As all time traveling mercenaries know, manipulating the timestream is tricky business. Sometimes you will need to take decisive action to ensure the success of the mission, and sometimes that means taking a risk. Say you decide to cross your own timestream, alter your own past, or make other larger changes to the timeline. Well that will probably result in a personal reality shift, colloquially known as a “mutation.” From your perspective the change may not be a change at all “it’s always been like that” or be immediately noticeable “did I just grow new eyes?” or may have developed in the past “I got that cyber-implant for my 20th birthday.”

So where do these changes come from? Well sometimes it’s a simple cause and effect change to your past, or sometimes it’s you “switching tracks” with a version of yourself from an alternate timeline to help make possible the alterations you have made to the timestream. Don’t worry these changes are a normal part of every time traveler's work life, with the proper training you will have nothing less to fear.

So in Chronomutants players generally interact with altering the timeline in three distinct ways.

1. Going into the past and mucking about through normal play.
2. Using the Rewrite Reality Skill Move.
3. Directly altering previous events they were involved in.

When players do any of these things, the GM should attempt to track threats rolled in the past and apply the appropriate anomaly on the players return to the present, at a rate of:

1. Threat = Mutation for those involved,
2. Threat = a Minor Anomaly,
3. Threat for a Major Anomaly,
4. or more Threat for an Apocalypse. 

Sometimes I give out Mutations in addition to other consequences for directly altering their own past, if it feels dramatic or appropriate, but I always warn a player before they roll on the threat of a Mutation or other Anomaly.

All Anomaly have varying degrees of negative in-game consequences, except Mutations. The current odds on the Mutation table are:

• 25% Chance to gain a beneficial Mutation
• 10% Chance to receive a cosmetic only change
• 30% Chance to gain a “mixed” result that gives advantages in some situations and disadvantages in others
• 25% Chance to gain an entirely negative Mutation
• 10% Chance to Mutate in a way that causes your death

At first look these numbers might seem pretty ruthless, but there are a few factors to consider.

1. You only roll on the table after rolling Threat, not all the time.
2. Characters with Training in Rewrite reality or Precognition get Temporal Defense. Allowing them to roll an additional time on the table per Defense and letting the player choose which mutation they get.
3. Death is soft in Chronomutants. Each player character can die 3 times before being erased from the timeline, but they do roll a mutation when they die. You come back stranger.

Previously, I had almost exclusively positive Mutations on the list, just because I hadn’t gotten around to writing enough, and certain savvy playtesters were able to game the system to get a bunch of superpowers nearly risk free. The new list prevents this, as even if remote, a skilled time traveler still has a chance to explode into flames with a very unlucky roll. Time Travel should be dangerous. Danger is fun.

Overall the mutations and anomalies are meant to be a risk associated with time travel, and changing it to be risky is doing a much better job than me just verbally warning players, but then giving them superpowers instead. Players can get cool gifts like Intangibility, but only 25% of the time.

Early testing shows the new list to be a big hit. The current playtest group has decided if they have defense, they don’t want to read the entries before deciding, they just have me tell them names. I’m not planning on making that a rule, but it shows they are getting into the spirit of the game. Although, the player without defense that got two extra mouths on their buttocks certainly wouldn’t have chosen for that to happen. Also with the new number of entries (240) it’s now possible to roll with 1d12+1d20 which feels a lot better than having to use a random number generator. Finally, with the 1.2 update you can roll on every table with standard polyhedral dice.

With 1.2 out, I think this is likely the last really big content update, the next couple of updates are going to focus on the artistic presentation of the rules. While I start another round of public playtesting before locking in the layout. The game has been running really well, so I don’t foresee any major system changes at this point. I’m taking a little time off, the next Devlog will hopefully be 7/11/23. Unless I get really inspired to write something between now and then.

Have fun, play the genetic lottery, don’t burst into flames, good luck

-g