Thursday, July 16, 2020

D20x5 Truculent Time-Travellers

Time passes like mercury, slippery and poisonous.

Click the button below to generate your own time-traveller:




To automate the rolling of a table of your own, I recommend trying this: http://paperelemental.blogspot.com/p/list-to-html-generator.html

D20This traveller came from
1 a dusty museum-world where records of the past dwarf living civilizations
2 a corporate city-state in the pollution-choked future of the trash-cyborgs
3 a future of enforced, eternal stagnation
4 a false past recreated in the future, when high technology is passed off as magic
5 an indeterminate multiversal cyst of quantum chaos
6 the people-zoos of the molluscoid mind-masters
7 the interregnum period of an intergalactic empire when warlords duked it out among the stars with barely-understood technology
8 a hedonistic apocalypse when the invention of Nozickian experience machines leads most of humanity into pleasurable extinction
9 next Tuesday
10 a prim and proper suburban ecumenopolis where the ‘50s never ended
11 a wondrous city of flying cars and atomic dishwashers
12 a decadent and carefree future where humanity is the pampered pets of machine intelligences
13 a savage techno-tribe which scavenges the glaciated ruins of a new ice age
14 a cold and dark ultra-entropic enclave on the verge of heat death
15 a fully-automated luxury gay space communist utopia
16 the scarlet-skinned tribes of terraformed Mars
17 the trinitite cities of the blattodean empire which is destined to rise after humanity’s self-annihilation
18 a heretical anti-unification war-cathedral on the border of the Omega Point
19 a branching paraverse wherein Neanderthals achieved dominance instead
20 the exiled dinosoid meteor-kingdoms
D20 using 
1 an amulet that allows its wearer to swap minds with anyone else wearing the amulet in another time
2 a rift torn in causality by a chronomancer’s catastrophic miscast
3 an overdose on chthonic oracular vapours
4 their own reality-warping psychic powers
5 the incomprehensible machinations of Yog-Sothoth
6 a tachyon-hammer which knocked them through time, with no means of return
7 the help of a shapeshifting master of darkness
8 a pair of sapphire sandals which took them to the maker’s home (in time and space) when they clicked the heels together
9 the gland of a creature which migrates temporally as well as spatially
10 a jaunt to the anti-matter universe, where time flows in reverse
11 a glitch in the base code of reality
12 a scroll woven from norns’ hair
13 a key forged from Chronos’ chains
14 a time machine some Victorian guy left unlocked
15 a naturally-occurring wormhole
16 a cursed period piece film
17 a closed timelike curve
18 reified Nietzschean philosophy
19 a Tipler cylinder
20 a mutant teleportation spell
D20 in order to 
1 erase some cringe moments from their past that keep them up at night.
2 start a religion that will worship them.
3 conduct a scientific investigation into causality.
4 collect data that may eventually help to reverse entropy.
5 take samples from species that will one day go extinct.
6 go on a truly wild bender.
7 prevent the premature invention of time travel (“premature” being an ambiguous word when speaking of things outside linear time).
8 confirm the divine inspiration of a prophet they worship.
9 live in an era that their historical records idealized. They’ve been disappointed so far.
10 lose their virginity to themself. It went horribly wrong.
11 arrange the time-loop that will lead to their own birth.
12 perform next-level archaeology.
13 learn an enemy’s weakness before they mature.
14 scout targets for transtemporal invasion.
15 escape enemies in their own time.
16 see wonders lost to decay.
17 loot your era’s natural resources.
18 do time-tourism.
19 hasten the creation of a godlike artificial intelligence, and so prevent nigh-infinite copies of themself from undergoing atemporal torture in a series of simulations.
20 kill hyper-Hitler before he rises to omnicidal power.
D20 This time-traveller views people of your era 
1 with paternal condescension.
2 similarly to how we might view tool-using apes.
3 as moral non-entities, as they’ve already been dead for so long from the traveller’s perspective.
4 as naive children.
5 with mocking derision for their backwards ways.
6 as cautionary examples of what went wrong.
7 as scientifically interesting subjects of study.
8 as incomprehensible cultural aliens.
9 as schmucks tied down to one time.
10 as quaint bumpkins.
11 as dispensers of folksy wisdom.
12 with fetishistic admiration.
13 as honoured ancestors.
14 like NPCs in a videogame.
15 as foreigners with strange but charming ways.
16 with astonishment every time they manage to be more than drooling simpletons.
17 with colonial ambition.
18 as living more authentically than people of their own.
19 as just people, nothing more and nothing less.
20 as abhorrent in their moral ignorance.
D20 This time-traveller has with them 
1 a disintegration-ray that can also produce copies of the last thing it disintegrated.
2 a silver-wire talisman that, should you die while wearing it, it will reset the flow of time to six seconds before your death. It will tarnish itself to uselessness in the process, however.
3 glass orbs full of the ultimate ooze, which all life will eventually decay into. Converts organic matter it’s in contact with into more of itself.
4 a crystal infocube containing oracular recordings of events that have yet to occur.
5 their own ghost, bound in chronalite chains.
6 a doomsday device set to activate if they’re killed.
7 trophies collected from Cretaceous game animals.
8 a guardian-golem that can shoot incinerating beams from its hollow eyes.
9 an amulet which projects period-appropriate holographic disguises.
10 a terraforming matrix which could convert a hundred square miles of wasteland to lush greenery.
11 a Matryoshka implant which produces a slightly smaller clone of themself from their corpse if they’re killed.
12 a malfunctioning translation device that inserts a faux pas into every sentence.
13 1d6 fetal carnivoro-mammoths in rapid maturation tubes. Give one a twist and two rounds later you’ll have a fully-grown voracious meat-eating mammoth.
14 a grimoire containing several time-related spells such as Haste and Slow, printed on heavy and hyper-durable sheets of muonic matter.
15 a laser-sword.
16 a psychometric device that can display what happened up to one hour ago in a room.
17 an ace and a joker, both enchanted. Once, and only once, someone touching the ace may critically succeed on their next roll, and someone touching the joker can be made to critically fail their next roll. Both cards are of the clock suit, which was only adopted for playing cards in a single delicate timeline.
18 a pair of burly, hirsute proto-humans with mind-control implants protruding from their skulls and spines.
19 genetically-engineered fungal rations that can regrow if their dregs are planted in fresh feces. Their taste and texture is similar to cotton candy.
20a chrome rod that can lock a target it taps in time for 1d6 minutes, rendering it totally invulnerable and immovable. The rod has 2d6 charges remaining.

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