in Eberron, and I made a new Daelkyr, who’s the master of time. As he corrects his imprisonment 3 years ago, the alternate reality created from this starts seeping through (and is a great source for encounters). The PCs are about to find that the event that caused him to fail taking over the plane 3 years ago was the mourning. In order to save the world, they must go back in time I’m order to ensure one of the greatest of calamities occurs by their own hands.