Woke up this morning to find that I had been linked to in the Time Travel definition of TVTropes.org. (Warning: This site itself may in fact be a persistent/benign/obvious temporal anomaly. Those visiting inevitably hear the siren call of each and every link, resulting in the viewer experiencing missing time. Click at your own risk.) And the elegance and accuracy of their description of Time & Temp struck me:
Time and Temp is another Tabletop RPG entirely about Time Travel, using office temps (temps, get it?) as field agents because (as unimportant shlubs) their lives are least likely to suffer a reality-ending paradox due to their own past actions. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Kicking around on the site a little bit, I found quite a few other tropes that applied to most of the Time & Temp games I’ve been in.
- Adventure Town is the staple . . . well, adventure. Sort of. Clearly the temps are hopping from time to time, fixing problems before they occur, but they’re also creating problems as they do so. Problems they will eventually have to go back and fix. Slowly tying all of time together into one giant City of Adventure for them.
- Mistaken for Spies, Mistaken for Badass, Mistaken for Special Guest, or just about any Mistaken will work to shove the temps out of the time machine’s door and into their destiny.
- The tense issue is a perennial gag, as are Young Future Famous People and this harrowing list of possible futures.
There’s almost as much grist for the Time & Temp mill on this site as there is on Wikipedia. Definitely worth the afternoon of work you’ll lose perusing it.
