TimeWatch - Review of an Amazingly Great Game

I'm a big time travel fan, so when TimeWatch was a Kickstarter project in 2014, I immediately backed it. Like most Kickstarters that keep on adding content as stretch goals, the final book was delivered 1.75 years later than scheduled. The good news was that upon pledging, we got a preliminary PDF, then a PDF version for copy editing, then a PDF with full images and corrections, then a final PDF and hard copy version. And several books with campaign support material. Multiple contributors for content (needing editorial changes for consistency of tone between writers) and art (switched from B&W to color as a stretch goal) were reasons for production delays. The final book ballooned in size to 392 pages.

The good news was that I was able to play TimeWatch in 2014 with the preliminary PDF. There weren't any scenarios written yet, but I found an amazing scenario written by Michael Rees: The Buffalo, The Pirate and the Consulting Detective. He has other scenarios on his website and his scenarios were so well loved that he was asked to contribute to the final book. See what happens when you have a time travel Kickstarter? Someone writes stuff for a game that hasn't been published yet and it winds up in the published game.

TimeWatch uses a modified Gumshoe system. I have mixed feelings about Trail of Cthulhu due to Gumshoe, but for TimeWatch, I LOVE the system.

What's different about TimeWatch?

Well, if the PCs can time travel, then most ordinary crimes can be easily solved, so the antagonists that the players face are always other time travelers. There are a variety of bad guys listed in the book, but there are two that are extensively show cased: Sophosaurs and Ezeru.

Sophosaurs vs Ezeru

The Sophosaurs are intelligent dinosaurs from the past who want to prevent the Asteroid from wiping them out, so the reign of dinosaurs continues into the future. The Ezeru are giant cockroaches from the future who rule Earth after humanity wipes itself out with nuclear weapons. They want to start WW3 early.

In between the Sophosaurs in the past and the Ezeru in the future are humans. Both races want to squeeze humanity out.

TimeWatch can be played in a variety of styles, humorous like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or serious like Timeless.

Most of the games are investigative. Instead of following clues forward, in this game, you follow the clues backwards in time. There's always some instigating event far in the past and its effect ripples out forwards in time until things change in a massive way. An example is a story written by Ray Bradbury: A Sound of Thunder.  TimeWatch is tasked to fix these disruptions to the "real" timeline.

How does TimeWatch know when something has gone wrong? Well, they have detection equipment seeded throughout time and when something changes suddenly like high levels of radiation or the equipment suddenly goes dead, they know something has gone wrong and they send a TimeWatch team to check it out and fix it.

E of TimeWatch

At the beginning of time, before the Big Bang is the Citadel, where TimeWatch HQ sits. TimeWatch agents are dispatched from there. In my game, the players' handler is E, he gives the mission briefing to the PCs. I also love James Bond, so I made a reference to it by using letters as titles (M and Q). I know, MiB also does this except they're referencing people's names.

How do they time travel? Each agent has an Autochron that allows them to time travel. You set the time and location and it takes you there in a few rounds. The Autochron will adjust your location so no locals can see you arrive. The more you travel in time, the less accurate the Autochron is, so if you travel thousands of years, you might arrive a decade too late. The Autochron creates a personal time bubble much like what happens in The Terminator.

Terminator Time Bubble

In my games, I like the idea of a watch being a time machine, so my Autochrons look like wrist watches. And I have a fondness for the story: The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything.

How do you know what in the timeline is broken? Well, the PCs have a device called a Tether that's like a local version of Google/Wikipedia. When you arrive, you can talk to people or check libraries and newspapers for deviations from your local knowledge store. In my games, the players are allowed to look up facts on their smart phones. This generally takes no more than 5 minutes and it enhances the role play experience. Their smart phone is a low tech version of a Tether.

Instead of the Stability/Sanity metric in Trail of Cthulhu, TimeWatch has Chronal Stability. Each time you time travel or create a paradox (when you do something that contradicts a known fact), you might lose Chronal Stability. If you annoy time too much, it might subsume you and merge you into the current timeline, modifying your memories, like skin growing over a splinter. If you do something totally bad, time may erase you from time, then even your TimeWatch team members won't remember you and no one can bring you back.

How do you know you've fixed everything? You can time travel back to beginning of the adventure and see if everything is back to normal. In one scenario, the PCs are given a device that can detect time drift and when the needle is in the green section, they know they've finished the mission. A bit meta and odd, but that works too.

In my games, E doesn't give out too much information and doesn't want to know how the agents solve the problem because if you know, then history is set and you're subject to paradox. It's the unwritten history missing from their Tethers that allows TimeWatch Agents to act freely.

A number of rules and pieces of equipment is to allow for better game play. I always bring this up because some new players would say some things don't make sense. And I would explain the mechanical reason for it and that would end the argument.

To prevent PCs from having to learn every possible language and infinite costume changes, the PCs have universal translators and Impersonator Meshes (in my world, they're holographic disguises). This mainly aids in game play when PCs jump from time to time and geolocation to geolocation.

Since killing someone in the past might erase your future, the agents are given stun weapons and MEM-tags. The MEM-tags sends an unconscious body back to the Citadel for memory wipe/modification. Once processed, the body is returned, so as to not disrupt the time stream.

What is fun about the game is that you get to play with history, learn history, and interact with it.

So far, I feel it is a daunting task to write a scenario from scratch. The good news is that the core book has 3 complete scenarios and 32 Time Seeds (inspirational ideas for your own game). The Kickstarter included a campaign "Behind Enemy Times" which contains 6 connected scenarios. "The Valkyrie Gambit," 3 stand alone scenarios. "Book of Changing Years," a faux history/diary of TimeWatch to be used as inspiration for your own games, in the spirit of "The Armitage Files" and "The Dracula Dossier." And I've a run several of Michael Rees' scenarios that he's posted on his website.

I definitely got more than my money's worth from the Kickstarter and I'm glad Kevin Kulp spent the time and care to get the books right.

The devil is always in the details. For example, it took me a long time before I noticed the following detail on the cover of the TimeWatch core book:

Battling Civil War Armies

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As an aside, I originally thought Chronal Stability checks were only done for time travel and paradox checks, but in "Behind Enemy Times" one scenario stated that any teleport with the Autochron also required a Chronal Stability check. So, I contacted Kevin Kulp and he explained that using the Autochron even for teleportation requires a Chronal Stability check. The rationale is again more of a mechanics thing where it would be more interesting if the PCs had to take local transport to get things done, but if they really, really had to teleport, then they can still do it by using the Autochron with the possibility of a Chronal Stability loss.

I generally GM, but one player wanted to GM a scenario, so I made a character who was really fun to play: Ted "Theodore" Logan of the Wyld Stallyns (link to character sheet).

 "Future Ted told me, Present Ted, that later, you dudes should run."
"Be excellent to each other."
"Party on, dudes."

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In the spoiler section below is:

Behind Enemy Times or why I got so excited that I had to write this blog post

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Behind Enemy Times

In "Behind Enemy Times," the scenario "Time Will Tell" brings in the idea that some rogue TimeWatch Agent is modifying history to be nicer and is revising the main database, so that his revised history is "correct." In this history, the PCs are told the correct history is that Abraham Lincoln is supposed to live and the PCs are sent to accomplish this mission. The players in my game felt very uncomfortable with that, but rolled with the punches and completed their mission.

The whole idea is whether TimeWatch should make the world a better place or whether history should be left alone. One of TimeWatch's punishment details is making sure Hitler isn't assassinated.

A later scenario in this campaign is "Rebel Heart."  In "Rebel Heart," the PCs are "burned" and told that they were to be stopped by other TimeWatch Agents because they're going to become traitors if they go on their next mission. This of course is supposed to be a trick, unbeknownst to the PCs, to get the PCs recruited by a Rebel TimeWatch group.

As published, after the PCs are recruited, they're told by the Rebel group to save Abraham Lincoln again. So, what has transpired is that TimeWatch finds out that the "correct" history was incorrect and Abraham Lincoln is supposed to die and have corrected it. So, basically, the PCs would have to save Lincoln a second time.

Well, this didn't seem right to me and didn't seem that interesting. So, instead I reversed it.

Instead, TimeWatch has left Lincoln alive as their "correct" history.  And the Rebels who are Restorationists (true keepers of history) have asked the PCs to have Booth kill Lincoln at Ford's Theater. The Restorationists also tell the PCs that they have discovered that some people high up in TimeWatch are indeed modifying history and hiding it.

After given this new mission by the Rebels, I sent a message to the PCs from TimeWatch congratulating them for infiltrating the Rebels and asked them to turn the Rebels in.

In "Rebel Heart," one subplot was the Rebels getting a British secret agent swapped for captured Russian agents. But the British agent is really a double agent and he's supposed to infultrate MI5 a la Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

This was earlier revealed to the PCs by the Restorationists. The Restorationists are doing bad things in order to restore order.

In the published scenario, this causes great harm to Britian, but in my revised plot, it doesn't and things happen as they should.

The PCs after getting their message, realize they were now double agents.

So, the question comes in as to whether the PCs will turn in the Restorationists or kill Lincoln and indeed turn traitor.  Well, the PCs picked killing Lincoln and turning traitor.

As a GM, this was such a great moment for me. The PCs did turn traitor and the mission they weren't supposed to go on was indeed the mission that made them traitors. Wow!

The Restorationists have a plan to create a stable time pocket and use that as their base of operations; this will be something similar to the Citadel at the beginning of time.

In "Time Will Tell," the PCs are told that any paradox in the Citadel has a chance of destabilizing it and causing the Big Bang. Because of that, in "Rebel Heart," their Autochrons can't return to the Citadel and their MEM-tags are deactivated. In my game, I put up a red warning symbol on their Autochrons that they've never seen before. When they checked their user's manual, the icon was the "Your clearances have been revoked. Please contact TimeWatch." In my game, the PCs captured all of the TimeWatch Agents sent to capture/kill them and striped them of their equipment. And in the rest of the scenario, they used the kill team's equipment instead.

So, my upcoming plan is that after the Restorationists have created their stable time pocket, they're going to ask the PCs to cause a paradox at the Citadel and start the Big Bang, so that the Restorationists' TimeWatch would be the only TimeWatch. And you know that eventually the Citadel will have to go because if it doesn't, there's no universe.

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Morgan's AetherCon 2016 Adventures

This is a free online convention.  Last year, there were issues with time zones and such.  This year, adding an event to my google calendar placed the game at the wrong time.  Off by one hour.  Also two links to game tables were incorrect (Baker Street and Cthulhu Dark Ages).  I learned from last year that you go to the Ox and Mule for tech support.  After listening in to all the issues they have to face shows that all conventions, especially online ones have various tech issues.  Online conventions have to deal with time zones, incorrectly configured sound and video feeds, incorrect links, etc.  Lots happen behind the scenes. And those guys do it for free.

I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked. 

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Friday, November 11, 2016

Baker Street: A Day in the Country
System: Baker Street: Roleplaying in the World of Sherlock Holmes
11/11/2016 • 4:00 PM PST
Game Length: 4 hours
Number of Players: 3-6
Characters Provided: Yes
GM: Jessica Geyer

The investigators are invited to a lovely weekend at a country estate. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Game started half an hour late as the link to the game table was incorrect.  I was able to contact Chris S. with the new link, so there were only 2 players for this game where 4 players had signed up.

I enjoyed the game.  But since the game required 3 players and we wound up with 2, the GM added a NPC investigator.  The system does require 3 players as there are 3 skills that are required and generally each PC only has one of those skills:  Observation, Reason, Deduction.

I guess Sherlock Holmes is an uber-investigator with all 3 skills.

Observation gives you clues and 3 leads for each clue.  Reasoning eliminates bad clues.  Deduction eliminates bad leads. Player's skill rolls determine how many clues are found, how many clues can be eliminated, or how many leads can be eliminated.

For example: A clue could be a key.  Leads are related to the clue such as the key was planted, the key opens this and other rooms, or the key belongs to someone else.  With deduction, you can ask N times whether a specific lead is true or false. N is determined by how many successes you get.

Skills go from 2d6 to 4d6 (or at least those on our character sheets).  A skill test requires you to roll your dice and a special Sherlock Die.  On the regular d6s, a 4-6 is a success.  1-3 is a failure. The Sherlock Die is a special d6 with 1, 2, 3, Watson, Sherlock, and Moriarty as its faces. Watson gives you either an additional success or an aid to another player.  Moriarty make all failures count against your successes.  Sherlock lets you name 1, 2, or 3 and make them all successes. If you are rolling a professional skill, any 6 (explodes) is a success and you get to reroll the die until you fail to roll a 6.

PCs can aid each other and also spend resolve to roll extra d6s.

When PCs go on a false lead or get GM help, the threat level goes up and eliminates various possible bonuses when we roll the Sherlock die.  At threat level 1, ones don't count; level 2, ones and twos; level 3, 1-3 don't count.  So, it basically makes the Sherlock die less useful.

I think at some point, the GM gave us some needed clues, but raised the threat level without us knowing about it.

I found the system ok, but I disliked that you really needed a minimum of 3 players for the game. The mystery was fun, but I found the number of clues found based on your die rolls a bit constraining.  In the murder room, we got some clues (randomly selected), but we didn't get any in relationship to the body and that felt strange.  And I wanted to look at the body, but we weren't allowed because that wasn't the clue we found -- I think we could have but that would have raised the threat level.  At other times, we were only allowed to look for clues N number of times equal to the level of success we got. So we were only allowed to explore two places and we had more than that number of unexplored locations.

The system seemed artificially constrained.  But designed so that the players didn't spend forever in one room looking for all the possible clues.  The game can still suffer from bad die rolls and no clues found and having the investigators stuck with no leads.  The raising of threat level was created to help with dead ends, but it's also an odd death spiral as an increasing threat level reduces the chances of success.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

At one point, I told Chris that I think our host is going to be murdered and it's by probably his younger brother because the host stayed in his room during the dinner and the brother went downstairs last.

Well, I was right, but the game was more about figuring out exactly how it was done, what the motive was, and who did it.

We got two clues in the bedroom where the body was.  One was a key in his hand and the other was a boot left near a chimney/fire place.  What was odd to me was information about the body.  I wanted a clue about the body, but the game system gave us these two random clues.  Since the game was early, and we didn't want a threat level increase so early in the game, we had to follow these two clues instead of checking out the body.

I wanted to checkout the chimney and found someone had already put a ladder on the side of the house.  We found a strip of torn cloth on the ladder.  We then wanted to check everyone's clothing and see to whom the cloth matched.  Of course, after a die roll, we were only allowed to check two closets in the house.  This was another artificial limitation placed by the system.  These artificial constraints were driving me crazy.

Near the end of the game, we called in the constables and then did the big gathering and unmasking of the killers.  The two killers (younger brother, dead guy's wife) then blamed each other and both got arrested.

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Saturday, November 12, 2016

Herald of the Yellow King
System: Call of Cthulhu Dark Ages
11/12/2016 • 11:00 AM PST
Game Length: 4 hours
Number of Players: 3-6
Characters Provided: Yes
GM: Eric Betts

Investigators are members of the household of Norman Lord Boniface. The year is somewhere around 1040 and takes place in the fiefdom of Shereborne, in Wessex, in southern England. It is a couple of decades after the Norman conquest of England. Your lord has summoned you to take a journey to a distant town in his domain for a personal matter...

The link to this game was also bad. I wanted a better experience for this game, so I contacted the Ox and Mule two hours before this game.  They emailed and Facebooked the GM. Well, the link didn't get fixed until right before the game.  So, yet again less players showed up.  Only 4 showed out of 6 and one guy had audio problems and the GM spent half an hour trying to fix the guy's audio.  We then gave up and let the guy fix his audio while we played.  Fifteen minutes later he got his audio working and the GM had to give the guy a summary and character sheet.

We didn't finish the scenario and the GM summarized the rest of the game for us.  I think this waiting for players and trying to fix their technical issues cuts into the play time unnecessarily.  The GM told us that the game was a 5th edition game, but wanted to run it as a 7th edition game.  As he ran the game, it was apparent he was very unfamiliar with 7th edition rules.  He should have just run the game with 5th edition rules.

Also during the game, I was the only person who muted the microphone.  The GM had an air purifier, children, and phone calls interrupting the game.  One player had a dog barking.  Another a cat and visitors.  So, lots of interruptions that affected the game.  Also the roll20 audio quality failed and we reloaded the table a few times.  Too many down time issues to make the game pleasurable.

I actually liked the Baker Street game much more than this one.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game was very A, B, C, D.

An old man was promised that his liege lord wasn't going to chop down a specific oak tree.  But it was done and we were sent with an apology.

We go to village A and it's wiped out.  Wolves were feasting on dead bodies and people barricaded themselves inside and died of thirst.  A scarecrow with a yellow mask stood in the field during winter. We found a Yellow Sign and a silver torc and what we later learned was bardic clothing in an older home.  No sign of the old man, maybe he was eaten by the wolves -- we actually didn't think that was the case. (We had to fight wolves here).

We return to the liege lord.  Then he sends us to village B and C to see if we can figure out what happened to village A.

Village B is wiped out and people were eating leaves and grass.  We get attacked by crazed villagers.  We learn that a young bard came by and told people stories and they went mad. (We had to fight crazed villagers here).

We send word back to the liege lord to not trust any bards and continued to village C.

Village C is happy and cozy.  As some PCs were toasted by the village elders, my character and another PC found a cannibal meat facility.  The PCs escape with their lives back to the liege lord. (Fight more crazed villagers).

We ran out of time and the GM summarized what had happened to us.

Apparently we would have to fight through the liege lord's keep partially transformed to a much larger and darker presense -- not sure why we would do that.  Then find the bard (who was not at the keep) and either kill him or make him change his ways.  The old bard was telling the story of the yellow king and each time he drove a village mad, he would get younger - and bring Carcosa closer to reality.  The felling of the tree drove the old bard mad as that was his anchor to the physical world.

Yeah, this game was very straight forward and not to my liking.  Lots of combat for no reason. Very little investigation.

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Sunday, November 13, 2016

Pandora's Box
System: Call of Cthulhu: Pulp Cthulhu
11/13/2016 • 11:00 AM PST
Game Length: 4 hours
Number of Players: 3-5
Characters Provided: Yes
GM: Mike Mason

A fabled artifact comes to a big city nightclub. At first, it seems like just a publicity stunt but bad luck follows the device and all who chance upon it. The heroes must navigate through a range of interested parties, some less desirable than others, in the search for a missing man whose past has caught up with him.

Wow! This was a really fun game. I guess it doesn't hurt to have Mike Mason, who wrote Pulp Cthulhu run a game of Pulp Cthulhu for you.

Mike kept the pace up and everything interesting.  Every PC and NPC was interesting.  And even when the party split up into three groups of two, Mike made sure everybody got something interesting to do.  A very nice technique. I know in some games when a split party goes to some dead end, nothing happens and the other part of the split party gets all the screen time and fun.

Pulp Cthulhu doubles a PCs hit points, gives characters special moves, and extended the use of Luck spends for heroic effects.  We lucked out and nobody got killed at the end.

As an aside, only one person had audio problems, we tried for a small bit to debug his system and finally just started the game.  He wound up fixing his system and was able to play after a short while. The players also muted their microphones when not in scene.  Yay!

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

I looked up the scenario after the game and liked the changes Mike made for our one-shot. In the published scenario (one of the several scenarios in Pulp Cthulhu), the mob is involved and the PCs are normal investigators - as is expected. In our game, we had a combination of criminals, a journalist, and a psychic sent by the the mob boss to find the missing item and missing man.

Mike used the psychic to give us clues when the pacing lagged.  A nice technique for a one-shot.

At one point, our party split up into three groups of two:

1. The psychic and a con man visited a high end clothing shop and got a lead to The Seekers of Eternal Wisdom - yes, a cult dabbling in things they shouldn't.

2. A journalist and my character (a cold-blooded killer) actually rushed to a pawn shop and found the effects of the cursed item and tore a page out of the pawn shop's ledger that contained a lead's name.  This is funny because in the published scenario, this event is actually just a newspaper item the players learn about after the fact.  I really like that the players are not passive and investigating things that had already happened, but are investing as things are happening. In our alternate reality of the game, it was the PCs who made the news and also wrote about it.

3. A brother and sister criminal team found another crime scene and encounted a Shoggoth upstairs. What was interesting was how Mike described the minimal damage the shotgun blast did to the creature.  So, it was clear that the massive blast did almost nothing.

As you can see all three groups ran into significant things that were interesting.

Then the psychic had a vision and we rushed to the finale in the cultist mansion's basement just as the cult was about to open Pandora's Box and release big bad things.

When I fired my tommygun at a big bad thing, I was looking for clues to see if my gun had any effect.  I loved how Mike said that the bullets hit and it was wavering and moving and YOU JUST CAN'T TELL.  Nice touch.

In the end, we made a replica of the Pandora's Box to return to our boss and then encased the real one in cement and sunk it in the river.

This being Pulp Cthulhu, no one died.  Someone lost his fingers.  If we didn't have the pulp rules, I think at least two characters would have died.

The pacing of the game was non-stop and a lot of fun.  When things were flagging, Mike just threw us clues to get us to the next scene which is required for a time constrained one-shot.

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