locarno24 said:
this map is four dimensional, it plots the locations of various time portals in three dimensions of space and one of time, they are temporary wormholes with one end in the past created in the past, the other end appears in various locations in time and space typically when one appears, another appears two weeks later.
Sounds cool - actually reminds me of something rather like
Primeval anomalies.
The big question with any time travel element to a campaign is predestination - can the players "change" history, or will they always find out they were supposed to do what they do all along. And if they do change it, what's the effect of doing so? Are they aware? Will they become aware on returning to the present? How will this change the history map?
Who the hell created a "chronodisplacement map" in the first place? Or was the time-travel element always part of the machine's design?
A race of humans evolved on the planet Venus when he Solar System was young, about one billion years old, all the planets were complete, the Earth and Moon were complete, thought the Earth was uninhabitable for the Venusians. The Sun, when it was one billion years old was dimmer than it is today, so Venus was squarely in the habitable zone then, though at the inner edge of it. The Venusians were aware of one thing, their planet was dying, they Sun was heating up, the equatorial regions were already uninhabitable, so the Venusians were looking for a second home for them, they looked to the third planet, but it was too cold and uninhabitable, they were thinking of terraforming it, but there wasn't time, their planet was going to be uninhabitable in one thousand years, their population had diminished with wars, their ecosystem was ravaged, there was no hope of making Earth habitable in time for them, so another means was developed, time travel. They could terraform Earth with time itself, by directing the course of evolution of that planet.
The way time travel works is that you can only travel forward in time from the moment the time portal is created. The time portal is a wormhole with both ends created in close proximity to one another, and one end is accelerated to near the speed of light. (The wormhole need not be large to do this, it could be microscopic.) One end of the wormhole is accelerated to near the speed of light. To get the ideal environment on Earth, the Venusians had to accelerate their wormhole to near the speed of light and use relativistic time dilatation to send one end billions of years into their future. At about one billion years ago, the Earth got warm enough and the oxygen levels in the atmosphere got high enough to allow animal life to migrate onto land. The Venusians launched thousands of wormholes into the future, and manipulated the Earth life so that it evolved in certain direction, after a number of stops and starts, they managed to get one species of primates to resemble their own, with their careful manipulation, it developed intelligence, developed tool use and started to build a civilization. They decided to let it develop on their own, and their next wormhole arrived in the vicinity or Earth in the middle of the 21st century, to pique their curiosity they sent some additional wormholes from their time into Earth's past from that. A number of Venusians mingled with Earth's population to study them, so they could record Earth's history, but they were careful to avoid influencing Earth's historic events. One problem was that while Earth life resembled theirs on the macroscopic level, on the cellular level it was quite different, it was an example of engineered convergent evolution. The Venusians could drink the water and breath the air, but they could not eat the food! The biological basis of Venusian life was chemically different from Earth life, they discovered this fact too late to do anything about it, when their first wormhole arrived on Earth, life had already evolved, and the rule is, once history is observed it can't be changed, the timeline from that point forward could be shaped, but nothing that has already been established could be changed. What they wanted to do was move their population off to some future Earth. At a later point, they discovered that indeed time could be altered, but when that happened, the wormholes start to close off, so they beat a hasty exit to some parallel Earth, leaving the machinery for time travel behind with many open wormholes from their failed previous experiments. At some point some Earth human discovered a wormhole, a Venusian remaining behind gives him a "map of time" which is basically a series or wormholes leading from Past Venus to a series of points in time in Earth's history and prehistory. The thing is that if anything is done to alter the established history, these wormhole begin to close off. Since the users of these wormholes want to explore history further, they do not want to alter history and close off these wormholes. Altering history does not actually change the present, it just branched of the timeline where the change occurred into a parallel timeline, this puts strain and the wormhole connecting these two timelines causing it to collapse.
Time travel is an interesting thing. The big thing to remember is that the link between time and distance is the speed of light - that is, one second's displacement in time (1s) is supposedly equal to one light-second's displacement in space (3x10^8 m). Which means a time-space 'gate' billions of years into the past is a huge investment in energy, and not to mention that one ten-thousandth of a percent inaccuracy can "miss" your desired destination time period by a full millennium!
