Magic to Make the Sanest Man go Mad

Continued from Time Loops

So the new series Star Trek: Discovery delved into the Time Loop trope with episode 7 of the first season. There may be some **Spoilers** to follow, so, if you haven’t seen it, well, you have been warned.

In the Discovery episode, from which this blog post borrowed its title, Harry Mudd sneaks aboard the U.S.S. Discovery and uses a Time Loop to interrogate the crew, as a way of learning how their propulsion system works. Essentially he threatens them with death and destruction if they do not tell him, and then follows through on the threat. Then resets the Time Loop and tries again.

As plans go … I don’t think it’s a particularly good one. None of the crew are aware of the time loop (None of them? Well of course one of them is, because otherwise the Time Loop trope wouldn’t be in effect. But Harry’s plan is that none of them are aware, so we’ll circle back to the exception a bit later.) so it’s not as useful as an interrogation method, because generally, they depend on long passages of time, and the anticipation of what is to come. The repetition does give him an unlimited amount of time and will allow him to question everyone on the ship, without the bothersome part of having to take everyone hostage. It also has the advantage, that he has the ultimate element of surprise, over and over again, and the crew does not have the advantage of being able to come together to fight against him, because 30 minutes is not enough time to formulate a plan. And it does sort of work that way, but really I think his main motivation is to seek revenge on Captain Lorca to soothe the feeling of injustice. After being abandoned by the captain on a Klingon prison ship, the chance to kill him over and over again was obviously a great way to scratch that itch. But, back to the plan …

The problem with the plan is highlighted by the way it ends up working. One of the crew is living outside of time, because of … well that’s a bit complicated to go in to here. The point is, this one crew man has also been living through the death of Captain Lorca and the rest of the crew, time and time again, until he just can’t stand it any more, and thus gives Harry Mudd the information he wants to make it stop. See; long passages of time; anticipation of what’s to come; these are tried and true methods of interrogation.

Anyway, this episode shows a new use of the Time Loop: To gather information. How could we make this work as a Scheme in a game of Legendary? I don’t think there is any information the Heroes have that the AI Villains might want in a standard game. Hero cards are only in each players decks, discard piles and the Hero Deck. Perhaps something can be shuffled into the Hero Deck (Villains, Twists, Strikes) that can be information used by the Scheme. And each Twist resets the Hero Cards, by placing them to the bottom and revealing 5 new Heroes, thus increasing the chance the needed cards will be revealed for the Scheme to be completed. Something like:

Setup: 8 Twists. A set of 10xHenchmen is added to the Hero Deck. Each time a Henchmen is revealed from the Hero Deck it is stacked next to this Scheme.

Twist: All the cards in the HQ are placed on the bottom of the Hero Deck and new cards are drawn.

Evil Wins: When 5 Henchmen are stacked to the Scheme.

Continued in Travelers

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