Travelers

Continued from Magic to Make the Sanest Man go Mad

Revisiting the Time Loop idea after watching some more Travelers. If you haven’t watched any of yet, the premise revolves around the consciousness of humans from hundreds of years in the future, being sent back to over write the consciousness of present day humans, just before those present day humans would die. The new consciousness from the future, known as Travelers, can then take actions, or prevent actions, that would have killed the present day human, and thus live on, to complete missions, that will help humanity in the future. It is created by Brad Wright, one of the driving forces behind Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis, so if you like those shows, look this up on Netflix. First two Seasons are ready to go.

Without getting to Spoilery, the missions of the Travelers in the 21st, are all controlled and set by the Director in the future. As the Travelers in our present do things, they change the future (which is obviously the point) and the Director in the future can see how the historical record changes. If need be, the Director can send another Traveler or a Message to the team to tweak things. But there is a ripple effect in the time line, so that the Director can’t send anyone back to a time before the arrival of the last Traveler, or Message. If something is going wrong with the mission, the Director has an ever decreasing amount of time to send a Traveler, or a message, to fix things. They can’t send someone back to before things started to try again.

This is bought to a head in a Time Loop episode of Travelers, where a mission has a catastrophic failure. A Traveler is sent back to try and fix things, but because of the rules in place, they have a 20 minute window to repair things AND, the closest candidate host is about 20 minutes away. The first Traveler is sent, and, of course, things don’t work out, but the Traveler learns things, that information makes its way to the Director in the future, and the Director sends another Traveler with a slightly different plan. But, because of the time ripple effect, the second Traveler has to get sent to a time after the first Traveler arrived, and because they had already chosen the closest candidate, they send the second Traveler to over write the consciousness of the first Traveler, and they try again.

It is a clever twist on the Time Loop trope, and has fueled ideas for a game with a short amount of moves to complete an objective, and a limited number of resets, which build the game the same way, each time. The game would revolved around an Event Deck which gets randomly created, and then the cards play out from the top each turn, covering the previous card, so that at the reset you can easily put them back on the top of the deck, and they will play out again in the same way. Then you get to choose different actions, to help you deal with the cards that get played, and on future iterations, to help you prepare for events you know are coming. Things are progressing.

Continued in Time Travel Game – Affecting Your Own Past

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