These are the news skills for this book, broken down into Historical Skills, Time Travel Skill Programs, and Time Travel and Dimensional Skills. These are, essentially, what they say on the tin. Historical skills include things like Flint Working for making flint and obsidian weapons, Weapon Proficiencies for Black Powder weapons, History skills specialized by period, etc. "Skill Programs" are a bit like skill groups in Shadowrun 4th edition, where skills are bought together as a discount; Time/Cross-Dimensional skills basically break down into <specialized> Physics, Pilot/Navigate (Time/Dimensional Machine), and appropriate mechanics skills.
I wasn't too keen on Palladium before and I fucking hate them now, but the skills are percentile, which seems to borrow more from Call of Cthulhu.
So far, we've talked a lot about creating your mutant and not alot about...anything else. There's been pretty much zero setting development, aside from some half-assed hints at Time Lords and wizards from dimensions full of talking animals. So now it's time to get into...time travel.
Time and Time Again
We begin this chapter with an egregious misunderstanding about physics: Temporal Energy (T.E.).Time is tricky in a role-playing game. After all, we're already doing strange things to time. Like skimming over a couple weeks of inactivity in a few seconds of playing time. Or taking an hour to play through an intense combat that might have taken less than a minute in real life.
Let's be clear about something: energy is a quantity. People like to think of it in terms of an amorphous mass of stuff, but this is not quite true. You can't separate out a particle of energy. We talk about kinetic energy and chemical energy and electrical energy and things like that, but energy itself doesn't actually have particular kinds or properties; we just use that as shorthand to distinguish a source of available energy. So "temporal energy," which is in everything and drives time along, is bullshit on several different levels. This would give an actual physics major a stroke. Fortunately, I'm an engineer, and I know this is cartoon physics. We just go with what works.
Anyway, bullshit physics means that right after the Big Bang Temporal Energy was maximum, and as time passes stuff has less T.E. in it. I don't know where they think it goes, but presumably they're acting under some bad-ass version of entropy where we're all fucked. Anyway, this provides the basis for the idea that stuff is affected moving through time. Go backwards in time, and your time machine and gear breaks; travel forward in time, and your stuff gets stronger. Also, the longer stuff is in the future/past from its original time, the more likely it is to break, due to "time distortion," and involving a percentile formula based on how many millions of years in the past/future you traveled. I just wrote that and I hate myself for it, so here's a turtle punching Hitler.
On the plus side, sending a living thing through time causes it to mutate. Going forward gives them a surplus of T.E. which results in random mutation like getting a bunch of BIO-E points; going backwards in time causes devolution.
This wasn't cool even when Star Trek did it, but whatever.
I'm not sure what the purpose of the next section is. It's called Temporal Freeze, and it proposes that you're under the effects of...something...that counteracts the flow of temporal energy at the same rate that it pisses away. Do this wrong, and you're supposed to age to dust in seconds; do it right, and time passes as normal for you in your Temporal Freeze zone but everything around you seems frozen. This is supposed to give you, effectively, Matrix-style bullet time where you look like you're moving very fast relative to everything else. I don't think that works even within the context of their bullshit physics, but I don't care.
You're in a bad place when this movie makes more sense in terms of time travel.
Pushing the Time Stream: Time Travel the Hard Way discusses a way of time travel you're not supposed to use. Basically, you can travel in time by adding or subtracting T.E. to something. I don't know how this is supposed to work at all, even by their bullshit physics, and they don't either. They claim it requires 10,000 Watts to add or subtract a second to a minute. This is not how Watts work, because Watts are a unit of power, which is energy per second. However, I suspect the entire point of this section was one example:
So yeah, I suspect this entire, unworkable section about a form of time travel that nobody uses was based on that one spell in another game.In Beyond the Supernatural (TM), the "Time Slip" spell lets a character push just seven seconds into the future. And that costs 15 Potential Psychic Energy Points, about what it would take to teleport 50 pounds across five miles, or to call down three powerful (6D6 + 6 damage) lightning bolts.
Jumping the Time Stream: Time Travel the Easy Way is the preferred method of time travel.
First, think of time as some kind of tube.
Think of the time stream as being like some kind of garden hose.
I'm not fucking with all of this.
Anyway, history has twists at about 125 year intervals (edit: I read ahead and the intervals change) and then larger Cycles. So you can jump through time a lot easier by jumping through twists and Cycles, moving through Cycles is easy, but you have to jump through each individual twist to get to the one you want. As you go farther back in time the twists and cycles get bigger - not that you gave much of a shit about going to 40,000,001 B.C. versus 39,999,998 B.C.
Okay, this is all retarded, but bullshit time mechanics allow you to narrow down your potential time periods you can travel to down to a large but finite number. It's basically how ChronoTrigger worked, without trying to explain it.
Then we get to synchronisity. No, I didn't fucking misspell that, Wujcik did.
Basically, you're still losing T.E. even when you're in the past or future and...well, it's designed so that there are fewer temporal paradoxes where you can meet yourself, basically.All time trave methods maintain the synchronisity of the time travellers. In layman's terms, that means that anyone travelling back in time, spending an hour in the past, and returning, will end up back in the present an hour after the departure.
Why?
I'm just throwing this up there.
The Geography of Time
Now that we know when we'll show up in time, the next question is, where are we going to show up? There are are two rules that govern where a time machine will appear. First, time travellers tend to follow other time travellers. Second, if there is no other time traveller to follow, time travellers tend to stay in the same location from one time coil to the next.
...I got nothin'.
Dimensions of Null-Time is basically like Limbo in the Marvel Universe; instead of skipping from twist to twist, you bop over to the Null-Time zone and go to where you need to go. The local, most useful is the 79th level of the Dimension of Null-Time, which is inhabited by Time Lords. More about them next time!