Time Travel in a Traveller campaign

[Werner]

A great convention scenario. "Okay, you get the hatch open. Roll versus health. No reason."

A bioweapon would likely be designed not to exist outside of a living host for too long, it would make it troublesome to salvage the ship afterwards, in this case they didn't count on the ship jumping out too close to the planet, so this Earth gets to salvage the ship instead, creating a parallel timeline. Four astronauts from a dragon capsule spacewalk to the hull of the Merc Cruiser and they find a manual hatch, it appears obvious that it is a manual hatch designed for human hands. The astronauts talk with Mission Control, and they receive permission to open the hatch. The hatch leads into an airlock. There is an inner hatch inside the airlock, when an astronaut attempts to open it, this trips a sensor which detects life readings, the outer hatch closes automatically with the astronauts inside the airlock pressurizes and the inner hatch can now be opened.

The astronauts test their radios and find they can still communicate with the dragon capsule and mission control, the artificial gravity takes a few minutes to kick in, the astronauts in their suits gradually gain weight until they are standing under a full Earth gravity, and they find their EVA suits to be quite heavy and cumbersome. An astronaut opens the hatch and finds a bunch of human and alien dead bodies strewn about in various states of decay. The ship powers up, the life support goes on. Astronauts radio back to Mission Control for instructions, they continue the exploration making their way through the Starship, they finally make their way over to the Ship's bridge in their EVA suits, NASA is taking no risks here.

Some people in Mission Control are scratching their heads over what to do, finding dead humans onboard the ship was definitely not expected. The astronauts probably bag the dead bodies, and stuff them into a seperate dragon cargo capsule for return to Earth for analysis. Once the dead bodies are removed and decision needs to be made as to whether the astronauts should take off their suits, as it is hard to move around in them under a full gravity, and analysis indicates that the atmosphere is breathable, and they are military astronauts of course, so risk is part of the job description. They test the air and there are no I'll effects from breathing it. The astronauts read the displays on the bridge, they notice a version of the Latin alphabet is used, the language us unfamiliar however, some of the words look like English words, they make some educated guesses about what the various controls do, but they do not touch them!

What do you think happens next?

 

[Gray Lensman]

Since our group plays Traveller and Space:1889 (among others) I'm sitting here scratching my head wondering why none of us ever thought of this as a segue from one to the other :nonono: *SMH*

 

[Nathan Brazil]

Being immune to a disease means your immune system kills it off and won't let it replicate in you body, you won't catch it, you won't have it in your body and therefore won't infect others.

You are wrong. There are a few types of "partial immunity" I was referring to:
A.Carriers of disease. Individuals (Typhoid Mary) or percentage of populations (AIDS/HIV sufferers) who may suffer little or not at all for years, unaware they may be spreading the illness because they feel no syptoms. Hansen's Disease (leprosy) is another good example. Though the infection rate is quite low, 95% of those who do contract the disease never display symptoms. The remaining 5% can take up to 20 years to begin to display the overt necrotic symptoms.

B.True partial immunity. Smallpox death rate is listed as 90% of Native Americans during the Spanish conquest, but the death rate amongst those same Europeans is far lower, because they clearly had something:

Smallpox was introduced into the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1509, and into the mainland in 1520, when Spanish settlers from Hispaniola arrived in Mexico, inadvertently carrying smallpox with them. Because the native Amerindian population had no acquired immunity to this new disease, their peoples were decimated by epidemics. Such disruption and population losses were an important factor in the Spanish achieving conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas. Wikipedia - Smallpox/History

What then did the Europeans acquire?

 

[Werner]

You are wrong. There are a few types of "partial immunity" I was referring to:
A.Carriers of disease. Individuals (Typhoid Mary) or percentage of populations (AIDS/HIV sufferers) who may suffer little or not at all for years, unaware they may be spreading the illness because they feel no syptoms. Hansen's Disease (leprosy) is another good example. Though the infection rate is quite low, 95% of those who do contract the disease never display symptoms. The remaining 5% can take up to 20 years to begin to display the overt necrotic symptoms.

B.True partial immunity. Smallpox death rate is listed as 90% of Native Americans during the Spanish conquest, but the death rate amongst those same Europeans is far lower, because they clearly had something:
What then did the Europeans acquire?

How many diseases are a group of four pcs likely to be carrying in their scout ship? Most of those Indians suffered when the Spanish settlers arrived, now if you assume the scout ship arrived by accident, then those four are all your likely to get, and if the timeline shifts with their arrival, you won't be getting more from that future.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

Another factor to consider in your scenario communication between time travelers and the people of the time period they have entered. The further distance in time one goes in either direction, the more a language changes compared to what is normally understandable. Forms of address (Hey Dude vs My Good Sir), slang (I don't like the color of your tweed), acquired words from other languages (kamakazi, canyon) and idioms even with a universal translator ("Tember! His eyes open!"). This does not in itself prevent travel, just an additional hurdle (roleplaying opportunity) along the way. For us, 500 years back takes us to Middle English which untrained takes a bit to be fluent in. Go back a thousand and have fun reading Beowulf in the original Old English, if you can find a written copy. Spanish is similar, there are different "Spanish" going back to Latin. Those Castilians talk funny (I'm Mexican American). Don't know the exact info for other languages, but I suppose it's similar

 

[Nathan Brazil]

The likelihood contracting an illness is the GM's fiat or the level of failure of their END rolls . Codified procedures for disease are found in Mongoose Traveller and Cepheus Engine:coffeesip:.

 

[Werner]

Another factor to consider in your scenario communication between time travelers and the people of the time period they have entered. The further distance in time one goes in either direction, the more a language changes compared to what is normally understandable. Forms of address (Hey Dude vs My Good Sir), slang (I don't like the color of your tweed), acquired words from other languages (kamakazi, canyon) and idioms even with a universal translator ("Tember! His eyes open!"). This does not in itself prevent travel, just an additional hurdle (roleplaying opportunity) along the way. For us, 500 years back takes us to Middle English which untrained takes a bit to be fluent in. Go back a thousand and have fun reading Beowulf in the original Old English, if you can find a written copy. Spanish is similar, there are different "Spanish" going back to Latin. Those Castilians talk funny (I'm Mexican American). Don't know the exact info for other languages, but I suppose it's similar

I was thinking in the above scenario, the ship's computer library helps out, among the many things kept in the Ship's library are ancient language files, and there is an autotranslare program that when activated translates all the displays on the bridge, it has a glass cockpit with holographic touch screens an AI residing in the Ship's computer listens in to the astronaut's conversation while they are onboard, when it finds a match with what they are speaking with one of its ancient language files, it auto translate suddenly all the display screens show readouts in early 21st century English, and all the library files are translated too, that should speed things up.

The AI doesn't have much of a personality, it tends to stay in the background, sometimes it just does something but it doesn't explain itself very much. Some people find an overly talkative ship's computer a little creepy, so it keeps quiet. The astronauts might be a little shocked when suddenly they find everything on the display screens in English, there are also online users manuals, and technical readouts for every Ship's system, including any damage to the ship's jump drive and how to fix it. Spare parts are located in the ship's cargo hold.

 

[aramis]

How many diseases are a group of four pcs likely to be carrying in their scout ship? Most of those Indians suffered when the Spanish settlers arrived, now if you assume the scout ship arrived by accident, then those four are all your likely to get, and if the timeline shifts with their arrival, you won't be getting more from that future.

The average human has a whole lot of microbiome.
over 300 in the gut alone. And some of those pass out of the gut.

And that's before accounting for actual suppressed diseases.

The majority of the human species is infected with one or more herpes virus strains. the immune system can render harmless without actual eradication.

So, the number of potentially problematic carried diseases is in the hundreds to thousands of species.

The question shouldn't be "how many can be problems?"
It should be, "How many are likely transmissible?"

And that has been, historically, at least 2-4 diseases...

 

[Grav_Moped]

...
B. There are some illnesses that we have never had real natural immunity to and worse may be "forgotten". One example might be smallpox. The last US outbreak occurred in 1949. The last smallpox vaccines were given in 1980 and now exists only in laboratories (as far as we know). :devil: Say, a time traveler goes back to 1889 and gets exposed. Will those samples exist 3000+ years in the future to make new vaccine? Or will billions suffer and die as the research has to be redone :smirk:

The genetic sequence will be stored in the Vilani False Knowledge repositories.

Alternately, it will be incorporated into the standard IISS and Imperial military vaccination package. (No, you don't know everything it covers -- that's above your pay grade -- but it covers pretty much everything.)

 

[Werner]

The average human has a whole lot of microbiome.
over 300 in the gut alone. And some of those pass out of the gut.

And that's before accounting for actual suppressed diseases.

The majority of the human species is infected with one or more herpes virus strains. the immune system can render harmless without actual eradication.

So, the number of potentially problematic carried diseases is in the hundreds to thousands of species.

The question shouldn't be "how many can be problems?"
It should be, "How many are likely transmissible?"

And that has been, historically, at least 2-4 diseases...

Still, four people can't be carrying that many new diseases, the population of 1889 would be getting new diseases all the time, I'm not sure the diseases four people would bring would be statistically noticable or traceable to them given the disease ridden manure piled world of 1889. I bet you New York City absolutely reeked of horse dung in 1889, imagine all those cars you see today being replaced with horses and carriage and what that would smell like! Imagine all the black flies all over the place. Where ever you have huge concentrations of people you also get huge concentrations of animals and their smells. Imagine living in New York City and smelling horse sung where ever you go. It would be hard to get rid of the smell of all those beasts of burden.

 

[Werner]

I think I'll use Dying Mars from GURPS Mars for the Mars in this setting. The technology of Mars is TL 3 in Traveller terms, except for the relic tech in the well preserved ruins deep in the Martian desert. It might be possible to repair or replace the jump drive with some of that tech.

 

[Straybow]

What is the best way to introduce time travel into a Traveller campaign?

Don't. Almost all time travel stories suck. Most multiverse stories suck. In many milieux that include rebounding from collapse, one can find a planet at a pop and tech level comparable to 21st cen Earth.

 

[Werner]

Don't. Almost all time travel stories suck. Most multiverse stories suck. In many milieux that include rebounding from collapse, one can find a planet at a pop and tech level comparable to 21st cen Earth.

You can't find a country comparable to the 19th century on Earth, not even in the third world, they may be poor, but they still exist in the 21st century and have 21st century technology.

Time travel isn't too bad if you don't do it too often. If you have a time machine where you can set the date and time and go there, it becomes a device to solve problems, you can go back in time and fix it, and if at first you don't succeed, try try and try again, that is what a fully functional time machine allows you to do.

Accidental once in a campaign time travel is a different story, you get the time travel portion over with to bring you to a specific time and you never revisit it, the player characters can't repeat it, they have no idea how it happened in the first place, and they didn't even choose to go back in time, the time travel event was a total fluke beyond their control, so they are stuck back in time and have to make the best of things with the resources under their control.

 

[mike wightman]

Fixing a problem in the past means the future you return to is not the same as the future you came from.

As an aside have you looked at any time travel rpgs? Time and Time again is one of my favourites, and EABA has quite a nice time travel game in Timelords.

 

[Werner]

Fixing a problem in the past means the future you return to is not the same as the future you came from.

As an aside have you looked at any time travel rpgs? Time and Time again is one of my favourites, and EABA has quite a nice time travel game in Timelords.

In science fiction, the setting and the RPG are often one and the same. Its interesting that they never adapted Dungeons & Dragons for
Lord of the Rings, nor have they adapted Traveller for Star Wars. Nope Lord of the Rings needs its own game mechanics, it needs its own ability scores, ways of determining hit and miss, and its own character sheets, instead of just creating a set of rules pertaining to the setting, they have to make a whole RPG from top to bottom.

I have owned a game called Timemaster, the hard part about time travel is not knowing the setting until the players set their time machine to go there, dungeons are easy by comparison, the limit the possibilities so the GM can prepare for them. Instead, you can have PCs hunt down Adolf Hitler on the battlefields or World War II, they pepper him with bullets and then jump into the time machine and head to the future, and the GM has a few minutes to figure out what they find once the get there. I guess there are rules to prevent PCs from doing this. Free PC determined time travel, where they can set the dials of their DeLorean to anywhere they want is hard to rule one the fly.

The other choice is simply have a game where the PCs get to play disentimed characters. The characters are in a piece of real estate with a bunch of other characters that are in a time period they are not supposed to be in by accident. Island in the Sea of Time, or 1632 by Eric Flint, if you don't have characters moving up and down the timeline at will, it is much easier to GM.

 

[whartung]

Star Trek (TOS) did several takes on time travel.

From actually going back in time, trying to mitigate their impact of going back in time, to just finding cultures that were "trapped" in time (Chicago gangsters, Romans with TV, Nazi Germany).

Landing on Timerovers Old School Texas planet is essentially a trip back in time as well.

 

[Werner]

Star Trek (TOS) did several takes on time travel.

From actually going back in time, trying to mitigate their impact of going back in time, to just finding cultures that were "trapped" in time (Chicago gangsters, Romans with TV, Nazi Germany).

Landing on Timerovers Old School Texas planet is essentially a trip back in time as well.

The best time travel stories are about the destination rather than about the time machine itself. If you are an author writing a book about time travel and your characters have a time machine, you control your characters so they don't get any bright ideas on how to use time travel to solve certain problems unless you want them to. For instance in Back to the Future Marty's encounter with the Indians resulted in a severed fuel line, which after he was chased out of the cave by a bear resulted in the fuel tank being drained, so now Marty had no gasoline with which to reach 88 miles per hour, no problem, they just have to dig out the other Delorean that Doc Brown buried in the mine for Marty to find in 1955, and then siphon some gas from that Delorean's fuel tank to this one's, and they can swap whatever parts they need between the two cars, so long as they can be replaced in 1955.

One cheat is to move the time machine into the future to find out how the PCs solved a problem, one way to counter this is to rule that the PCs went missing for the amount of time they moved into the future, the timeline the moved forward in doesn't include them returning from the future, so they can't ask their future selves how they solved a particular problem, so when they return to their present, they create a new future which makes the future they visited irrelevant.

Time machines can be resurrection machines, you can go back in time and save a character right before he died by removing him from the situation that killed him, you create another timeline when you do that.

You know when you do all sorts of funny stuff involving paradoxes, that kind of takes away from the past places the characters would be visiting, PCs end up going back and forth in time trying to do this and that.

 

[BRJN]

In the No-Rebellion timeline, one of the 'news bulletins' mentions an Nth Interstellar War courier arriving at Dingir in 1120. It promptly is rescued by the Navy and disappears from public view.

 

[Straybow]

Not worth it.

You can't find a country comparable to the 19th century on Earth, not even in the third world, they may be poor, but they still exist in the 21st century and have 21st century technology.

That's only true now because we're selling it to them. Just one lifetime ago (80 yrs) it wasn't so. There were whole countries that had no electricity. Heck, there were parts of the USA that only got electricity courtesy of FDR's rural electrification project. There were islands that had never seen a ship or airplane before WW2, started cargo cults, etc. The African interior was equally deprived, technologically.


A planet isolated by trade collapse, with a local collapse of civilization, could easily get them back to using steam and maybe forgetting about high tech entirely. Strand your players there with almost any kind of maintenance problem and there are no resources for them to repair the ship.

Time travel isn't too bad if you don't do it too often. If you have a time machine where you can set the date and time and go there, it becomes a device to solve problems, you can go back in time and fix it, and if at first you don't succeed, try try and try again, that is what a fully functional time machine allows you to do.

Accidental once in a campaign time travel is a different story, you get the time travel portion over with to bring you to a specific time and you never revisit it, the player characters can't repeat it, they have no idea how it happened in the first place, and they didn't even choose to go back in time, the time travel event was a total fluke beyond their control, so they are stuck back in time and have to make the best of things with the resources under their control.

Just as bad. Time travel can't happen by accident, like the guy with the chocolate bar and the guy with the peanut butter jar bumping into each other. In a milieu such as the OTU, a one-in-a-billion accident would happen regularly, maybe once a month. The chance of it happening to you is still so small that it becomes an implausible plot.



If time travel could be possible it would take stupendous amounts of energy even by scifi standards of near-limitless power (maybe mc² per second traversed). It would take precise manipulation of space time with exotic matter and super-duper handwavium fields, not something that can just happen. And if it can happen once, it can be duplicated. Only a stupendous energy requirement would prevent it from becoming the Temporal Authority intervention of the week.

 

[Grav_Moped]

And if it could be duplicated, it would be. This would lead to the standard time travel problems, like would-be Hitler-assassins running into each other or an impossibly large crowd at The Crucifixion.

One catch is that if there was any action that could make time travel impossible, and a transfinite future in which time travel is possible, with a similarly transfinite number of time-travelers, one of them will eventually do that very thing and block time travel for everyone permanently.

And I still like the central conceit of Niven's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation".

Spoiler:

The universe itself hates time machines, and thus a series of increasingly implausible and catastrophic coincidences will ensure that none will be completed.