Wednesday, September 6, 2023

Retrospective: Timemaster

That the history of the RPG industry is filled curiosities should come as no surprise. Then, as now, "the industry" largely consists of small operations big on passion but often lacking in the business sense necessary to channel that passion into a lasting enterprise. Pacesetter Ltd is a great example of this from my youth. Founded in 1984 by a number of ex-TSR staffers, the company lasted only two years before disappearing. However, during those two years of existence, Pacesetter managed to publish four different RPGs, three of them in the same year – Chill, Star Ace, and Timemaster. 

Though Chill was by far my favorite of the three games the company published in 1984, Timemaster was a close second. As a kid, I enjoyed watching reruns of the old Irwin Allen television show, The Time Tunnel. Even though it only ran for a single season, I remember thinking that it was a great premise for an ongoing TV show – like Star Trek, except that time, not space, was the final frontier. Consequently, Timemaster was an easy sell for me.

Like all Pacesetter RPGs, Timemaster came in a box, inside of which was a 64-page rulebook (Travelers' Manual), a 32-page Guide to the Continuum, which explained in greater depth of how time travel worked; and a 16-page adventure, Red Ace High, set during World War I. Also included were some cardboard counters and a hex map to use with the adventure, which dealt with the First Battle of Cambrai in 1917. It's a nice little package that very much appealed to my sensibilities as a TSR fanboy. I've long suspected that this was intentional on the part of Pacesetter, whose games always had a "TSR-but-not" vibe to them – no surprise, given that its staff included Mark Acres, Garry Spiegle, Carl Smith, Stephen D. Sullivan, and Michael Williams, all of whom had worked at TSR in the years prior. 

Mechanically, Timemaster is pretty similar to the other RPGs in Pacesetter's roster. It makes use of a color-coded action table of the sort I most strongly associate with Marvel Super Heroes but which would eventually be found in many other games during the mid-80s. Character ability scores are generated randomly, but the player can choose his character's skills and paranormal talent, a psionic power of limited utility, like telepathy. The design is nothing fancy but I recall it working without too much fuss in play, which is precisely what I've generally wanted out of RPG mechanics.

Where Timemaster really shined was in the execution of its basic premise. The game assumes that characters are members of the human Time Corps, a 72nd century organization tasked with protecting the integrity of "the Continuum" from those who would disrupt it for their own ends. The two primary sources of disruption are renegade humans and a race of shapeshifting aliens called the Demoreans. Adventures thus consist in efforts by the characters, as agents of the Time Corps, to ensure that disruption is, if not stopped completely, kept to a minimum.

What I found most intriguing about Timemaster was that the Continuum was more than just a linear progression of time. Instead, it encompasses a wide variety of parallel timelines, some of them very different from the timelines from which the characters come. This gave the game a much wider scope than just traveling up and down the timeline to visit famous historical events – though the game certainly supported and encouraged that. Characters could also visit odd parallel worlds where magic works or dinosaurs evolved to intelligence, for example, or even where literary characters like Sherlock Holmes or the Three Musketeers were real. 

It's all quite ridiculous, of course, but Timemaster made it work, in large part because the game clearly spells out the Laws of Time and then follows through with them in a way that makes game sense if not necessarily scientific sense (assuming such a thing is even possible when talking about time travel). This makes it easier for both the players and the referee (or Continuum Master) to get a solid handle on how the universe of the game works and that's essential. Otherwise, everyone can quickly get tied up in knots over questions of paradox and time loops and so on. Timemaster recognizes this and lays it all out in a way I found quite helpful. You might disagree with its take on certain aspects of time travel – I was never fond of the "literary" parallels, for example – but there's no question that it all hangs together decently, if you're willing to accept the game's premises.

Timemaster is one of those roleplaying games that I occasionally remember exists and then think, "I should play this again some time," because I had fun with it in the past. As I said, the game won't win any prizes for game design, let alone scientific "realism," but, like many of the best RPGs, it's a delightfully open-ended vehicle for exercising your imagination and that's no small thing.

20 comments:

  1. I scored a half dozen or so adventures for this, in 2014, for 5 bucks a piece. but no corebook, so, there they sit, teasing me.

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    1. Are the adventures any good? I've never seen them myself.

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    2. mmm there is something there, that could be good, but pretty generic

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    3. I had almost all of them back in the day (one of the FLGSs remaindered them in 1987-ish) an dthey were quite erratic, but I wouldn't call any of them great. Mostly just strung-together combat encounters with a very thin connecting plot regardless of system, with Chill being a bit better on average (ie more investigation and roleplay) and Star Ace being the worst in that regard. Nothing in the whole kit and caboodle that came close to classic D&D stuff like Barrier Peaks or Keep or Temple.

      Timemaster did have one of the best module titles of all time though, in the form of "Terrible Swift Ford" - which is about a second US Civil War fought with what amount to Car Wars vehicles. It's a bit of wordplay on "Terrible Swift Sword" (an actual ACW ref familiar to gamers and historians alike) that manages to be simultaneously awesome and stupid and memorable to boot. The adventure inside it is bland, but oh, that title.

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    4. Core box pdf is readily available on DTRPG, and can probably be found pirated as well. Not recommending you actually play, but you could if you wanted to. :)

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  2. In addition to their RPGs (and a rather large number of supplements for all of them except Sandman) they also put out two boxed board games, Black Morn Manor (based on Chill, basically a haunted house "dungeoncrawl") and Wabbit Wampage (obviously inspired by the Bugs Bunny cartoons). Their output was simply staggering for the two years they lasted.

    You can still buy a fair amount of their stuff as pdfs through RPG, with Goblinoid Games (who may be shut down now, but still have a store page there) having Timemaster and Sandman and later editions of Chill avaialble from a couple of sources.

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    1. Make that three boxed board games. Wabbit's Wevenge (a sequel to Wampage) apparently did actually come out just before the company shut down completely in 1986. Never saw it in person and assumed it the few ads for it were teasers for a never-was, but it appears I was wrong.

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  3. Had this as well as CHILL. Always wanted to run both games but just didn't have the time between our systems of choice at the time (homebrew military/cold war, MSPE and Espionage/Justice Inc.). I too loved the TSR-esque vibe of their games.

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    1. One positive thing about Pacesetter's RPGs was that they all shared such similar game engines using elements from one setting in another was pretty easy to do. I distinctly remember a college GM who ran us through a horror story using a Chill entity in Star Ace, with an undercover Time Agent helping out the Aces.

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    2. It's been so long, IDR the systems at all. Sounds like they were jumping on the Chaosium/BRP and HERO games line of thinking. And thanks for reminding me of Star Ace- I think my buddy bought that one.

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  4. Never played, but it strikes me as the kind of game that could not be played "sandbox" style-- you need a strongly plotted adventure for this to work properly. This same "problem" exists for other mission-type games (Top Secret, for example) where the players can't just decide to go do something different.

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    1. Going by their published adventures, all their RPGs were intended to be played that way. I'm not sure they even understood the concept of a sandbox, although Star Ace did have a strategic map that might have allowed a space hexcrawl (ala Traveller) to work with a very adaptable GM.

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  5. I had assumed they based Timemaster of the Time Wars series of books by Simon Hawke. I never learned of The Time Tunnel show until much later in life.

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    1. More likely directly influenced Fritz Leiber's excellent "spiders and snakes" short stories, about two groups (the aforementioned "spiders" and "snakes") who battle through time in an attempt to change the future.

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    2. Probably not unless Hawke (originally Nicolai Yermakov, he legally changed his name to his most-used pen name in the early 1980s) was personal friends with the Pacesetter staff. Timemaster came out in 1984, the same year the first three(!) Time Wars novels dropped. They were probably both in the works at about the same time, at least for the fisrt book in the series. If anything, Timemaster might have influenced the later Time Wars books a bit if Hawke saw the game in time.

      If nothing else, I cannot imagine a 1980s game designer not cribbing the nuclear hand grenades that "clocked" most of the explosion to a random point in an alternate timeline if they'd know about them. Who doesn't want a mostly-clean 10' diameter fission explosion in the hands of PCs? That's the kind of thing that makes Rifts players wet themselves.

      Looking at Hawke's bibliography again for the first time in years I'm struck by the fact that I've read an *lot* of his books in years past. Time Wars might have been the best of the lot but the Wizard of Insert Address Here books were wonderful modern fantasy schlock and the Shakespeare mysteries were a bit ahead of their time going by the amount of that kind of thing is on the market now. Always a reliable hack writer in my experience, really should have been born in (or time-travelled to) the pulp era, he was made for it.

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  6. I always assumed one of the inspirations for this game would've been Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories - especially the time cycles or chronoscooters or whatever they were called.

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    1. Forgot about those! But certainly the idea of some sort of group that makes sure that the timeline is preserved is a very common one in stories, comics, and tv shows. There was the short lived Voyagers! TV show in 1982. One conceit I liked from that show was that the heroes would go to one messed up time, say WWI, realize that the reason the Allies were losing was due to, say, the airplane not being invented, then have to go back to Kitty Hawk in 1903 to fix that issue.

      (And yes, I know that anyone with more than grade-school history can point out a million reasons that the above example is pure bunk, but it's a fun conceit.)

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    2. Yeah, I loved that show! I once wrote a letter to Kenner Toys begging them to make a replica of the Omni (the little compass/miniature globe doohickey that the Voyagers used to travel through time). Sadly, nothing came of that! I got it on DVD a while back for my nieces, but it never caught on with them. Its age shows in the little blurb at the end of each episode urging you to visit your local library if you want to learn more about the historical events/characters it featured.

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  7. I loved this game as a kid, but my high regard for it was as a time travel RPG that used the same game system as Chill (the consensus headline RPG from Pacesetter). The time machine on the cover looked like George Pal's movie version of The Time Machine, and I personally preferred the Voyagers! TV show to Time Tunnel (which was before my time), but I still liked the premise. I felt like the published adventures mostly fell short of the initial promise, however.

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  8. Obsessed with time travel and TT fiction as I was, I picked up everything in the Timemaster line — though ironically the timing was never right with my gaming group and we never got to play. It was still a great read.

    The hefty Time Tricks expansion added a LOT of material to the game but created an amusing and confounding hurdle to linear storytelling (and roleplaying sessions) that would likely trip up all but the most clever of GMs: the possibility that a successful mission by the players might wipe the existence of their characters from the timeline. Whoopsie!

    I'm wondering if anyone ever played long enough for one of these scenarios to appear (or, should that be, disappear)?

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