Time Keeps on Slippin’
Tomorrow I am faced with the unenviable task of figuring out precisely what actually happened during last month’s Mage session. If you’re wondering why that’s so difficult (after all, I was there), then you don’t realize that last month’s session involved dueling Time Mages.
My brain hurts just remembering that there was a session last month.
Then there is the communication spirit standing around the cabal’s Silver Ladder Mage, Arrow, with a sign telling him that there is a problem with their phones that they noticed just after the poor innocent young woman that they were trying to kidnap managed to punt herself backwards in time long enough to escape from their kidnapping attempt. Except of course that she didn’t manage to punt herself backward in time because a certain purple haired troublemaker (AENAIYAH!) punted herself backward in time to erect a time lock to prevent the punting from ever happening.
Just before all of these actions that didn’t happen Aenaiyah was kidnapped in retaliation for the kidnapping attempt that her friends had just initiated… but that didn’t happen either because – you guessed it – she pushed herself back in time a few seconds to give herself a chance to escape the fact that the air around her head had just been turned into chloroform…wait… was about to be turned into chloroform… by entering the portal to where her friends had been beating on a poor defenseless Acanthus Mage who had just punted herself backward in time before Aenaiyah arrived.
Which didn’t happen because when she arrived and discovered what happened… almost… because it didn’t happen… but when she first got there it really had in fact just happened… sort of…gah!… she went backward in time to prevent it.
Fortunately for her (and for what’s left of my sanity) she left a message with someone who has an Acanthus friend and knows better than to ask certain questions to remind her to cast a Time Locking spell when she stops by later as part of the kidnapping attempt preparations… just because it’s a good idea and she might forget later.
My decades of Doctor Who fandom served my well last month. The fact that “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” is permanently etched into my semblance of a brain certainly didn’t hurt either. (remember a trash can!)
Large doses of alcohol would really come in handy tomorrow – so I’m expecting donations from my players. Hopefully they know what’s good for their characters.
It is a fleeting hope.
Posted on August 12, 2011, in Gaming, Mage Awakening, MtAw, RPG, White Wolf, WoD, World of Darkness and tagged Gaming, Mage the Awakening, MtAw, roll playing game, rpg, Time Travel, world of darkness. Bookmark the permalink. 8 Comments.
Time travel is bad, mmmkay.
There’s a reason why one of the Laws of Magic in my RetCon game banned messing with time. Star Trek alone played too much with the time/space continuum in my opinion. Time magic — phooey.
Come over to the werewolf side. We don’t do mean things to our GM, like mess with time. We just make him improv iconic figures (and true to tell, he loves it).
I allow time travel, but only going forward. Problem solved. (-=
I think I need to solve this problem by unleashing a massive paradox that not only devastates the Path to the Arcadian Watchtower, but actually destroys that Watchtower entirely.
Yeah… that’s sounding like a plan…
You do realize that in doing so, you motivate every Acanthus ever to travel back in time to stop that paradox?
Thousand of time mages, wandering around, all mucking up timelines as they grow convinced one of the OTHER time mages effed everything up. . . only to be preempted by the time mage they were going to preempt themselves. . .
We could call it “The Infinite Catch-22.”
There is a way around that but only the most extreme Acanthus-hating GM would ever use it.
A really, really powerful archmage, convinced that time magic was going to unravel the universe comes up with a plan to destroy, block, whatever the Arcadian watchtower and does it in such a way that there’s no warning and history is rewritten. Poof — all previously Acanthus mages are now mages of another watchtower with no memory, sign or hint that things were ever different.
It’s really mean but would also pose a roleplaying challenge for the players because a guy powerful enough and smart enough to pull this off is not going to leave a loophole that’s easy to find or clear, abundant signs that things were different.
If the players ever do find something that hints at a different reality, it should be much further down the pike and something that doesn’t cause them to immediately jump to “hey, I used to be a time mage!” They’d have to really work against their own player knowledge to do it right and make sure they’re not acting on info their characters don’t have. Even if they did eventually find evidence, a certain amount of disbelief should be roleplayed.
Hell, technically, it doesn’t even have to be an archmage. Since Paradox in WoD is essentially the fabric of reality fighting back against mages changing it, it could be an organic reaction and the universe’s innate defense mechanism against time magic undoing everything.
Just a thought. Like I said, it would be really mean and few GMs would even contemplate the idea but there’s always a way around something, even hundreds of time mages.
Fortunately for my Mages I’m not that mean…
…or am I?
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