I ran the first third or so of Kevin Kulp’s Timewatch adventure “The Gadget” last night for my weekly group. It’s published in Behind Enemy Times, the adventure supplement for Timewatch. We only had a couple of hours– we might actually finish the rest of the adventure next week.
We’re in a kind of limbo while 2 players are absent and only have 2 players available. So we’re filling in with some time-travel buddy cop fun.
Our investigators are a 24th century “reformed” time criminal, and a Roman Praetor (very law-and-order) from 200 BC. It’s interesting running a GUMSHOE game where not all of the investigation skills are covered. Especially when one of those skills is “History: Contemporary” and your game starts out at the Trinity test site in New Mexico in 1945.
Not advised, mind you. But interesting. I decided to run with it and see how it goes. So far, there’s been a little bit of “fish out of water” silliness, but I’m sure they will get more into their element when they travel to more distant times and places as they track down what happened at the Trinity site just days before the first test detonation of the atomic bomb.
The cool part is that I’ve been able to easily grab images from history to use in the adventure. Like a woolly mammoth, which I was able to turn into a Roll20 token pretty quickly!
I’m encouraged that you’ve been having fun with Timewatch. I’m excited to try it some day, and am a bit trepidatious about open ended time-travel and my own fuzzy grasp of history.
I can imagine trying to write a scenario would just get bogged down in all the cool details of what actually happened.
I’ll be honest, playing with those details is amazingly fun. It’s pretty much about writing an adventure of “historical what-if.”