Rip It & Run! The Time Slip...

On occasion, movies and books use the notion of time travel to create interest in their ongoing storylines. Sometimes this is annoying and intrusive, but sometimes it can really make the narrative work. Sometimes it can lead to intrusively-Meta storytelling where the knowing winks and nudges lead to much eye-rolling; and sometimes it can be used one time too many to wipe out some calamitous mistake that the characters have enacted. However, like many tropes and cliches, if used sparingly and deftly, it's all to the benefit of your ongoing saga. As usual, it's all in the handling.

As an example, let me tell you about a campaign I set up awhile back. I sent each of the prospective players a packet of information about a future world, a United Kingdom that existed under a totalitarian regime which was a cover for a shadowy Mythos dominance. This future UK had mainly 50s technology with some minimal (and heavily-monitored) computer hardware and the excitement of a limited and soon-to-be-launched Internet analogue. Life in this society was tough, with heavy rationing, competitive hierarchies in all areas of science and technology, secret police activities and the possibility that the next day your neighbours might be completely new people who - against all evidence to the contrary - "had lived there for years".

Into this repressive regime, I asked the players to invent characters, grouping them at a particular locale where I wanted the story to be set. I gave them the history of the country, as divergent from the actual real history of the British Isles, and asked them to work their notions of what life there would be like into their character backgrounds. In this world, a prominent figure had risen to power and used unknown (non-nuclear) technology to win World War Two and then take command of the Commonwealth and many of its neighbouring states. The US had the first faint notions of The Bomb, but there was no way for them to test it without the Brits knowing about it and exacting some kind of punitive economic or military sanction. And there was the stark de-population of the entire Indian sub-continent by Means Unknown to make them think twice. People in this Britain sometimes muttered in disgruntlement about escaping to the US and some notion of "freedom", but propaganda about America painted a twisted and very dire picture for the majority population.

Once we had our characters, we began playing and it was a couple of sessions of character development and establishment and of giving them just enough rope to start to get into trouble. The place to which they all had connexions was a military science complex in Scotland's Western Isles where they were working on some serious dimensional technologies, trying to break down the veils between worlds. At the same time, the Glorious Leader of the New Britain was rumoured to be dying and the (heavily-edited) print media was speculating, as much as it was allowed to, about "What If?" and "What Comes Next?". Just as things began to go pear-shaped, the technology glitched and the party was transported through time, back to a point where the Glorious Leader was just starting his rise to power.

This is where the campaign really kicked off. The world had re-clocked back to the "Classic Cthulhu" era and the the party had privileged information as to what kinds of horror lay in store for them. Initially there were many sessions of working out how they were to organise themselves in a time where they were un-recorded as individuals, and then there were a few sessions of philosophising about whether or not the time stream would play out as it had in their day, or if they were indeed in their original dimension. Soon however, elements of their previous history began to fall into place and it became clear that, if they didn't do something, things would replay to their terrible conclusion. 

On the plus side, the party had access to information and skills that few other people were even aware existed, even minor computer skills in a world decades before the notion. This gave the party a distinct edge over the Mythos threat looming ahead. 

This is not to say that the campaign became a railroad trip towards ending the Mythos Menace From Tomorrow. Standalone adventures and other diversions took place regularly and some of the Heroes From The Future even died along the way. However, the rationale of the party's existence was a nifty way of keeping them going and, more importantly, keeping them on track.

Another way to throw time into the mix is by means of prophecy. In another campaign in which I participated, Nyarlathotep opposed the party and, after we won clear of it, it swore that our doom would fall upon us "when we next met in Malta". Unfortunately, that prediction didn't come to pass before the group dissolved; however, you can bet that we all did our darnedest to avoid the Mediterranean island at all costs. And there was that time we started to run out of fuel en route from Alexandria to Cagliari...

Of course, this trick is all about positing a future set of circumstances and then engineering them to come about. The Keeper needs to play fast and loose between being too vague - in which case virtually any situation could fit the circumstance - and being too specific, whereupon the outcome is easily avoided. You know you've executed this trick perfectly when the party doesn't see it coming despite knowing about it beforehand...

Temporal manipulation can come about by a variety of means, through spells, deities or creatures of the Mythos, or artefacts (like Hermione's "time-turner" in The Prisoner of Azkaban). The main thing that the Keeper needs to pin down are the rules concerning time travel: will there be an awful explosion (and much cleaning up) if a character comes into contact with their future self? If a character travels into the past and treads on a butterfly, will it completely unhinge the future? Perhaps, if someone travels into the future, they are unable to move until the past "catches up" with them? There are all kinds of sanity-blasting options with this stuff. Just make sure that the rules are clear and consistent, then no-one has cause for complaint if the worst comes to worst. Troll though your Mythos source material for inspiration too - stories like "Ubbo Sathla" and "The Treader of Dust" by Clark Ashton Smith, or HPL's "The Horror in the Museum" and (of course) The Shadow Out of Time. 

And remember that the Hounds of Tindalos are ever on the look-out for breaches in temporal causality...