Time Travel Basics[]
Time Itself[]
Note from the Authors: This tome is not intended to be a stand-alone guide to chronomancy or to the theories of Time that are offered as fact in this work of fiction. Instead we are presenting one of many philosophical takes on the concept of time travel and running with it. It is our hope that it provides just enough suspension of disbelief to make this book and the concepts within it fun to play and think about.
Many concepts of time revolve around the “butterfly effect.” In this fragile temporal paradigm, something as seemingly insignificant as killing an insect in the past changes a whole chain of events and ultimately and irrevocably changes the present and the future. This makes time travel dangerous on many levels and opens the way for confusing paradox.
In this setting, however, time is not so fragile. Instead, we have the “boulder effect.” This mean, sometimes quite literally, that if you mess with a fixed point in time, a boulder may fall on your head, sometimes even preemptively, thus eliminating you from the equation. Time in this universe seems sapient, aggressively defends itself, and does not like it when people try to change major events but doesn’t care too much about the little details, including the individuals who make up those details. Chronomancers, or time mages, learn very quickly the rules of time. They are, as follows:
- There are fixed points in time that Time will actively defend. No one has ever succeeded in changing them. Usually events that cause great change are fixed points.
- The little details are usually not important to Time, and neither are individuals. If one particular villain creates a fixed point event, and you go back in time and kill that person as a baby, time will likely eliminate you for meddling, and just change events so that some other villain takes the place of the person you killed. A time mage who covers too many bases is actually just inviting time to change events so that mage never existed. Time will actively adjust hundreds of minor details to preserve one fixed point.
- Time does things in complicated ways. When time makes an adjustment, it is usually in dozens of minor details instead of a few major ones. These details add up to unexpected consequences. As a result, changing big things in the distant past has fewer discernable repercussions than changing a small but recent event, because time has room to change a lot of little things to nudge everything back into place. With recent events, there is less room to work with, thus forcing time to make larger adjustments. Thus changing the distant past is always safer than changing something within someone’s own lifespan.
- Time doesn’t have to make sense. On occasion, Time seems to ignore the destruction of fixed points. Occasionally Time vehemently protects a seemingly minor detail. While overall, Time seems to be logical and follow some recognizable chain of thought, this is not always the case. Sometimes Time will actively transfer objects or beings from one time to another for seemingly minor reasons or no discernable purpose at all.
- Time is keeping score, and will punish a low score eventually. Many chronomancers get a false sense of security because they can get away with a lot and suffer no consequences. This time score is known as Karma, and obtaining a negative pool gradually gains the notice of the forces of Time. This could happen early on, or after a huge negative pool is amassed, but it will happen.
KARMA[]
Karma is a pool of points collected or lost while directly interacting with the forces of time. Doing something that helps time maintain its fixed points grants a character positive points.
Performing acts that mess with fixed points will result in negative Karma. Everybody has some amount of Karma, but few have a score that Time cares about unless they are a mage that can cast spells that mess with time. The average person perceives Karma as good or bad luck, but a chronomancer sees it as a calculable risk or benefit.
If a character has a negative Karma score, the Game Master, at any arbitrary point, can decide to turn a success into a failure, turn a roll of 20 to a roll of 1, or manipulate any number of minor details that may even result in the death of that character. Afterwards, at the Game Master’s discretion, some positive Karma can flow into that pool.
On the flip side of this, if the bad Karma character is having genuine bad luck, the Game Master can sprinkle some positive Karma into that character’s pool as a more organic payment for bad Karma spent.
Most character start with zero Karma, and most non-magic users never actually change that score. Actual points gained or lost for chronomancy magic is detailed in Chapter 4 of this tome. In Chapter 3, there is a chronomancer prestige class that actively spends positive Karma to elicit temporal effects.
Time Portals[]
In the golden age of Chronomancy, time magic was a life-long endeavor. Chronomancers would begin study at an early age, and, if they were lucky, have a firm grasp on temporal mechanics and how to manipulate time in their golden years. Time travel was the magnum opus of these chronomancers. It was accomplished through powerful arcane constructs known as “Time Portals.”
While they vary greatly in size, shape and design all time portals share the features listed below:
THE WINDOWS[]
While most time windows look like nothing more than openings to another time, they are vastly more complicated than that. In fact, because the window actually exists in four dimensions (the fourth dimension being time); it is difficult to comprehend what is actually going on without dropping down a dimension as an analogy.
If we use Time as the 3rd dimension, we would see the window as a long tube or cylinder stretching from the present to a point in the past or future. The length of this tube remains constant and is always traveling forward (into the future). Thus if you travel through the “tube” it keeps up with you through time. If you spend an hour in the past and return through the same portal, an hour would have passed in your own time. This part is fairly easy to conceptualize.
However, it gets a little more complicated when we realize that a cross-section of that tube is not a circle (as it would be if we were bisecting an actual cylinder), but instead it is a sphere. The window is basically a bubble, usually smashed into the form of a thin cylinder or other seemingly 2-dimensional shape via the magic of the Time Portal. The mind blowing part is that the analogy breaks down a bit after this. The outside plane of the “bubble” in the present time leads to destination time (past or future), and the inside plane anchors the window to the present. However, at the destination, the outside and inside are reversed in a typical time portal, so that the outside plane of the sphere now leads to the present, and the inside plane anchors to the destination point.
To the typical traveler however, they simply see a window to another time and can walk through that window to enter that time. In that other time they can see a window back to the present, and may walk through that window back to the present. Most portals had “frames” built around windows in the present to prevent anyone from standing inside the area where a window would be created. Travelers never encounter the “inside” of the sphere, or even realize it is there.
Clever chronomancers know it is there, however, and it was something of a mystery for quite a while. Even seasoned time sages had no idea what a temporal anchor might appear as. What would happen to something or someone caught in the middle of a time window? Would they cease to exist? Would they continue to exist inside a bubble outside of time? One brave chronomancer eventually solved the riddle by building a time portal with a “thicker” window and standing in the middle of it when the portal was activated. His name was Nathan Watt.
Watt seemed to vanish. No magic could detect him. He was neither in the present nor the past. His colleagues lamented that he warped himself out of existence or ended up in the Well of Worlds.
Watt did not disappear, however, nor did he end up in some other dimension. He was simply in the same space looking out into two different times; the present and (in this case) the past, each superimposed other each other. He could step out of the bubble with ease, and, after about an hour of observation, he did just that, greeting his astonished comrades in the present. Repeated experiments, however, yielded that walking out of a bubble only takes you to the present about 75% of the time, and 25% it brings you to the destination time. Truly, the inside of a time portal follows stranger rules.
Nathan Watt, quite elderly (and likely from a different time) was part of the council of chronomancers that built the Veil, and played a pivotal role in its conception. Understanding a window helps in understanding the Veil. Basically a gigantic time portal was created with a huge bubble that was formed into a titanic and irregular tetrahedron that encompasses the entirety of the Devonian Isles and much of the continental shelf around them. On the outside, in the present, one sees a seamless window to the past. This portal is slightly different, however, in the inside returns to the present and the outside is the anchor point. Thus traveling through the tetrahedral window into the past brings the traveler into a gigantic tetrahedral “snippet” of the past that looks out seamlessly back to the present.
In the distant past, the outside of the tetrahedron shows a ghostly visage of the Devonian Isles at their present time superimposed over the waters as they were meant to be. The chronomancers who made the veil never imagined that any sentient creature would ever see that sight, as the outside was filled with primitive fish, plants and other aquatic life that were far from contemplating or recording what they saw.
The chronomancers also had no idea that the temporal anchor of a time portal had issues such as time slippage and rifts. Of course, time portals were never fabricated on such a scale, nor were the windows ever reversed. Temporal anchors themselves left sages with much more questions than answers. There was a lot of room for uncertainty. Without question, the Veil was a desperate gamble, and those saved by it were lucky that it worked at all.
PYLONS[]
All time portals have 4 pillars or “pylons” that determine the size, shape and temporal destinations of the portal. These are the physical “nuts and a bolts” of the portal. Each pylon is an artifact in its own right. While they do nothing by themselves unless attuned to the other three, they still give off powerful auras and are nearly indestructible. The only known way of destroying a pylon is by dropping it into the Well of Worlds. However most pylons are fairly large (weighing a minimum of one ton) and are usually rooted to their locations. Also note that the pylons only exist in the present, and the destination point has only the “window” part of the time portal. So moving a time portal can be a major undertaking.
The pylons are usually arranged to encircle the time window in some way, though this formation does not have to be exact or even in the same shape as the window. In the case of the Veil, the pylons are arranged inside of the window. This was also experimental at the time of the Veil’s creation, and, quite luckily, the pylons continue to function in this formation as well.
In the Viridian Veil, the pylons each appear as titanic green crystals rising up from a circular dais inscribed with several glowing sigils. Each Devonian pylon is hundreds of miles apart, inside the corners of the tetrahedron.
SIGILS[]
On or around the pillars are a series of glowing green sigils. A lot of chronomancy magic involves drawing circular sigils in the air (the somatic component), and this is permanently reflected in time portal construction. These intangible, disembodied diagrams serve as “control panels” to fine-tune, activate, or deactivate the time portal. They are generated by the pillars themselves.
These controls are not universal, however, and may be impossible to decipher or use by even the most powerful chronomancers who were not intimately involved with their creation.
For the Veil, this information was intended to be passed down but was instead lost. No one knows how to turn off the Veil or use the Sigils to fix the time slippage or rift issues. Many speculate that the sigils would be useless to fix these issues anyway, and may even be part of the malfunction.
The Veil & Time Rifts[]
Of course, the most exciting feature of the Devonia is its boundary; the Viridian Veil. The outer perimeter bisects roughly 3,500 miles of ocean. From the outside, the Veil is entirely invisible and nearly undetectable. The scale at which it encompasses makes the Veil appear seamless when you are right up upon it. Crossing it into another time causes a feeling of uneasiness, but a look back one sees the sea from which they came from.
From the inside, however, the Veil is quite a spectacle. Not only does it show two skies overlapping each other, but shimmers of green ripple through it regularly, like a monochrome borealis. Only the double day is bright enough to drown out this effect.
The inside of the Veil was never intended to be a time window. Part of the mechanical aspect of a time portal, the inside of the Veil is what is known to chronomancers as a “time anchor.” Much like the grey side of a mirror, it functions to project a certain image (and opening) to the opposite side. Its properties are not entirely understood.
Its most worrisome feature, though, is the presence of time slippage. While the time portal continues to function normally on the outside, the inside shows signs of decay. The internal workings of the time portal are shrinking and no one knows why. The distant past continues to run backwards at a slowly increasing rate, which is about half a millennia further into the future than it should be. The image of the present, which stretches days into 48 hour intervals, is now actually about 500 years slow, leading to what is essentially the past, even though it is present day in the Cerulean Seas timeline.
In the three dimensional time analogy presented earlier in this chapter, we saw the time portal as a long tube of a specific length moving a constant speed forward. This is still happening with the outside of that tube (the time window). But the anchor portion is shrinking at a rate of about 24 hours per day. Each day, the internal tube gets 12 hours shorter on both ends. And this phenomenon has been slowly increasing over the millennia that the Veil has existed.
It goes without saying that the time anchor portion of the time portal was never intended to work like a window. However, the Veil is not a prison wall. While most wildlife avoids it (from the inside, in any case), one can easily pass through it. The time anchor of the Viridian Veil takes you to what you can see, which is either 500 years into the past (which conveniently happens to be present day in the Cerulean Seas timeline) or 400 million years into the past (minus about 500 years, though that makes little difference to those stranded there.) Unfortunately, with regards to the Veil, this is a one way trip.
If you pass through the veil and look back, you would see exactly what the rest of the world sees: open water. 75% of the time this will be in the present day world of the Cerulean Seas, and the other 25% of the time you’ll be 400 million years in the past. It’s a gamble that has a payoff fairly easy to figure out by looking at the local wildlife.
However there are ways of getting home (if your home happens to be under the Veil). The first and most obvious option is to hire a chronomancer to come with you. Chronomancers are quite famous for being able to leave the Veil and come back. Their services do not come cheap, however, and most require you to go on several side quests first to gain their trust.
Aside from chronomancers, one would have to be lucky enough to find a rift that takes you back under the Veil at the right time. A rift is a fissure in the “time tube” that lets stuff into the bubble from pretty much any time the bubble passes through. In the case of the Veil, this span goes from 400 million years ago to 500 years into the future. They occur and disappear naturally and unpredictably. They are fractures in the fabric of time and they never appear on the time window. They appear where the window would be in the past and always lead through the time anchor into Devonia. However, being random occurrences, it is pretty difficult to find one. Unless you are a chronopterid, that is.
Chronopterids evolved by exploiting these time rifts. They know thousands of them intimately. Sworn enemies to chronomancers who love to close their precious rifts to gain Karma, the chronopterids will guide other races through as long as those individuals are proven trustworthy or completely unable to divulge the location of these rifts to others.