Time Travel (GM advice)

[slade the sniper]

How do you handle time travel in game?

My game has mutated considerably and is now focused on faeries and elves and fairy tales...which of course means time travel (right?)

So, basically I have a LOT of time and multiplanar travel and I am looking for some ideas on just how to do that. Right now I have it so that no being can move backward in time, but the rate is totally dependent on the PC. For example

Each plane is a separate time line, so lets say that you are in Arcadia and the time is 17,566 After Sundering. You travel to Midgard in 1447 AD. You spend 20 years in Midgard to it is now 1467. You can travel back to Arcadia to any point in time from 1 second after you left to X thousand years in the future. I don't know if I am explaining it correctly, but basically, I want "time" to be a fairly malleable factor in the game, but I don't want to deal with time paradoxes or alternate timelines (they are present, but NOT for PC "use").

Any ideas?

-STS

[guardiandashi]

Bah I hate timey wimey issues
With that said in our campaigns time isn't a straight line like most people think it is.

One of the best descriptions is that while we perceive time as linear, it really isn't. Otherwise time travel wouldn't be possible. Time is more of a spiral or coil, and if you have the capability to step outside the normal frame of reference then you can reinsert yourself at any point.

Or you can always do the whole time in any specific dimension is a constant, and progresses at a fixed set rate, however time when in different dimensions doesn't necessarily correspond to another dimension.

For an example consider the chronicles of Narnia.
When people from our world go there and then come back, they always come back to the exact state and time that they left, however they can be in Narnia for years and also if they leave Narnia and go back to Narnia, years or even centuries may have passed in Narnia. (Of course Aslan is a big factor in why that happens)

[slade the sniper]

For an example consider the chronicles of Narnia.
When people from our world go there and then come back, they always come back to the exact state and time that they left, however they can be in Narnia for years and also if they leave Narnia and go back to Narnia, years or even centuries may have passed in Narnia. (Of course Aslan is a big factor in why that happens)

Narnia is one of the many influences in this campaign, so I wanted to be able to replicate, but I still wanted stuff to "happen" in Narnia without having to wait for the PCs to get back. This allows the PCs to skip ahead to fun stuff, or go back to the exact second they left...plus it really does allow for a lot of the time-skip stuff in anime as well as people walk out a room, and then walk right back in for person A, but for the PCs 37 years have passed.

-STS

[Tick]

How do you handle time travel in game?

My game has mutated considerably and is now focused on faeries and elves and fairy tales...which of course means time travel (right?)

So, basically I have a LOT of time and multiplanar travel and I am looking for some ideas on just how to do that. Right now I have it so that no being can move backward in time, but the rate is totally dependent on the PC. For example

Each plane is a separate time line, so lets say that you are in Arcadia and the time is 17,566 After Sundering. You travel to Midgard in 1447 AD. You spend 20 years in Midgard to it is now 1467. You can travel back to Arcadia to any point in time from 1 second after you left to X thousand years in the future. I don't know if I am explaining it correctly, but basically, I want "time" to be a fairly malleable factor in the game, but I don't want to deal with time paradoxes or alternate timelines (they are present, but NOT for PC "use").

Any ideas?

-STS

What you are describing is not time travel but world/dimensional travel. If you go back in time prior in the same place (World) you are time traveling. You would have historical references like dinosaurs and cowboys, sailors and such. But a world or dimension travel would have different people. gods, elves, dwarves, ect... but time for them is relative as you reference it. size of planet, rotations of sun and moon and all are measured in a different way. So you would be a much older self traveling back to a time you are familiar with as far as tech, cars and such are but you would be older, your world would continue normally on that normal time line... You need to make up your mind if you are time traveling on one planet or dimensional planet jumping or using a combination of the two ideas and concepts.

You might not be time traveling at all. A Superior alien race won't time travel to earth to say hello, we time traveled here at your time. They will likely come to earth to conquer with the vast tech resources they have. They did not time travel. They are superior, earthlings are inferior as far as tech goes... Hope this helps to answer your question. Time is a measure based on what we define... Start Trek uses star dates that are a count of day month year hour, minute and second that records a time when they left earth. so leaving earth on jul 4 2017 2:28am would be noted as star date...2017.07.04.2.28... Then when they return to earth they use standard time as the rest of us know it once they stop serving start fleet... or what ever format you want to use... hope that helps.

[The Beast]

How do you handle time travel in game?

My game has mutated considerably and is now focused on faeries and elves and fairy tales...which of course means time travel (right?)

So, basically I have a LOT of time and multiplanar travel and I am looking for some ideas on just how to do that. Right now I have it so that no being can move backward in time, but the rate is totally dependent on the PC. For example

Each plane is a separate time line, so lets say that you are in Arcadia and the time is 17,566 After Sundering. You travel to Midgard in 1447 AD. You spend 20 years in Midgard to it is now 1467. You can travel back to Arcadia to any point in time from 1 second after you left to X thousand years in the future. I don't know if I am explaining it correctly, but basically, I want "time" to be a fairly malleable factor in the game, but I don't want to deal with time paradoxes or alternate timelines (they are present, but NOT for PC "use").

Any ideas?

-STS

Well you could always read through Transdimensional TMNT and pick out the parts on time travel you like from there. Only bad thing there is that the temporal spells in that book were written with the non-PPE magic rules in mind and haven't been converted to the PPE-based rules yet.

[slade the sniper]

I already have TMNT and didn't really like their idea of the Time Coils and their time wizards were OK, but since I am basically making the Fae have almost unrestricted dimensional travel, it really isn't good enough to have an OCC that is that limited.

As for the time travelling portion, I should probably expand on it a bit.
Elf A travels to 1980 and does something that negatively affects Elf B, who is in Arcadia and who last traveled to Earth in 1976.
Elf B can travel to back to 1980 and undo it...BUT, Elf A can not go back and redo what he already did (he was already in that timeline previously)
Therefore, Elf A has to hire Elf C to go back to 1980 and undo what Elf B did.
If Elf B still wants the event to occur anyway, he has to send Elf D back to do it.
What this means is that each being can only be in a single point in time, one time. So Elf A, Elf B, Elf C and Elf D all have been present on 1 January, 1980...so those four elves can never go back to that point, or earlier, ever again (Deities can...because, gods).

-STS

[Killer Cyborg]

Time travel is pretty easy:
It's impossible to change the past unless you already have and this is the result.

For example, those time-travelers that went back in time to save Abe Lincoln?
Well, they obviously failed.
But those time-travelers that went back in time to stop those first time-travellers?
Well, they obviously succeeded.

[Razorwing]

To be honest... traveling in time doesn't have to be complicated... or even restricted. Handling paradoxes is simple... don't. Your characters went back in time and accidentally killed their grandparents before their parents were born... no problem; that haven't actually prevented your characters from existing as they merely created a new timeline where they won't be born (but the original timeline where they were born still exists... they merely are no longer in it).

Other events can become part of the timeline. This happened with the Minion War... where a portion of the Demonic Invasion force sent by Hades ended up rifting to Earth during the 200 year Dark Age following the Great Cataclysm rather than in 109 PA when the rest of the invasion force appears. While this portion of the invasion force was cut off from reinforcements, they were able to set up a foothold in Calgary and wait 200 years for the rest of the force to arrive and reinforce their position (though in those centuries they have suffered both losses and gains).

You don't really need to keep track of every event that your players perform in any given timeline... even if they return to the same time it may not be the specific timeline they altered... thus paradoxes from their actions only matter if you want them to.

It really is this simple.

[eliakon]

When I am in a mood to allow time travel in my games (and to be frank I don't usually allow it since it creates the attitude of "nothing matters, we can always go back and fix last week")

The best system I have found is that time travel works best when:
It has a large black out period (i.e. you can travel back thousands of years, but not a couple of weeks or decades)
Is not something the PCs have at their beck and call (no spells or powers, devices are non-replicable by players and supplied by some sort of time authority)
There is a high level of plasticity and resilience (it can bend a lot with out changing... temporal inertia if you will)
Paradoxes simply can't happen (if something is about to cause a paradox the traveler is simply shunted back to their time or shifted into a parallel timeline)
That there are multiple time travel groups (so that the PCs are not the only ones out there raiding time at will with no competition or problem)
And last that there be one or two large powerful "time police" or the like to keep groups from going wild with changes and raiding.

YMMV of course.

[dreicunan]

Just look for the out of place looking blue police box and ask the nice man inside to explain how it all works.

One of the things that I actually liked in Terminator: Genisys was when John Connor 2.0 told them that he didn't think that time cared what happened. Similar to Razorwing's post, time travel just creates a new timeline without annihilating previous ones. To quote everyone's favorite professor "And if history doesn't care that our degenerate friend Fry is his own grandfather, then who are we to judge?"

[Blackwater Sniper]

Look at Flashpoint (DC), Back to the Future, Source Code (movie), or Planet of the Apes (Charlton Heston, 1968) and look at any changes in the past as creating an alternate timeline.

[Glistam]

How do you handle time travel in game?

My game has mutated considerably and is now focused on faeries and elves and fairy tales...which of course means time travel (right?)

So, basically I have a LOT of time and multiplanar travel and I am looking for some ideas on just how to do that. Right now I have it so that no being can move backward in time, but the rate is totally dependent on the PC. For example

Each plane is a separate time line, so lets say that you are in Arcadia and the time is 17,566 After Sundering. You travel to Midgard in 1447 AD. You spend 20 years in Midgard to it is now 1467. You can travel back to Arcadia to any point in time from 1 second after you left to X thousand years in the future. I don't know if I am explaining it correctly, but basically, I want "time" to be a fairly malleable factor in the game, but I don't want to deal with time paradoxes or alternate timelines (they are present, but NOT for PC "use").

Any ideas?

-STS

Sounds like this is going to get very complicated very fast. Let's say I leave dimension A and go to dimension B. In dimension B I enter 1,000 years in its future from "now." Can I go back to dimension A at the point I left or am I restricted to some new future point based on how quickly or slowly time passes in A compared to B? If I go back to A and then return to B, are those 1,000 years I skipped still a possibility? If I go to Dimension B at 1,000 years from "now" can another player or NPC who leaves right after me go to B only 950 years from "now," arriving before me even though they left after me?

[kaid]

One option is to use the time as a powerful river type model. Where you can go back and try to change things but major events still occur. Names and places may change a bit but overall major things like WW2 happen. So gives them some ability to make minor changes to help save some particular person but overall nothing they do has a big effect on the overall course of history unless you managed to do something on a truly catastrophic level enough to effectively make the river of time change course.


The other way is to basically say nothing you are doing is actually time travel. It is just visiting alternate dimensions. This is the easiest way to handle things as they can blip around and make big changes but the changes they are making effect only that one dimension. So you travel back in time to save abraham lincoln and succeed congrats but when you return to your own home history is unchanged. It eliminates the butterfly effect issues or accidentally killing a relative and stopping yourself from being born.

[The Beast]

Hey I just remembered Rifter 55 has some time travel stuff in it that was different than the TTMNT stuff I mentioned earlier.

[slade the sniper]

Thanks for all your help! I am going to try and find that Rifter.

I leave dimension A and go to dimension B. In dimension B I enter 1,000 years in its future from "now." Can I go back to dimension A at the point I left or am I restricted to some new future point based on how quickly or slowly time passes in A compared to B?

You can go back to A at any point in the future from the time you left. The timeline "speed" in each dimension then does not matter.

If I go back to A and then return to B, are those 1,000 years I skipped still a possibility?

No, you can not go backward in time.

If I go to Dimension B at 1,000 years from "now" can another player or NPC who leaves right after me go to B only 950 years from "now," arriving before me even though they left after me?

Yes.

To further elucidate..
The places the PCs can go are: Arcadia, Earth (including Middle Earth), Alfheim, Svartelfheim, Comorragh, Thrar, Narnia and Palladium world (why why why can't they name the place?)
The PCs have to do things like find Excalibur, find Maleficent, stop the Goblin Queen from dying and letting her marry Alexander Summers, stop the Evil Queen of Air and Darkness from killing the White Queen, regain the loyalty/support/alliance of various races of fey/elves for the seelie/unseelie courts.

To do this, they have to travel a lot to different interconnected planes.

To stop the PCs from not caring about failing, they can only go to each place and time one time, and the next time they visit that dimension, it must be in the future of that dimension. That gives them ONE chance to do each of these tasks...they (themselves) can not redo it in the past. If Jareth the Goblin King (their nominal King) really wants it done after the PCs jack it up, a new group of fey have to do it.

-STS

[dreicunan]

Thanks for all your help! I am going to try and find that Rifter.

I leave dimension A and go to dimension B. In dimension B I enter 1,000 years in its future from "now." Can I go back to dimension A at the point I left or am I restricted to some new future point based on how quickly or slowly time passes in A compared to B?

You can go back to A at any point in the future from the time you left. The timeline "speed" in each dimension then does not matter.

If I go back to A and then return to B, are those 1,000 years I skipped still a possibility?

No, you can not go backward in time.

If I go to Dimension B at 1,000 years from "now" can another player or NPC who leaves right after me go to B only 950 years from "now," arriving before me even though they left after me?

Yes.

To further elucidate..
The places the PCs can go are: Arcadia, Earth (including Middle Earth), Alfheim, Svartelfheim, Comorragh, Thrar, Narnia and Palladium world (why why why can't they name the place?)
The PCs have to do things like find Excalibur, find Maleficent, stop the Goblin Queen from dying and letting her marry Alexander Summers, stop the Evil Queen of Air and Darkness from killing the White Queen, regain the loyalty/support/alliance of various races of fey/elves for the seelie/unseelie courts.

To do this, they have to travel a lot to different interconnected planes.

To stop the PCs from not caring about failing, they can only go to each place and time one time, and the next time they visit that dimension, it must be in the future of that dimension. That gives them ONE chance to do each of these tasks...they (themselves) can not redo it in the past. If Jareth the Goblin King (their nominal King) really wants it done after the PCs jack it up, a new group of fey have to do it.

-STS

If they jack it up, and the Goblin King sends other fey to go and do it, will those other fey run into the group in the process of jacking it up?

[slade the sniper]

Thanks for all your help! I am going to try and find that Rifter.

I leave dimension A and go to dimension B. In dimension B I enter 1,000 years in its future from "now." Can I go back to dimension A at the point I left or am I restricted to some new future point based on how quickly or slowly time passes in A compared to B?

You can go back to A at any point in the future from the time you left. The timeline "speed" in each dimension then does not matter.

If I go back to A and then return to B, are those 1,000 years I skipped still a possibility?

No, you can not go backward in time.

If I go to Dimension B at 1,000 years from "now" can another player or NPC who leaves right after me go to B only 950 years from "now," arriving before me even though they left after me?

Yes.

To further elucidate..
The places the PCs can go are: Arcadia, Earth (including Middle Earth), Alfheim, Svartelfheim, Comorragh, Thrar, Narnia and Palladium world (why why why can't they name the place?)
The PCs have to do things like find Excalibur, find Maleficent, stop the Goblin Queen from dying and letting her marry Alexander Summers, stop the Evil Queen of Air and Darkness from killing the White Queen, regain the loyalty/support/alliance of various races of fey/elves for the seelie/unseelie courts.

To do this, they have to travel a lot to different interconnected planes.

To stop the PCs from not caring about failing, they can only go to each place and time one time, and the next time they visit that dimension, it must be in the future of that dimension. That gives them ONE chance to do each of these tasks...they (themselves) can not redo it in the past. If Jareth the Goblin King (their nominal King) really wants it done after the PCs jack it up, a new group of fey have to do it.

-STS

If they jack it up, and the Goblin King sends other fey to go and do it, will those other fey run into the group in the process of jacking it up?

Yep. Hilarity Ensues.

-STS

[ShadowLogan]

You could treat it like the Astral Plane, or going into TimeHole to avoid issues.

Basically your "planes" move forward at given rates, but you could never leave one plane for another after someone and arrive before them.

[dreicunan]

Thanks for all your help! I am going to try and find that Rifter.

I leave dimension A and go to dimension B. In dimension B I enter 1,000 years in its future from "now." Can I go back to dimension A at the point I left or am I restricted to some new future point based on how quickly or slowly time passes in A compared to B?

You can go back to A at any point in the future from the time you left. The timeline "speed" in each dimension then does not matter.

If I go back to A and then return to B, are those 1,000 years I skipped still a possibility?

No, you can not go backward in time.

If I go to Dimension B at 1,000 years from "now" can another player or NPC who leaves right after me go to B only 950 years from "now," arriving before me even though they left after me?

Yes.

To further elucidate..
The places the PCs can go are: Arcadia, Earth (including Middle Earth), Alfheim, Svartelfheim, Comorragh, Thrar, Narnia and Palladium world (why why why can't they name the place?)
The PCs have to do things like find Excalibur, find Maleficent, stop the Goblin Queen from dying and letting her marry Alexander Summers, stop the Evil Queen of Air and Darkness from killing the White Queen, regain the loyalty/support/alliance of various races of fey/elves for the seelie/unseelie courts.

To do this, they have to travel a lot to different interconnected planes.

To stop the PCs from not caring about failing, they can only go to each place and time one time, and the next time they visit that dimension, it must be in the future of that dimension. That gives them ONE chance to do each of these tasks...they (themselves) can not redo it in the past. If Jareth the Goblin King (their nominal King) really wants it done after the PCs jack it up, a new group of fey have to do it.

-STS

If they jack it up, and the Goblin King sends other fey to go and do it, will those other fey run into the group in the process of jacking it up?

Yep. Hilarity Ensues.

-STS

From a practical point of view, how do you play that? Do you decide ahead of time that they jacked it up and have the other fey show up the first time through, or do you replay the session? (Please note that I am not criticizing this, either way, I am just curious.)

[slade the sniper]

Thanks for all your help! I am going to try and find that Rifter.

I leave dimension A and go to dimension B. In dimension B I enter 1,000 years in its future from "now." Can I go back to dimension A at the point I left or am I restricted to some new future point based on how quickly or slowly time passes in A compared to B?

You can go back to A at any point in the future from the time you left. The timeline "speed" in each dimension then does not matter.

If I go back to A and then return to B, are those 1,000 years I skipped still a possibility?

No, you can not go backward in time.

If I go to Dimension B at 1,000 years from "now" can another player or NPC who leaves right after me go to B only 950 years from "now," arriving before me even though they left after me?

Yes.

To further elucidate..
The places the PCs can go are: Arcadia, Earth (including Middle Earth), Alfheim, Svartelfheim, Comorragh, Thrar, Narnia and Palladium world (why why why can't they name the place?)
The PCs have to do things like find Excalibur, find Maleficent, stop the Goblin Queen from dying and letting her marry Alexander Summers, stop the Evil Queen of Air and Darkness from killing the White Queen, regain the loyalty/support/alliance of various races of fey/elves for the seelie/unseelie courts.

To do this, they have to travel a lot to different interconnected planes.

To stop the PCs from not caring about failing, they can only go to each place and time one time, and the next time they visit that dimension, it must be in the future of that dimension. That gives them ONE chance to do each of these tasks...they (themselves) can not redo it in the past. If Jareth the Goblin King (their nominal King) really wants it done after the PCs jack it up, a new group of fey have to do it.

-STS

If they jack it up, and the Goblin King sends other fey to go and do it, will those other fey run into the group in the process of jacking it up?

Yep. Hilarity Ensues.

-STS

From a practical point of view, how do you play that? Do you decide ahead of time that they jacked it up and have the other fey show up the first time through, or do you replay the session? (Please note that I am not criticizing this, either way, I am just curious.)

The first time through is with the PCs. IF they mess it up through their own actions (I am very sandboxy and never decide anything ahead of time), they can replay the adventure with new characters, and they will run into their old characters doing the things they did

-STS

[taalismn]

T\

You don't really need to keep track of every event that your players perform in any given timeline... even if they return to the same time it may not be the specific timeline they altered... thus paradoxes from their actions only matter if you want them to.
.

"Ah...you didn't swat that mosquito, did you, Dave?...."

[Blue_Lion]

I do not have time travel backwards in my games. (forward is basically charter is removed from the game until they return.)
To big a pain in the neck.

[glitterboy2098]

I haven't had to deal with it yet in any of mine, but if i did, i'd be adapting the TDTMNT rules. not only do they make it fairly straightforward to handle, and easy to explain to players, but they manage to remove many of the potential abuses of it too. since you can only visit specific time periods, you can limit their access to more problematic eras. plus since these eras are decades, centuries, and millennia apart (or more!) you can minimize the chance of both grandfather paradox's and with the flow of time preserved in each period you can't micromanage your timestream, preventing Bill&Tedd style 'retroactive combat' where the players just go back in time after the battle and arrange specific unlikely events to insure an overpowering win. saves the Gm a lot of headaches and keeps that sort of immense GM-negating narrative power out of the hands of the players.

plus, because of how it is described and works, it makes time slightly self correcting, giving the Gm the ability to ignore a lot of the little details. kill a butterfly in the Mesozoic and it shouldn't matter because there are billions of butterfly's, millions of years, and at least two global major extinction events between then and now. kill Hitler though before he became the leader of the Nazi party, and history might change. (though perhaps not the way anyone would expect.. odds are WW2 would still happen, just with different names for the Nazi leadership, and slightly different events. might even be worse)

[Blue_Lion]

Instead of time travel dimensional travel.

[Silvananthus]

I have thought of kind of novel way of approaching time travel in the megaverse after reading a couple rifter articles and watching a new netflix series. I mean honest to goodness time travel. I had the idea about paradoxes being resolved by treating the outcome of them however the GM wants and using dual sets of memories as a story device for the players. So say the characters go back and kill Hitler before his rise to power. The GM decides how he wants history to unfold but the player characters that were involved in the campaign have two sets of memory upon returning to the present. One set of memories of the story line the GM is currently running and a second where Hitler never rose to power.

Essentially it leaves the power to direct the campaign in the GMs hands but still allows the players to retain the experiences or understand the repercussions of their actions. What is even better is if the players wonder why things didn't turn out how they thought they would it can lead into more adventures as to why their attempt failed or why history is different than they remember.

I hope that idea of "two sets of memory" as a story telling device is something helpful. It had never occurred to me before but it could work well in any campaign.

[Freemage]

I rather enjoyed Robin Laws' Feng Shui game's approach to time travel:

There's an otherworldly limbo dimension called the Netherworld, that exists outside of time.

This dimension taps into Earth's timeline at four points: First Century AD, mid-1800s, contemporary era, and about 60 years later. Furthermore, the portals are locked into their relative times--if you go to the first century portal, spend a month there, then go back through the Netherworld to the modern world, you'll come back one month later.

Historical inertia is a BIG part of the setting. You can trigger what are called "superficial shifts", where names are changed, small details differ, and so on. But the big tides of history just keep on keeping on--unless you first harness enough mystical energy via Feng Shui sites to be able to have your actions have real meaning; then you can trigger "critical shifts", which are the equivalent of Alan Rickman's Epic Tea-Time Table Flip.

Netherworld travelers are given immunity to paradox by virtue of their traveling--however, they have no memory of the altered timelines, and so must make a regular effort to 'relearn' their own history with each trip. Eventually, many become so disconnected from anything on Earth that they opt to move to the Netherworld on a semi-permanent basis, becoming known as Displaced Persons. Some are resigned to their fate, while others maintain hopeless delusions of mounting a campaign to return to Earth and 'correct' the shifts that have led them to their disconnected existence.

[RolandCorsair]

Fantastic thread bty my very first Rifts campaign was about time travel many years ago, below is some cliff notes I still have from those dim long ago fun memory's hope this helps and adds to the discussion and games

Summary it can be used to change small local events but when trying to change major events like the assassination of Dunskin father by the republicans or stopping the coming of the rifts nature fights back and stops it ( See Stephen king's 11/22/63 on hulu)

A Item in a Rifts game The time line is flexible and is subject to change.
2.1 The time line is extremely change resistant and requires great effort to change it. Small changes will only alter the immediate future and events will conspire to maintain constant events in the far future; only large changes will alter events in the distant future.
2.2 The time line is easily changed (example: where the time line is fluid and changes often naturally).


A User's Guide to the Black Box
By Scott Maxwell

All it takes is a grasp of theoretical physics, control of the space-time continuum, and maybe a ball of cosmic string.
Time travel is the concept of moving backward or forward to different points in time, in a manner analogous to moving across the north amarican contencet. Additionally, some interpretations of time travel take the form of travel between pellale worlds much like rifts. A central problem with time travel is that of causality - causes preceding effects - which has given rise to a number of paradoxes....forchently for you my team and I have already messed up lots of times so you can learn from our mistakes....Marwell of the hill people just to name a few but I am getting ahead of myself.
Did the tech bubble burst in your face? Were you one of those unlucky outsiders who missed the juicer uprising or got harbly injured during the tolkeen wars? Wouldn't you like to be, just once, in the right place at the right time? Now you can. Follow a few simple instructions to relive the best moments of your life and bail out just in time - or meet your great-great-great-grandchild.
Once confined to ravings of a Crazy and roge scienctis, time travel is now simply an engineering problem one that some body has fixed. Physicists schooled in Newton's laws believed that time moved along a straight, steady course, like a speeding arrow. Then came this Einstein guy. His equations showed that time is more like a river. The more mass or energy you possess, the more the current around you varies. By moving at high velocity, for instance, you can make time slow down, and when you come to a stop, you'll be younger than if you'd remained at rest. Thus, a speedy spacecraft makes a fairly basic time machine. Even after Einstein, most physicists believed the clock ticked in only one direction. While moving faster than the speed of light could, according to Einstein's equations, reverse time's arrow, such motion was impossible, because any object that reached that velocity would become infinite in mass. Trips to the past were preposterous. Not anymore. Having examined Einstein's equations more closely, physicists now realize that the river of time may be diverted into a whirlpool - called a closed timelike curve - or even a fork leading to a parallel universe. In particular, the more mass you can concentrate at a single point, the more you can bend the flow.
Exact specifications depend on where in time and space you wish to travel. You'll need a hefty CPU to solve the relevant equations for your machine's precise size, shape, motion, location, surroundings, and so on; the more accurately you can nail down these variables, the closer you'll come to your intended destination. The designs that follow don't have the panache of the black box but they will need a supercomputer, and a solar-system-scale machine shop. Warning: Time-space distortions may not be stable and may collapse as you enter, so approach them at your own risk. Also, when going back in time, do not - repeat - do not kill your parents before you are born. Wired takes no responsibility for parallel universes in which you find yourself trapped for eternity.
Throne Plates
Many scientists believe the big bang that created the universe left behind cosmic strings - thin, infinitely long filaments of compressed matter. There was a person who discovered that two of these structures, arranged in parallel and moving in opposite directions, would warp space-time to allow travel to the past. He later reworked the idea to involve a single cosmic-string loop. A Gott loop can take you back in time but not forward. The guide to building your own:
•Scan the galaxy for a loop of cosmic string.
•When you find one, fly close to it in a massive spaceship. Use the ship's gravity to shape the string into a rectangle roughly 54,000 light-years long and .01 light-years wide. Gravity exerted by the longer sides of the rectangle will cause it to collapse, bringing the sides closer and closer together at nearly the speed of light.
•As the two sides approach within 10 feet of each other, circle them in a smaller ship. When you return to the start of the circle, you will have traveled back in time.
Fine print: To take you back one year, the string must weigh about half as much as the Milky Way galaxy. You'll need a mighty big spaceship to make that rectangle.

The Black Box: At fist a seemly harmless device which is often mistaken for battery or other power supply. In fact this item is just about one of the most dangers devices in all of rifts earth! It is in fact just as dangers as any of the great rune items found currently on rifts earth. The black box is a damaged device which effects time, and in some cases space time. It seems like a part to a larger device but that is only a guess.

Origin: Unknown. Some rumors persist as to its origin by the few that know of its exsestence. Many clamed it to be a produced of a mad tecknowisered, or a temporal magic experiments gone very wrong. Still others clam it to be a pre rifts device, there is some who also say its a Naruni weapon that not even they could control.

Effects: Time skips into the past, some times seconds other times days weeks. *strange note one rearly runs into ones self. Has also been know to drop you miles away from starting point. reacts badly when near or with in a leyline. Also reacts poorly when ppe is pumped into it. " actives it is many peoples resons for doing so"
PPE cost: unknown some times 4 to 5 which = minutes other times it would drain all but one ppe from a target.

[Kovoston]

Take a look at The Rifter Article (in Rifter #56) on page 37.

lots of good ideas an help in that article.

[Tick]

Take a look at The Rifter Article (in Rifter #56) on page 37.

lots of good ideas an help in that article.

[Zer0 Kay]

I do time travel foward as if progression was linear but backwards is branched parallel universes. As soon as our time traveler goes back he has created a new reality. Going back and killing his parents doesn't delete the time traveler because he is from a different reality. All the stuff they mess up or improve will have consequences when they return but they aren't returning to the same dimension they left and it is extremely unlikely they'll ever return to their original dimension. So let em play and then twist their return, a little if you don't mind it a lot if you do.

[Armorlord]

I tend to roll with TMNT as my main guidepost for time travel in Palladium. Somewhere on here I've even proposed that the history of Rifts Earth as we know it didn't exist until the Cataclysm, it's all one big shorn pipe of timeline (ala TMNT major disruptions) with some seepage from other realities due to the scale and the dimensional chaos it was outputting to. That disruption also being why temporal mages/raiders have been unable to travel to before that point.

Back to the main topic, there are a lot more ways to handle time travel, and I've toyed with a few different ones, sometimes even in the same campaign with different methods offering different flexibility and consequences.

Paradoxes, no paradoxes, being required to resolve paradoxes or face a face worse than non-existence. Those are big factors. Oddly, not the biggest, but they set the tone for how the past is interacted with.

Next being the degree of control. Like TMNT's loops, Seven Days' 7 days, Back to the Future's exact dates, etc.
Paired with that being how difficult it is to setup. Immediate, five hours, an uninterrupted ritual, as long as it takes to reach the Well of Eternal Ephemerality, acceleration to 88 MPH, etc.
Those two real set how it gets handled by the players, and how readily.

I'd suggest that if you ever want to go full immediate time travel spy-vs-spy Bill & Ted level stuff, give the Continuum RPG a look. Never ran a proper game of it, but I've scavenged their ideas heavily. That paradoxes, or events you've done but haven't done yet, have to be resolved is a lovely bit of fun.

On the no paradoxes end, just look at everything attached to the Terminator franchise. By Genisys they are neck deep in cascading time war. It is glorious and terrifying at the same time when you think of it from a game-running perspective.