So my group started using the Navis Primer for warp travel and such. Our luck died at the end of our last session where we got stuck in warp transit for an approximate 275 days. Then, lo and behold, we got spat out 5 years in the past where my friends Explorator hasn't left his Forge World yet and my Astropath is currently on Terra. So many options but overall, we're screwed

Leave the empire, leave it right now and don't come back until the time line has caught up. Be pirates for a while if you got to, do something but don't stay in the Imperium or your looking at a very short lifespan indeed.

lurkeroutthere said:

+1

lurkeroutthere said:

Time travel is tricky business (story wise) to get it right, so I'm always curious to peoples view on the matter. So why would this incur a short(er) lifespan when these players are in 'proximity' of their time ancestors?

wolph42 said:

thanks for the elaboration!

'ordo chronos' never heard of them (no pun intended here) but I like the ring to that.

There are however a couple of 'softening' circumstances.

- first off, communication within the empire is slow so its reasonably safe to say that NO ONE has an up to date overview of who actually is an official RT, these warrants will be in flux constantly and it may take years for them to get updated at hubs. Granted within the sector where you got your warrant and where the house operates things are likely more up to date, but even then it might take a year or so for it to get updated.

- given that, the second question is: how many times does a RT actually have to show her warrant? Usually trade is done in the name of house X and the presence and official documents of ownership concerning the 'to trade good' are usually enough. That and in the sector if you start more emphasis on exploring you will encounter new planets anyway and you can colonize those.

- You should however indeed be weary to entre places like the Solomon planet of administration or Port Wander. Footfall however… who cares, they mainly be looking at the size of your gun and the air of your chin.

- As for astropaths… fair point, so hire new ones, might be a bit tricky but hell you're still a RT

-Assets… also good point, but the house WILL have had assets 5 years ago, you SHOULD have the documentation of these…but…trading them might indeed seriously screw up the timeline. There are however also intangible assets e.g. blackmail, status, favors etc which you know have not been called in for the past/future 5 years by your time ancestors so you can call them in now.

As for 'timeline screwing' itself, here there are choices to be made into which theory you follow. The 'best' IMO is the one where Terminator (movie) is base on and IRC Primer as well. This Simply assumes that as soon as you travel back in time you create a new time-line which, if you were to do absolutely nothing, will *look* very similar to the one you already lived in (but is different altogether). Its called a N type (based on the form of the letter:

| originally time path

/ (this forum does not allow the backslash) travelling back in time

| again travel the same time distance

creating a time travel that looks like N also showing that the first | and the second | are NOT the same.

Its good to keep that in mind as GM.

Hopefully one of the characters kept a journal of where they went and what you did so you could avoid yourselves. Things you could do are:

• Go deep into the expanse and see what profits you can make there
• Change your name and retag your ship to assume another identity all together (GM could allude to a rogue trader doing big business that you heard of but never met)
• Secretly help yourself out by hiding out until your group gathers and then create conditions favorable to your past selves(sabotage a trader you know you need help from and your group can easily help him out, attack a base before your group would have to, go recover loot you couldn't get to, kill a rival before he would have screwed you, ect.)
• leave a note to tell your past selves those were the droids you were looking for

Kill your past selves and take their places.

I might not be familiar with canon material regarding time travel in the WH40k universe, but I don't understand the reaction of, "OMG! Stay Far Away from the Imperium!" Five years is not a long time in the lives of people who can live to be 600-700 years old, so staying away wouldn't be a big deal, regardless. You could just have it occur out-of-session too. The next time you meet to play just have 5 years as passed, and make cosmetic changes; everyone's a bit older and fatter, etc. This might be an opportunity for your GM to start a radically new set of endeavors or to run the campaign on an entirely new tack.

When I put myself in the boots of a rogue trader in this situation, I think: "Hey I just won an extra ship, fully stocked crew, a new family member who thinks just like I do and a physical back-up of my warrant of trade!" I would try to find that person and stop at nothing to make an immediate alliance. 'Double your money and power overnight!

If you can't trust yourself to have your own back, who can you trust?

This gives me all sorts of adventure / endeavor ideas:

• Party learns that their past selves were killed / destroyed after they entered the warp trip, which lead to their time travel; paradox solved! Now the explorers may set out to discover what happened to their old selves and maybe salvage what's left of the party or their assets. Maybe they find their old selves in a coma (wounded or otherwise). These "old selves" might be placed in stasis fields to be "thawed out" when the explorers are killed, a great way to justify Fate point burn off for surviving an impossible situation, like a destroyed void ship. How do they have such great memories? The party seneschal kept an excellent adventure journal! Maybe they could even divert the situation that lead to their destruction?
• Dispense clues to some future adventure / endeavor: the Explorer(s) suddenly recall being approached by a stranger in a market a few years ago who gave them dire warnings, which if they did not heed they would surely be destroyed. "I though he was a mad man; I'd nearly forgotten the whole thing! But . . .It all makes sense now! He did look awfully familiar!"
• Use this to justify a sudden, unexpected surge in Profit Rating; "A few years ago the dynasty received a servo skull with instructions to invest in certain holdings. It seemed like a ridiculous long shot at first, so we just put a few thousands thrones into it. Couldn't hurt, right? Well, if we had known of the resultant windfall we would have put the entire family's fortune behind it! I wish I knew who sent us that servo skull, I'd like to build him a statue. . ."
• The explorers of the past are caught in "warp loop" caused by the time travel incident, which leads to their being trapped in the immaterium (while the time traveled explorers did not). When they finally escape, they are hopelessly insane having spent decades lost to the Warp. Their only wish is to find and destroy the time-shunted explorers, the current party, which they somehow believe will end their torment.

Look at the new Star Trek relaunch that came out in 2009. Time travel is a story-telling opportunity by which you can tell all new stories with well-known characters. Don't be afraid.

I should have elaborated further. There's basically a page report in intot he storm about a navy ship that came out of the warp before it had even left the dockywards. There was no record of this ship on the imperium's rolls so naturally they were detained. The Admech and Church portions of the crew were remanded to their patron organzations. The captain went into Inquisition custody and the common ratings and officers were executed by spacing.

5 Years isn't presumably as big a deal but it still is going to cause some problems. The default assumption if they linger in the imperium itself is going tob e they are imposters, especially in areas as heavily patrolled and regulated as major shiping lanes and port wander. Going out into the backwater will help considerably. Going out into the expanse is even better. The further you get from the maw the safer you are. Also they've got a problem if their their warrant is of a very recent vintage as they've suddenly got a post dated warrant. If they have an older warrant they could stay in the imperium as long as they go somewhere far from where their current selves are located.

All this is based on the Imperium's natural paranoia and inflexible nature about irregularities. If there is actually a concerted effort by shadowy powers within the inquisition to protect the timeline then they've got even bigger problems.

It'll be pretty hard for them to get into trouble as imposters since they are themselves, so they should be able to pass any and every authentication test.

Except there's no person yet to authenticate to, or rather the person their authenticating to hasn't been giving the position they are claiming to have.

Personally I would go for black ops. Deep dark and covert. I would begin setting up events to stay hidden but culminate in the 5 years that would ultimately aid in what ever endeavor the time travel so rudely interrupted. The key things would be it has to stay secret and it has to have no effect on the timeline till you catch up.

Yeah, its gonna be interesting. We basically have 3 ideas that we are tossing back and forth. Keep in mind that my Astropath passed his Forbidden Lore Warp test with like 5 degrees so the Gm said that there is no causality because its the Warp, can do whatever the hell it wants. One is that we take on aliases and act like nothing and basically screw our past selves over by redoing a lot of the missions and taking all the money. The next is that we just kill our past selves when they get on their ship and take their places. The last one, my favorite, is that we just hide out somewhere, or assist our past selves, secretely of course, and "re-enter" when our past selves would go into the Warp that leads to the time jump.

Sarvus von Blod said:

If I were your DM I'd rule that entering the warp in the same place and the same time produces the same result, and you're now in the past again, along with your past selves.

Don't forget that it's not only about you. You have a crew of at least 10,000 - possibly many, many more. I don't know the nature of your crew compliment. If they're all basically void-born and have lived generations aboard that ship, sure, fair enough, there won't be many problems.

But even amongst a fairly solid crew with their homes with them, there's possibly thousands of workers that were just signing on for a single trip, or have families elsewhere, or were hitching a ride from point A to B, hitchhiking through the galaxy. There could be workers that send their earnings home to far-away relatives and whatnot.

What about them? You, the maybe 20 or so senior officers, career folk with your families aboard - there's no problems for you. You can kill your former selves, screw them over, you have no attachments that are dependant on temporal causality or space-time location. But out of the tens of thousands that are working for you, I bet there's at least several hundred that do, if not thousands.

This just reminds me of an Ork warboss that ended up arriving at a battle before he left and attacked their fleet in the past and killed himself because he wanted a copy of his favorite gun.

I'm not sure i'd want to kill myself even if the resident expert was sure there was no causality, just seems like the epitome of bad karma.

Those crew, if they had any sense at all, would have understood that even the "safest" rogue trader vessel could be away from the Imperium for years at a time, if only due to warp time dilation. Family ties outside the ship get strained by years passing while the crew only see weeks or months.

I say keep away from the Imperium, disguise the ship (there is a fake front component in Hostile Acquisitions) and use skullduggery to aid your dynasty in secret for five years.

The other option is just don't tell the crew that they've been shunted through time and keep them on a tight leash for the next 5 years.

I think the big problems here (for the GM anyway) are answering how a paradox works and what happens when you meet yourself.

Decessor said:

Fgdsfg said:

Well, yes and no. I mean, you don't get the time dialation that you would when you actually go FTL, but you *do* get a lot of time weirdness because the Warp is the Warp. The correlation between time spent travelling and the duration of the journey is generally pretty weak.

Have you heard about that supposedly canonical story about how an Ork Warboss killed his past self to get two of his favorite gun?

There weren't any repercussions or anything. He didn't wink out of existence or anything like that. He just kept on going, now with two of his favorite gun.

That's apparently (one option) of how time travel works in 40k…

Fgdsfg said:

Sure, the vast majority of the Imperium don't know that significant time travel is a danger of the warp. But that's just because the vast majority of the Imperium doesn't know squat about warp travel at all. A ship's crew, on the other hand, will, even if it's only superstition, oral histories etc.

But no, warp travel is not time dilation free - quite the opposite. It's just that the time dilation isn't constant the way it would be with 'regular' (Real World) high speed travel. A ship in the warp will experience time differently than people in the RW - you might live for three weeks in the Warp while 6 months go by in the Imperium, or spend 6 months in the warp while three weeks go by in the RW.

In any case the crew of a long-range warp vessel (one that makes more than 5 light year jumps regularly) accepts that they're unlikely to ever return home (assuming 'home' isn't the ship they are on, which it will be for most of them). A Rogue Trader leaving Scintilla for a trip out to the Koronus Expanse might not return for a decade or more. One leaving for another Segmentum might not return for centuries (if ever). And the crew don't get a say or any warning of which it's going to be. If you agree to work for a RT (as opposed to being press ganged or bought, which most new recruits probably are) then you do so knowing that you're basically signing your life away.

Fgdsfg said:

Take a look at p183 of the core book. The section on "The Passage Of Time In Real Space" for where I'm coming from. The "average" ratio given is for each day in the warp, twelve days pass in real time. That varies wildly depending on local warp conditions. Hence, warp time dilation.