Time Travel
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Time travel is an incredibly popular topic and plot point found throughout all of fiction, and all mediums. Tabletop gaming certainly is no exception, with its presence being in abundance.
What is time travel?
Putting it simply, time travel is regarded as the ability to advance from one's "present" starting point to periods in the past, or even into the far future. Exactly how far one travels through time is irrelevant, it's the ability to move outside of the normal linear flow of time that defines this term.
Forms of Time travel
At their core, time travelers can be split into two primary categories: deliberate and accidental. Deliberate time travelers purposefully attempt(ed) to travel through time, whilst accidental time travelers "fell" through time involuntarily.
Specific means of breaching the time barrier can include:
- Rifts in the fabric of time.
- Machines or magical artifacts that allow one to travel through time.
- Arcane rituals that can transport or summon individuals across the gulf of time.
Such means of time traveling can also be divided into intentional and accidental versions, as well as permanent and impermanent versions.
Perhaps the two most iconic forms of time travel in general pop culture are the time traveling machine, which allows for at least a semi-controlled shifting through time, and the accidental time-rift, where a "science" experiment goes wrong and accidentally throws one or more folks through time and they have to figure out how to get home before they are stuck there permanently.
Time travelers
Time travelers are a diverse lot, and can usually be divided into one of several informal archetypes:
- The Victim; somebody who was pulled through time against their will and really, really wants to go home.
- The Immigrant; typically similar to a Victim, but decides they like their new temporal residence much better. The "gay person from the past who prefers the present for its superior gay rights" archetype is a popular sub-branch of this archetype amongst a certain audience.
- The Tourist; somebody who travels across time for the sheer pleasure of seeing incredible things, whether it's the wonders of the future or the most notable events of the past.
- The Academic; a history student who wants to answer the great questions and solve the famous mysteries by traveling back in person to see how it happened.
- The Nomad; somebody who simply doesn't feel at home in any one time zone and so travels throughout history looking for a place to belong.
- The Questor; somebody who travels through time to achieve some epic goal.
- The Impossible Thief; a time traveler who attempts to steal treasures and relics from what they consider the past.
- The Eternal Conqueror; a would-be empire builder who seeks to exploit the past, the future, or both in order to set themselves up as a powerful ruler.
- The Time Police; a person who attempts to fix time rifts and stop people from exploiting time travel for profit, often by claiming that such actions could lead to the destruction of reality.
Science
At a high level, physics pretty clearly indicate that travelling backwards in time is impossible. But in the same hand it also says that how fast you travel forward in time is governed by velocity and mass. From the perspective of things like black holes or light, they are frozen in time as the universe flashes by around them. So if you wanted to travel to the future, you could theoretically do that by orbiting a black hole for a while as time outside the gravity well passes faster for the rest of the universe than it does for you. Or if you wanted to travel to a distant star, you could accelerate to the speed of light and the closer you get to that speed, the slower time passes for you the traveler.
Conundrums and Scenarios
Examples
Gallery
See also
- Chronomancy - The specific magical field of time travel.
- Chronomancer - A practitioner of Chronomancy.