Time Travel is probably one of the most difficult plots to put together. I've tried to make one, and I've seen many others try to make them, and usually the threads go quiet.
I would suggest asking yourself - what aspects of Time Travel do you enjoy? What is it about Time Travel that makes you want to run it as a campaign?
One of the key parts of time travel stories is that the plot suddenly ties up sometime in the end of it - like in back to the future with Doc wearing a bulletproof vest all along, for example.
This is almost impossible to implement with dnd as it required that decision to have been made by the story writer before the rest of the story was written - and dnd being a collaborative story writing system, this would mean that everyone in the game would have to decide this, which wouldn't make it much of a reveal!
I'm not saying this to dissuade you, but it is certainly worth considering!
Now, for Time Travel.
There are a few different types of time travel, and you'll need to pick one in order to make this consistent:
1: Back to the Future (only number 1, as the latter ones lose some consistency)
If you go beck in time and change something, it wil lchange the future and you might find yourself ceasing to exist, fading away as the decision you changed takes place before you. However, if you change things which don't affect your timeline (like Biff sort of did when he changed thing in BTTF2, where Marty somehow still became friends with Doc, despite him being locked up... like I said, it loses consistency) then the future changes and you'll go back to see it being different. This is possibly the simplest option - the players encounter a locked door, they go back in time to when someone was there with the key, take the key, and return to the future - and the DM has to work out how this affected time. My reccomendation for this would be to allow the players one use per session - and tell them that when they jump back forwards in time, that's the end of the session, giving you time to make a more impactful assessment of the change.
This would be a lot of work for the DM, and would mean you ned to know the intricacies of how everything in the world has gotten to here, in case they interlink. If you can plan that all out, the players may find odd things changing, and work out how things link together, leading to an amazing reveal. But, that's a lot of work.
Option 2: Time is Fixed
There's a movie where someone tries t ogo back in time to fix something, and finds themselves incapable of doing so - their every effort had already happened, and the thing already happened, so they cannot stop it. This wouldn't be much fun for dnd as you'd basically have to DM caveat everything so that what happened before still happened.
Option 3: Schrodingers Time Machine.
This is one I've coined myself. The concept being that things are only as they are because they have been observed to be so, and therefore if you do not see something happen, you can change it. An example would be that if you saw a carriage careen off a cliff, you could go back in time to ensure a soft landing - moving all the rocks from the ocean below so that the person in the carriage isn't dashed to bits, or even digging a lake for it to land in. You couldn't stop the carriage from falling off the cliff - you saw that happen, after all - but you can change what you didn't see. If you went to the edge of the cliff and saw that the carriage was shattered on the rocks, you can no longer change this.
This premise revolves around the players making a spur of the moment decision to jump back in time. It can't be a carefully planned decision, it can only be then and there - the carriage just fell off the cliff, quickly, let's go back and dig a lake for it to land in! or, "Quickly, the carriage is heading for the cliff, let's go back in time and dig a pit trap ahead of it so it doesn't go off the cliff!". It would require some form of restriction, as above, which prevents things from being altered (EG shifting the road, planting loads of trees or placing boulders) which will require DM caveats, and may require Modron Control (who police the multiverse, makes sense they police time travel too), so players making paradoxes may be hunted down by Modrons (or your own homebrewed time police) to realign the world (the world is misaligned because the PC's remember different events - realigning could be mind wipes, or possibly just execution for repeat offenders).
If you're going pop-culture (IE the delorian) then go all out - look up all the time travel plots you can find and incorporate them as side quests. Maybe have someone hosting the best party in the world to coax all time travelers to attend. Perhaps have a character in a blue box (which is bigger on the inside) looking for assistance on a quest. Perhaps the BBEG gets hold of the time travel machine and replicates it for his goons. There's a lot of time travel out there, so why not reference a load of it!
It kind of depends on what kind of time travel story you want, since there are different ways to go about it
For example, say that the apocalypse happened and the players go back in time to stop it. It would be a different scenario if the players were alive when the apocalypse happened than if they were from hundreds of years into the future. With the first one, the best way would be if they didn't know what caused the apocalypse like in Umbrella Academy and they had to figure out how to stop it while in the second what they would know would be pieced together and thus misleading or incorrect and they would have to deal with culture shock. Both would be more of a mystery campaign.
Another way to do it would be to follow the example from Dexter's Lab movie: the characters' descendants travel back in time to get help from them to stop the end of the world, they go together to the future but their time machine malfunctions and they end up further forwrd, then they have to fix their time machine to go back and stop it for real, with the reason that they don't abuse it is that it is magic and can only travel to points in time when a certain magical event happens.
Or you could try to keep the changes contained. They find a castle in ruins, something send them to the past, they prevent its destruction and then go back to the present. But wait! It turns out that the ancestor for one of the players lived there and without the castle being destroyed they never left and met their significant other! Time for shenanigans to ensure they leave. Or have an enemy of the players send someone to kill their parents like in terminator movie and, since it involves their parents, they have to be careful not to erase themselves so they actually have to be discreet while pretecting them (make sure the guy who sends them back emphasizes this)
Or you could go with a timeloop. They end up reliving the same day over and over again (think a festival like groundhog day) until they figure out what is causing it. The side quest for that one would certainly not be mysteries because they would solve them easily save for what caused the loop.
Then there are weirder ones. You could have a school in which a magical effect causes the characters to keep slipping into the past and back into the present. Don't make it obvious what is happening at first (make it a school in which people don't always share classes) and make sure they befriend someone in the past that dies at some point in an unresolved mystery. After the characters figure out that they are actually going to the past instead of dealing with ghosts, they have to figure out why they die and prevent it, but when they change stuff and slip back to the present there are changes like someone else dying instead, changing who the teachers are, what the situation at the town is like, etc.
O all the players lived through the same tragedy as children (a friend died, their town was destroyed or absorbed into a Dread realm, their lord went crazy, the prince of Austria got shot there, etc) and it is their mind that travels back in time. So now they are children as experienced as older adventures but without items or reputation (in which case, it might be best if none are Wizards) trying to prevent it.
What kind of sidequest you would get would depend on the time of time travel story you wanna do.
Hello, I'm making a time travel campaign. Any ideas?
I have played dnd before, but it's my first campaign DM'ing.
I have some ideas including the DeLorean from Back to the Future.
I wanna make a great campaign for my players, but I'm afraid I might f*ck up.
Any ideas for sidequests, subplots, and general filler?
Thanks :D
Time Travel is probably one of the most difficult plots to put together. I've tried to make one, and I've seen many others try to make them, and usually the threads go quiet.
I would suggest asking yourself - what aspects of Time Travel do you enjoy? What is it about Time Travel that makes you want to run it as a campaign?
One of the key parts of time travel stories is that the plot suddenly ties up sometime in the end of it - like in back to the future with Doc wearing a bulletproof vest all along, for example.
This is almost impossible to implement with dnd as it required that decision to have been made by the story writer before the rest of the story was written - and dnd being a collaborative story writing system, this would mean that everyone in the game would have to decide this, which wouldn't make it much of a reveal!
I'm not saying this to dissuade you, but it is certainly worth considering!
Now, for Time Travel.
There are a few different types of time travel, and you'll need to pick one in order to make this consistent:
1: Back to the Future (only number 1, as the latter ones lose some consistency)
If you go beck in time and change something, it wil lchange the future and you might find yourself ceasing to exist, fading away as the decision you changed takes place before you. However, if you change things which don't affect your timeline (like Biff sort of did when he changed thing in BTTF2, where Marty somehow still became friends with Doc, despite him being locked up... like I said, it loses consistency) then the future changes and you'll go back to see it being different. This is possibly the simplest option - the players encounter a locked door, they go back in time to when someone was there with the key, take the key, and return to the future - and the DM has to work out how this affected time. My reccomendation for this would be to allow the players one use per session - and tell them that when they jump back forwards in time, that's the end of the session, giving you time to make a more impactful assessment of the change.
This would be a lot of work for the DM, and would mean you ned to know the intricacies of how everything in the world has gotten to here, in case they interlink. If you can plan that all out, the players may find odd things changing, and work out how things link together, leading to an amazing reveal. But, that's a lot of work.
Option 2: Time is Fixed
There's a movie where someone tries t ogo back in time to fix something, and finds themselves incapable of doing so - their every effort had already happened, and the thing already happened, so they cannot stop it. This wouldn't be much fun for dnd as you'd basically have to DM caveat everything so that what happened before still happened.
Option 3: Schrodingers Time Machine.
This is one I've coined myself. The concept being that things are only as they are because they have been observed to be so, and therefore if you do not see something happen, you can change it. An example would be that if you saw a carriage careen off a cliff, you could go back in time to ensure a soft landing - moving all the rocks from the ocean below so that the person in the carriage isn't dashed to bits, or even digging a lake for it to land in. You couldn't stop the carriage from falling off the cliff - you saw that happen, after all - but you can change what you didn't see. If you went to the edge of the cliff and saw that the carriage was shattered on the rocks, you can no longer change this.
This premise revolves around the players making a spur of the moment decision to jump back in time. It can't be a carefully planned decision, it can only be then and there - the carriage just fell off the cliff, quickly, let's go back and dig a lake for it to land in! or, "Quickly, the carriage is heading for the cliff, let's go back in time and dig a pit trap ahead of it so it doesn't go off the cliff!". It would require some form of restriction, as above, which prevents things from being altered (EG shifting the road, planting loads of trees or placing boulders) which will require DM caveats, and may require Modron Control (who police the multiverse, makes sense they police time travel too), so players making paradoxes may be hunted down by Modrons (or your own homebrewed time police) to realign the world (the world is misaligned because the PC's remember different events - realigning could be mind wipes, or possibly just execution for repeat offenders).
If you're going pop-culture (IE the delorian) then go all out - look up all the time travel plots you can find and incorporate them as side quests. Maybe have someone hosting the best party in the world to coax all time travelers to attend. Perhaps have a character in a blue box (which is bigger on the inside) looking for assistance on a quest. Perhaps the BBEG gets hold of the time travel machine and replicates it for his goons. There's a lot of time travel out there, so why not reference a load of it!
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It kind of depends on what kind of time travel story you want, since there are different ways to go about it
For example, say that the apocalypse happened and the players go back in time to stop it. It would be a different scenario if the players were alive when the apocalypse happened than if they were from hundreds of years into the future. With the first one, the best way would be if they didn't know what caused the apocalypse like in Umbrella Academy and they had to figure out how to stop it while in the second what they would know would be pieced together and thus misleading or incorrect and they would have to deal with culture shock. Both would be more of a mystery campaign.
Another way to do it would be to follow the example from Dexter's Lab movie: the characters' descendants travel back in time to get help from them to stop the end of the world, they go together to the future but their time machine malfunctions and they end up further forwrd, then they have to fix their time machine to go back and stop it for real, with the reason that they don't abuse it is that it is magic and can only travel to points in time when a certain magical event happens.
Or you could try to keep the changes contained. They find a castle in ruins, something send them to the past, they prevent its destruction and then go back to the present. But wait! It turns out that the ancestor for one of the players lived there and without the castle being destroyed they never left and met their significant other! Time for shenanigans to ensure they leave. Or have an enemy of the players send someone to kill their parents like in terminator movie and, since it involves their parents, they have to be careful not to erase themselves so they actually have to be discreet while pretecting them (make sure the guy who sends them back emphasizes this)
Or you could go with a timeloop. They end up reliving the same day over and over again (think a festival like groundhog day) until they figure out what is causing it. The side quest for that one would certainly not be mysteries because they would solve them easily save for what caused the loop.
Then there are weirder ones. You could have a school in which a magical effect causes the characters to keep slipping into the past and back into the present. Don't make it obvious what is happening at first (make it a school in which people don't always share classes) and make sure they befriend someone in the past that dies at some point in an unresolved mystery. After the characters figure out that they are actually going to the past instead of dealing with ghosts, they have to figure out why they die and prevent it, but when they change stuff and slip back to the present there are changes like someone else dying instead, changing who the teachers are, what the situation at the town is like, etc.
O all the players lived through the same tragedy as children (a friend died, their town was destroyed or absorbed into a Dread realm, their lord went crazy, the prince of Austria got shot there, etc) and it is their mind that travels back in time. So now they are children as experienced as older adventures but without items or reputation (in which case, it might be best if none are Wizards) trying to prevent it.
What kind of sidequest you would get would depend on the time of time travel story you wanna do.