Character Backgrounds

So, basically, you want to be either a criminal…or possibly some sort of researcher or historian or someone who knows how to find information.

Character creation backstory options:

  1. You were born and lived in one of the three main timelines until something happened that made you a temporal refugee. This can have been decades ago, or it could have just literally happened ten minutes ago and you are still disoriented.

    A temporal refugee is someone who cannot go back to their thread, and is the reason that Haven was created. Two common reasons for that are: a) you found a time machine and ran off, either with someone or not, and now you have diverged too much to return, or b) Someone tried to ‘save your life’ from your normal fated death, but as that is not how time travel works, all that did was create a version of you still alive but without a thread to be in.

    This is the most likely background for a character, that you are already in Haven.

  2. You are from 1970-2020 Legacy, and still be there, being a completely normal person. And the plan is to pick you up during the first session.

    You have to talk to me about that. We figure out a backstory that links you with the plot, or at least puts you near the plot.

  3. You were born on Haven. Haven has existed for 31 years, after all. That’s unlikely as a choice, it’s not particularly interesting as a backstory, but you could have extremely interesting parents from any point in time or any timeline.

Note that there a generally agreed upon ‘now’ that is is 31 in Haven, 1951 in Commonwealth, 2011 in Legacy, and 2071 in InterAct. However, that does not impact where you are from at all, what that is talking about is where their temporal enforcement agencies are currently at, an arbitrary agreed upon consensus.

If you are living on Haven, you (along with those temporal enforcement agencies, and indeed all time travelers), generally know what is going to happen in the near future of each timeline. Although that is not entirely certain, as those agencies themselves exist and can end up changing things in ‘their future’. But their past is pretty much set in stone.

Tech

There are technically three kinds of computer networks. The Internet in Legacy, the old Interlink/Textlink in InterAct which is almost identical to the Internet while maddeningly slightly incompatible, and the newer virtual/augmented reality much higher bandwidth The Link, which uses direct induces currents in the brain and reads them back, which was developed about 2030 in InterAct

I’m not going to worry too much about players knowing that. If you are someone who hacks, that’s the sort of stuff I assume you learned offscreen, and I won’t impose any penalties for ‘the wrong’ sort of technology.

However, to do the last sort of hacking of The Link, or to even interact with The Link, you have to have either:

  • an implant, which is pretty hard to get if you don’t exist in that timeline, although you could already have one of you’re from there. (Which you presumably already had jailbroken when you got to Haven because they will try to phone home and shutdown when they cannot.)
  • a neural link, which is the same concept of direct brain induction but just sticks onto your temple, or some are glasses-shaped. (But even if glasses-shaped, it’s direct brain induction, not VR goggles)

If you are running around in the ‘now’ of InterAct, 2071, or even any point past the mid-2050s, be aware that is basically impossible to do anything without The Link. Augmented Reality (AR) is overlaid on top of everything by that point, and if you cannot see it, you are basically not living in the same consensual reality as everyone else.

Meanwhile, if you have a phone from Haven, which you do, you can do the other networks just fine…those phones can speak both Internet and Interlink/Textlink. If you ever need to make or receive calls outside Haven, we’ll assume you’ll get burner accounts for them offscreen…assuming cell phones exist in that time period, that is.