I hate asking the men questions. Hate it hate it hate it. It’s a simple job with the women; they almost run the conversations themselves. Heck, I think I’m practically doing them a favor, letting them talk about their dead sister, husband, father, distant cousin. But I’ve got to drag it out of the men; I have to ask very specific, pointed questions to get answers at all, let alone good ones. Men don’t seem to go to the past like women do; dark territory or light, they creep in cautiously, making sure they don’t step in something they forgot a long time ago. But I’ve got to talk to them, have to talk to everyone. “Efficiency is the key, boy,” Henry would say. “There’s not enough time floating around, especially nowadays, to be drinking half a glass of it and leaving the rest to spoil.” So efficient I am, going from person to person, asking my slate of questions / interrogations / excavations. I’m one to always do research. I’m a fan of doing research. Most guys among us that do Mining like this are sloppy. Lucky if they read through the whole obituary. They rely on brazen questions and shock value. A few can improvise real well. That’s just something I can’t do. I’ve got to be ready beforehand. It’s not much; check what high school they went to, charities, kids, grandkids. Drive past their house once. How long they were sick, if they were. The internet’s real jazzy for some of this; you can look up tons of stuff about their work in just a couple of minutes, never have to bother a soul. I try real hard to not to bother people. Funerals are just such an easy pickup; they’re practically standard in this business. There’s something about them that makes people look into the past - mortality reminding them that it’s still around, I guess. Whatever the reason, that’s why I’m there; to poke and prod just enough to get them to the point that they’re beyond just looking back, the point when they’re in the past, not just seeing it or hearing it. Really and truly in it. That’s when I gently tug a little bit of that time that they’ve pulled back to now. I don’t take much; the color of the first car their now-deceased father gave them, who played in the last ball game they took their sister to before she got sick, the name of the cruise ship where they had their 40th wedding anniversary. If the mourner wasn’t very close to the person, I’ll take more. If it’s a bad memory that I know they’d rather not have, I’ll help them let it go. It’s always been my thing, though, that these people are giving me a gift, unknowingly but a gift nonetheless, and it’s not my place to ask for too much. Henry and his doctrine of efficiency would be red in the face mad at me for the wastefulness, but I don’t care. I just don’t want to bother anyone. What’d I just call it? This “business.” Great way to put it. The best way to stop caring about something is to start calling it a job. I still care, though, I do. I use a lot less of the time I collect for myself than most do. I let myself age, for one thing. I keep the gray out of my hair (and my lungs, too, now that I think about it) but that’s less than most. A lot less. Almost all of the time I collect goes straight to the Cause. So if someone you don’t know comes up to you when you’re at a funeral, feel free to tell them anything you don’t want to remember. You just might not when you’re done talking to them. For us, it’s a gift, but it’s just a job.
The Game
In Clock Work, the players are people that have the gift of taking time and putting it to good use. They can take extra time from places that have collected it - waiting in line at the doctor’s office feels like hours because it probably was, the time just got taken - and use it for their own ends. Clockworkers can also take the past from people that have gotten it so clear in their minds that they’ve actually brought it back with them.
With the time they’ve collected, Clockworkers can do an almost limitless amount of things. For themselves, they can rewind their bodies’ aging as much as they have time - from keeping their hair from falling out and shoring up those wrinkles to becoming a ten-year-old again. They can do the same for other people and places as well, manipulating events, people’s lives, and even history if they’ve collected enough.
The goals of Clockworkers can be as varied as their powers. Some use their abilities in isolation, doing good, evil, or selfish on a local scale. Most discover (or are discovered by) larger Clockworker communities that all have different theories about their powers and how they are to use them. Groups are formed based on religious beliefs, philosophies, desires of money or power, and even self-preservation.
Characters
The characters in Clock Work are everyday people who, at some point in the past, have realized they have the gift of manipulating time - “Clockworkers.” Aside from the time powers, they don’t have any superhuman physical or mental abilities. The range of characters can still vary a lot, though, as Clockworkers can come from any place on earth and all walks of life. The characters can either be by themselves, working for their goals, or belong to one of the many different large or small organizations of Clockworkers.
System
Two different types of game systems would work well with Clock Work. One would be universal systems like GURPS that can create characters from any time period. Though the game is set in the modern day, there are some player characters and NPCs that could be hundreds of years old. Another kind of system would be one that creates “normal” modern-day people. White Wolf’s Hunter: The Reckoning character creation system or the career-choice system in Twilight 2000 would work well.
Adventures
Assassination Street
In the city of Washington, D.C. a surprisingly high number of homicides on the street are going unsolved or are leading to dropped charges due to lack of evidence. After the murder of a prominent senator’s aide and futile police attempts at finding a suspect, a Clockworker friend from the area asks for the characters’ help; apparently he’s detected the influence of time manipulation around this crime and others.
What’s happening: an independent Clockworker has set up shop creating untraceable hitman. For huge fees, the Clockworker supplies firearms that, after they’ve been fired, are turned back in time so the guns seem as though they have never been fired before. The characters have track down this loose cannon and take him out.
One of Four
A simple directive has been given to the characters from leadership high above them - find the dead girl and find out why she’s dead. But it gets a whole lot more complicated than that. The characters discover the girl was killed in a small airplane crash - but there’s four girls. She was one of a group of quadruplets; three of them were killed in the plane crash. The characters will have to track down the fourth sister and many others to figure out what’s going on. Why is this - are these - women so important to the characters’ organization, why are there four of them, and how did that plane crash? Could one Clockworker have been living four lives - and decided that one life at a time was enough?
Mommy’s Little Boys and Girls
Clockworkers are known to frequently split into factions, each one claiming to know the truth behind their abilities and what they should be used for. The moral ones know that, issues of belief aside, there is a code of ethics behind what they do that is more important than the short-term goals of any single person or group.
The evil Clockworkers could care less.
This one in particular, Sharon Connelly, is a pretty solid example of that. Sharon had a good normal life a long time ago; a husband, four kids, two dogs, one cat, and one home to put them all in. Then she started seeing peoples’ pasts as she met them, and then she could do more… and then one day, a group of Clockworkers came to her door, and recruited her for their “Cause.” Soon, that perfect life was far far away, and she didn’t find out until forty years later what happened to the husband, four kids, two dogs, and one cat. And she hadn’t aged a bit. She left that group not long after, and retreated to a cabin the mountains. The Clockworkers she worked for eventually forgot about her, for the most part. Until now.
Now she has what’s virtually a fortress in those mountains, and an army to boot. Over sixty-five kids that have been taken from their lives and brought there over the last two decades. Over sixty-five kids, specially chosen by Sharon, who all have of the gift of the Clockworks in them. Over sixty-five kids fanatically loyal to their “mother.” Over sixty-five kids that, despite up to twenty years of life in the mountains, are all still kids.
And they’ll be Sharon’s family forever. Even after - especially after - they kill every last one of those Clockworkers that took her first family away.
