[UA] The Reality Mechanics: Chronomancy

[Courtney]

That sounds interesting, but I think that your symbolic tension definitely has to involve the chronomancer being a slave to Artificial time.  In UA you don't get to have your cake and eat it too.  In order to become somethings master, you must become its slave.  The taboos you've set up don't really reflect that.  Irascomancers don't get to be angry, Personamancers don't get to be themselves, Chronomancers shouldn't be able to follow Natural Time.

Have you read the Thief of Always by Clive Barker?  This reminded me of it.


"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." - - -James Nicoll 


Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:31:16 -0600
From: demon.of.maxwell at gmail.com
To: ua at lists.unknown-armies.com
Subject: [UA] The Reality Mechanics: Chronomancy

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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