Mechanical Changes

New Ability: Temporal Flux Sensitivity

You can always sense any level of temporal flux. Being in moderate levels causes Lesser Harm whenever you’re standing in even mild levels of Temporal Flux, which means in practice you always get it upon time traveling. And the Lesser Harm stays with you after that, you have to do what you always have to do to clear Lesser Harm.

You can also detect trace amounts of temporal flux on people who have time traveled, or who even time travel commonly. And departure locations used, where flux had built up but is theoretically gone.

Basically, if there was temporal flux there, it’s possible for you to detect it and even roll to try Understand to figure out more.

This trait is free. List it under Abilities, but it does not cost an Ability at creation.

Existing Abilities Alterations

Kevin Bacon - Disallowed because that makes very little sense anywhere outside of near your origin or on Haven.

I Had Prep Time - No changes, but that makes it even more useful considering how Flashbacks are different.

Flashbacks

It seems like it would be possible to make flashbacks use time travel, but mechanically that quickly turns into a nightmare. We’re not playing Bill and Ted here where you can go back after and solve your problems…once you’re in a thread, you’re in the thread, you have to keep going forward, you can’t jump back inside the thread and do something, you’d end up in a different thread. That’s not allowed by the rules of the setting, and we’re not tempted to bend them to make it work mechanically because…nightmare.

However, what time travel does do is reduce the unpredictability of knowing you will need to do something, thus likely flashbacks making cost less on average. You likely already know how things turned out, after all. You might have even watched events play out. There’s almost never going to be a 2-level unpredictability.

This makes the ability ‘I had prep time’ becomes even more useful, because you have a pretty good chance of getting the predictability cost of a flashback to zero. If you have prep time, and knowledge of the future, you are quite a force.

Mind

It’s generally assumed you will have some base level of knowledge before traveling to a time period.

Modify

This is TV world, if you are smart in a certain way, you can hack. It’s presumed you learned whatever you didn’t know natively offscreen. Maybe you learned all off them offscreen if you’re from the past.

Obviously, hacking is not super useful farther in the past, but remember Modify is also things like IDs and paperwork, which is incredibly useful when no computers exist, especially for Commonwealth, which is currently in the middle of a Cold Civil War between the Commonwealth of All People and the United States of America and strangers are indeed sometimes questioned by the authorities. And telegraphs and phones exist everywhere, although they are manually switched before a certain point, so if you want to ‘hack’ those, you’re going to have to grift the phone or telegraph operator…or track down the wires running directly into the place you want to ‘hack’.

Understand

This honestly is kind of a big one, especially if you’re trying change things without notice until later. Also, it really helps if you’re trying to understand a situation from context.

Locate

This includes figuring out good arrival and departure points, and yes, that could become relevant if you’re in a hurry. Also just…the scope of the game is pretty big. Literally all of time in three universes.

Social

In InterAct, there’s going to need to be some hacking involved in a lot of social stuff, because people are used to looking up information about who they are talking to, and you likely do not exist.

Connect

There are people on Haven that have all sorts of information and resources. And if you’re trying to make things better, being honest to contemps is often the way to do it, warning them of actual real outcomes that you know about and are trying to avoid. Maybe even telling them you know the future, it won’t hurt anything if they believe it, although obviously that can backfire if they think you’re a lunatic.

Order

Turns out Order is actually pretty useful under fascism, where everyone is used to obeying orders.

Grift

You won’t ever have to roll to make people think you aren’t time travelers, that idea is so silly no one ever thinks it originally. But they might think you are a bunch of complete weirdos or even enemy agents. Grift is also useful for noticing if anyone else is a time traveler, although that is unlikely for you not to know.

Body

Grasp

In ‘present’ InterAct, cheap physical locks have been replaced by cheap AR electronic locks that you can’t open with lockpicks. Although some are so cheap they can be defeated just by inserting things to short across specific pins, so ironically you can ‘lockpick’ them with a paperclip, if you know how to do it…which you do.

Sneak

You might think this is easier when there were not cameras, but you may discover that cameras, paradoxically, made things easier, because without them guards are often employed, and they have less blind spots.

In InterAct, lethal booby-traps are illegal. Non-lethal booby traps, on the other hand, are not. Practically, this just means they avoid using sharp things or bullets or even blunt force, but are perfectly willing to spray you with enough pepper spray to burn your lungs or immobilize you with an amount of foam that they can mathematically demonstrate is unlikely to cover the average person enough to suffocate them or remove enough air from the room that you pass out but not long enough to kill you. And if those things accidentally kill you, that’s moderately large fine.

Meanwhile, back in Commonwealth, the laws are saner, but they are literally in the middle of a cold war that is sometimes a shooting war. Try not to be mistaken for a spy. Also try to remember if you’re in the Commonwealth states or the US.

Legacy is about to descend into fascism, but it’s a good ten years from ‘now’ before it gets really bad.

Assault

Despite the name, this includes all large movements, including dodging and rolling, so if the time travel does go wrong, it’s this to not get injured.

Private ownership of firearms is ‘illegal’ in InterAct, in that it is actually still legal under the 2nd amendment, but barred by contract basically everywhere. This means the police, aka Inter-Accord Enforcement Action, aka, InterAct, will be very startled if you have a firearm as they are not expecting it, but also will likely overreact.