Im thinking of making a mission or even a full campaign dealing with time and the surrounding things and i was wondering what the imperium had experimented or even knew about time anyone know?

ThenDoctor said:

I assume you mean time travel. As far as official canon on time travel, I'd say there isn't a whole lot. Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor travels through time via a doorway through the Warp in the book Ravenor Rogue . And there are stories about ships flying through the Warp that sometimes emerge at their destination before they ever left their starting point, or ships that get "lost" in the Warp only to emerge hundreds of years later, even though from the perspectives of the people on the ship, it's only been a few weeks. Of course, that's all very unpredictable stuff that's probably very hard to reproduce in any reliable manner.

But, if you want to do a time travel story, you can just make it up. The Warp is a good tool because anything is possible when it comes to the Warp. There could also be lost tech from the Dark Age of Technology or Xenos tech that might allow time travel.

Personally, I'd be wary of time travel plots because there are many potentials for logical paradoxes and thematic problems. (E.g., If I go back in time and kill someone's parents before he was born, then does that person still exist? Can I go back in time and tell myself something? If I change something in the past, then do I create an alternate timeline in addition to the timeline I came from, or do I destroy the old timeline? If I destroy the timeline I came from, then do I cease to exist? Etc.)

To me, there are 2 basic approaches to time travel that make sense. The approach you see in the movie 12 Monkeys . And the approach taken by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five . LOST just did a whole season on time travel, so you could always purloin some of that material.

Im taking the Doctor Who rules on time travel meaning if you do something like that it creates a paradox in which demons called Reapers kill you very quickly. it wont be about time travel just the technology behind it, basicly an adept wants to bring back his dead inquisitor and he decides to bring him back the moment just before he was killed with strange mix of xeno heretek and dark age technology and the result are these slip streams of time that let in creatures i just wanted to know if anyone else had ever encountered time as a main plot theme.

Doctor Who's time travel rules are completely plot driven. Whatever makes a good story, hooray. The Father's Day R eapers were introduced then quickly forgotten about in favour of 'wibbly wobbly time wimey' and 'I can sense when I can change things and when I can't'. Which is to say: Anything goes as long as the story makes sense.

With 40k, the few things I recall which even begin dealing with timetravel:

- C'tan & Necron Tech (the very nature of the FTL/teleportation stuff implies relativity, causality and maximal speed of signal propogation doesn't work like we think it does/should)
- The short story The Voice in Tales of Heresy
- The novel Star of Damocles , second in Andy Hoare's Rogue Trader series
- The novel Ravenor Rogue
- The novel Harlequin or Chaos Child (no3 in the Inquisition War trilogy)
- Speculation on the 'Hrud'. There's been things like 'out of synch with time' and other oddball things like that. Who knows what it means? Not me!
- Eldar farseeing
- Divination in any form hints at an alternate view of time as to the 'conventional'.

Personally, I think a campaign which uses time travel as an almost 'antagonist' is intriguing. The beauty of 40k is that nightmare resolutions to paradoxes are quite possible. I see no reason whatsoever that your future self couldn't pop out of the warp and try to kill you. If it succeeds...so? The nature of the warp is that it doesn't just defy reason, it can often defy explanation .

Doing this in a manner which doesn't irritate the hell out of your players and is satisfying would be difficult, but not impossible. Try not to give them actual control over their time travel. Even if they end up in the TARDIS, have it act largely beyond their control. Naples 1860? No, Cardiff 1869.

Lots of opportunity, but you can really struggle with it too. A few of my ideas for the Demiurg deal with vaguely introducing some 'timetravel aspects'. Not pitching them as actual timetravellers , but as folks who might . I.e. as a plothook one could've experimented and travelled back in time and now you're foe is someone who's stranded in the past (your present) from the future! But have it...imperfect.

Alternatively have them trample all over their pasts having to face off against chronodaemons and future-spectres and alternate-ghosts. You could really go to town with inviting paradoxes, certain changes undoing (or incurring) old injuries, certain other changes removing party members. Tie the threads of fate together in an inventive and fun way, but do avoid exasperating your players. A compelling narrative with lots of opportunity for fun should hopefully overturn the pedantry of some people!

I have tried telling stories in a non-chronological order. Thus allowing the players to experience things outside of their main characters timelines, either through their characters (very tricky), or by letting the players borrow other characters. This assumes that the character travels regularly along the timeline, only that the players sees it differently. It is tricky to create enough railroading and clues to make the stories match up without overcontrolling the players power over their characters. But I don't think this is what you will do. What I want to reccomend you strongly is to make sure the time travel machine is dependent upon some non-reproduceable factor that the PCs cannot control and that goes away after the adventure. If this is part of a more regular campaign you do not want your players have access to time travel. It makes plotting frakkin impossible.

The best way I've found to handle timetravel is the strange, unexplainable approach. Confuse your players. Try something like this:

At the beginning of the gaming session have the characters in a seriously uncomfortable situation (wrong side of a courtroom, in front of annoyed inquisitor etc) Keep it unclear for the players exactly what they are accused of. Have an unseen benefactor step in and get your characters out of the trouble by speaking to the judging inquisitor. Let a few skilled perception tests give a glance at the benefactor, who looks very much like a member of the party (preferably a player that could use a bit more stage-time). Get out of trouble, start the main story <insert main story, saving a dead inquisitor, possibly the same inquisitor that was questioning them earlier>

Later in the story, after the main plot have been resolved, have your characters sent back in time to rescue your earlier self from the peril. "it's necessary to stabilize the stream" Naturally with stern instructions to act exactly as the benefactor did in your previous experience of the happening, breaking that would of course place you all in an other timeline. Something will of course go wrong, and the characters will return to a completely baffled time travel machine operator who has never seen them before, (he might have sent some completely different people away). In this timeline the players don't previously exist (or they might have been jailed or something), wich they might enjoy, or might not. The operator can figure out what happened and offer to help the characters set it right (maybe they have to resque the inquisitor... again?). Sending the characters back in time to ambush their second incarnation in this particular spot, without being seen by their first. After they have succeeded and they are returned, they will be met by a bunch of inq stormtroopers or similar, and arrested and taken to the uncomfortable situation where this story begun. This time it will be apparent that they are being tried for messing with the timeflow. The players alternate selves then steps in and saves the caracters (this is probably their second incarnation). The rest of the day passes uneventfully, without any of the strange things that happened last time they went through it. End of story. By now they should be reasonably confused and feel lost and like they had a great adventure and nothing really happened. Feel free to introduce the same timetraveling acolyte again with the same request of the players later in the campaign, I'm sure your characters will appreciate it greatly... they might even refuse :-)

The thing is none of the pcs will be traveling through time, maybe a little out of sink, i.e. a cat walks down a hallway and 5 seconds later you see the same thing, simple things like that but i want time to be an antagonist like chronodaemons or future spectres perhaps they are trying to stop a possible future from occuring or making one start to happen. i cant decide though of the book list would you mind just summing up the time bits. and as for doctor who thats why i like those rules they bend fairly easily lol

If you want a good (and I mean very good) treatment of how to run a time travel rpg game, check out Continuum. It's the best game you'll (probably) never get to play, and has as a basic premise some fairly casual time travel. There are a couple of torrents of the rulebook floating around, but I'm going to say support the makers (aetherco) and get it from them. I will warn you that much of the theme of the game is insufficiently grimdark for 40k, but using it as an example of how to deal with 4-dimensional thinking and paradox is definitely useful.

ThenDoctor said:

All this is in my very humple opinion: I think it would be a terrible waste of a time-machine if you do not let your characters travel through time in it. It seems to me like you are going to use it like you could any old stupid demonic summoning circle or necromantic ritual. It might bring the dead guy back to life, and it will spawn strange enemies that the players will have to fight. I think you are wasting a lot of wonderful story potential here.

At least consider reintroducing this timemachine later on in the same campaign... please? *puppy eyes*

Well, its certainly very easy to travel into the future in 40k. In fact, you simply have to kick on the plasma drives at maximum and accelerate for about a year into deep space without switching off the plasma drives. Then you could drift for a bit, turn around, come back, and see how everything turned out for the good old Imperium of Man. If you timed it right, you could easily play a game of 'Warhammer 80K' roleplay after your realtively short trip. Hell, you could get a look at the Universe long after mankind goes extinct. (Maybe this is what the craftworlds are doing, drifting out there in deep space)Traveling backwards in Time would obviously be more difficult and might represent a tech-heresy of the most lethal proportions. Like an entire AdMech battlefleet mobilizing to halt/steal the technology. But, given Warp Travel and Teleportation, Time travel is certainly possible. Maybe even controllable. Hell, even Stasis Fields represent a form of time manipulation. Perhaps secreted away in the depths of the Lathe Worlds is a Time Manipulation Array, concealed for Millenia in the Adamantine core of the Planet. Perhaps the mechanicus turn it on and cause some serious problems (Black Sun anyone?). Perhaps the acolytes are sent to distrupt the Tech Ritual before heinous damage to the sacred history of Mankind and Plan of the Emperor is irevvokably damaged. Maybe in the process they are drawn into the device and end up in the middle of some serious sh@#, like for example the fall of Eldar Civilization and the opening of the Eye of Terror, or perhaps the days when the Emperor walked the earth, and pretty much killed everyone who didn't agree with him.... Wherever they end up, there should be a very pressing reason for them to get 'home' as quickly s possible...

im sorry that was a typo i meant to put "They will NOT be time traveling"