Game Review: Timewatch, by Kevin Kulp
“History is not written by the victors, it’s written by the people with the time machines.” — Robin D. Laws Time Travel, as one of the earliest streams of science fiction literature, is similarly one of the earliest themes and modes in roleplaying games. From Timemaster to GURPS, to Continuum, and many others, characters acting as adventurers, patrollers, and explorers in the corridors of time and space have been a staple of science fiction roleplaying. Timewatch, written by Kevin Kulp and published by Pelgrane Press, is the latest iteration of time-travel roleplaying games. The default setting of the Timewatch RPG is the familiar line of a Time Patrol who monitors and keeps History on track. The Timewatch have a citadel in the out-of-time-and-space locale just before the singularity event that creates the Big Bang, and it is from that point that they monitor changes to the time stream due to outside agency, and then when one is detected, the agents are dispatched to discover why history has gone off track, and to correct it. Time’s track goes off because of, not usually pure chance as in the matter of Voyagers!, but rather because of other time travelers. Thus the players are pitted against would-be meddlers in history ranging from misguided do-gooders looking to kill Hitler to mutant time-traveling intelligent cockroaches seeking to create the nuclear apocalypse that will bring their species into existence. The opposition wants to change history permanently, and it’s up to the PCs to foil their plans and fix it.
