It's Dangerous to Go Alone

Art by Tyler Edlin

Poking around the other day on the Giant in the Playground forum, I happened across a neat fan supplement for using the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons to run games set in Hyrule, the setting for Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series of video games. Presented in two books, the author - GitP poster "ninjadeadbeard" - has translated many of the races and items from those games into 5E terms (which are, to my eye, easily translated into the OSR game of your choice), as well as concocting a more group-centered version of Hyrule for your band of adventurers to explore.

This is presented as a post-Triforce era with a number of factions vying and intriguing for control of Hyrule - some inspiration from Game of Thrones is obvious, and probably inevitable. Still, the setting is reinforced with plenty of plot hooks, which are worth a look no matter what system you're using, and it's always interesting to see how somebody else interprets a setting like this. Particularly useful, I thought, were the Triforce-themed alignment system and the thoughts on using D&D classes in the world of Hyrule.

Three TimeWatch Campaign Ideas

As the Kickstarter for TimeWatch enters its final few hours, I've been looking over the Jurassic Edition playtest rules and pondering - specifically, pondering how to tweak the rules for various already-established-but-official-RPGless settings.

The Legend of Zelda

Although it would seem that the more well-known fantasy rules would be most suited for adventuring in Hyrule, some of the games do have an element of time travel to them. Mostly these are hops from one set era to another, but the idea of taking action in one time to set up a success in another translates quite well.

For the adventure itself, I can see the PCs being a cross-section of various Hyrulian races banding together on account of Link disappearing, probably on account of temporal shenanigans from Ganondorf. In an amusing twist on the normal tropes of the series, releasing him would involve exploring a single location multiple times, in multiple times.

Assassin's Creed

Art by chadf

Honestly, it would only take the slightest bit of of reworking to turn TimeWatch into the Assassins and the autochron into the Animus, with Chronal Stability representing Synchronization. Or perhaps the Animus could be re-imagined as an actual mental time-travel device - this would be especially useful in explaining how more than one Assassin can travel to the same era.

In any event, this sort of game would probably draw quite a bit from Night's Black Agents as well as TimeWatch - you'd at least want to put together a Templar conspyramid, and all the better for one spanning multiple eras. 

And with the added element of actual time-travel, there's opportunity for both sides to try to re-write history to their own advantage. Players could even, theoretically, travel into the minds of their future selves, of course to find a dark, Templar-dominated cyberpunk or post-apocalyptic landscape. The big finale of this campaign would probably end up being killing the creator of time travel.

Which brings us to -

Back to the Future

All I really want from this is to have the characters from these movies stated out and set loose on a Tourist campaign. As things progress, they'd meet other iconic time travelers - I have a feeling Doc and Marty would get along great with Bill and Ted - and, of course, evil terminating robots:

Rumor has it that of these characters might get show up in the final edition of the TimeWatch book, bit if not you can probably expect to see them here in about a year or so.