When dealing with a subject as complex as time travel, confusion is a common state of mind. As the Time War RPG develops, questions are bound to arise. Since I have a very clear idea of the background in my mind, many questions that should be asked most likely won't occur to me. That's where you come in. If you have any questions or comments about the Corps, Temporal Physics, the rules or the game itself, hit the button below and drop me a line. You'll get a response from me in a day or two, and your question and its answer will be displayed on this page as an aid to other readers.
Q: Are you planning on publishing a Time War RPG, or are you just posting rules and fiction on the net?
A: Initially the intention was just to publish Time War on the web, as a systemless sourcebook, for use with whatever your favourite system happened to be. However, the overwhelmingly positive feedback has led me to consider making Time War commercially available with its own dice engine included. As yet, the format is undecided, though I'd be delighted to see Time War produced as a honest-to-goodness, smack-the-players-over-the-head, paper RPG.
UPDATE: The dice engine for Time War is currently (as of 17 June 2000) undergoing early playtests. Hopefully in the near future I'll have enough of the bugs ironed out that I'll be able to make a draft version available to members of the Time War Mailing List for playtesting. The dice engine is a "lite" cinematic system, designed to allow easy conversion to other systems, since experienced gamers will already have a favourite system and will probably convert the game anyway, and inexperienced gamers will prefer a simple introduction to roleplaying rather than a more mechanistic system.
A: Currently, no. Time War is written in Word, before I use Netscape Composer to convert it to HTML. Consequently, the files are huge. Add that to the fact that my net connection is as slow as a constipated weasel and...well, you get the picture. At some point in the future I may be in a position to present Time War in downloadable PDF format, but not any time soon.
A: Yes and no. Yes, because Hawke's excellent novels - currently being reprinted by Pulpless.Com - made me realize that a solid set of temporal rules is necessary for any time travel fiction or game to work well. No, because apart from a similar title and premise (the well-used idea of a "temporal police force"), the two backgrounds are totally different. If I were to identify the major source of inspiration for Time War, it'd have to be the Time Patrol stories of Poul Anderson, which I highly recommend as a resource for all prospective players and GM's.
A: It's coming. Be patient :-)
A: Currently, they're hanging out at the same bar as the rest of the background :-) Seriously, I'm just one guy, and I want Time War to be as good as I can make it. That takes time and inspiration. I'm sorry for the long wait between updates, but that's the way it has to be.
A: Yes. The Colonel and I have been talking about this, and he says if I don't rescue him from the cliffhanger at the end of chapter 5 soon, he's going to kick my scrawny arse. So I guess you can expect an update any day now :-)
Q: Temporal Inertia and Timelock seem pretty similar. What's the difference?
A: Temporal Inertia is the force that makes history resist change, and is what stops altered timelines from straying too far from the previous pattern of history (it's also the power that prevents the GM from having to create an entirely new history on the spot whenever someone creates a disruption). When a disruption is successful, temporal inertia is the force that "damps out" the effect of the change in the future.
Timelock is a manifestation of the Limitation Effect, which applies purely to repeated attempts to alter the exact same event, by increasing the amount of temporal inertia associated with it. With each attempted disruption or correction of the event, the temporal inertia increases, making the event harder to change. This is Timelock (a term coined by Earl Wajenburg and used with his permission). If travellers continue to mess with the event, its temporal inertia becomes so great that reality will no longer allow its disruption, creating distortions in space-time that cancel out any further actions by the travellers. This can get... messy.
Q: If prospective Corps agents are recruited from the point of their death or a few picoseconds before, how come their paramemory does not kill them almost immediately after being released from stasis? Since they are now time travellers, doesn't the Rule of Death apply to them?
A: The simplest way to answer this is to compare paramemory to a back-up drive on a computer. Simply put, it stores the memories of previous histories, and protects them from being overwritten by any "new" history. Though almost every traveller gains this faculty after their first trip through time, paramemory cannot store any memories until it is activated, just as you can't write anything to a back-up disk you haven't yet installed. The Rule of Death only applies to events experienced after one has become a time traveller, not before.
Q: What happens to people whose timeline gets erased? Are they dead? Does the Time Corps kill billions of people every time they set history back on the right tracks?
A: Big question - no easy answer. The Corps will tell you that no one has died, since they simply never were. However, since the PC's will be able to remember erased histories through the use of paramemory, claiming that deleted people never were is somewhat hard to support. Corps agents and specialists tend to argue this point a lot, but most agents prefer to believe that deletion is not the same as death, pointing out that what people remember can have little bearing on what actually happened.
Q: Why would anyone want to mess around with history if it could end up destroying everything? How dumb are these people?
A: The answer there is that most of them aren't dumb at all. Most people go through life aware that terrible stuff can happen, but equally sure that it will never happen to them. That's not being dumb, that's just coping with life. Many of the folks who mess with history do it in the full knowledge of the potential cost, but either believe the potential gains outweigh the risk or don't believe it'll happen to them. Still more either have an incomplete understanding of the way time travel works (not everyone has the benefit of Corps training), or consider the threat of Omniversal destruction to be Time Corps propaganda. A very few simply don't care, and at least one group believes that destroying the Omniverse in the right way will reveal something altogether better and purer.
Q: If the Time Corps can use Temporal Isolators to protect agents from changes to their personal past, why don't they either build really big ones and protect whole planets, or seed the Omniverse with nanite-sized ones and protect everyone?
A: For two reasons;
Q: If the Time Corps can save the Cryolis from being deleted, why can't they save everyone? They can save a bunch of bugs but they can't save people? And doesn't the rescue of the Cryolis break the rules of the Corps?
A: Corps agents have rescued people before, many of whom have either been recruited or relocated to colony worlds in the Cage and other empty parallels. However, this course of action is a rare occurrence, because the Corps has neither the resources or the space to do it on a regular basis. Rescuing people from their historical fate is technically possible using Quantum Echo technology, but the resultant drain on the resources of the Corps, the damage to spacetime caused by all the shuttling back and forth, and the tiny historical changes inevitably caused by any temporal intrusion, would eventually result in a catastrophic disruption. The Cryolis were considered a special case because they were an entirely new sentient lifeform, whose entire existence was the result of temporal manipulation. Regardless of their physical nature, they are of course people, and it would be racist to consider them otherwise, since humanity is just one part of the Corps as a whole. The removal of the Cryolis from their timeline before its erasure does not violate any of their rules (see Rules and Regulations, in the Guide to the Time Corps).
Q: Let me get this straight - if I'm a bad guy, and the Corps attack my base, all I have to do is jump into the past and I'll be safe? Even if they kill me at some point in my past, as long as I'm pastwards of that change, I'll be perfectly alright? Won't paramemory kill me, like it says under The Rule of Death?
A: In the scenario described above, you'd be perfectly fine. Remember that changes only propagate forward in time, into the future, so as long as you were pastward of your past self's death when it occurred, the change wouldn't affect you. And since you weren't affected by the change, you'd have no paramemory of the event, and no risk of being affected by the Rule of Death. Remember that the Rule of Death only applies to undoing a time traveller's death, not to causing it. Clever time travellers can be extremely hard to kill - no one ever said the Corps had an easy job.
