[UA] The Reality Mechanics: Chronomancy

[Luke Pendo]

One of two related kinks schools I'm working on. Very little game balancing
has been put into effect beyond the conceptual stage, as I want to get these
schools clearly defined in my mind before I get lost in statistics and
mechanics.

Chronomancy
aka Clockmakers, Clocksmashers

"Each watch I smash apart
Just adding to my power
Each watch I smash apart
Just bringing near the hour
of 25 o'clock."

-XTC, "25 o'clock"

Also inspired by Thief of Time by Terry Pratchet. Somewhere, at least.
And I just realized there's a little bit of the Midnighters here -
especially the mathmagic.


You know time is a lie. You know every tick of a clock is a scream as
Natural Time is chopped and cut to pieces. It all started when you saw
Skinny Betty reach into the punk dealer's chest like it was made of water.
You felt your world fall apart, and suddenly everything made sense.

Your room was filled with clocks, clocks you had built and bought and
repaired. You closed your eyes with the ecstasy of revelation, and while
closed, everything stopped. The ticks of the clocks stopped, and a wonderful
roaring silence filled the void. It was the din of Natural Time reaching in
to claim the spaces Artificial Time forgot about. For a single beautiful
moment that may've contained hours, after you opened your eyes time was
halted.

But in a moment, it began again.


Chronomancers realize there are two kinds of time. There is the Time that
existed before the Enlightenment and damned Modernism and clocks. We're
slaves to ticks and alarms - zombies walking through life with watches on
our wrist.

Clocks define time like a moth pinned in a display case. Without cease, the
seconds take us forward, and things grow old and die. It does not have to be
this way. If you take responsibility for yourself you can exist in a bubble
of Personal Time - and get enough power, you can make others follow your
clocks.

Chronomancers reject others defining time for them. They take hold of the
moments and make time their bitch.


Note: Let me take a moment to define some terminology

Natural Time - time spent without clocks. It passes continuously and subtly.


Artificial Time - the time invented in the Enlightenment as clocks were
perfected. Time stretched out and cut into pieces.

Personal Time - Clockmakers create schemes to measure time according to
their preference and creativity. Seconds are verboten and systems based on
12 and 60's leave clockmakers with an uncomfortable feel. Their magic
doesn't like 12's and 60's.


Taboo:
Look at a clock keeping Artificial Time and becoming aware of the time it
reads - it doesn't have to be exceptionally accurate. Even looking at a
flawed clock that was designed to keep time according to seconds and such
ruins the magick.

Shouting out the time doesn't taboo them, but with a Speed -20% check, those
clever and controlled enough could create a consistent beat - a time signal
that breaks the bubble of the Clockmaker's Personal Time.

Also, every Chronomancer in the world taboos on the solstice and the
equinoxes. As far as anyone can tell, it has something to do with megaliths
like Stonehenge. Turns out some variant of Chronomancy has been around for a
long time.

The unnatural phenomena that manifests after such an event generally results
in the destruction of the clocks around the clockmaker. Quartz crystal are
shattered, gears have teeth filled away.


Charging Scheme

Minor: The chronomancers gain charges by refusing to live according to the
Artificial Time of the Enlightenment. There are two ways to garner minor
charges for this school. First, for every day you spend in Personal Time you
garner a charge, similar to the scheme for Dipsomancy and Onieromancy, just
a lot slower.

Further, you gain a minor charge from building a clock or watch designed to
keep Personal Time. Yes, for a quartz watch this means cutting your own
quartz crystals.


Significant: You gain significant charges from freeing someone from the
constraints of Artificial Time. Examples include flickering the power in
someone's house the day before they have a meeting that will make or break
their career.

I'm not sure if this next idea makes the charging scheme too easy, but I am
tempted to include Einstein's Second Theory of Relativity - "Put your hand
on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty
girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
If you directly cause an event like this happen you get a sig charge. I'm
thinking of the scene from Fight Club here.

Note: Yes, the event that makes a chronomancer counts as freeing someone -
in the case of the above described trigger event, the significant charge was
immediately dumped into a missing time effect as the nascent chronomancer
had no idea what the hell he was doing. Normally, from the birth of a
mentored adept, the mentor gets first dibs at the sig.


Major: No one has gained a major charge yet. (Excepting, possibility, for
those in the modernist predecessor in this school). An obvious way to get
one is to have a personally designed system of measurement of time be
accepted as a global standard.

Another interesting thing to try is getting an extra leap second added to
the calendar at the end of the year. Yes, if you can get the Earth to slow
down in its orbit around the Sun, a major charge is yours!


Formulae:
None so far. It's a kink school, and the practitioners are still working on
them.

(Which is code for I haven't thought of any nifty effects beyond the random
ones.)

Random Magick:
Slowing time. Stopping time. Making hours flow by. Increasing their
initiative in fights. Aging things. Anything related to time keeping, or the
manipulation of perception of time.


Symbolic Tension:
I'm still having some difficulty here. I can feel the tension, but I can't
quite articulate it.

I've got a little bit of an idea for tension - chronomancers are the
ultimate hypocrites. They free themselves from the old definitions of time,
but they still find themselves locked in killed Natural Time. They still
live their lives to a beat, to a scream of tortured Natural Time. A second
by any other name and length...


An Otherspace associated with Clockmakers:

The Hours Between Ticks Of A Clock
Remember how compelling the Bullet Time from the Matrix seemed? Everyone
wanted to parody, or use it. It's become an accepted part of the grammar of
video games.

The universe obeys. Perhaps the Hours existed before, but until the idea of
Bullet Time became cemented in the collective unconsciousness they couldn't
be accessed. Perhaps the Hours were created whole hog and expanded with each
new instances of Bullet Time to hit the tube and the silver screen.

But, this is Unknown Armies. Things are hardly easy.

As you enter, you feel a pressure in your chest. Those with especial
presence of mind realize that their hearts have stopped and they are no
longer breathing. The part of your brain that make sure that autonomic stuff
keeps happening? Yeah, it doesn't work in the Hours. Don't worry - your
cells and tissues aren't really alive in the Hours, so they don't need
oxygen.


Throwing yourself out of time really, really fucks up physics. Gravity,
electromagnetic repulsion, and the consistency of materials are all
different in the Hours. Yes, you can jump real good, you can walk through
walls - but any movement is hard to start. A profound lethargy seizes anyone
moving in the Hours. Don't forget you're not moving by muscles and nerve
impulses. You're moving by pure force of will.


Finally, everything distorts as the Hours go on - as time goes to zero, the
probability of significantly weird quantum events increase. On a small
enough time scale, anything and everything happens. It just happens fast
enough that no one notices. Well, no one except those going really really
fast themselves. The last time I was in that room it wasn't filled with
motionless strange gnomes in red hats making faces and performing lewd acts
with my mother. Weird.


And finally, as we all know from that episode of Eerie Indiana, the hidden
hours are watched over by guardians - silent and implacable men in black.
The Stagehands of the Universe, they make sure everything keeps working from
moment to moment. And they really, really don't like to see people in the
Hours.



I'd like to know what you guys think.

-Luke
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