allgeektout

I like campaigns that have an end game. Not necessarily at a set time in the future, but at some point, I want the major mysteries will be revealed, the world will be saved, the big bad will be defeated, and so on. After flipping through the Eberron Campaign Guide at Borders and reading the included adventure (it includes, among other things, a flashback scene to be played before the rest of the adventure in the present), it gave me an idea for a campaign based off of the novel and upcoming TV show Flash Forward. I want to preface with the fact that I am not intimately familiar with either of these, but I am more familiar with the TV show and will be referencing that more if not exclusively).

The Flash Forward

Instead of starting with the flashback like the Eberron adventure, this would jump to a set period of in-game time in the future (the TV show has six months, which I kind of like as a number). You could handle this in a number of ways, but there are a few questions you need to ask.

• The World or the PCs? In Flash Forward, everyone in the world experiences the flash simultaneously for two minutes and seventeen seconds. Although the disaster that this kind of flash could cause would be interesting to explore, it wouldn’t focus as much on the PCs. More likely, the PCs would be the only people who experience it – which also sets up the question of why did they see it? Also, they couldn’t share it with the world, as they would be viewed as insane – perhaps the characters can’t even share it with each other at first, because they don’t realize the others saw the future as well (they tried to join with the others because the future showed them together or something).
• What do they see? There are two ways that I could see someone going about this (plus a third, which would be to combine the other two). The first is character driven – ask the players where their characters see themselves in six months, and then betray their expectations. Why didn’t they manage to achieve what they though they would? The characters would try to change time so that things worked out the way they think they should. The other option is the epic plot – they see the world ending, or some kind of catastrophe, and because, as previously mentioned, they can’t tell anyone what they saw, they have to stop it themselves. I’m sure a DM could find a way to weave these two stories together.
• Is time immutable? Both ideas above lead to this question – can what they saw actually be changed? In the book Flash Forward, it could – people saw themselves in a situation they didn’t like, and many committed suicide, changing the future that way. Obviously, it wouldn’t be a fun campaign if the PCs were headed towards an inevitable future. I wonder if you could again toy with their expectations, though – perhaps although the future was immutable, not everything was as it was appears. That’s definitely something I want to keep in mind, but I think the easiest and most enjoyable solution for the PCs would be to make time malleable.

How would you handle a Flash Forward-style campaign?