Why Time Travel?

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of time-travel. Raised on Dr. Who (Mostly Tom Baker), Star Trek, Time Bandits, and other media, I’ve always loved the concept of time travel. Going back in time to change things and what that would do to the present flow of time. It was with that in mind that I began to develop Chrono-Rogue. I’ve always loved the romanticism and adventure behind piracy and I’ve played a fair amount of Warhammer 40K (both the war game and the rpg), so I began wondering how one could combine the infinite of space travel along with the action and adventure of being a time traveling pirate. I started from a multitude of points. What kind of world would this be? What would cause a society to turn to time travel? Who would regulate it for a profit and who would do it illegally, risking all the dangers? What were the dangers? Self erasure for one.
I thought about our own society and how we burn through resources so quickly at the risk of the planet, and I thought a society who was pillaging the resources of the past would definitely stave off their problems temporarily. That felt very much like the world we’ve lived in. Operating quickly without the thought of immediate consequences. With that a world began to shape itself in my mind.

I had to tackle the meta-problems first. The “what if I went back and killed a relative directly responsible for my birth before i was born paradox.” I had to at least attempt to solve that problem before tackling some of the other problems. I thought about what would happen if something would get changed in one’s past. What would delete them from history? I came up with a metaphysical energy and just called it paradox. Paradox eats the things that aren’t supposed to exist. Then I had to come up with humanity’s solution for that problem, and envisioned the paradox suits and the paradox fields. No matter what happened to one’s past, their present would be unaffected. And in my mind, that translated well into a multiverse. Since time has been altered so many times, there had to be infinite branches of possibilities for characters to explore. This would also mean that player characters could investigate an infinite possibility of outcomes. They could visit a Rome where Caesar survived, stop the assassination of JFK, stop Genghis Khan before he took over half the world.

I knew I wanted to build a cataclysm into the lore of the world. Something that would force this time traveling society into a state of hiding. I also wanted to prevent player characters from going to the point when time travel was invented and meddling with that moment, so I killed both problems at once. Criminals went back in time after taking down the global paradox grid and killed the individual responsible for creating time travel. Boom, world destroyed.

Chronoliths appeared. Massive floating cities with intact paradox fields took in the remnants of humanity from a timeline that was ripping itself apart. The Chronoliths traveled back, attempting to stabilize the timeline by floating at key nexus points in the past. They hoped to stave off the attack of paradox with their own powerful paradox engines….