Time-loop

Spell Jammin’

The Editioning has started. We made some characters for OD&D the other night. We have one Fighting Man, one Magic User, one Cleric and one Thief, just as Gygax (or maybe Arneson) intended. But today, I want to write about a mini 5E campaign we just ended.

I have been running a Spelljammer campaign on and off for the last three years or so. The main campaign is, I guess, nearing a conclusion. I had always envisioned a particular timeline for it, factored in major plot beats, character moments, significant locations and events, but underestimated exactly how long a lot of that would take and, of course, where the PCs would take the game in some cases. So, last year, I decided to take a break from it. But, some months before the break, one of our number was launched into the IRL adventure of welcoming his second child into the world. When he and the rest of us came back to Spelljammer, I wanted to play something that would explain where his character had been in the interim.

The Wild-spacer Giff, Azimuth, is our resident Charisma Fighter. Or, he was. Now, he’s a Fighter/Paladin. He used his charm to get the group out of a couple of tight spots and himself into a couple of hot dates. He had a troubled back-story. The rest of the crew picked him up after he had been left stranded in Wildspace when some disaster befell his own ship, captained by his father, Parallax, also known as “the Admiral.” He didn’t know what had happened and he was driven to find out. When their adventures took them to the Rock of Bral, he did some investigation and discovered that something was happening to ships in a region of space known as the Amos Expanse. This struck a chord with Azimuth. So he put a crew of his own together while his erstwhile companions pursued their own goals, and he set off into the Expanse to find his dad. We called it, “The Search for the Admiral,” or “Dad-quest” for short.

Side Quest

This is how I handled it. We took another extended break from the main campaign and I got the other players to create new characters to act as the crew for Azimuth’s own ship. They all had a connection of some sort to the Admiral so it made sense that they would want to help find him. The players really got into this! They loved the opportunity to play new PCs in the same world, and even, in a way, the same campaign as their older characters had been in for a couple of years. They came up with some incredibly different characters compared to their original ones. My wife was playing a gnomish artificer in the main campaign and decided to create an Astral Elf Circle of Stars Druid who talked like Jennifer Coolidge (like many of the people I play with, my wife is a fully paid up member of the funny voice club.) I wrote, last summer, about the idea of allowing the players to use their two characters interchangeably from now on.

The bulk of the seven session campaign was spent searching and investigating the Amos Expanse. I handled this as described in this post. TL;DR they rolled on a few encounter tables and they marked progress points when they rolled a 6. In the end, they rolled on those encounter tables quite a few times. What I enjoyed most about this part was that they found a through-line of a plot in the random encounters that I had never intended. There were a number of different hazards, problems and encounters that involved Kindori, the whale analogues in Spelljammer. There was an encounter with some space-vikings who were hunting them. Another involved the corpse of a Kindori that was being mined for space-ambergris and another was an encounter with a Kindori ghost. I had come up with these by using the spark-tabes in Between the Skies but never saw them as connected. And they wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t been for the order they were rolled up by the players during their journey. Anyway, on 5 progress points, they found what they were looking for.

Loop

It just so happened that the last encounter they rolled up before the finale was a big one. They encountered a Void-frost Elemental that was holding open an anomalous portal from the Elemental Place of Frost into Wildspace and it was spreading out from there. The PCs’ ship got caught in the ice (along with another Kindori who ended up helping them) They were forced to trudge across the space-ice-floe and defeat the elemental to close the portal and release their ship. It was a tough fight and they took a lot of damage to achieve their goals, but they won out in the end. When they did, of course, the enormous portal popped out of existence. This event drew the Crimson Cloud they had been hearing about to that spot, to fill the “void” it had left. It also trapped the PCs inside the cloud!

It turns out this was a fortuitous happenstance since this is also where Azimuth’s Da had been all this time. He, along with all his crew and a whole other ship had been trapped in a time loop inside the cloud ever since the disaster that had left Azimuth stranded at the start of the campaign!

Here’s what happened. Azimuth’s Dad, Captain Parallax, had been commanding his ship through the expanse when it encountered the Crimson Cloud. The Cloud was a temporal anomaly that allowed beings and objects to travel in time. Inside the anomaly, they got hit by another ship that had also been caught in it. This other ship also bore Azimuth’s Dad, just a much younger version of him. And it was a mercenary ship from decades earlier. The mercs rammed into the Admiral’s innocent merchant ship, assuming they were their target. And that’s when they got stuck in the time-loop. A device aboard the Admiral’s ship, a sort of Portable Dungeon, meant to trap whole armies in a prison demi-plane, interacted with the temporal anomaly and trapped them in the time-loop.

The way I planned it, the loop would last only about 15 minutes. As such, the two crews and the two versions of Azimuth’s Dad had done this over and over again, hundreds or thousands of times. But none of them were aware until the PCs also got sucked in, half way through a loop.

This is what I did to handle the loop. I established the events that would happen without the intervention of any outside influence such as the PCs. Here is the basic set of events:

1. The ships enter the cloud/loop after colliding – The Mastodon’s Breath (Parallax Senior’s ship) is damaged but not completely wrecked. It has a great hole near the prow. The Jackpot (Parallax Junior’s ship) has only taken minor damage, but, unknown to them, it is enough to cause a massive blowback effect when they fire the cannon into the Mastodon’s Breath. It will be enough to destroy both ships in a cataclysmic explosion.
2. Xenotermination giff marines get together to make an assault on the Mastodon’s Breath. Lieutenant Parallax is cheering them on from the spelljamming helm. The assault is met with surprising opposition from the elves in Lord Faewynd’s retinue (these guys were being transported by Parallax along with their cargo) and the crew of the Mastodon’s Breath, not to mention the distraught Captain Parallax himself. The fighting is bloody and results in the marines retreating, badly hurt.
3. Fearing the worst, Lord Faewynd and a bodyguard escape the MB on a small tender with the spelljammer helm from the ship and the Astral Dungeon on board. Meanwhile, both crews take the time to rest and heal.
4. Just as the Jackpot’s captain, Captain Lagrange orders the firing of the main cannon, Lieutenant Parallax and Captain Parallax finally see each other from opposite decks. That’s when both ships explode in a fiery blaze.
5. Not long afterwards, the Astral Dungeon will reset, taking everything back to the starting point, just after the two ships collided.

Live. Die. Repeat.

I got the idea to do this, partly because my wife is a big fan of time-loop movies like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow and I wanted to give her that experience. But also, I had read a clever adventure in the Dragonbane boxed set that showed me it was possible to create an adventure like this. In fact, it made it seem relatively easy. It hinged on the series of events, of course, but “The Village of the Day Before” was far more complicated, in many ways than what I had planned. It had a lot of NPCs you had to locate and keep track of, for one thing. I didn’t need to do that so much since everyone was restricted to one of two ships. In fact, it was surprisingly easy to run, is what I found, as long as I kept the timeline in mind.

The PCs experienced three iterations of the time-loop. On the first two times, they got blown to smithereens along with everything else trapped in the anomaly when the merc ship fired their enormous cannon and blew up the Astral Dungeon. They reappeared on the edge of the map each time. On the second go, they noticed the interaction between the explosion from the cannon and the Astral Dungeon in the middle of a pitched battle with the giff marines. By the third one, they had figured out they had to prevent the cannon from blowing that thing up and they had to get to it and find out some way to shut it off to free themselves. And that’s what they did. They had to kill the mercenary captain and fight the marines to a standstill while they figured it out, but they managed it.

Conclusion

In the end, there was no “big bad” to fight to end the adventure. There was just a puzzle to solve and some chances to take. The players did that and they escaped the time trap. It was exactly what I wanted and the players seemed to enjoy it too.

If you’re thinking about running a time-loop adventure, DMs out there, do it! But let me warn you, it’s hard to keep it to yourself when you’re planning it!