The Basics

=== Base system: === All skills, attributes and averages are based on earth gravity (9.8 m/s) and early 23rd century (2200). The past and future are calculated from there. Base technology is also from there. There are ways to have your character born in another time, and will be covered in subsequent sections

Premise:
Your character has somehow, depending on your backstory, acquired a Time Warp device. This basic device allows you to jump 50 years into the past or future, but not to travel. When you use it, you will go (for example) from the corner of A street and Third Ave in San Diego in the year 2200 back 10 years to the corner of A street and Third Ave in San Diego. This is only a temporal shift. Not a physical one. As you gain experience and get better devices, you can travel further in time, and to different locations.

To keep things as simple as possible, there is no ‘butterfly effect’ unless the mission (or the Game master) dictates. Time is assumed to be resilient enough to handle and compensate for you stepping on a butterfly in prehistoric time without it effecting what exists in the 25th century. There are some key events, however that MUST occur, and these will be noted in adventures. For example, killing Hitler would probably mean that the Nazi movement would still be alive and unwell (time would find a replacement) and WW2 would still play out the same way. However, killing the whole Nazi party and getting a Jewish pacifist elected would probably screw things up pretty bad, since that would be a major shift in time because WW2 would not have occurred. Again, it’s up to the Game master and other players as to what constitutes a key event.

Eventually, due to financial and electro-mechanical constraints, the party is striving to build their own Time Ship, which can travel space and time at their convenience. Each member of the group has a specific set of skills that can be used to enhance the Time Ships operation with defenses, stealth and communication.

Also, the construction of the Time Ship allows higher level characters to enter the Twilight Paradox game mode, where space and time are meaningless, and roleplaying is all!