Someone murdered an ambassador’s wife, leading to a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact war in the 1960s. Your team is on the case, but not to bring
the killer to justice. This is TimeWatch
– and your job is to prevent this crime from ever happening in the first place.
Time travel is one of the most difficult topics/powers to
tackle in an RPG. In a traditional RPG, it can be incredibly unbalancing if
used as anything other than a one-off plot device. Creating an entire RPG
centered around characters with the ability to travel anywhere up or down the
time stream sounds equally awesome and impossible.
Game designer Kevin Kulp accepted that challenge, creating
TimeWatch based on the
investigation-centric Gumshoe RPG
system. Gumshoe makes it easy for
game masters to build seemingly elaborate mystery-based adventures with minimal
effort, and lets players find clues and solve mysteries using their own wits
instead of a lucky die roll. I interviewed Kevin about the development of TimeWatch.
io9: TimeWatch uses the Gumshoe system, with a focus on investigation and mystery solving,
but it also incorporates pulp action and other types of adventures. Did you
consider any other systems, or have any plans to port it to other systems? In a
lot of ways it feels like a Savage Worlds
game, for instance.
Kevin Kulp: TimeWatch was a (somewhat streamlined) Gumshoe game since day one. I think it’s
a great match: Gumshoe’s design
assumes that finding clues is less fun than deciding what to do with them. I
wrote the game to take advantage of those mechanics. My goal was to work in
just about every time travel trope you can think of, including the “Bill
and Ted” solution of having your future self drop off useful objects, and Gumshoe handled that seamlessly.
I’m a little surprised by how adaptable the TimeWatch rules are turning out to be.
They work as well for classic sci-fi as they do for 1920s Lovecraftian secret
societies who combat mythos horrors by traveling through dreams; Sliders-like
parallel universes where we jettison time travel entirely in favor of
adventures in alternate timelines; and a “crime-time” setting where
you play time-traveling con men and master thieves. I’m not sure how many of
those campaign expansions will make the final science-fiction-focused rulebook,
but I’m delighted they’re possible. I’m not sure such settings would work as
well with a different rule system.
io9: There are a few
obvious time travel touchstones, like Dr.
Who, Quantum Leap, and the X-Men
comics. What are some of the other influences on TimeWatch?
Kevin Kulp: Our
premise is that you’re an elite time cop, fixing history after other time
travelers accidentally (or purposefully) screw it up. Poul Anderson’s classic
“Time Patrol” series of short stories inspired that initial seed. TimeWatch is fueled by history podcasts
(particularly Dan Carlin’s Hardcore
History), alt-history forums (such as a superb one on Reddit), Harry
Turtledove and Simon Hawke novels, the old “What If?” anthologies,
the Terminator movies, and Kenneth
Hite’s old alternate history work.
io9: Some of the
character concepts are pretty out there — uplifted gorillas, psychic
velociraptors. How does Gumshoe allow
for that kind of flexibility?
Kevin Kulp: Those
examples belong to TimeWatch’s Pulp
playstyle, something you really wouldn’t see in a more hard sci-fi setting, but
here’s what I love most about
Gumshoe: the rules don’t give a
damn about how you describe something, so long as your character can accomplish
it.
https://gizmodo.com/mix-vampires-and-espionage-with-tabletop-rpg-nights-bla-5974636
For instance, let’s say you want to intimidate a subject
into spilling a clue. The rules don’t care if you’re a huge and threatening
intelligent gorilla, a frail accountant who can hack the subject’s credit
rating, a medieval psychic who mentally activates the subject’s worst fears, or
a futuristic super-scientist who uses nanotechnology to influence emotion.
That’s up to you. All the rules care about is, “do you have one or more
points in Intimidation?” Having those points means you’ll get the
information you need from the GM—everything else is you being creative.
As a result, you can play agents from anywhere in history,
from neanderthal times to the far future. You build your Gumshoe character normally, describe her however you like, and
you’re good to go. If you’re playing a neanderthal, for instance, I recommend a
high Disguise skill — and it’s up to you whether your disguise comes from
clothing and makeup, a high-tech Mission Impossible-style mask, a holographic
projector, or something else. As long as you make your Disguise roll during a
scene, you’ll be fine.
io9: I’ll admit that,
as a GM, the thought of creating a cohesive adventure for my players that
involves time travel is pretty daunting. Can you tell me about the mission
seeds and other GM advice you have planned? Any plans to publish complete TimeWatch adventures?
Kevin Kulp: If
there’s one thing I’m experienced at, it’s writing GM advice! I think that’s
essential for TimeWatch. Time travel
games give players huge flexibility: if you can’t get past a security guard,
you can go back in time a few years and befriend him, so that when you
encounter him standing guard in the present day he recognizes you as his old
neighbor and barbecue buddy. Or hey, why not go back two months and get a job
there yourself? Or go back a couple of hours and arrange an emergency, so that
the guard is called away from his post at the perfect time.
Encouraging the players to be creative and innovative is a
strength of the game, and it’s something I’ll want to talk about extensively in
the GM advice. That’s equally true with designing adventures. In TimeWatch the bad guys have usually
already gotten away with it—changed history—and you have to figure out what
they did so that you can go back and stop it from ever happening at all. That
makes it different from just about every single game on the market.
So how do you build an adventure for a setting like that?
Until the internet age, time travel adventure design was intimidating—you’d
have to head to the library and hope for a useful encyclopedia. Now it’s dead
simple: a single search about a historical era will turn up dozens of
completely brilliant plot hooks that can fuel an evening’s play. We’re going to
include multiple missions and dozens of short adventure hooks to inspire you,
and we’ll likely have a 96-page campaign expansion that includes a series of
missions, thematically linked but playable in any order. Over the last three
weeks we’ve also seen a number of free TimeWatch
missions being written and posted online. I think GMs will be in good shape;
with Wikipedia, it takes me about half an hour to prep an adventure, and it’s
fun to do so.
I love that the game inadvertently teaches you history in
the process. I’m just never sure whether to mention that as a selling point.
io9: Have any of your
playtesters surprised you with unexpected ways to use time travel?
Kevin Kulp: Constantly.
I had one player use literal rocket science to set up a meteorite as a weapon
of mass destruction against Nazi Germany. I had one player recruit his own
younger self into TimeWatch. I had a
character run a 20 year long-con, living with a nomadic hordes for two dozen
years in order to secure the great Khan’s trust and respect during one crucial
minute.
The stand-out surprise happened when a group of characters
barely survived a brutal ambush, traveled back in time, then set up that same
ambush against themselves in order to prove to a Mongol warlord that they could
predict the future. Utterly brilliant, completely unexpected, proved that the
bad guy didn’t know where they were after all, and it ended up winning them the
day.
As one of our playtesters said, making sure his TimeWatch team had a convenient parking
space as they pulled up in front of a Prohibition-era speakeasy: “If it’s a
game about time travel, I will use it
for frivolous, dramatic purposes.”
