u/the_gay_harley

I'm a first time DM with some experience as a player who runs a homebrew campaign for a group of mostly beginners. Before we started the campaign I heard about this homebrew "God of scheduling conflicts" who'd just temporarily remove a PC from existence if their player couldn't make it to the game. Since our potential for scheduling conflicts was high I introduced the concept to my players with the exemption that we'll reschedule if the plot doesn't allow the absence.

Over time I started to expand on this God, giving him a name, a personality, powers, lore and even a homebrew cleric subclass. The result was the forgotten god Timal, God of splintered timelines. I took inspiration from Griffin from Men in Black 3, making him a being that can simultaneously see any possible future across all points of time. He quite enjoys watching the world the other gods created but his presence can cause changes in the world. Things like, merchants arrive too late to a business deal because the time of the meeting was changed without adjusting his knowledge of the time. Or, a day suddenly is 48 hours long which results in the party having to manage their resources until the evening. I have a whole D100 random events table for such events.

Timal also turned out to be a great help with the only player who wrote a "bad" backstory. I honestly can't make sense of it until this day and even he admitted that he doesn't quite understand it. We know for sure that he wanted his character to be the daughter of the Goddess of Nature, but she doesn't know that. And then there was something about an Aarakocra poacher with a feathered hat she never saw clearly who mumbled something about passing up on the opportunity to drink unicorn blood...

Well, the player and I are friends from evening school and he always stays for the whole weekend instead of just coming here on Saturday for the game itself. So we made a habit of it to just take a long walk on fridays and just have some solo roleplay along the way, thanks to DnD Beyond. So, Timal became kind of the center of these solo sessions. The first time she woke up in his realm she just learned of his existence, had a nice chat with him and thankfully didn't lose her mind thanks to a high wisdom save. She didn't retain all of her memories upon returning to the material plain but the name Timal echoed in her mind. The second time, he reminded her of the things she forgot and told her, that he was keeping a closer eye on her than he should have which caused the Aarakocra poacher to exist for a brief moment in her timeline. His interest in her comes from her divine heritage though he's unwilling to share the identity of her parents. The player actually thanked me for that since he himself had no idea what to make of this poacher storyline.

Today, will be the third time the two meet and since the group leveled up last time the player wants to multi class into cleric and take the homebrew subclass.

Besides that I've found another great use for Timal. Since the campaign started as a sandbox so my players can get the hang of the game and I can get experience as a DM, the world is relatively empty. But I've recently been stuck in this rabbit hole of "what was medieval life actually like", "what kind of food should your players realistically be served in a tavern", "how to define baronies and the political landscape of your map" I've decided that I'm not that comfortable with the world I created anymore. So in the coming weeks and months I'll work on redesigning the map, making the world feel more alive and then introduce them to the updated world as the work of Timal.

Of course he still serves his role as remover of PCs but that itself can produce so many nice ripple effects when only the party remembers that their comrade ever existed. They once were challenged by the empresses bodyguard to fight him in the local arena since he thought their victory over a green dragon was sheer luck. The 4 PCs went into the viewing gallery to watch the other fights before it was their turn but in the next session they were only 3 and nobody but them saw any issue with that. In the session after that the bodyguard even addressed that during the fight there was no doubt in his mind that he was facing the full group despite clearly missing a member at that time.

I love the potential this forgotten god brings to my game and I'm sure he'll be part of every campaign I'll dm in the future.

Tell me what you think about the God of splintered timelines