TIME TRAVEL

And since there's so little banter on this wavelength, I might as well fill the silence. My campaign has been going on for a year, it's a detective campaign in LA. After a while, I gave one of the PCs access to Space Time Lore. This was after six months, after the character had gone through tons of role-playing opportunities, playing his character to the hilt, surviving all of the traps I had set related to his disadvantages (and there were a lot, around 60-70 points worth of disadvantages), and I started to reveal a little bit of info to him. The problem is this: My carefully set up plots are now open to blatant manipulation. Example: they get hired to recover a kidnap victim. Finding the time and place the person was last seen, they can now go back in time, follow the person, and lay in ambush for the kidnapper. Or if someone who has information is murdered moments before they can get there, they can go back a couple of hours before, warn them, and then get the info. Now my players haven't been able to do this yet, I keep them too busy dodging police, murderers, killers, and homicidal weeping fallen angels, but I see this as quite possibly happening. How do people deal with time manipulation? Do you allow the antagonists the same magic, so that if the players go back in time and rescue someone, than maybe the killer goes back in time to kill the PCs off one-by-one in a time before they go back in time? Do the authorities intervene when someone travels through time...such as lictors showing up at the front door of the temple? Or do people simply not allow player Space Time Lore? Something to think about...in fact...I dare you to respond!

Reality magic is the only TRUE magic. It's the magic that can change things in the world beyond the illusion. It says somewhere in my rulebook that when you become awakened you can use all normal magic instantly and instantaneous. But to be able to use Reality Magic you have to start studying again.

If the adventure takes place outside the home town it'll be hard to use the magic since you don't have a real temple. (besides the spell to walk through time to be able change these things is very high rated) If the players can see through time and see the killing/kidnap doesn't make them very reliable witnesses, or? I think you can let them solve a mission or two in this way (if they have the proper skills (about 20 in the school of T&S, and a successful spell of walk through T&S at least 5?)). If they try to use it as a standard the idea of lictors showing up at the door of the temple, or climbing out of the T&S portal is excellent!

About the use of Time & Space Lore in KULT games: I had a player-character in my campaign who learned some of this, and I recommend making the Lore, and all magic in KULT, very hazardous and hard to predict. For things like merely seeing into the past or future, or remote-viewing your opponents' hideouts, it's not too hard to make the campaign adjust (you'll just have to figure out other ways to hide events than having them take place in the past), and you can use it for all sorts of prophecies and disturbing visions. Any 'scrying' can be turned into a dream-hallucination, or may accidentally see the wrong time, or a 'possible future', or something like that. Also, you can always modify the rulebook's requirements for spell casting, so that the players need to find some rare gem or plant or incantation, or perform multiple human sacrifices, to get a particularly important spell done. And then there are the Incarnates and semi-Awakened people and other entities which can change the players' time perception..

For actually physically traveling in time, I would definitely make this very risky; there are rulebook monsters which exist just to chase down and kill people who break the Laws of Time, and I was ready to have 'em show up if the characters tried to time-travel. However, I also freely used a lot of paradoxes and time warps, which were very fun and disturbing to the players -- effects caused by Mental Balance as much as Lore mastery. At one point the characters ran into a person with +250 Mental Balance who was working for Malkuth and opposing them (albeit gently, having a +250 MB). All the characters except the one with a really high Mental Balance, and another one who was possessed by a Nachtkind, simply froze in time and the other players' combat with the near-Awakened person passed instantly as far as they were concerned; they just blinked and the next thing they knew, this saintly-looking person was lying dead on the ground in a pool of blood and their two comrades were reloading their guns. In another case, a character had a vision of the past and future of New York taken out of H.P. Lovecraft's story HE. Of course, in Metropolis 'time does not exist', which may be interpreted in many ways. At one point the characters went to Metropolis, opening a gate there with the Lore of Madness; the gate led from their apartment to an empty lot somewhere in the city. After passing through, they noticed that their apartment building was visible on the horizon, so out of curiosity they walked over, entered their apartment (after some encounters), and arrived just in time to hear someone walking through the gate; they'd arrived just an instant after they left! Rashly, two of the players jumped through the gate, where they confronted their past selves in the empty lot. Their immediate reaction was defensive hostility, so I role-played their past selves (played as NPCs) to react the same way (each one thought it was the 'original'); then more and more reiterations of the unlucky PCs started pouring through the gate into the empty lot, as a wiser character who had some knowledge of Time & Space watched with concern from the apartment side of the gate. Soon a huge fight between the different 'selves' erupted (needless to say, these characters were combat twins), in which a grenade was thrown which exploded a gas station, and the surviving characters -- who rushed back through the gate into the 'apartment' -- got to see their other selves burn to death. One duplicate of one of the players also made it back to the apartment, and they wrestled and struggled to push one another back into the flames; finally the 'duplicate' failed its Ego check, went into a berserk rage, and kicked the hell out of the original before throwing him into the gas explosion. However, since the duplicate was in all ways exactly the same and just as real as the 'original' character, we immediately resumed play with the player controlling the time-warped version of his character, and he was left to struggle with thoughts about souls, time and free will.

With the character who had Time & Space Lore, things got even weirder. At one point, admittedly as a rather wimpy DM decision, I made him unconsciously teleport himself forward in time to escape being mutilated in his sleep. However, this resulted in him splitting into two equally real selves, the mutilated one and the unscarred one (with different Mental Balances), which I made him role-play simultaneously since he didn't have a clue what was going on. He had an incredible conversation with himself where he tried to figure out what had happened, and the two selves ended up hanging out for a week of role-playing time, before the paradox was resolved and he ended up as one person, heavily scarred but not maimed. At this point in the campaign things were getting so bad for the players that I was afraid he might try to time-travel back to before the campaign with his Lore and prevent all his various miseries from happening. However, I'd prepared for it -- months back, as soon as he'd first started learning the Lore, the other PCs in the party had encountered a person who appeared to be him (the magic-using PC), albeit with his throat and hands slashed, and crawling towards them, apparently pleading for help. The other PCs where caught off guard (this happened when they were expecting to have something dangerous crawl out of the shadows... instead, it was the dying PC), and in panic actually gunned down the already-dying PC instead of listening to his feeble attempts to communicate. They were shocked when they then went back to the usual meeting place and saw the magic-using PC (now playing himself... I hadn't told him about the previous incident) seemingly unharmed and having spent the entire day hundreds of miles away. Completely confused and feeling guilty, they never told the magic-using PC about 'killing' him. This inexplicable event was the set-up for the magic-using PC's attempt at 'time-traveling into the past'... if he tried such a thing, I was going to have him be immediately attacked by time-monsters (I forget their name) and, unless he rolled really well, have his throat and hands seriously injured, preventing him from being able to speak or write. Injured and unable to control the time-streams, he would be flung before the other PCs, where he'd attempt to communicate his warnings to them, but probably die before he could accomplish anything. That was the plan... but that the other PCs actually KILLED their friend was the ultimate irony! If the magic-using PC had done it, I would have retold it from his point of view, and his free-willed actions, most likely, would have led to the same grim result. Unfortunately, the magic-using PC never did try to go back to the past, but if he did, I now had my escape-clause. It was just another impossible incident in KULT. That's the trickiest part of any kind of predestination/time-travel stuff: tricking the players into behaving so that the predestined event occurs. However, it's not impossible, and if you can manage it, the feeling of all the puzzle-pieces coming together into a shocking whole is very rewarding. (I do think, also, that you shouldn't force the players into doing something if they actually manage to sneak out of it by luck or guile.)

As far as your time travel issue, I'd suggest creating your own guardians of time -- some manifestation of collective belief to prevent paradoxes from ripping the fabric of reality. Also, it seems to me that neither the archons nor the death angels would take to kindly to anyone jaunting back and forth in time, as the illusion could easily be compromised that way. What would happen, for example, if someone, anyone, went back in time to before the illusion? Perhaps you could make time travel so inherently dangerous that no one would want to risk it.

First to respond to a thought that Garett had, I believe that magic should be an innately unstable enterprise. When a character begins to warp and twist the illusion itself there are bound to be repercussions. You had already mentioned a Lictor showing up at the characters door. What about the possibility of extensive warping of the illusion drawing the attention of something from beyond the illusion? Maybe a creature from Metropolis, another skilled mage, or an Awakened human. What if the constant use of space and time magic causes localized tears in the illusion around the character's temple? If the players feel there is the possibility of unknown danger they won't abuse the power. This is especially important given the power of magic in Kult.

This sounds a bit like Paradox in MAGE, which I think is a good idea. Certainly the Archons have agents to crack down on mages and semi-Awakened people. As far as time travel -- ah, but is it possible to travel back in time before the Illusion? My impression has always been that, once the Illusion was 'created', by our meager sense of time it 'had always existed'; that no matter how far forward or back you go into the KULT future using conventional means, you'll just encounter Medieval people trapped in the Illusion, caveman trapped in the Illusion, far-future cyborgs trapped in the Illusion... and, if the Illusion is ever totally 'broken', these different time periods will have no meaning, and everything will be mixed together as it is in Metropolis. Someone else posted something similar about this a few months ago: the idea that we perceive the past as being 'nasty, dirty & brutal' being because of the current state of the Archons & Death Angels, and if we could travel back to the past, we'd see it that way, with leprosy and disease and ugliness and ignorance. Whereas, if the Archons & Death Angels had different levels of power, it'd look different; if, say, Chesed (the 'helper', right? I always mix them up) were still 'alive', both the past and future would be more comfortable, clean, attractive places, and our history and predictions in the present would reflect this. So in that way, the Archons and Death Angels and the other 'major players' are sort of outside time, and their actions have the power to change not only the way things Are and Will Be, but the way things Have Always Been. It's a definite time travel/paradox sort of thing, IMHO...

Thanks for sharing some interesting ideas about time travel. I have used Time travel a lot, but almost always as a plot device, since unfortunately my campaign is very plot driven as opposed to character driven. There's a revolving group of about 8 whom I play with, but since I never know who is going to show up, I have to always come up with a narrative to weave it all together. One use of time travel as a plot device was when the characters (Detectives) are called and told that there will be a client coming in tomorrow, and woke up the next day to discover that a day or two was missing from their lives. I had also placed a few clues to indicate that although the characters had skipped a day of their lives, they actually had receipts and the like for stores outside of California in their pockets, so that they had lived a week of their lives, were jettisoned back in time, but still bearing the proof of this lost week. They eventually had to retrace their path across a few states, and there were all sorts of interesting roleplay opportunities with waitresses that were angry at them for not tipping them last time...etc...

What happens to one's mind, when one gazes into Abyss? Does the Abyss look into one's soul? If so, what that strangest of entities, feels about someone who attempts to influence it? If the Abyss is alive and conscious albeit not in human sense, ie. it is capable of reasoning and reacting to stimuli, then does it like someone molding it? Well, does it?

If you open gates of your mind to swirling possibilities, does that affect you? Who you are after the experience to know whether you're still the same person? Are you really sure, you have lived yesterday, that the memory of the pleasant bath wasn't just imprinted in your brain?

In my opinion, the Time Travel is a very intimate experience ... a Mage opens wide his consciousness to perceive four dimensional sculpture. But it means he becomes vulnerable, it is like an invitation for all the sharks, a flag that says "Take me!". Exploring the neighborhood of moments would be a caress, flowing with time - an immersion in a hot tub, forcing against time - an ecstasy difficult to bear, to control oneself. And making an alteration, transporting her/himself, - a new birth, a nerve shattering experience ... a long, long trip.

And you feel someone is watching you. You're exposed, you're alone, you've lost your head - you're vulnerable! And instead of sobering up, this heightens the exquisite feeling, the thing, the it! Finally ... you did ... what? This or that? What exactly? Don't you remember?

Ahh, would you want to try again?

Future is a cold place, but moving in time definitely not. I think that stressing vulnerability and lack of control together with a few memory lapses would make anyone sane reconsider. Future is a cold place, because when you find yourself there, you cannot alter yourself - you may change your past, but that would not take away your experiences. That's the point - you can help everyone but yourself.