Basic Information
Time Travel stories are about characters who travel through time. Possible motivations include changing history to avert a bad present or future, correcting changes made by other time travelers, personal gain (typically only by villains), or the results of a Stable Time Loop.
Time travel comes with risks such as getting stranded or inadvertently changing history. Paradoxes are also never far away, especially if you think about it. See Time Travel Tropes for a variety of possible hazards and plot developments.
When its specific themes are downplayed a bit time travel can combine well with other genres (particularly other Speculative Fiction genres), either as a one-off story arc or in the context of a conflict between the main characters and some other group of time travelers. (See Time Machine for some advice on keeping things under control.) The genre offers great freedom in combining characters and plot elements from any time period, and a writer willing to suffer some paradox can use Stable Time Loops to justify just about anything.
See Also
- Time Travel Tropes features many classic tropes used in time travel fiction
- The pages Our Time Travel Is Different and Time Machine cover a lot of the basic questions and decisions the GM will have to deal with in starting a time travel scenario.
- The Time And Relative Dimensions In Space page touches on this as well.
- The GM will need to decide whether to rule in favor of Ontological Inertia …or have fun contemplating Temporal Paradox and upended Causality …or rule that Time Travel is actually portals to Parallel Universes or Branching Time.
- Stephen Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture indicates Time Travel can't happen.
- Other scientific view points say it can. See Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, Spacetime, Relativity, and (to a lesser extent) Fourth Dimension.
- For crazy things you can do with a time machine, see Temporal Tricks.
- News: No paradox for time travellers
- News: 2008 - Does time travel start here?
Sources
Game and Story Use
- See Time Travel Tropes for a variety of possible hazards and plot developments.