Time Loop Adventure: Distant Star Space Station

Over the last year and a half, I've developed a kind of format for time loop games, ttrpg one-shots that have mostly-scripted events occurring at a variety of locations and a sort of puzzle for players to work out in order to resolve conflicts in those locations. I started with a quiet seaside town called Standstill Cove, where players had to prevent a mysterious foe from exploiting the time loop to cause destruction. After that came Hourton City, a much darker adventure set in a large city; this one-shot centered around completing the necessary steps to break the time loop. To this developing tradition, I'd like to offer this, Distant Star Space Station, a one-shot where players must manipulate the time loop in order to escape the failing station and its dangers. 

As I've said of the previous time loop one-shots, there is a strange balance to strike with these adventures. On the one hand, there is a need for there to be a certain level of scriptedness (which I mostly provide in the notes below) in order to seem like a time loop at all. On the other, players will rarely have occasion to live out parts of the loop in exactly the same way for strategic reasons, and there's little reason to not simply say, "You successfully maneuvered this before, so there's no reason to make you repeat your success" once the players have figured out a section of the puzzle and don't want to change anything. This means that you will have to do some improvising with the notes below as more of a guide than a strict and complete script. I recommend reading through the entire adventure's notes below to familiarize yourself with the general aims and story moments that will be the most important and trusting your instincts as you try to help your players navigate this adventure. 

 

One key difference between the Standstill Cove/Hourton City time loop adventures and this one is that those games focus on interacting with people in the locations at various times, while this adventure has no NPCs in it at all. Instead, this game revolves around environmental storytelling, where all of the discoveries are made and the objectives completed based on observing the space station itself. This is a quite different mode of game which requires a great deal of investigation and puzzle-solving without the complication of social interactions. I hope you enjoy this experiment in environmental storytelling.

Please have fun with this adventure, and good luck! 

Hourton City: A Dark Time Loop Adventure One-Shot

I had a lot of fun creating this time loop one-shot adventure from a while back, so I thought that for this site's 200th post, I would share another iteration of it. Where Standstill Cove was a 1970s New England town, Hourton City--the setting of this game--is a grungy city in a New York-like setting in the 1980s. This adventure deals with some relatively adult material, so please play responsibly. 

So, throw your players into this game. Every time they exhaust the day's time, the game will reset. They'll have to explore the setting, experiment with different strategies, and eventually put it all together to escape the time loop. This system uses no formal rules or dice, and this means that you as the GM will be called upon to improvise a lot of the material. But also, you'll need to make it so that things happen in generally the same way to sell the time loop effect, so there will be a need for balance between the two extremes. 

If environmental storytelling and sci-fi are more your thing, consider the Distant Star Space Station Time Loop.

Please have fun with this game!