August 2024 RPG Blog Carnival: It Came From Beyond Time

Welcome to the new month for the RPG Blog Carnival - our topic for August 2024 is "It Came From Beyond Time" - on my mind is the stramge effects of long life and magic can have in dredging things up from the deep past and hurl them into your current campaign. You can find some deeper background on the RPG Blog Carnival on 'of Dice and Dragons'.

If you want to join the carnival, write up your own entry and post it in a comment below, send me a link (my username at gmail.com) or ping me on the 'blog-carnival' OSR discord channel or find me bluesky, twitter or mastodon. I will gather all the participants into a wrap-up post on September 4th.

Below is my own take on the topic.

With all the strange magics and long-lived creatures kicking about your standard D&D setting - not to mention the timeless nature of the astral plane - all sorts of anachronisms can pop up in your campaign.

Some interesting ways to harness this are:
- Ancient items - both magic and mundane
- Travellers out of time
- Splinters of ancient civilizations

We can sometimes experience the first of these in our own world - things miraculously preserved in just the right conditions - but with magic and the planes for our games we can encounter the living past.

One approach to this is the reappearance of long forgotten secrets which change the balance of power or send people scrambling for them. There is a relatively mundane version of this in archaeology - the rediscovery of lost knowledge from ruins and the like - this is not what we mean here; these are the things that resolve questions about ancient times with perfect clarity and are those highly valuable to those seeking to use that information.

Another approach is ancient magics, the classic lost artefact that can be reclaimed and wielded for good or ill.

A last strand, one which I always liked, was the rediscovery of tiny carches of consumables - Dragon No.221 had a great example of this with dreamwillow and the lost school of Oneiromancy. Effectively the knowlege was about but the magical components (dreamwillow) was long gone extinct - if you should find a few perfectly preserved seeds do you try and cultivate new dreamwillow or use them for one last impossible casting? And best of fun is the desperate hunt to find *more* caches of something long extinct - great gaming fodder there.

I heard a story of one of the large houses near where I grew up that had a store of cigars purchased by some previous lord and through sheer conincidence were stored in a place where the conditions were accidentally perfect to preserve them. Forgotten, the servants were steadily using them as kindling to light fires until some guest noticed and sampled one, identifying them as perfectly preserved and wonderful quality. The remaining cigars were sold to auction at a fabulous price.

d10 ways that this thing has been preserved
1. Stasis machine that just wore out
2. Frozen, just thawed out
3. A pocket dimension
4. Adrift on the astral until it fell through a rogue colour pool
5. Magical trap that was just dispelled
6. Sealed in just the perfect environment, by pure coincidence
7. 'pearled' within an immortal beast
8. Submerged in oil pool or bog that just drained to reveal it
9. Entombed in geology - too magical to decay or fossilise - now revealed by time and erosion
10. In a hive comb, saturated within honey, potentially a melified version now

People - individual people can get lost in time easily - roll d6 on the table above to see where they were. Assume some revivification or epic bull-headedness to drag themselves back from their long sleep.

d6 motivations for this new arrival from the past
1. - Lost heir (recent) to kick-over the settled political equilibrium of the campaign - contest the throne
2. - Old lord (ancient) to call ancient pacts and contest the very occupation of this place by the current polities.
3. - Ancient villain released
4. - Maintenance man - here to check on conditions and ensure something that is supposed to keep happening is still happening - fixing a ward
5. - Long watchman - here to check that something is *not* happening that should not be - a cult remains dead, etc.
6. - Lost - someone 'ordinary' transported through time, with unusual knowledge but just trying to get by

If you've got the head for it, there is potentially lots of fun to be had by running people out of time with a different ruleset - an early edition, for example. It is canon that the way everything worked changed between editions (see Die, Vecna Die!) For another example of different rules for different folks see Flames of the Meta Dragon.

Cultures - these could also be the mechanism by which the individual has been carried down the calendar but they also serve as ways for communities to be moved.

d6 causes for this whole slice of a nation to re-emerge from the depths of time
1. - The classic vault full of the one-time local hegemons asleep - see Mass Effect's Protheans. An army in waiting that was deliberately chucked down the timeline to re-seed their empire after the dust of whatever cataclysm had settled
2. - The necromantic awakening of some old faction; similar to the above but more vengeful and 'burn the world' than reconquering
3. - 'Vault' type re-emergence where the dwellers have been active all this time but isolated and aware time has passed. There is no immediate plan for conquest
4. - Return from the feywild/shadowfell - very much a thing in old Irish myth, the reappearance of the land beneath the hill, Tir na nOg, etc. - complete with confusion as to why things have changed
5. - New cycle of a great migration - just because this place has been empty for ages from your perspective, does not mean that the wandering court of the djinni or the Seelie or whoever have that same opinion
6. - Macro version of the 17 year cicada - something with a very long life cycle flips to a new phase - could be something wakes up and emerges or something that has been around in the background suddenly becomes dramatically proactive.

As you can see from all the above, deep time is a way to throw some disrupting factors into your campaign - stuff is the mildest because the PCs will have the most agency over what to do with it, this is mostly pure opportunity. People is trickier because they have their own motivations and plans and then cultures can be the most disruptive, like dropping a whole new faction on a boardgame. There is potential for the players to stumble upon a time-lost culture on the verge of re-emerging and so getting the agency to act there but a culture splinter re-emerging will be a chunky disruptor as everyone reacts to them, use with caution.