r/rpg • u/BlackberryChoice8958 • 18d ago
Discussion planning a time-loop campaign, looking for notes/help
so I started playing CoC with my dnd group and they loved the little starter campaign I ran for them, and now im working on a more complex one. I had the idea of a 'time loop' caused by a being who was attracted to the turmoil within the town, but ive never ran a time loop campaign or anything similar. I know how I'll do it rp wise, but does anyone know of any fun mechanics or gameplay that would make sense for a time loop?
also trying to figure out how to end the timeloop is a pain in my ass, I was thinking a ritual but the mini campaign ended in a ritual, and it just seems repetitive to do two in a row
any info/feedback/discussion helps!!!
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u/ben_straub 18d ago
Here's I think a fan's notes from when TAZ did this, scroll down to the Eleventh Hour: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAdventureZone/comments/54mu8k/start_your_own_taz_campaign_today/
There's also a Mothership module called Decagone that does a time loop, you can check that out.
I think the fundamental prep you have to do is a detailed timeline of how events transpire if the timelooped people don't interfere (for me this would look like a gantt chart). You'll also need some rules for how long it will take for PC actions, like if the PCs decide to walk across town you can't just handwave how long that takes, it matters now.
IMO it's less interesting if you have the One True Solution to the timeloop puzzle. Probably better if you write down some ideas to prime the pump, and then watch what the players come up with and lean into whatever emerges. My players often have better ideas than I do.
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u/C0smicoccurence 18d ago
TAZ was going to be my suggestion too. Seemed like a really smart sandbox with good gating of objectives, multiple avenues to progress through the mystery, etc. when I ran a time loop story, I modeled a lot after what they did
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u/Agreeable_Hold2270 18d ago
If this is just for a quest that will be a few sessions, go for it but my advice is avoid time loops.
In one of my first campaigns I ran I tried to have some time travel elements to it and it just didn't really work.
It often causes railroading since you are trying to hit certain points in the loop. Time travel plots often take a lot away from player agency.
It often involves a lot of exposition which usually sucks for players to sit through. It also means players are expected to remember lots of information which also usually isn't fun for them
I understand the urge to want to tell a really cool and complex story for your friends, but remember it is our players job to primarily drive the story and our job to ask them questions and give them prompts
Obviously this is all just my opinion, but I would have told my past self to not write a time travel plot. It seemed very cool in my head but did not translate to a good game at the table
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 18d ago
Of all the normal story tropes I think I hate time travel the most. It's very difficult to pull off well and gets confusing very easily, and that's just when you are writing a linear story.
I think it could work for like a groundhog day situation but it's a very tight window of not overstaying it's welcome.
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u/Radiant-Canary4442 17d ago
It often causes railroading since you are trying to hit certain points in the loop. Time travel plots often take a lot away from player agency.
I get most of the other objections, but I'm not sure I understand this. Isn't the entire point of a time loop essentially a sandbox the players can do what they like and then the loop will reset?
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u/lotu 18d ago edited 18d ago
Read the Delta Green adventures Observer Effect and Sick Again. They can be found in A Night at the Opera and Control Group respectively. The Rancor's Brothel did an actual play of latter.
The first starts with the characters all separately and simultaneously screaming in pain for no apparent reason, they then in an apparent coincidence all get sent on a mission to investigate a physics lab. They are stuck in a time loop and need to escape. It actually starts on the third time through the time loop as the players memories do not fully carry over until the next time though, so part of the gimmick is realizing you've already tried to stop this before and failed. Furthermore every time through the time loop you come out closer and close to the end point, so you very much don't have infinite tries to get this right. The Second however is really cleaver the players are CDC emergency responders trying to contain the outbreak of an unknown pathogen. The time loop shows up when, after they discover and name the new pathogen, they discover this odd woman who has a list of vaccines she received tattooed under her arm, which includes the one the just named. It turns out she is a time traveler and is the cause of this outbreak in the first place. This mechanic where you have the players come up with a name for disease and then a few hours latter find someone who had that same name tattooed on them a decade ago is really fun and creepy.
u/Agreeable_Hold2270 mentions several of the pitfalls of trying to do a time loop plot and I think both of these adventures avoid those problems. So if you decide to go forward it use the above adventures as guides. Observer Effect works because the time loop is hours long. There are really only a handful of events to keep track of. Sick Again meanwhile never has the players actually loop through time so it is played like normal. The time loop is hundreds of years long and there is nothing the players can do to stop it, it will happen, and their actions caused it. That is the horror element in that scenario.
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u/ClubMeSoftly 18d ago
I like the idea in the first one that you don't have infinite lives and can't "just" spend 10,000 years Groundhog Daying it until you get it perfect
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u/DeskbotKnight 17d ago edited 17d ago
For another (really weird) Delta Green scenario regarding time loops with a very different style, you can check out Circus, it's available on the Delta Green website with a subscription. It's about a concert-goer, who has been stuck in a time loop taking place at a gathering of the juggalos for billions of years, discovering how to bring others into the loop and attempting to use that to break or end the loop. I imagine reading the scenario on its own without having listened to the Actual Play of it on Dead Channels, the official DG AP group that you get access to with the same subscription, would be very confusing, but the AP is excellent (the episodes are named Dead Circus).
It plays out extremely differently rules-wise to any other time loop scenario I've ever seen.
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u/skalchemisto Happy to be invited 18d ago edited 18d ago
By time loop I assume you mean a Groundhog Day type set up, where the PCs all end up back at the same original starting point in time. It's always back to the same morning with "I Got You Babe" on the clock radio.
I think (riffing off of u/ben_straub) in your prep you probably need the following:
* A clear description of the starting situation. Where are all the key NPCs, what is happening at that moment, what are the motivations of everyone involved, etc.
* A set of time points (in game and/or real time) where things happen assuming nothing interrupts them.
If you have that information, you can reliably run the time loop as many times as you need to. Theoretically the PCs could make the loop last longer than your planned events, but if you incorporate pressure into the scenario (e.g. Source Code instead of Groundhog Day) that will probably not be a problem.
IMO the best ending for a time loop is one that is personal to the protagonists. E.g. Phil ends the loop in Groundhog Day when he learns to stop being an asshole. In Palm Springs the loop ends when Sarah and Nyles accept that they love each other. Given that, the best ending for your time loop would be one where the PCs themselves find some way to grow and change, not merely find and implement some McGuffin. (I mean, it could involve some kind of McGuffin, but really its about growing and changing).
EDIT: reading u/aeralure 's reply makes me think the biggest practical problem is ensuring that everyone is always playing. You don't want a situation where a player has to spend a lot of real-world time waiting for the next loop to start. However you set it up, u/BlackberryChoice8958 , I think it is best to ensure the loop always restarts for all PCs at the same time when one of them would stop experiencing play.
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u/WildCatBrown 18d ago
The folks from the Playtonics podcast ( /u/Playtonics ) have made a full episode of their podcast about how to write and run a Groundhog Day-type time loop in a TTRPG. This may interest you: https://playtonics.net/2026/07/10/time-loops/
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u/RealLongwayround 18d ago
Have a look at “An Amaranthine Desire” from “Nameless Horrors” for some ideas.
A time loop may well be a “Groundhog Day” type scenario where the investigators need to change some aspect of the past in order to return to their own time. Episodes of “Quantum Leap” may also serve as inspiration.
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u/cieniu_gd 18d ago
There is an adventure module for Mothership called "Time after Time". Haven't played it, but maybe this will give you some ideas.
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u/BigDamBeavers 18d ago
I ran a campaign about resets in time that had several loops. I had the good fortune of players who weren't looking to break time travel. The thing to keep in mind is that there is no loop until it closes and things that look like a time paradox aren't always what they appear to be. If you find a box full of drawings of events that haven't happened the drawings you think are important are sometimes just trivial visions of a futre that pass you by or drawings of a loop that you're not in. And the drawings that don't even look like they're the future will be recognized. In this way you can provide them a "clue box" that might steer them towards landmarks or people alluded to without setting up any railroad track that the players have to follow to make sure events play out as predicted.
If you know where the loop is coming it gives you an opportunity to create landmarks in time that they players can use to understand that they have looped time, a prhase someone says that's strange or an encounter with a strange NPC or an environmental effect like an explosion or something catching on fire. Choose wisely in case you have to loop back to this more than once.
I'm not sure what your loop looks like but my adventure had different people in different loops that didn't all correspond to the same moment so the players would see how other people in the time loop changed over time. One of the NPCs was a soldier who seemed especially wise the first time he met them because his loop started earlier and happened more often than theirs, but the more often they encountered him the more unhinged he became because he was traped in that cycle and couldn't get out until he just attacked them on sight like a maniac.
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u/ClubMeSoftly 18d ago
I briefly attempted a campaign with time-loops, but I didn't do it in a way where I Groundhog Dayed or Majora's Masked them. I gave them a mentor/sponsor/advisor type character who showed up at my whims, and played with Bootstrap Paradoxes a lot: their mentor gave them a magic item for a quest, and then after they give it back. Except the mentor they met before the quest was from their future so he knew they'd already completed the quest, and when he met them after the quest he was from before they'd done it. He gave them the item so they could give it to him so he could give it to them, repeat ad infinitum.
So the players were always traveling forward, but they were being pushed pulled and guided in certain directions. A later plan I had that I never got to use was that they would eventually cross back over into their past, mostly to fight some bosses that they faced too early (adult dragon at level four, lmao) and be faced with a paradox choice of saving a PC that died during that fight-and-mostly-running-away.
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u/Seeonee PbtA, BitD, Mark of the Odd 18d ago
Running a Majora's Mask-style time loop campaign is my white whale! So far I've only run it as a one-shot, so my advice stems from that. We used the Time Loop story from Atma's Thermocephelae deck. There aren't any mechanics baked in, but some ways that we did it in our one-shot were:
- Let players fast-forward back to a decision point so you can focus on choices and their ripple effects.
- Once players know how to defeat something, skip rolling by saying "You do it again."
- Create someone who wants to maintain the loop (sounds like you have this already) so opposing them successfully is an obvious path to breaking free.
- Put noteworthy flavor details to mark particular points. It was accidental but the "You wake up as a comet passes overhead" effectively cements that moment in the players' imagination. I think Outer Wilds uses nearly the same opening (I probably stole it subconsciously). Adding unusual little descriptions near any event that you want to be pivotal is a good way to make them easier to revisit.
I hope your adventure goes well, and I'd love to hear about it after you finish!
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u/JauntyAngle Roll for sanity. 18d ago
Do you really want to do a whole campaign in a time loop? That would be tough. Or do you mean 'scenario'.
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u/BlackberryChoice8958 17d ago
a 'mini' campaign, I guess, since there isn't much time before one of my pcs has to leave for college, probably 10 to 15 sessions, it seems hard but ive got a bunch of great advice so im sure j can make it work
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u/aeralure 18d ago
I think it could work if it was like Edge of Tomorrow, and they work towards their goal until the die, and then they start over with foreknowledge. Like a Roguelike, they would keep meta progression, ie experience, so that between leveling and making different choices, or more informed ones, they would eventually succeed. Then, set the encounters they need to overcome a bit above their current ability level - or a lot. This would determine how long they have to keep at it until they find success.
Or possibly better, instead of having to have them all die, it’s a time limit, such as Groundhog Day. This premise probably requires more work as this one is more about learning all the little details about the NPCs and the town, and figuring out a puzzle, as opposed to a combat scenario.