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Timelords (role-playing game)
TimeLords is a set of time travel role-playing games by Greg Porter and published by Blacksburg Tactical Research Center (BTRC). The first two editions used a custom d20-based game system; the most recent edition uses the EABA system from BTRC.
TimeLords was developed by Greg Porter while attending college at Virginia Tech in the early 1980s, and many of his fellow Wargaming Society members are immortalized in the first edition as sample characters. He approached many game companies with the idea for a time travel-based role-playing game, but all preferred a supplement for their own systems rather than a stand-alone RPG. Fantasy Games Unlimited agreed to publish the game, but sat on it for several years and never did.
Porter started Blacksburg Tactical Research Center in 1985, and TimeLords was its first RPG product. It did not initially sell well, but maintained a cult following that allowed a second edition to be published in 1990. Several books of adventures were published in the early 1990s for use with the second edition.
In 2003, Timelords was redone as a setting for BTRC's EABA universal role-playing game system. BTRC stopped paper publication of all of its games, and made them available only in a downloaded PDF format, or printed on-demand.
TimeLords begins at the End of Time. In the far future, a race known as "The Designers", gifted in both psionics and sciences, set about escaping their fate as the inevitable end of the universe encroached. Eventually, they discover time travel, and use this knowledge to move their entire solar system backwards in time to when the universe is about 15 billion years old. The actual Designers have never been seen by humans. The pinnacle of their achievements was the "Matrix", a small time-travel device, the size and shape of a 20-sided die, weighing about 1 pound. A Matrix could be used for personal time travel, as an energy source, and other things only hinted at by the rule books. When activated, a Matrix generates a spherical force field 6 meters in diameter, and instantly transports everything inside it to the new time and location. It is one of these Matrix devices that the players of the game find to begin their adventure.
TimeLords may be played two possible ways:
Characters may find themselves at any time in Earth history, past or future. Space travel is also a possibility, with some modules taking place on spaceships or other planets. The game also hints at the idea of traveling to alternate universes, where mental powers, magic, or alternate technologies exist, opening up the possibility for fantasy, steampunk, post-apocalyptic, or any other game setting the players may want.
The game explains time and time travel through a branching multiple timeline system. Traveling to the past does not change the timeline you came from, it creates a new one with you in it. This makes it impossible for someone to go back in time and kill their own grandfather (the Grandfather Paradox), as this would only create a new timeline where the grandfather was dead; the old timeline where he was alive would still exist also. This also makes it incredibly difficult for characters “lost” in time to find the original timeline they came from, as every jump creates more and more timelines, and pushes them farther from the original.
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Timelords (role-playing game) AI simulator
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Timelords (role-playing game)
TimeLords is a set of time travel role-playing games by Greg Porter and published by Blacksburg Tactical Research Center (BTRC). The first two editions used a custom d20-based game system; the most recent edition uses the EABA system from BTRC.
TimeLords was developed by Greg Porter while attending college at Virginia Tech in the early 1980s, and many of his fellow Wargaming Society members are immortalized in the first edition as sample characters. He approached many game companies with the idea for a time travel-based role-playing game, but all preferred a supplement for their own systems rather than a stand-alone RPG. Fantasy Games Unlimited agreed to publish the game, but sat on it for several years and never did.
Porter started Blacksburg Tactical Research Center in 1985, and TimeLords was its first RPG product. It did not initially sell well, but maintained a cult following that allowed a second edition to be published in 1990. Several books of adventures were published in the early 1990s for use with the second edition.
In 2003, Timelords was redone as a setting for BTRC's EABA universal role-playing game system. BTRC stopped paper publication of all of its games, and made them available only in a downloaded PDF format, or printed on-demand.
TimeLords begins at the End of Time. In the far future, a race known as "The Designers", gifted in both psionics and sciences, set about escaping their fate as the inevitable end of the universe encroached. Eventually, they discover time travel, and use this knowledge to move their entire solar system backwards in time to when the universe is about 15 billion years old. The actual Designers have never been seen by humans. The pinnacle of their achievements was the "Matrix", a small time-travel device, the size and shape of a 20-sided die, weighing about 1 pound. A Matrix could be used for personal time travel, as an energy source, and other things only hinted at by the rule books. When activated, a Matrix generates a spherical force field 6 meters in diameter, and instantly transports everything inside it to the new time and location. It is one of these Matrix devices that the players of the game find to begin their adventure.
TimeLords may be played two possible ways:
Characters may find themselves at any time in Earth history, past or future. Space travel is also a possibility, with some modules taking place on spaceships or other planets. The game also hints at the idea of traveling to alternate universes, where mental powers, magic, or alternate technologies exist, opening up the possibility for fantasy, steampunk, post-apocalyptic, or any other game setting the players may want.
The game explains time and time travel through a branching multiple timeline system. Traveling to the past does not change the timeline you came from, it creates a new one with you in it. This makes it impossible for someone to go back in time and kill their own grandfather (the Grandfather Paradox), as this would only create a new timeline where the grandfather was dead; the old timeline where he was alive would still exist also. This also makes it incredibly difficult for characters “lost” in time to find the original timeline they came from, as every jump creates more and more timelines, and pushes them farther from the original.