Many of the inspirations for my Cepheus Engine adventures are old episodes of the original Star Trek series. Kirk, Spock and McCoy led many interesting adventures to strange new worlds and places. But one recurring theme in the show was time travel.
The show demonstrated a number of possible ways that one might go back in time. These included:
- Alien artifacts
- Getting too close to the sun’s gravitational force
- Getting too close to a black hole’s gravitational force
- Planets which adopted Roman and Nazi forms of government
- Strange machines in libraries on a planet about to go nova which could send one back into history to escape the devastation
- A time traveler who fought with a duplicate of himself causing havoc in the space time continuum.
If the show had gone on for a fourth season I am fairly confident that they would have come up with even more methods. One thing that they neglected, however, was the possibility of going into the future rather than into the past.
With time travel your players could visit historic times in the distant and not so distant past. Think of the possibilities? Some that come to my mind while writing this article include:
- Prehistoric times visiting the dinosaurs
- Prehistoric times visiting the neanderthals
- Visiting the ancient Romans or Greeks
- Visiting Occupied Europe during the second world war
- Arriving at pearl harbor just before the attack (the Final Countdown Movie)
- Finding oneself on the front lines in the trenches of World War One
- Going into the future (and considering that we are playing a futuristic sci fi game that might take some serious imagination)
There are all kinds of things one could do and all kinds of directions that one could go. One could even go into alternative histories. What if?
- What if the Nazis had won?
- What if the Japanese Empire had?
- What if the Germans had won in the previous war to end all wars?
- What if the Roman Empire never fell?
There are many other what ifs that you could probably think of that I have not included here. Those possibilities are endless too.
