Internal Time Travel Consistency? It’s Timey-Whimey Ball!
“Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator – and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap… will be the leap home.”—Quantum Leap Opening
Over at RoleplayingTips it was suggested; You might as well roll on a table to see what happens next. Well, that’s sounds like a challenge to TheRandomDM. Because yes; We love to roll on a table to see what happens next. And as you might have gathered from the leading quote, the Tip was in regards to Time Travel, and how to run a Time Travel Campaign that had internal consistency. Well my Consistency is the Timey-Wimey Ball. And you can take that continuity knot, because armed with the “Wild Stallion Rule”, the “ME Squad”, and “Future Google” I’ll “Superman Spin”, the crap out of your “You Can’t Fight Fate” Timeline.
| 1d8 | Episode Trope | |
| 1 | You Can’t Fight Fate | |
| Characters go to the future! They must get back to their own time and prevent the future from going horribly horribly wrong. | ||
| 2 | Set Right What Once Went Wrong | |
| Characters go to the past! Again, this is usually to “fix” the future- that is, the characters’ “present.” | ||
| 3 | Make Wrong What Once Was Right | |
| Characters go to the past! But… not to fix the present or future. They want to change the events in some way, to favor themselves or their employer. | ||
| 4 | Stable Time Loop | |
| Characters go to the past! And in the past, they turn out to be responsible for the events that led to their “present.” | ||
| 5 | Reset Button | |
| The characters go through a world of crap, or somebody “changes history”, and they resort to time travel to fix it. | ||
| 6 | Trapped In the Past | |
| The characters are stuck in another time with no way of return and must choose between quietly living out their lives without changing history or working to change the world to their (and the natives’) benefit. | ||
| 7 | Alternate Universe | |
| The characters time-travel has split their universe in twain. There’s the universe they’re in (that’s they’ve “changed”) and the universe they’re not in. | ||
| 8 | Temporal Paradox | |
| Characters go to the future! Upon returning to the past, they are able to fight fate and prevent the events of the future from occurring. | ||
| 1d6 | Temporal Mutability | |
| 1 | You Already Changed the Past | |
| Past, present, and future are an immutable whole. Consequently all time travel to the past results in the creation of a Stable Time Loop, by virtue of the fact that the past—including the interference of all those time travelers—already happened. | ||
| 2 | Enforced Immutability | |
| In theory, the past could be changed, but some force stymies anyone who tries. Maybe Time Police or Clock Roaches menace anyone who violates the Temporal Prime Directive, or maybe the past can only be visited via Intangible Time Travel. | ||
| 3 | Rubber Band History | |
| Time is mostly immutable, like a wide river following a well-worn path. Travelers can make changes to the past, but these changes inevitably get smoothed over by the passing years. | ||
| 4 | Temporal Balancing Act | |
| There’s no rubber band, so there’s nothing to prevent you from making major, permanent changes to the past if you want to. But at the same time, it’s possible for a conscientious time traveler like yourself to leave the past exactly as you found it. | ||
| 5 | Temporal ChaosTheory | |
| The Butterfly Effect is in full force. Simply by being in the past in the first place, you alter the past, both overtly and in ways too subtle to notice. And these changes inevitably snowball, eventually rendering the Present or Future (almost) completely unrecognizable. | ||
| 6 | Branching Timelines | |
| Your time-traveling causes a new timeline to split off the original, and both timelines exist (if only temporarily) as Alternate Universes of each other. | ||
| 1d8 | Temporal Tricks | |
| 1 | Wild Stallion Rule | |
| Anything you need to have at hand, is at hand. Be Excellent, Ted! | ||
| 2 | Future Google | |
| Or could it be a Future Bing Decision Machine? Got a question? The Future has your answers | ||
| 3 | Instant Guitar Lessons | |
| Much like Future Google, if you need a skill you can train yourself in the future or the past, and be instantly proficient | ||
| 4 | Me Squad | |
| A single thought or a note can send all your future selves to be your cavalary. Woe be the time traveler who can’t call on the Me Squad | ||
| 5 | The Ouch Idea! | |
| Let’s say you have a rectangular block. It’s three units tall, one unit deep, and one unit wide. You flip it over. Now it’s one unit tall, one unit deep, and two units wide. Now add time the 4th Dimension | ||
| 6 | This is my Boomstick | |
| Future Tech is indistinguishable from Magic | ||
| 7 | Time Traveler’s Immortality | |
| If it’s not an instant-kill, there’s a way around it | ||
| 8 | Tomorrow’s Tech Today | |
| Quantum Death Gun? Check. Chameleon forcefield that stops everything? Check. Anything that is more powerful than what you have? It’s in my dimensional hole of goody stuff. | ||
| 1d4 | Time Line Laws | |
| 1 | Can’t Take Anything With You | |
| 2 | Hitlers Time Line Exemption | |
| 3 | Never the Selves Shall Meet | |
| 4 | Only One Me Allowed Right Now | |
| 1d6 | Time Travel Methods | |
| 1 | Superman Spin Control | |
| 2 | Faster Than Light Travel | |
| 3 | Black Hole Travel | |
| 4 | Einstein-Rosen Bridges | |
| 5 | Unobtanium Material | |
| 6 | The Great handwavey Device | |
