Temporality Review

By Stephen Wark, Staff Reviewer

Available at RPGNow

Initiative Round
Temporality is a 158-page sourcebook about time travel written by Bret Boyd and published by Dark Quest Games. Temporality sells for $9.50 at RPGNow. The full-colours cover depicting a fighter, a cowboy, a modern spy and a future soldier, is by Timothy Hibbets.

The notion of time travel in fantasy roleplaying goes all the way back to the first edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, which had a provocative two-page section on converting fantasy characters to the Boot Hill Western rules and the Gamma World post-apocalyptic sci-fi rules. The notion of mages and paladins traveling into the far future where they'd encounter pistols and high-tech medikits - and possibly bringing those strange devices back - certainly got my twelve year old DM creative juices flowing!

The idea of time travel poses both technical and creative challenges for the DM and the party. The technical challenge involves replicating the feel of the different eras within the scope of the rules. All that really distinguishes one era of roleplaying from another are the rules that simulate the environment where the characters interact, and these environments have their own internally consistent logic. Mixing eras breaks that consistency, because new rules are brought to bear, which can lead to no end of trouble: Do lasers overcome damage resistance? Can a dragon eat through plasteel amour? Can an alchemist reproduce gunpowder? Can you enchant a Colt .45?

The creative challenge is managing the consequences of time travel - what happens when the characters travel back in time and prevent their parents from meeting, or what happens when a character sees their future, and then sets out to avoid their fate?

Clearly, time travel is not something to be attempted lightly. Any rule set that addresses time travel must help resolve both the technical and creative aspects. The GM needs a coherent vision of the nature of time and time travel to guide the players through cross-time capers, and be able to explain why the rules are bent in such a way, or why killing the great enemy in the past doesn't necessarily change the future, while stepping on a butterfly in the present may shift a great culture in the future.

Temporality, written by Behind the Spells author Bret Boyd, is just such an attempt to deal with the technical and creative challenges of time travel in a fantasy setting. The sourcebook contains the expected banquet of new rules, adapted OGL rules that are suitable for the author's vision of time travel and references to a time-spanning organization that can be used to introduce time travel to an adventure or campaign.

The ideas and concepts are all interesting, but they are presented in such a confusing manner in the sourcebook that it's hard for the reader to see that all-important coherent vision that makes time travel seem relatively plausible and sensible.

The first three chapters introduce the concept of time travel. These chapters could easily be combined into a single chapter. After a page-long discussion of how time can be made an important part of a roleplaying session, Temporality then presents some basic terms and mechanics for time travel.

In Temporality, the time continuum is analogous to a forward-flowing stream, with each timeline occupying a current, called a Flow. Travel along a Flow is straightforward time-travel, while travel between Flows involves crossing over to parallel worlds. All such travel is called shifting, with the travelers called shifters.

In addition to the Flows, there are temporally neutral locations called Havens, which exist outside of time, and the Badlands, a chaotic realm where shifters who are lost during time travel quickly perish.

The rules for interacting with the past and future are straight-forward for the sake of playability. There can only be one of anything or anyone in a given point in time, which means that a shifter cannot interact with an earlier self. The shifter becomes the earlier self in the minds of everyone else in the past.

If the shifter is unable to materialize at the target destination in time because, for example, there's something physically blocking the destination, then the shifter becomes lost in the Badlands.

Altering something in the past creates a divergence, putting the shifter into a parallel world when they return to their relative present. The effect of actions in the past depend on the length of time traveled and the nature of the action. A list of examples, which would have been more helpfully presented in the form of a table, helps a GM determine if the divergence is superficial, limited in scope, or reality-spanning.

Traveling to the future is fun, but future knowledge is not necessarily helpful because the future hasn't happened yet.

Scattered throughout these rules are references to the Association of Temporal Observers (ATO), an organization of spellcasters that exist to monitor and guide the Flows of Time to an end that they consider desirable. The ATO is developed further in the second half of the sourcebook, but the early references to future chapters "muddy the waters" - to use the time/stream analogy.

In literary criticism, the term for this type of narrative device is prolepsis. Think of it as a "flash-forward" where the details of a future event are described before they are experienced. The term for a "flashback" is analepsis. Both are methods of time travel with the written word.

Chapters 4 and 5 both contains flash-forwards. Chapter 4 - Renouncement deals with the process by which members of the ATO can give up all their memories of time-travel and start their lives over in the Flow. This information is presented before the ATO and its goals, and appears as a disruption to the initially more important game rule information.

Chapter 5 - Reincarnated Characters offers suggestions for using reincarnated characters in a time-traveling campaign, and refers to new feats introduced later on the book. Reincarnated characters are a great way to maintain continuity in a campaign, but must be used very sparingly.

After a turbulent start, Temporality enters the familiar sourcebook territory of mechanics.

Chapter 6 - Prestige Classes offers two new prestige classes with a time-traveling theme: The Fated and the Temporalist.

The Fated character has a certain, but indefinite vision of their death in combat against a certain creature type in a certain terrain type, and gains defensive bonuses when the combat corresponds to the elements of the vision. The exact details of the death are not predetermined, so the character that survives a combat that matches their vision can feel that they've cheated death, and then wonder if the next combat will be their final combat.

The Temporalist is a spellcasting class where the character studies time magics and seeks to slip the bonds of time. Members of the ATO are often temporalists.

Chapter 7 - Skills and Feats outlines new skills and feats required for time travel. Magic is required to move within or between the flows, but accurate travel requires skills such as the temporal navigation and feats such as temporal acuity.

Chapter 8 - Equipment in the New Continuum contains a surprise. Rather than listing all the different types of equipment that could be available to a time-traveler (an impossible task), this chapter describes the effects of time on mundane equipment left

Temporality really hits its stride with Chapter 9 - New Spells, a mere thirty pages into the book. This chapter collects existing spells that fit the overall theme, and introduces new spells with the [Time] descriptor. These spells age the spellcaster one month for every spell level, which makes them a risky proposition for short-lifespan casters.

The new spells in this chapter are overflowing with possibilities. There's a spell that temporarily increases the class level of the target for the purposes of using class abilities; a variant of mirror image that plucks duplicate selves out of the timestream; and my favorite is road not taken, which allows the spellcaster to temporarily adopt a class that she would have taken had she not become a spellcaster! (This essentially requires maintaining two different character sheets, but the idea is so neat that it's more than worth the extra bookkeeping.)

Chapter 10 - New Magic Items contains a variety of new magical arms, armor, items and artifacts, along with new special qualities. Most of the items appear to best fit the time-traveling ATO campaign theme, but some, such as the bloodline shield, add a dash of temporal flavor to any campaign. There's also a section on new magical poisons.

The special qualities are interesting. The Phoenix amour quality, which resurrects the wearer when killed by a specific attack, is an intriguing concept, and the hesitating quality for ranged weapon projectiles brings "bullet-time" to the fantasy gaming session.

Chapter 11 - Temporality & Your Game is a short discussion of how GMs can use time travel concepts in their existing campaigns. Playing with time travel lets both GMs and players take greater risks with their adventures. Time travel and alternate worlds can serve as a universal "reset button" in the campaign.

Chapter 12 - Geography of Time explores the elements of the model of time introduced at the beginning of the book: the Badlands, the Plane of Time, the Flow, the wormholes that allow for physical travel in time and space, and the Havens that exist outside of Time. There is more game rule information for each element.

The history of the Roanoke Island colony is offered as a sample Haven. After describing the real story of the colony and the mysterious disappearance of its inhabitants, Temporality transposes the story into a fantasy setting, complete with characters, that can be used in a traditional campaign.

Following the Roanoke Colony example is a comprehensive set of guidelines for using magic in alternate worlds such as the famous "Mirror Universe" of Star Trek fame, where "good" is "evil" and "fast" is "slow" etc. Spells, magical items, clerical domains and even the skill-based abilities of core and prestige classes are covered. This section really should have been included in Chapter 11, because it's an excellent example of using time travel in a campaign.

Chapter 13 - Temporality As Your Campaign is a chapter about game mechanics and setting. Game rules establish the temporal style of an adventure as much as the descriptive text read by a GM, so characters created under fantasy d20 rules will have a different "feel" when they are played under the d20 Modern rules in the future. This section contains specific suggestions for adapting the core and prestige classes in fantasy d20 to the d20 Modern classes, without or without the Defensive Bonus rule in d20 Modern, and vice-versa.

Chapter 14 - Weapons by Genre is another example of how game rules establish the feel for the game. Weapons from all eras of history are presented, along with the essential cost/damage/size tables. Playing in a world with shotguns is very different than a world with only slings or crossbows.

The weapons are divided by era - Ancient, Medieval, Colonial, Old West, Pulp, Modern, and Science-Fiction - which helps establish the relative power of the weapons and the (in)efficiency of armor. It also means that this chapter has the most comprehensive list of temporal gaming genres in the book, which is strange, to say the least. This list could easily be incorporated into the introductory chapters or Chapter 11.

Chapter 15 - Allies and Enemies Across Time is a full-length discussion of the Association of Temporal Observers (ATO), describing the different branches and command structure of the organization and noting that not all factions within the organization are as dedicated to the preservation of the same timeline.

There are also two rival organizations, which would use time travel to either sow chaos throughout time, or remove all knowledge of time travel from the Flow, which is a delightfully contradictory goal.

There are no sample ATO figures in this chapter, which is disappointing, but there is a tantalizingly brief discussion of the idea of "temporal psychologists" who use time travel to understand what makes characters. Good temporal psychologists want to use this knowledge to heal their charges, will less-scrupulous psychologists may want to shape the personalities of their patients in specific ways.

Chapter 16 - Twenty-Five Adventure Ideas offers exactly that: twenty-five paragraph-length adventure seeds. If you're still stuck for ideas about incorporating time travel into a campaign, look no further. These adventure ideas do no require the ATO elements to be interesting.

Chapter 17 - Campaign Ideas is a short collection of three campaign ideas using the ATO history and background. These ideas summarize an entire campaign arc, leaving the GM to fill in the details.

Chapter 18 - New Monsters describes a handful of monsters that either fit the ATO campaign structure or the general themes of time-travel. These creatures either have time-traveling capacities, or have an acute awareness of temporal energies themselves, which can make them surprising and formidable foes.

The final chapter of this, as with most other d20 sourcebooks, is the Open Gaming License. Ordinarily, this is not a topic of much interest, but Temporality contains the largest list of referenced OGL material that I've ever seen. Bret Boyd specifically lists each spell, ability, item, feat, skill, or rule element that comes from the body of OGL material, which showcases both the breadth of the material available to game designers and the author's considerable skills as an editor for selecting and combining game rules from disparate sources in a thematically consistent whole.

Finally, a word about the interior black and white art by David Hamilton: I didn't like it. Not one bit. The artwork detracted from the overall reading experience.

Critical Hit
Temporality presents a unified view of time and the effects of time-travel, making the inclusion of time travel in a fantasy roleplaying game seem both easy from a technical point of view, and exciting from a creative point of view. The author has a keen eye for assembling OGL material that fits his vision of the subject.

The time-travel spells, which bend time to reproduce familiar spell effects, or which pluck characters from alternate worlds, are my favorite elements in the book, followed by the discussion of mirror-universe parallel worlds.

Critical Fumble
Temporality suffers overall from poor organization, logical structure, layout and editing. The biggest problem seems to be with tables, where tables cut into to the right margin artwork, are on the wrong page (e.g., the Summon Alternate Self table appears on the page before the spell), are not used when they should have been (e.g., the Divergence information in Chapter 3), or fail to be present at all (e.g., the Terrain table for the Fated prestige class).

Scattering the references to the ATO-themed campaign is also highly confusing to the reader or user of the book. A stronger separation between the technical information and the creative material would strengthen the book overall.

This review is based on the first available PDF version of Temporality, which has since been published in print. I hope that the more serious layout problems have already been rectified.

Coup de Grace
Time travel has officially been party of roleplaying since the early days of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, but has probably been an element at the gaming table since the very beginning. What party could pass up the opportunity to wish themselves a second chance at a combat, and what GM wouldn't love to send a party into a future without magic, but with plenty of gunpowder?

For all of the inherent interesting gaming possibilities, the rules of time travel have received scant attention. Perhaps that's because the subject is so vast, and the consequences of tampering with different realities and different timelines are too much to codify in a rules set. The stricter and more certain the rules for time travel become, then the paradoxes of time travel become more apparent.

I know that the more I think logically about time travel, the more my head hurts.

Temporality emphasizes the creative fun of time travel in a campaign by simplifying the technical challenges. The stream analogy used in the book glosses over the paradoxes of time travel and turns the time continuum itself into a wondrous, disorienting world of adventure and risk.

Reading Temporality for the first time is similarly disorienting at first, but the attentive GM can find within its pages the seeds of some fun gaming moments. The timestream may be turbulent, but the rewards of the voyage are worth the risk.

Review Scores
Game Mechanics Rating: 10 (67%)
OGL Open Content Rating: 16 (100%)
Originality Rating: 17 (74%)
Playability Rating: 12 (55%)
Presentation Rating: 24 (75%)
Value Rating: 13 (54%)
Reviewer Opinion: 6 (60%)

Overall Total (Does not include OGL Rating): 82 (65%)
Final Grade: C-