This is sort of a design diary. Not a true one since, you know, the design part is done, but I never mastered the art of writing about a game and actually writing it at the same time, so this is what you get.
When I decided to do a time travel book, I was determined to do it right. For me that meant making it as much a historical resource as a book about temporal mechanics. Maybe more.
Any GM who wants to run a time travel game has an idea in his head how he wants it to work. Black magic? Psionic loners on the run from the government? Shadowy cabal from the future? Travelers from a post apocalyptic wasteland attempting to prevent their own future?
Well you get the idea.
SO since I knew the time travel part would be the easy part, I set out to do the hard work. That meant a massive timeline, covering the entire world, from its formation through the year 1900.
It was a massive undertaking, involving about 400 hours of research alone over the course of 6 weeks. Websites were consulted. Books were read. Books were listened to while I was in the shower.
All in all the timeline takes up about 40 pages of the book and provides you with, at the very least a good starting point to your own research if you wanted to run an adventure during a time. Despite its size and amount of space it takes up, with so much ground to cover the timeline is still just a guide.
But hey, its a guide loaded with adventure hooks.
Next time we'll talk about the crunch.
2 comments:
So, Blood and Time sounds like a nice historical read on its own (if your Hannibal series is any evidence), regardless of whether one games or not. I look forward to buying it.
I certainly hope its a nice read.
Its a timeline, rather than the more narrative approach I did here (since a narrative history of time would be about 5,000 pages).
This is more of a bullet point, with the occasional sidebar to point out places where time traveling could be extremely interesting.
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