The Herringbone Code

About the adventure

Play a team of early-career temporal agents unraveling a powerful conspiracy. Tell a story of a powerful time monitoring agency that has been undermined from within, and the stakes for the entire future if they are not stopped. Unravel a mystery that takes you from the Caribbean during the Age of Piracy to the woods outside Washington State in November of 1971. You have been working for the TimeGuard for so long that your own past seems to become a blur of crossed timelines and jumbled histories—and yet you haven’t been here so long that you’re ready for a promotion from field scutwork, cleaning loose timeline strands out of other agents’ missions. And then, while on the job, the most beautiful woman asks you to hold her scarf, calls you by your whole full name, and says, “don’t trust anything you can’t look up”. Wrapped in that scarf is a DVD of every moment of history up until this point, and etched deep within its herringbone pattern is a message in binary code about a mole in the TimeGuard. And then she tells you to take three steps to the left, and that’s why you’re the only one who survived that mission. Join this table if you’re into: playing brilliant but untested temporal monitors in a volatile company of observers and fixers, like in 'Loki' or 'Seven Days'; * telling the story of a bloated bureaucratic intelligence agency about to be ruined by double agents, like in the HYDRA arc of 'Agents of SHIELD'; and how you stop bad actors from tampering with history for their own ends and cut off a massive conspiracy to alter the future before it erases you, like in 'Timeless'.

Additional Details

How to prepare

Mics are required; webcams would be preferred but not necessary. Players will create their own characters. Discord and Roll20 are required; when I've acquired a Foundry license we will transition to that platform together.

What I provide

I will be providing PDFs of Timewatch for anyone who doesn't have any, as well as access to Roll20. Sometime later in play we will transition to the more robust Foundry VTT which has more useful tools for the Gumshoe system, but that will be after Session Zero. Game voice chat and pre-game text chat will be in my Discord server, which I will message all players a link to beforehand. As a GM, I'm big on dramatic NPC relationships, factions with vivid and complex interests, pulling threads on deep relationships between PCs, and missions that are often sudden and intense. I'll also bring strong weird worldbuilding that can swing from revelatory to mildly creepy to outright silly.

Gameplay details

Historical references to racism and sexism are immediately set as Veils unless otherwise specified. In Session Zero, it would be ideal to specify if attending a particular time period would be a line or a veil, for any reason; if it's a line, we never have to go there.

Content warnings

(none)

Safety tools used

Breaks
Lines and Veils
Monte Cook RPG Consent Checklist
Session 0
X, N, and O Cards

How will character creation work

Character and crew creation will be discussed during Session 0. During that session, we'll work together to discover what interesting elements of the TimeGuard organisation you want to play with, and what your relationships are to the company and to your fellow PCs. Feel free to come with questions or with initial character ideas!

Players can expect

• Find a game to join solo or search for a professional game master for you and your friends/coworkers/family.
• Book your session and wait for the Game Master to approve you.
• If you don't have a blast with your first game, your next game is on us.