Yes, it’s mildly awful. Or at least the implications are. Gotta give the PCs a suitably awful Ultimate Big Bad to aim for, right?
The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD – Google Docs
The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD
Well, it’s like this. Time travel is possible, you can change the past, but it doesn’t effect anything that happens back in your home time period. The nations of the world — at least, the ones whose governments survived any number of revelations by people raiding the recent past for evidence of awkward or illegal shenanigans — have banded together to create an international organization dedicated to making sure that all the awful consequences of time travel stay strictly Downtime, and never impacts Uptime (currently 2057 AD) at all. OK? OK.
Well, various academics and historians all banded together at one point and got enough funding to do a thorough investigation of the world of 800 AD. Why 800 AD? Charlemagne, mostly. But the people interested in pre-Norman Britain and the Mayans and the Abbasid Dynasty and the Tang Empire had no complaints. The initial project was straightforward enough: jump in, establish a portal, wire key buildings and areas for video and sound, and of course copy every document that wasn’t nailed down. Most of the work was done via drone, of course; some of it was disguised, some of it was pretty obviously not (it was intended to be too high up in the sky for anybody from Downtime to notice).
And the project went off without a hitch! They filmed and recorded without being noticed for two or so years, and then the funding dried up and it was time to abandon all the sites. Which the various groups did; and they left all their junk behind, because doing so was cheaper than the energy cost they’d need to bring the stuff back Uptime. And then, inevitably, somebody came across the caches…
Welcome to the Great Drone Wars. All over the planet, various Dark Age empires are enjoying the advantages that come when you have invulnerable eyes in the sky that can see your enemy’s every move. The major research hubs were England, Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire, the Itza, Tang Dynasty China, the Abbasid Dynasty, Cahokia, and the Gao Empire: needless to say, every single region there is involved in a war of expansion, conquest, and/or consolidation.
The good news is, there aren’t any guns, and while the items left behind still function it’s unlikely that Dark Age savants will figure out any time soon how they actually work (even translating the texts has been problematical for everybody except the Abbasids, thanks to the limited linguistic drift of Arabic). The bad news is, the original researchers left behind plenty of maps. Once the locals figured out what these maps are and how accurate they are, well, it’s also the start of an Age of Exploration.
So, basically, that’s the game world. Early-medieval technology, a limited number of technological miracles, and an accurate world map. If the original Uptime researchers found out about this place and could come back, they would — and probably try to run it as some sort of demented MMO. Uptime can be a bit funny in the head, when it comes to Downtime affairs…
Very minor nit to pick: AD dates are properly written with AD before the number, as opposed to BC dates where BC comes after the number. As I said, very minor; I’m just glad that you don’t use that execrable CE and BCE nonsense. (IMHO, if you’re going to use the Christian calendar, then use the Christian calendar terms, dammit. Quit expropriating MY culture.)
Coming in a day late on this one, and reading about “expansion, conquest, and/or consolidation”, my first thought *this* time is that around this time (supposedly) there was a scheme to marry Charlemagne and Empress Irene, which could, conceivably, led to unification between the Eastern and Holy Roman Empires. I can see how the Franks having access to this technology could have made this match happen.