The interstellar democracy is on the cusp of collapsing into a totalitarian dictatorship, and members of the LORDS party are all too eager to place themselves at the head of the new regime which they will bring about by promises of efficiency in government.  One man has proof of the plans of those involved, but because of their maneuverings he is in no position to deliver it to the chief executive Louhi Kulvero (called Secretary-General in the early chapters but later Executive Secretary; it appears to be an error in the writing, not intended to indicate a change in the title).  He seeks someone willing to accept the mission of carrying the message from the outer extremes of human space to Earth itself, and to find a way to deliver it.

This government, the IDE (Interstellar Dominion Electorate), has stood for about five centuries, but will not stand for another.

Like our first article in this Adapting series, this article looks at a book which came to me bound with another, the first of two parts of To the Magic Born by Christopher Stasheff, but was originally published under its own title, Escape Velocity.  It happens that I am adapting the second book in that volume in great detail as I run it for a player, and I anticipate learning much about that book from that run, although it may be a while before it appears in this series.  Meanwhile, the first volume is also interesting, and has potential as a game story.  Further, although in a very real sense this book is the prequel to that, they are so completely separated from each other that the only characters in both–a several thousand year old computer and a ghost–do not remember their involvements in the critical events of the first that lead to the setting in the second.  Reading this discussion will not interfere with playing that world.

The book provides a sort of race and chase plot through several interesting settings; a player character could be introduced at any of several points along the way and could move with the main characters or fall into the developing sidestories of those other worlds.  The author uses several mnemonic tools including drug names and twists on names of famous people and turns on words; those the referee spots will be helpful for him, but those which are obscure are not worth learning.

We’ll start with a quick overview of the major characters.  They are distinguished as “major” by virtue of the fact that they appear in multiple “acts” of our story; other important characters appear in one part of the story and then vanish.  The plot itself will be divided into “Acts”, which will be our way of moving the characters from one point to another.

There is at least a chance of positioning the verser as the main character in the story as written, although the referee is able to do otherwise and still put the verser in the primary story.  As a convict on a prison planet placed there by administrative fiat by an angered military superior, Dar Mandra has good reason to want to get away from the planet Wolmar and go see the wonders and comforts of the nearly fully urban Earth (where there are still a few parks, such as the Rockies, but most of it is city and most of the people are bored and trapped in their place in the universe, according to Samantha “Sam” Bine who fled the place).  Dar has some basic computer skills, is a low-level professional teacher trained to mid professional level as an army pilot with extensive knowledge of the army’s quartermaster’s office systems–how to get what you need delivered where you want it.  Only the piloting skill is put to use, but he is the logical choice for keeping the plot on track.  He also has some wilderness stealth skills which are used at one point, but are not particularly prominent.

Dar’s first role is to introduce Sam to Wolmar, so as to shift her understanding from seeing it as a settlement of conscripted colonists (the prisoners) stealing the world from the established native settlers (the Wolman, human descendants of an earlier “back to nature” group) to a place of hope with a growing democracy and unity with a developing unified economy.  He works for “Cholly” ostensibly as a trader, but surreptitiously as a teacher bringing the natives an understanding of philosophy, technology, science, economics, politics, and other fields of study.  He enlisted in the army and became a space tug pilot, then was assigned to quartermaster corps, where he attempted to correct an intentional mistake and got administratively routed to prison entirely by the manipulation of red tape and alteration of computer records.  Described as slim, Dark Egyptian skin color, he was a pilot, then stock clerk, then studied data processing, promoted to corporal, and knows all codes for all army platoons and naval ships.  He is given the temporary name “Ardham Rod” (“Dar Mandra” reversed by sound) by Cholly when disguised on Wolmar, and is later dubbed Perry “Pa” Tetic, given the position of commercializing scripts, by Tod when they are masquerading as a film crew in Act V.  He is trained in hand-to-hand and disarming techniques, and in wilderness stealth skills.

Samantha Bine, known as Sam, was an experienced clerk in the Bureau of Otherworldly Affairs (BOA) who dropped out to join the leading “non-comformist” faction of the universe, the “Humes”.  As a Hume, she shaved her head and wore the least flattering dull flannel outfit possible, which causes her to conform to all the other non-comformists in the universe.  As Cholly explains at one point, non-comformists dating back to the English Puritans have always been more unified in their conformity to each other than are the members of that society to which they refuse to conform.  It gives her the advantage that other Humes will recognize her and will provide assistance even at significant risk to themselves against the “outsiders” that comprise the law, govermnent, and society.  She also matters because she is psionically gifted, referred to in the story as a “telepath” but using several distinct abilities.  She never reveals them.  Those with whom she travels are so completely unware of her gifts that when their adversaries broadcast accusations that there is a dangerous telepath traveling in their group the group writes it off as propaganda intended to bend opinion against them.

At various moments in the book, Sam might project thought.  She understands how to operate ship communications, and is notable for her sleight of hand skills when she rifles luggage and removes credentials unperceived.  She also picks a primitive combination lock after “listening” for sound outside, finds path through a pitch black labyrinth, anticipates traffic in halls and avoids occupied cells, and picks a second lock in total darkness.  Cholly gives her the temporary name “Enid Mas” (which is “Sam Bine” reversed by spelling) when she is disguised on Wolmar.  She is dubbed Unit Manager Ori Snipe during the film company ruse, and ultimately becomes Lady Loguire.

There is a major villain, Canis Destinus, who appears in the first act but who remains on the edges of the story and is not named until considerably later.  He begins as ostensibly an Aide to Bhelabher, described as rat-faced or fox-faced.  We gradually learn that he is half cousin (son of father’s half-brother) to Father Marco, and is working for IDE Secretary for Internal Security, a LORDS party member.

In the third act, three more major characters join the cast.  The most important of these is Tod Tambourin, also known as Whitey the Wino.  No one knows Whitey is Tod except his companions–the outer rim people know Whitey the drunken entertainer, while those in the Terran region know Tod, Poet Laureate of the Terran Sphere.  He is described as a lean, short, aging man who looks as hard as a meteor and merry as a comet, with stark white hair, eyes so light blue they are almost colorless, skin weathered and toughened but with a bleached look.  Dar’s first impression of him is of a skinny pincer-like hand, and he limps when rushing.  According to grandaughter Lona, he would come between a man and his wife only if he had the chance.  On stage he plays a flat keyboard which he otherwise keeps under his tunic.  He is a brilliant writer and good singer, and also reasonably skilled in fisticuffs.  To escape Falsaff he buys a surface-to-surface navy surplus scout ship, christening it “Ray of Hope”.  It is later destroyed.  He mentions at one point that he was once an engineer, so he has some understanding of ships and ship systems.  Being quite wealthy, he buys another ship in Act IV with cash in his pockets.

The most significant of the three characters to join the cast in Act III is Lona, whose last name is never given but is probably also Tambourin as she is Tod’s grandaughter.  He insists that she call him “Uncle”, which she is quite content to do once everyone within earshot knows the truth of their relationship, because of a commitment to honesty in the little things.  Described from Dar’s perspective as the body of Venus outlined by a flowing sleeveless calf-length gown that clung to every curve, high smooth brow, delicate eyebrows, large wide-set eyes heavily lidded, small tip-tilted nose, mouth with a hint of a smile, tawny hair rippling to her waist, with a singing voice as sweet as spring and clear as a fountain, she also has piloting skill and skill with nearly any machine, particularly if it has electronic parts.  She is dubbed Fulva Volpes, Assistant Director and Director of Editing, when her grandfather is creating a cover story.  The planetoid Maxima, a dead world filled with extremely wealthy computer and robotics experts, sounds like heaven to her.

The third character to join in act three is Father Marco Rice, Order of St. Vicoden of Cathode (O.S.V.), an order whose members are all engineers or scientists in addition to being priests, and who carry a small yellow-handled screwdriver in the breast pocket as a symbol of their order.  He demonstrates skills at physical crowd control, blocking people out of a fight; it is implied that he would be able to fix the important parts of a computer-operated spaceship, but his precise skills are never discussed.  He is described as a little stout, which is relatively slender given that on Falstaff where he meets them most of the people are incredibly fat.  He is later dubbed Coburn Helith, research & script development, when Tod is creating his film crew cover story.

The final major character is Fess, or that’s what Lona calls him.  He is the robotic brain controlling the second spaceship they purchase, from an asteroid miner.  Properly he is designated FCC651919, but Lona wants to be able to call him something that establishes a rapport between them, and “Fess” is her choice for how to pronounce the three-letter opening acronym, which stands for Faithful Cybernetic Companion.  Fess cannot resist accuracy in mathematics.  Its prime overriding instruction is the sanctity of human life, and it otherwise obeys its owner completely.  Fess suffered damage to a capacitor in an accident.  A circuitbreaker bypass was installed, which shuts down all systems when stressed.  Designed on Maxima as a brain for a humaoid robot, when he joins the team he is running a “burro boat”, a rather maneuverable but relatively slow utility craft with practical tools on the exterior.  His previous owner is discussed in Act IV.

Maxima, a planetoid in Sirius’ asteroid belt, makes computers and robots.  It has no atmosphere, no trees or grass, but is all rocks and dust.  It is said that there is nothing to do but design and build computers, which are the best in the galaxy, and laze in luxury with three robots per person and the computer people all very rich from the industry.  It is also 8.7 light years from Terra, which Lona regards close enough for weekend excursions if desired.  Fess was designed and built there.

Act I:  Wolmar

The planet Wolmar is an army prison planet, very like eighteenth century Australia in space.  It has a 28 hour day, so noon is at 14:00.  Some years back, General Shackler, an army psychiatrist, was sent to serve as Governor, effectively warden of the planet.  However, the planet was not uninhabited; there existed other humans, descendants of a long-past back-to-nature settlement.  They opposed the presence of the prisoners.  Shackler decided that running it as a prison was not going to be the best approach, particularly given that he was anticipating the fall of the central government which would cut off support from the outside.  Thus in a skillfully plotted string of moves he removed the prison guards, allowed the prison population to degenerate into gang warfare, waited for the locally indigenous Wolmans to attack to force the gangs to unite for their defense, advised the prisoners as to battle strategy (the warden’s secure quarters had high-tech surveillance gear to give him a view of events), and when the dust settled accepted when they voted him to the position of governor of their new budding democracy.  He has since been guiding them in the building of a government and working toward peace with the Wolmans.

Part of that peace includes that the war continues, but in an orderly and relatively safe fashion.  Battles are scheduled for 8:00 AM and 2:00 PM, 8 hours apart, and soldiers from the prisoner’s city compound meet outside the walls with attackers from the Wolman tribes, everyone taking a chalk stick and fighting a combat in which to be marked with chalk is to be removed from the fight to the sidelines, where refreshments are served and the prisoners and Wolmans chat and get to know each other.  When the battle is declared finished by the commanding officers of both sides, a cash settlement is made based on the number of men each side has marked of the other, and individuals also pay out of pocket to the opposing warriors who marked them.

Trade is conducted by traders like Dar who are actually teachers.  They casually mention technological products, but they don’t sell the products–they sell the manuals and the parts, and let the Wolmans learn how to build their own and so learn how they work.  It is all done quite cordially.  This work is mostly overseen by Charles T. “Cholly” Barman, one of the most famous educators and educational theorists in the galaxy formerly at the University of Luna whose proposals that educators shouldn’t teach in classrooms but one-on-one in life situations in which they have cover jobs made him enough powerful enemies that he fled from assassins and was invited by General Shackler to hide and work here.  Sam Bine is not the only person in the story who recognizes his name when it is mentioned.  Cholly works as the bartender in the local tavern, discussing anything that will educate his customers, such as Descartes.

Cholly also runs the Wolmar Pharmaceutical Trading Company Inc, which trades materials requisitioned from off-world for “pipeweed”, a tubular grass-like plant that contains chemicals useful in the manufacture of certain valued drugs.  His experience includes working with a theatrical company, from which he acquired and learned to use some superior theatrical make-up which he uses to disguise Dar and Sam so they won’t be recognized by Bhelabher’s people.

Sam arrives on Wolmar expecting to see how the natives are being oppressed by the evil settlers, and is quickly impressed.  She then gives Dar the bad news, that someone named the Honorable Vincent Bhelabher has been sent to replace Shackler.  Bhelabher is a bureaucrat, formerly head of the BOA, whose move here is being couched as a promotion but might also be an effort to remove him from local access, because he has knowledge of the planned coup.

Cholly insists that this information not be delivered to Shackler, to preserve his ability to deny knowledge of it.  Instead, Sam and Dar set up a phony customs office with the help of a Wolman shaman of the Sars tribe, a known mind reader, who uses the name Reverend Haldane for the sting but is not otherwise identified.  During that customs inspection, the trio is able to cause all of the credentials and orders carried by Bhelabher’s group to become lost, putting Shackler and Bhelabher in the awkward position of having to send to Earth for confirmation of his claimed appointment.  However, Shackler’s work so impresses Bhelabher that he resigns his appointment and takes a job in information management in Shackler’s local government.  He needs someone to carry his resignation back to earth.  (Hyperspace makes faster than light travel possible, but not faster than light radio, so hand-delivered communications are necessary even when the communications are electronic in form.)  He also needs that person to alert the government to the conspiracy.

Bhelabher’s conspiracy includes the Electors Boundbridge and Satrap, one of whom is Minster of the Exchequer (we are never told which one), and a General Forcemain.  A set of memorized numbers calls up a file of hacked documents from the electors which proves the conspiracy; Dar is to deliver the file information to the Secretary-General.  He and Sam are given credentials, cash, and the promise of a return trip to Wolmar if they want it.  Dar is eager to see the luxuries of Earth, but Sam is reluctant to go until promised the return passage.

There are several good possible entry points for a verser.  He could arrive just before Shackler, finding himself on a prison planet whether within the compound or just outside.  He could watch the dismantling of the artillery and departure of the guards, the collapse into anarchy and then the tribalism of the gang collectives, the attack of the Wolmans that led to the arming of the prisoners by the gang leaders and their revolt against those gang leaders, then their election of Shacklerr and the beginnings of their constitutional democracy.  Alternatively, he could arrive after the developmental phase and be introduced to the backstory much as Sam is.

It would be easiest for the verser if he arrives in plain view of Shackler or Cholly, giving credibility to his claim that he is not a prisoner.  He could still maintain this claim based on the absence of records concerning him.  It will be most difficult if he arrives simultaneously with a prison transport.

Once Shackler recognizes that the verser does not belong there, he will offer to provide paperwork and transportation off-planet.  This provides an opportunity to send him with Dar and Sam.  It will also mark him as one of the telepath suspects, whether he leaves as part of their mission or simply travels on the same transport.

If the verser stays on Wolmar when Dar leaves, over the next year they will receive news of the telepath conspiracy and the shift to totalitarianism, and then transports will cease.  Shackler will establish contacts to resume private shipping for the import/export business, and Wolmar will settle into a democracy.

Act II:  First Flight

The hyperspace leg of the journey from Haldane IV to Wolmar took Sam a week and a half by freighter, but the return trip is made in a courier ship in only five days.  What Sam and Dar don’t know is that Canis has stranded the assigned pilot on Wolmar and is flying their ship into trouble.  They emerge from hyperspace and are ambushed by pirates.  They escape in a life boat with limited capability, but Dar flies it adequately to hide in the asteroid field in which the pirates had been hiding until police arrive, destroy the pirates, and rescue them in response to their distress signal.  It is at this point that Dar learns that Haldane IV is known locally as Falstaff; the police are local to that planet.

If the verser did not start on Wolmar and so depart with this ship, he could verse in here.  Since Dar and Sam know themselves to be the only passengers, he will have to explain his presence to them.  The pilot won’t check and the robotic stewards won’t care.  His explanation might be significant, though.  If they believe he might be psionic, he may eventually become the scapegoat if Dar reveals this.  (Sam probably won’t, in protecting telepaths like herself generally, but Dar does not reveal her as a telepath simply because he does not know.)

From that point forward, the verser will be marked as one of the telepaths.  Canis Destinus knows that two passengers left Wolmar but three were rescued by Falstaff police, and that to him will mean that telepaths are more powerful and more numerous than feared.

Act III:  Falstaff

Once rescued, Dar and Sam are delivered to the planet Haldane IV, which is known to those who live there as Falstaff.  Iron and all metals are rare, nails are cash, and wood, rare on many planets, is used for construction.  Everyone here is very fat, and all eat sausages constantly.

It is while waiting in a bar here that Dar and Sam meet Father Marco, then Ted Tambourin and Lona.  Dar falls for Lona immediately, much to Sam’s displeasure, but when Sam realizes that Whitey the Wino is Ted Tambourin, she becomes very interested in him.

Canis has by this time raised a police force of his own, which raids the bar during a staged brawl shortly after our quintet become acquainted.  They fight their way out, slipping through a basement crawlway into a brothel where the good Father has ministered, then in fresh clothes into the street where they are separated.  Sam and Dar escape the police mostly due to the help of some thugs who then take them prisoner to see Thalvar Sard.  These thugs would want also to capture the verser, if he came here.

Thalvar Sard is also known as The Syndic, head of the House of Houses, the leading crime syndicate in the galaxy, which happens to be headquartered not on Terra where everyone expects but here on Haldane IV where there are very few radios (due to the shortage of metal) and easily compromised police and authorities.  He has heard the rumors that one of them is a telepath, and at this point he figures it has to be one of these who just arrived from elsewhere.  He wants whichever one is the telepath to work for him; both deny any knowledge of telepathy, and he holds them prisoner.  It is at this point that Sam exercises her gifts in getting them out of their underground cells into the wilderness, and Dar gets them back to the city.

Sard, the Syndic, will be content to enlist either telepath, but would probably prefer to eliminate any suspected telepath who does not work for him.  He will not know how many are telepaths, but will not take chances.  He is not above making false promises to achieve his objectives, however.

The city is not particularly safe, because it’s crawling with police looking for them.  At this point, Sam takes advantage of her identity as a Hume and connects with the local Humes, who find it outrageous that the establishment is persecuting them and wonderful that they’re going to break the coming coup with their information.  One of them provides a hiding place for them.

They are discovered there by Myles “My” Croft (one of those mnemonics), mayor of Haskerville, by far largest town on Haldane IV thus making him de facto governor of the planet.  He is too fat to stand, and so rides in a hover chair.  He exhibits strong deductive reasoning, by which he locates them.  He also reasons that the best way to get Canis Destinus and his outside police force off his planet is to get Dar and Sam off first.  He thus sells that surplus scout ship to Tod, who is interested in fleeing the scene as well.  He would want the verser to leave, too, if he can find him; he at least wants Destinus to believe that any telepaths have escaped and fled.

If the verser initially arrives on Falstaff (verses in there), it might be tricky connecting him to the main story.  The best hooks are to introduce him early to either Father Marco or the Tambourins, and have him present for the fight and flight.  Other creative alternatives are plausible, but none are likely to draw him into the story.

If he remains on Falstaff, it will be similar to Wolmar.  Mayor Croft is anticipating the fall of the democracy, and expects to become de facto ruler here when his metal-poor wood-rich planet is divorced from the rest of the galaxy.  He has ships adequate to maintain some interplanetary trade, and knows how to manage his highly corrput society and the major crime syndicate that operates from it.  It is something of a seedy planet, with most illegal pleasures easily obtained.  It is evident that the overall obesity here is due to the diet, which includes the near constant consumption of sausages, and the verser who is not attentive will gain weight.

Act IV:  Second Flight

The now quintet (sextet if the verser has joined them) does not quite escape Falstaff cleanly, and when they enter the Terran system they are soon pursued by police ships seeking to kill or capture the dangerous telepath aboard.  They take significant damage, hide again in an asteroid field, and send out another distress signal.  Fess picks up the signal, and following his protocol brings the burro boat to their rescue.  The burro boat features a bachelor’s decor and a locker room scent, but has room and the necessary amenities.

Fess’ owner, an old asteroid miner, is never named.  He opposes the rescue, and is still arguing about it when he discovers that the crew of the stranded ship are all aboard his ship.  Tod bargains to buy his boat, and the miner accepts the deal thinking he got the better end of it, given the problems with Fess’ overloads.  He then sends word to Ceres City that he has been boarded by people who might be the criminals the police are seeking.  In exchange, Tod strands him in his own asteroid bunker with only an emergency beacon, and heads for Luna.

The verser could arrive aboard Ray of Hope (the escape ship).  The group would suspect him to be a stowaway and likely spy for one of the three factions they are fleeing (Mayor Croft, Syndic Sard, or Canis Destinus), and might threaten to space him if he can’t explain himself.  Assuming he gets through that, he will have time to win their confidence.  Failing that, he might be stranded with the miner.

He could arrive on the burro boat during the rescue.  This has interesting possibilities, because the miner would assume he came with the rescued, and the group would assume he was with the miner.  Fess would know, though, that he arrived by unknown means separately.  He would offer this information if asked, or if it became obviously relevant.  Fess would hold the data as “unexplained”, but a roll should be made to determine whether the explanation causes an overload shutdown.

He could arrive after the miner is stranded, which eliminates the possibility that they would strand them together but otherwise puts him in much the same position.

Act V:  Luna and Terra

Because Terra, that is, Earth, is so overcrowded, only ferry ships from Luna are permitted to land on it; thus the sextet come to Luna, the Moon.  There they begin building a plan to reach the Executive Secretary.

It begins by contacting Mr. David Stroganoff of Occidental Productions Inc.  He is a major studio executive who wishes he could educate the masses, but the masses want entertainment and expect that education ought to be dull.  Tod, who is a friend of his who has long resisted the pressure to go commercial, gives him a brilliant show script, and they quickly have things moving toward a vid production that will include an interview with the Executive Secretary.  This is still on Luna, where all the vid production companies have relocated for space.

Horatio Bocello, richest man on Terra, patron of the arts and especially Tambourin’s work, happens to own a controling interest in the production company, and so heard his friend Tod was on Luna, and phoned.  Tod and his other friends call him “Cello”.  He is described as a devout Catholic, tall and skinny with a thin long-jawed boney face with receeding iron-gray hairline, blade of a nose, burning eyes.  Sam is immediately struck by him.  Horatio believes there is no point in sex without love.  He plays Duke Horatio Loguire in their medieval reenactments, and becomes the same when they leave.

Before they reach earth, the Honorable Kasi Pohyola, Chairman of the LORDS party and Majority Leader in the Assembly of Electors of the Interstellar Dominions, is calling for an end to legal protections that protect telepaths (such as protection from unlawful search and seizure or the protections of due process and the requirement of probable cause and need for arrest warrants), and for the removal of the Executive Secretary Louhi Kulvero who is not acting aggressively enough to curtail legal protections in the effort to capture these dangerous telepaths.  The argument is put forward that since a telepath has made it all the way to Terra, he must have had help from other telepaths, and therefore there must be thousands of them throughout the galaxy working together against ordinary people.  Dar is stunned that such nonsense would be believed, but it is obviously building paranoia in the common people, all of whom are fearful that their thoughts might be being read.

Dar and Tod go alone to the meeting with the Executive Secretary, who is described as tall, white hair, craggy handsome face, dressed in modest coveralls.  Dar delivers the information exactly as it was given to him.  The secretary springs a trap and arrests them, and uses this to have himself voted emergency powers and the title Executive Director.  He has no interest in preserving democracy, but only in ensuring that when it collapses into a dictatorship he will be the dictator.

However, there is a genuine fear of telepaths underlying all this, and Dar is interrogated under heavily disorienting sensory stimuli to get him to reveal that he is the telepath or knows who the telepath is.  Since he doesn’t, he does’t crack.

Horatio Bocello arranges his rescue, sending in Father Marco with false credentials and two “torturers” from his medieval group, who in the pretense of taking him to where the real torture machines are located manage to bundle him into a car and get him to the ferry where Bocello and hundreds of emigres are waiting to flee to Luna and beyond.  The only one specifically identified is named Markone, who is also Baron of Ruddigore.  They also take Stroganoff.

Once on Luna, Sam joins Horatio and company.  Stroganoff hitches a ride with a promise that he can be dropped off at Wolmar, where he is eager to meet Cholly Barman.  Tod, Lona, and Dar reunite with Fess and head to Maxima, where Lona expects to be very happy becoming very rich using her computer talents, and she and Dar expect to change their names to d’Armand.  We know from the sequel that they did, had children, and kept Fess as a family heirloom for centuries.

It’s a bit late for the verser to enter here, unless the referee wants to use the fall of the democracy as a setting.  In that case, the character should hear Pohyola’s speech, with its fear of telepaths and push toward curtailment of all legal impediments to a police state.  From there, it’s mere days until the Executive Secretary announces what amounts to martial law and an open telepath witch hunt.  Whether on crowded Terra or environmentally enclosed Luna, he’ll have to hide and survive, or escape to the other planets.  This would be so, too, if he comes with the party and stays behind.

He could go with Dar, Lona, Tod, and Fess to Maxima, but unless he has remarkable computer or robotics skills he is unlikely to do well there.  If he hitches a ride with Horatio to Wolmar with Stroganoff, that will put him back in that scenario, detailed in Act I.

He could travel with Horatio’s people to create Grammarye, a medieval kingdom.  The sequel tells us that they succeed, and that Duke and Lady Loguire have descendants.  However, it must be made clear to him that going there means having his memory wiped and replaced with a false identity, and that it is not clear how or whether he could recover his lost knowledge.  The sequel, A Warlock In Spite of Himself, offers significant insight into Grammarye, despite being set centuries later.  That, though, is another article.

Just why are we here instead of nothing at all? Why is beer so common in all cultures associated with Womynity? Why are there electrons instead of cartrons?

The last one is easy I realized as I stared into my four or is it seventh cup? Cartrons would crash into each other and annihilate a good universe before it got started. At least that is what my car does.

And beer, golden beer, explains it all, even more than why you can’t live with them, and you can’t toss them off the nearest bridge.

There are those who say that the Universe began with a Bang and others with a Beginner. The Bangists, or Bangers, and Bangages…Bangi? They have a problem. No one really believes something starts without a Beginner to start it, not in their heart of hearts which is next to their empty wallet and above their temporarlily swollen tummy. On the other hand, and boy do I sound smart, just like my cousin the economist who gets paid big bucks to tell people what they want to hear, where was I, oh yes, on the other hand, the Beginners, they claim Yahweh or the Cosmic R did it. And they have strong support from Ol’ Ben who said … Beer was proof that God loved man.

Now these theories seem mutually exclusive. Almighty or Asinity *a big word mean stupid or something, Benevolence or Bad Luck, Creator or Chance, Designer or Dice, Effector or Eventual, Forever or Food for the worms, God or Goo, Heavenly or Hoggish but Intelligent Hogs, I AM or I I I, Jesus or Jump off the bridge in despair, Kill as in Thou Shalt Not Murder or Kill Crazy, Love or Luckless, Man the Noble or Man the Manimal…

Let me get another cup. Ahh. Parched I was after that long and rather beautiful oration, if I do say so myself.

But I have had a vision. What if we could combine the two ideas, Accident and Action of the deliberate kind. Instead of Bang and Beginner we have Burp.

In the mists of eternity past (actually it was smog from the cigs…) Mick the Mighty liked to hang out in a bar with his beer in his never emptying mug, and with the dancing girls he created to pass the time with. Now some might say that Mick was an Irishman like meself, but its not true. See there were no Irish yet. You got to keep up.

One particular span of time before time Mick had just finished a particularly huge gulp of beer. And then one of his pleasure girls jumped on his lap.

Out came the most prodigous Burp.

It was our universe in proto-universe form. Now Mick had to be All Mighty because a Universe is a really big thing.

Unlike the Greek gods who came after him, who liked a good drink too, Mick was Power. See, Apollo might scorch the Earth with his Chariot, or close the doors of the sun. Zeus could do even worse, or was it Jupiter. Oh well. If they put a bit of work in to it, any of the Greek’s gods could have destroyed the Earth, and some of them could have managed for the Sun.

But Mick’s proto-universe as it wafted away from him held hundreds of thousands of potential suns in a galaxy, and then the galaxies were in cluster with one cluster named after the coolest of those gods, Hercules, was he a god? Anyways, Hercules Cluster had five hundred galaxies, and then there were superclusters of clusters. Mick totally pawned Zeus, not that they weren’t good drinking buddies. Its just Zeus would throw a lightning bolt to get good service, and Mick would throw a quasar.

And Mick was all knowing as well. After all, a universe is chock full of information. That has to come from somewhere.

But Mick is not a patient fatherly Creator. No, he’s a burper. The girl on his lap squealed in laughter at the Burp, and so Mick used his Divine powers to swirl it around a bit. Then he forgot about that and bent to more pleasurable activities. Not that he was unaware of what happened being all knowing but he was good at ignoring things. Imagine your wife made you mow the lawn right before you were to watch the big game. You come in, hot and sweaty, crack open a beer, and plunk yourself down on the nice couch. You know at some level that later the wife is going to screech at you about ruining her red paisely wondercouch, but right now, you don’t care. Similar.

How godlike is man, in form and conception.

Good Ol’ Will, he knew something, and he liked beer too.

Now we turn from Mick to the proto-universe. Here it is. The basic laws are life-giving because Mick is alive.

This is a huge break because the odds of finding a universe where electrons and life can exist are roughly one in ten, ahem, one in ten followed by ten thousand zeroes, give or take a dozen. I didn’t pay much attention in my math classes, but even I know that’s way worse odds than winning the Powerball.

And the universe is swirling in a metaphoric sense which means energy. It explodes, particles race out making space-time exist with their presence. For unknown reasons, the particles that are racing outward decide in committee to wobble toward each other after a bit.

Presto. Interstellar gas. Except there are no stars to be between about. So, its just gas.

Gravity kicks in for some reason, and things begin to condense and swirl. After a while through a process shrouded by time and illogic gas becomes gas engines also known as stars.

The stars are spinning, probably because they like too. And so the remnants of such spin around them. Of course, some spin in opposite directions and others rotate totally opposite.

And frankly, no one, not me, not any scientists, no one but Mick has a clue as to how this happened. Our best theories say it did not happen. Which is comforting because that means I’m not here, and I don’t have to go to court for my Duh-dud-dumb lecture about automobile usage and alcohol consumption. Can’t a guy catch a break?

Anyways. So there are our planets. Dead as doornails which is just wrong because doornails have lots of life. For one they are covered with bacteria, and for two, there was the time last Christmas were one talked to me.

Planets. Dead. No life. Lightning bolts flashed and amino acids formed at irregular intervals of a billion and twenty-seven years to a billion and twenty-two years, but the amino acids were promptly denatured because they lived in a toxic soup and they had no cell wall to protect them because cell walls were not invented by Mick yet. Not that he was bothering. There was a new pleasure girl and the old one was throwing crockery.

But then the magic happened is what my boss likes to say in that sarcastic voice of his when he questions one of my brilliant plans. A time traveller came back from the future, and the traveller was how to put it…drunk as a skunk.

He Burped. Out of his mouth, his lungs, and perhaps his nose flooded cells. These cells might have been scared, but they too were drunk and thus they did what drunks do, and they began having children willy-nilly with no thought to the future.

There my friends is the beginning of the Human Race or as I like to call it, Womynity. Now you may object that a time traveller creating himself is not logical. You may proclaim that the fact that Science works to tiny, teeny decimal places proves the universe is rational, but I have the perfect counter.

The universe is not rational because my boss denied me the pay raise I deserved. I think I will go tell him that because after all, I’m the man who invented Beer Time-Travelling and caused the existence of the Human Race. You would think he would be grateful. The bar has not quite closed yet, so I’ll have a few more then I’ll drive over to his house and explain it to him.

Noise from the alley, a tuneless whistling jerks you awake in your stolen cot in the basement where you had been driven by pursuing police mini-copters. Opening your eyes hopefully, you see by the pink floor through the doorway that this is no nightmare. Just two or was it three days ago, you were a respectable citizen with the worst thing on your record driving ninety on an interstate. Now you’re a hunted fugitive in Insane Land.

Your stomach growls reminding you that its used to regular sustenance. Sighing, you get up, use the facilities after crouching low enough to get to them, and then turn on the clothes washer to rinse your hands and then use the same hands to fill your face with water. Slightly squeamish, you try not to think about bacteria and fecal contaminants. You had heard somewhere, probably in a Times magazine that Arabs used their left hand for neccessaries, and their right for eating. Now you understand the logic, and wish you had thought of this five minutes ago.

Examining the mess of your left forehead with delicate fingers you decided its coming along nicely. Happily it does not seem infected. A bit of a scab seems to be forming, and you jerk your hand back from the instinctive urge to pick at your wound. It had bled a lot, and there was no need to see if your blood was still red you hoped. That was a crazy thought, but it comes back to you.

What if I’m not human any longer? Maybe Crazy Land changed me somehow, and in three days time, which might be tonight, I’ll rise a werewolf or something.

Probably a were-gerbil you decide with a laugh that echoes eerily through the two room space. It renders your loneliness apparent. Loneliness, plus fear, plus pain, plus lack of food, no wonder you feel a bit unhinged you decide.

Relaxing you prowl the basement further, looking for some little clue you may have missed before.

Before you can get really serious, the door at the top of the fake wood stairs opens. Darting swiftly before the outsider’s eyes can adjust you scamper into the second room, and look about for a hiding place as footsteps plod down the stairs.

There’s nothing for it, but to crawl under the cot. Its a pitiful hiding place, and you make ready to leap to your feet.

A clack, some rustling from the other room, and then the most divine scent sends your stomach rumbling and your saliva glands drooling. Corn on the cob, steak, and mashed potatoes wafts through the doorway to your seeking nose. Almost you get up, but you restrain yourself.

And a good thing you do because a pair of feet attached to some magnificently hair legs trods past you, enters the bathroom, and flushes. A sound of rushing water follows that, and then the feet make their reappearance on the way out. Shortly thereafter a slower step up and a lessening of the good smell lets you know what’s coming. Its not a surprise when the door opens and slams shut. Shortly thereafter, you hear that tuneless whistling noise again.

Deeply hungry, you untangle yourself from the cot in too much of a hurry, and only succeed in making it worse.

Calm down, you say, and force yourself not to move for ten seconds.

With that, you’re able to extricate yourself, and then right the cot before entering the stairway room.

The fading scent assures you it was not a dream.

But, with head aching you see no evidence of where it came from.

You look closely at the dwarf sinks, and realize they have bendable arms underneath them, almost parrallel to the ground and just touching the sink base. Perhaps if they straightened out, they might be of a right height for you.

But this brings food no closer.

Looking at the native art boxes, you spot something. In the swirl of the trees, between the monkeys and the velociraptor hunting them is a word in squirrelly text.

“Bridgestone.”

Was it a tire box? Or was it like the Ikea clothes washer, an almost normal weirdling?

Not getting anywhere, you think, and decide to check in on the bathroom again. There is merely a toilet with a ruffled fringe near the floor. A large basin tank is behind it.

Narrowing your eyes, you realize the top part of the tank has a nearly invisible white on white line in it.

Pushing on the line, you are surprised when it swings inward and up like a door flap at a fast food trash bin.

Inside, soapy water flows from the top, and drops down into a drain into the bottom part of the tank.

Ingenious to save water that way, although you’re not sure how sanitary a combined sink over a toilet is.

The water soaps up your hands, and then the water changes to fresh water and you rinse your hands.

Now clean, you head back to the other room, and attack the problem with determination. The problem is, without food, its hard to stay focused for long.

You search for latches, for hidden buttons, and nothing.

“You stupid box! Open up!” You pound the box with a pair of open hands.

It pops open.

Inside is a freezer full of large plastic bags with pictures of food. Ecstatic, not willing to trust your good fortune, you grab the first one before something weird happens and takes the bounty away.

Ripping the cold bag open, you look for a microwave you don’t have, and wonder how you’re going to eat this.

But then the smell of hot roast beef, and broccoli with Swiss cheese and pumpkin pie overwhelms your questions.

You look more closely at the bag.

“Self-heating.”

“Remove balloon tray and inflate.”

Wondering you pull out what looks like a wadded up bit of plastic with a blowhole. A few quick puffs,and you have a serviceable plastic bladder in the sshape and size of a dinner plate. A spork of plastic is next to it.

The food is good, spiced by hunger.

And looking the now empty bag over you see that it claims that it contains ten thousand forty-seven calories. And that its based on a recipe passed down from the grandmother of the wife of Bill.

A thumbnail size pic of Chairman Bill, in a straw hat with a straw between his teeth advises you to enjoy his food for its a Microsoft product.

In a previous article I introduced the concept for his series, in which I will consider books I have read and how to adapt them for use in games.  The first of these books has fallen into place somewhat randomly, as it was the book I had just finished reading when the idea was presented.  I do not expect future installments to be any more orderly.

The book was originally published as Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold, one of several books the author has written in her science fiction universe.  The copy I have is bound with a later title in the same series, the Hugo Award-winning Barrayar, under the collective title Cordelia’s Honor, which continues the story for the characters.  This analysis will address the first book as a stand-alone.

The challenge with this book is it is very much about the relationship between the protagonist and another major character, officers in the space fleets of two planets not exactly at war with each other but definitely on opposing sides of a conflict.  Circumstances force them together and they fall in love with each other, and the book shifts from the clash of enemy alien cultures akin to Enemy Mine to the star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet, ultimately resolving with their marriage.  All this, though, is against a backdrop of political infighting and interplanetary war, which is where the external story lies.  The question is how to get the player character involved, and given the peculiarities of the story it would be extraordinarily difficult to replace either of the major characters with the player character.  There is, however, another way.

To get there, we need to establish the major events on a timeline.

The timeline begins with the fact that the government of Barrayar is planning an assault on Escobar, and in preparation for that they have stashed a supply cache on a planet that happens to be near several jump points to other planetary systems.  The government of Beta is unaware of the Barrayaran presence on the planet, and sends a scientific survey team to scout it and begin the process of cataloguing its life forms and features.  The Betan mission, under the leadership of Commander Cordelia Naismith, is camped on the planet.

Their presence as a survey team poses a threat to the intended surprise attack by the Barrayarans, and so a ship commanded by Captain Aral Vorkosigan has the job of eliminating the intruders by whatever means will prevent word of the Barrayaran presence from reaching Escobar.  Captain Vorkosigan leads a force to attack the Betans on the ground.  Unfortunately for him, certain factions see this as the perfect opportunity to execute a long-intended mutiny, stun and kill the captain and abandon his on the planet’s surface, framing the Betans.

It seems that the Betan survey teams are equipped only with stunners.  The Barrayarans have much more powerful weapons, but if they wish to get away with the mutiny they can’t use their weapons against their own captain, in case a later inquiry finds his body.

At the moment of the attack, Commander Naismith is out of camp with her geologist Dubauer on a survey.  Her first officer manages to draw fire to give the rest of the team time to board their ship and launch.  She hears the ruckus and rushes back to camp, too late to see the fight or join her crew, but she finds her first officer killed by nerve disruptor and gets a message to her second officer that he is to rush back home and report what happened–her ship can outrun but not outfight the Barrayarans.  She then sees a Barrayaran soldier, Sargeant Bothari, who fires a nerve disrupter at her.  Her geologist pushes her out of the way down a ravine, taking the shot himself but knocking her unconscious.

Bothari, who is a bit of a sociopath, was instructed to disembowel Vorkosigan to make it look like Betan work, but Vorkosigan is not only a captain and a former admiral, he is also a member of one of the noble houses of Barrayar.  Bothari would not lift his hand against the man without better cause.  Thus Aral Vorkosigan was stranded, but not executed.

Naismith awakens to find herself stranded with her severely injured geologist and the captain of the Barrayaran ship, who has all the weapons.  The camp has been reduced to slag; they are lucky to get any rations at all from the stores (they get a case of each of dehydrated oatmeal and bleu cheese salad dressing).  Captain Vorkosigan suggests that their only hope is to make the trek across the wilderness to what he calls a supply cache his people have on the planet, and he expects to take her as his prisoner but knows that he is going to have to work with her to get there.  She agrees to give her parole (that is, her promise not to attempt to escape) on the two conditions, first that they take her wounded geologist with them, and second that she be permitted first to bury her dead first officer.

They cover about forty kilometers per day for five days, and are at one point attacked by carnivores.  Along the way they bond.  Reaching the supply depot, Vorkosigan takes command, arrests those whom he believes to be complicitous in the mutiny, and retakes his own ship.  Koudelka appears here as the guard Vorkosigan can trust.  Securing the cache, which is much more a full-scale fleet depot, they then return to the ship.

He asks her to marry him before they leave the planet, but gives her time to think about it; she doesn’t answer at this point.

It is significant that at one point Bothari is assigned to guard and protect Naismith.  She treats him well, and he responds well to her treatment.

There are additional complications on the ship, in which Vorkosigan’s crew is still dealing with mutineers who have control of engineering and Naismith’s crew have managed surreptitiously to dock and board in a rescue effort.  Naismith manages formally to withdraw her parole, cleverly to defeat the mutineers to return full control of the Barrayaran ship to Vorkosigan, and surprisingly to escape with her crew.  End, part one.

Part two begins when the Barrayarans attack Escobar.  Now Commodore Aral Vorkosigan is not in charge of the attack, but has been given the position of organizing any necessary retreat.  Now Captain Cordelia Naismith is commander of a decoy ship, a small craft that has a top secret image projector that will cause enemy ships to detect and see a much larger battle cruiser nearby.  Her job is to come through the jump gate and lure the enemy after her so that Betan transport ships can deliver new equipment to the Escobar fleet, the plasma mirror field that reflects Barrayaran energy weapon attacks to hit their own ships.

There is a significant layer of political intrigue at this point.  Prince Serg Vorbarra’s father, the Barrayaran Emperor Ezar Vorbarra, has recognized that his son is not fit to lead the empire, and has determined that Serg and the war-hungry Admiral Vorhalas must be eliminated.  The purpose of the war from the Emperor’s point of view is to get these two men killed, leaving his grandson as heir to the throne; once that happens, Vorkosigan is supposed to return the fleet to base.  Before all of this happens, however, Cordelia Naismith’s ship is captured, and she is held prisoner.

Vorkosigan does not know this.  Vice-Admiral Vorrutyer is a sick pervert who regularly tortures and rapes female prisoners, and unaware of her identity he has her brought to his quarters.  He begins his torture by commanding his lackey to rape her; but the lackey is Bothari, and he recognizes her as Vorkosigan’s woman, who treated him well previously.  He thus refuses to harm her, and when Vorrutyer decides to assault her himself, Bothari executes him.  Vorkosigan arrives seconds later, figures out what happened, protects both Bothari and Naismith and reports the unexplained attack.  The ship is being searched, and Vorkosigan is under house arrest pending investigation, but the war continues and the Emperor’s plan works effectively, putting Vorkosigan in charge.  Naismith is moved to the brig and returned to Beta via Escobar in a prisoner exchange.  At first she is hailed as the hero who executed Vorrutyer and defeated the butcher Vorkosigan, and when she objects that they have everything wrong she is subjected to treatment to counter the brainwashing to which she was supposedly subjected.  She manages to escape and get to Barrayar, where she finally marries now Admiral Aral Vorkosigan, retired.  In the denoument, Vorkosigan is pressed by the Emperor into agreeing to act as regent for the four-year-old prince who will inherit the throne upon his imminent death, making Naismith Lady Cordelia Vorkosigan.

That’s the outline.  There are many side stories, including infants in artificial uterine devices (one of whom is Bothari’s), injury to Koudelka, the interaction of several other key characters, the fauna of the unnamed planet on which the story starts, all of which would require attention; I recommend that anyone intending to run this story read the book and have a copy handy for reference.  On the other hand, the plot just outlined may be sufficient to run something like the story for a verser.

The obvious starting point is that the verser will arrive on Vorkosigan’s ship shortly before the attack on the Betan exploratory team.  He will land in a secluded area moments before two men enter to discuss their planned mutiny.  Bothari should not be one of them, but they might mention their intent to order him to do the actual killing, one probably assuring the other that the sociopathic Bothari is reliable because he enjoys killing.

This puts the verser in a position of being a stowaway with information valuable to the captain.  It is unlikely to change anything, really.  If he contacts the captain, the captain will probably put him in the brig for safekeeping and lead the ground operation anyway; he has the awkward position that he can’t arrest senior officers for plotting a mutiny based on the word of a stowaway, but if he attempts to catch them in the act they may succeed all the same.  He can’t really take the stowaway with him, because on the one hand he can’t be certain the stowaway is not part of the plot, and on the other hand if the stowaway is present on the ground he makes too good a scapegoat for the mutineers to ignore.  Once the mutiny is successful, he will be questioned by first officer and acting captain Korabik Gottyan and political officer Radnov, attempting to learn which planetary government managed to smuggle him aboard and how it was done.  They might attempt to use a powerful truth drug to obtain the information from him, but his answers will undoubtedly confuse them.  When Vorkosigan returns, he will release the verser and question him in a more civilized fashion, and probably offer him a job.

If the verser is caught by the consipritors before he reaches the captain leaves the ship, they might decide to use him as a scapegoat.  The plan would be to kill the captain and frame the verser for the murder.  This seriously disrupts the story if it happens, but the captain is quite aware of the danger of mutiny and who is likely to be involved, so he will not be unprotected at any time.  It would be a very messy assassination, since they will have to deliver the verser to the scene before investigations begin, and kill any witnesses who could contradict their story.

If the verser hides on the ship through the events of the landing, he will have to stay hidden for a long time, at least until Cordelia’s rescue if he can find a way to escape with her crew, or possibly longer.  If at some point he escapes to one of the planets, the referee will have to play it by ear from there.

The alternate entry point is on the planet itself, probably setting his arrival at the point at which both Vorkosigan and Naismith are unconscious, the camp has been reduced to slag, and both landing parties have left.  The verser will have to explain himself somehow, as both captains would realize this was not a member of either crew (if only because he is out of uniform), but an extra hand on the journey would be welcome, and he could attach himself to either of the main characters if they all get through alive.  This requires more detailed information about the indigenous life of the planet, but makes more of the book’s adventure useful.  The interactions of the third character, though, will have to be carefully considered, as it is unlikely that Vorkosigan will be able completely to disarm the typical verser (we tend to carry some surprising weapons), particularly if the verser is already conscious when he revives.  On the other hand, if the verser arrives unconcious, Vorkosigan probably will have seen him arrive (stage one unconsciousness is brief), and will want an explanation for that sudden materialization.

In general, the plot tells you what will happen if the verser does not impact the story.  To the degree that the verser becomes involved, he derails aspects of it.  His direct involvement can be tracked by skill and attribute checks; his indirect involvement falls to general effects rolls.  The story reforms to the degree that he changes it, but remains the same where he does not.

The tech bias is clearly a high 14@, with interstellar travel a commonplace technology but no evidence of interdimensional work.  Although there are some unusual creatures on the first planet, nothing is outside the norm for earth normal body.  There is no evidence of psionics or magic in the book, but a low level high intensity bias in either or both of these would give the player character some options to make him exceptional, particularly if his tech and bod skills are not extraordinary.

Overall, tying the verser to Vorkosigan is the best play.  Naismith is the center of the action in the books, but her movements would prevent an unexplained outsider from tagging along.  Vorkosigan is in a position to name his own staff, and if the verser gets his approval he will remain connected to the story well into the next book.

The next book is a different problem, for a different article.

Chapter the First

Waking up, you open your eyes, and get to your feet. The rose-tinted concrete sidewalk under your feet parallels the blue line that borders the black asphalt road upon which three roller-balled mini-cars wheel silently. They seem to be electric cars, but perhaps not. The fluorescent green-yellow stop signs at the corner certainly catch your eyes as does the billboard for Kaintuck Broiled Chicken sold by the Major.

Of course, its flashy colors are competing with the bright red plaids of the men’s kilts and the white wigs of the women, and the jewelled necklaces of the children so that your eyes ache a bit from the profusion of color.

You lean your hand against a plastic telephone pole, and cover the laminated on poster for Beethoven Rap…with relief you stumble into Johnny’s Omie, and order the first thing on the menu, a two egg omelette with fried pureed parsnips and yak milk cheese as you try to absorb the weirdnesses of this new universe.

It doesn’t help when you see a newspaper on your tiny affixed to the wall table proclaiming in large type a disturbing message.

“Cubs Win Third Straight Superbowl.”

Three steps over to the counter for your ‘Javi’, and the stryofoam cup goes unthinkingly to your mouth. The scorch around your gums, and in a streak down your tongue and into your throat has you bite back a snarl. Looking with fury at the white pigtailed girl behind the counter who jabs at finger a sign high on the ridge between eaters and cookers you read.

“Javi is served 110 degrees copernican. It is hot. Enjoy as much as you want at your own risk.”

The look of bored unconcern on her pudgy face lets you know that lawsuits are no fear of hers.

How did you get here you wonder as you wobble back to your teeny-tiny seat even as the disgusting egg dish lands on your table. Struggling to eat some, but the burn abrasions from the coffee make it painful, you recall.

You were sitting at the laptop at work. New computers. Management finally sprang for something more modern than five years old.

Scriff Inside! The computer announced in its start-up sequence which was supposed to be something important. It was some new breakthrough which had juiced the speed of computers.

And then John, your co-worker came by with your cup of coffee seeing as it was his day to fetch the brew. He handed it to you. But not quite. The cup had slid from your hands, and you paused trying to reconstruct the memory.

Oh yes. It had fallen on your keyboard.

Then things got confused. John was shouting. Smoke. A great flash of white light.

And the weirdest dream. Orange tangerine grass and a giant clam the size of a car rolling over you. The sound of breaking twigs.

Uneasy, you pull up your shirt. There were no broken ribs, no crushed right arm. In fact, except for the burned mouth and the incipient panic attack, you felt pretty good.

But two questions occurred to you. How did you get here? And the check landed on your plate delivered by a gruff waitress. Just how were you going to pay for this?

Not so long ago I received a box of assorted books from a friend.  I appreciate the contributions to my literary education; I find I lack the knowledge not only of the important authors but sometimes of which are the important ones.  Yet as I devoured the gift, I wondered, and did so outloud on my Blogless Lepolt, whether I ought to write reviews of all these books.

And the one who so kindly provided them replied to my musings, I’d be more interested in your thoughts on how to use these various books for gaming worlds. Maybe not the book as it is, but some element of it.

It is perhaps a bit embarrassing that it has been a long time since I’ve adapted a book or movie or other story for game play–not, perhaps, since I did The Prisoner of Zenda for Multiverser:  The Second Book of Worlds.  Part of that is because the vast majority of the games I run are public games–the forum, conventions, demos–and I hesitate to use what will be perceived as “plagiarized” material, particularly by the authors but not much less by other game companies who spend money on licenses for popular works.  Thus I rarely run games based on worlds or stories created by others, and I don’t think to adapt stories for game use that I will never run.

But you might run them; even if you don’t run the worlds I get from books I’ve read, you might learn something from these adaptations that will enable you to do your own.

Besides, I’m considerably less concerned about important authors getting upset about my use of their ideas in game worlds.  I’ve met some of them now, and by and large they’re generally nice people–and whatever I tell you about how to run their stories in your games, you’ll probably need to obtain copies of their books to do it, so this is to their advantage.

Thus, in no particular hurry, on no particular schedule, and in no particular sequence, I am beginning a new series here at Gaming Outpost, what is I think the fourth series I’ve published here.  I am titling it Adapting, to be followed by the author and book title to be so adapted in each article.  The adaptations will be woefully sketchy for a wealth of reasons, but will focus on what I perceive as the best way to bring the player into the story or the story elements to the player.  I trust Multiverser referees will benefit from the effort, and those who do not play that game might still find something of value in the process for designing adventures for their own campaigns.

And if not, they can switch to Multiverser.

Incidentally, the first series I wrote for Gaming Outpost was the brief Point/Counterpoint series co-authored with Ian O’Rourke in 2000/2001.  This was followed by the Game Ideas Unlimited series which ran most of four years.  More recently there have been several book review articles under the In re title.  There have been numerous other individual articles here and elsewhere.

Some interesting books…

 Cordelia’s Honor by Lois McMasters Bujold is two books…Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Its set in the Miles Vorkosigan space opera universe. A number of her MV books I’ve reread three times. One of her books made me laugh out loud and cry in the same book.

St. Valentine’s Night by Father Andrew Greeley is one of his romance novels about love and the Irish in Chicago. Its not neccessarily the most memorable. Greeley taught me a lot about love and humanity.

Wolftime by Lars Walker is delightfully demented as it describes the human condition. Good and evil warring with the background of comedy. Odin has come to post-Lutheran Minnesota to face off against a dissapointed English lit professor who cannot lie. Very funny.

Blood and Judgement also by Walker is stranger, probably less well done, and much harder to understand with grimmer topics.

Infectress by Tom Cool, Commander in the USN…which makes him ‘Commander Cool’! A bioterrorist in the near future and a man’s loyal AI duel over the fate of the man. Cool has an interesting bit where he has two halves of the AI arguing with each other as to whether the spiritual realm exists. He also posits an interesting reason for pain…after the AI is first turned on, its a total sophist…err, solipsist. Its only after being tortured for some time that it admits reality exists outside of itself. A ‘cool’ read.

The Moon is Always Full by David Hunter is a set of short, true, Southern cop stories. Yes, the South is sometimes violent and crazy. But while it can be depressing in too large a dose, a small bit can be quite amusing.

Vigilant by James Alan Gardner. He also wrote ‘Expendable’. He has some seriously wild ideas, and some deep thought about forgiveness. In his universe, there is no interstellar war because the godlike League forbids it. If you intend to, or have murdered by act or ommission, knowingly, you die as soon as you hit interstellar space…no exceptions. But you can send someone off to likely death. And it helps the locals back home to know that the people sent off to die are ugly. So if you’re born with a facial birthmark, you don’t get the easy surgical repair. Instead, you get drafted into the Expendables as they call them selves. He’s very good.

Count Scar by Robert A. Bouchard is a medieval fantasy about an old soldier given a castle for his retirement and he’s put in the midst of a religious war. The opposing side has the doctrine of Perfected aka once God accepts you, you don’t sin any more. For those of you, who’ve met a Christian for longer than ten minutes, you’re no doubt laughing by now. One benefit of this doctrine is that it breeds arrogance, and arrogance makes for more powerful magicians.

Its an unexpected book in a lot of ways.

 Jannissaries by Jerry Pournelle has a group of American mercs given a ride to an alien planet populated with different groups of humans so they can grow drugs for the aliens. Its a conquer the locals, scheme against the aliens military SF with a lot of drawings in it as well. I’ve read it a number of times. Its one of the military SF that ends with a large battle which gets drawn out on a map. This is a common thing in a number of military SF.

Cradle of Saturn by James P. Hogan offers a startlingly different take on human history and the formation of the solar system. Its also a blistering slam against the Bishops of Big Science, and thats the first half. The second half is the predicted disaster.

All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot is not the first book in the series. They are the tales of a Yorkshire vet working in the 40′s and 50′s. In one book, he discusses the first time he used pennicillin. They are terrifically funny as he narrates the various hardships like sticking one hand up a cow’s butt while laying on slick stone at midnight without a shirt on in freezing weather with good humor.

A critique of the replacement theory of time travel

The replacement theory of time travel was developed by Mark Joseph Young to sort out various anomalies appearing in time travel stories. It is described in detail on his website Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies and illustrated by logical reconstructions of many complicated movie plots. The author recently had a lively email exchange with Mr. Young on the subject of time travel. On his suggestion this critique is posted here for comment and discussion. The article is self-contained, but the reader will benefit (and have fun) from reading Discussing Time Travel Theory section on the Temporal Anomalies website. The site also contains some previous discussion between Mr. Young and the author concerning time travel and the replacement theory (see A Critique of the Spreadsheet Theory).

Replacement theory

The gist of the theory is that if the past is changed by a time traveler from an original timeline, causes of changes must be replaced within the resulting new timeline. In particular, there has to be a person in this new timeline, who travels into the past and makes the changes that created it. Every time trip into the past, say from 2030 to 2000, terminates the original timeline at 2030 and rewinds the history back to 2000. The traveler then has until 2030 to re-justify his appearence in 2000 within the new timeline, e.g. convince his younger self to repeat the trip in 2030.

Otherwise, time snaps back to 2000 again to avoid a causality violation. Snap-backs are the main enforcement mechanism in the replacement theory and they are instrumental to its claim that a time traveler impacts his own life. Mr. Young sees this last point as a distinctive feature of true time travel as opposed to parallel dimension jumps. I will take up both ideas here and express my reservations about them. At the end, I will outline some approaches to modifying the theory.

By his own bootstraps

To get a feel for the replacement theory let us briefly illustrate how it deals with the classical time travel paradoxes. In cases with a single time trip to the past there are two basic types of them, often called bootstrap and grandfather paradoxes.

In a typical bootstrap paradox a traveler (Oldie) gives his younger self (Newbie) a book describing construction of time machines. Newbie reads the book, builds a time machine and goes back in time to hand over the book to himself. Where did the book come from? This is not a logical contradiction, but there is a mystery of that self-existing book with all its knowledge, which is forever trapped in a time loop.

The replacement theory is at its best in handling such bootstrap scenarios. In our example, it postulates existence of an original timeline, where Newbie invented time travel without Oldie’s help and wrote a book about it. Intending to save himself the trouble he travels to the past as Oldie and hands over the book. The original timeline is aborted as soon as he arrives at the past and time restarts from that point. In the new timeline, Oldie instructs Newbie to close the loop by returning the book to himself, and goes back to the future to live the rest of his life. This is the bootstrap timeline we started with. The genuine cause in the original is replaced by circular causality in the final timeline.

The entire process, called N-jump, can be pictured as a zig-zag of the original timeline terminating in 2030, snapping back to 2000, and continuing undisturbed into the future. Most of the reconstructions on the Temporal Anomalies website feature an iterated version of N-jump, where the first Newbie fails to close the loop, but after several intermidiate snap-backs one of his successors does.

Killing yourself the hard way

But suppose Newbie disregards good advice, throws out the book and turns his mind away from time machines. Or perhaps, Oldie discourages him from pursuing them. Then time is forced to snap back again from 2030 to 2000, the original timeline is replayed with invention of time machines, trip to the past, snap-back, new timeline with no time machines, snap-back, etc. This is replacement theory’s infinity loop that traps time forever between 2000 and 2030.

This is also a variation of the grandfather paradox. Classically, a time traveler goes back to kill his grandfather and prevent his birth, but we can do just as well with him killing himself. This is a true contradiction since he can kill himself if and only if he does not kill himself. To get what happens under the replacement theory simply replace ‘build a time machine’ with ‘kill yourself’ in the above example.

In fact, all grandfather paradoxes result in infinity loops and trapped time. Although the contradiction is removed, perpetual snap-backs do not give an appealing resolution. If time travel functioned according to the replacement theory it would likely trip up our universe soon after being discovered. If original inventors experiment with sending an ice cube one minute into the past and see it appear one minute prior to scheduled sending, they may well decide to see what happens if they do not send it after all. The result will be an entire universe forever trapped in a one minute infinity loop.

Time also gets trapped in more general situations, where instead of endless repetition there is endless production of new timelines, all aborted. These are called sawtooth snaps. In fact, iterated N-jumps ending in bootstrap timelines are the only scenarios having a satisfactory resolution. They are also the ones most commonly encountered in time travel movies and literature. But there are serious logical issues with the entire mechanism of snap-backs, which we discuss next.

Dead timeline walking

Time always moves from the past to point A and beyond to point B; at point B, when Traveler leaves time and heads to point A, time ends; but Traveler cannot arrive at point A, because he could not have been there in the original time line… The instant Traveler reaches point A, he destroys point A, replacing it with point C… Time will now continue to point D.

In this passage point A is year 2000 in the original timeline, point B is its year 2030, points C and D are counterparts of A and B in the new timeline. A time jump at B triggered a snap-back to C. The AB timeline has been aborted, obliterated, metaphysically erased. In my opinion, once AB sinks into oblivion its former existence should exert no influence over CD except through the traveler’s presence, which is available at C in the entirety of its relevance. One would think that time would not ‘know’ any different if the traveler simply popped out of nowhere as a result of some spontaneous fluctuation in space. After all, AB timeline is no more, vanished into the metaphysical past. In other words, one would expect time to be metaphysically memoryless. Not in the replacement theory.

Time has to make sure that traveler’s appearence at C is not a miracle, that it is supported by the new timeline. And there is a deadline for compliance — 2030. For an N-jump to occur the matters at D must stand as at B ‘in every pertinent way’, otherwise time snaps back again. In other words, time has to raise B from its metaphysical grave, compare D to B, decide if the differences are sufficiently pertinent and then snap-back or continue. There does not have to be any time travel attempt in 2030 for this to happen. When time is trapped in an infinity loop, no time machines are ever built in CD and nothing special happens in 2030. Somehow, AB timeline extends a dead hand from its grave and snaps time back. I understand the intent to preserve causality, but I do not see through what physical means such a snap-back might be accomplished.

Even if we accept that ‘nature abhors causality violations’ and the time traveler must reproduce circumstances of his appearence in 2000, why is he only afforded 30 years to do so? From CD’s point of view this due date is completely arbitrary. Oldie has left the scene, Newbie has better things to do, there are no time machines around. All that matters is that the traveler’s appearance in 2000 must eventually have a cause within the same timeline. This cause may be a time jump from 2030, or 2050, or 10327. At some point down the line the traveler or his clone must make a trip to 2000 to save causality, but other than that there are no restrictions. Perhaps, time patrol from a distant future will uncover the wrinkle, clone the time traveler, instruct him accordingly and at the appropriate age send him back to 2000. There is no immediate cause for the snap-back in 2030 within the CD timeline, which defeats the purpose of saving causality.

This is like a bill that comes due eventually but the payment can be deferred indefinitely into the future. Of course, in practice this means that the bill never comes due. The miraculous appearence in 2000 may remain a spontaneous act forever. There is no physical mechanism in the replacement theory to prevent that. Forcing a snap-back in 2030 is simply a deus ex machina.

Banana peels

This is not the only problem with spontaneous snap-backs. What if after dissuading his younger self from pursuing time machines our older traveler decides to visit 2040? Under the replacement theory there is no 2040 in this timeline, so no 2040 for him. But why? He would have had no trouble making the trip under the N-jump scenario, and his younger self still has time to change his mind and enact it. According to Mr. Young, travel to the future is benign and should raise no red flags on Time’s radar screen. But to stop the traveler, not only should CD know in advance that the history will end in a loop, it also has to keep diligent watch for any future travel attempts.

And what if after reaching whenever instead of 2040 our traveler decides to return and convinces his younger self to build the time machine after all? The timeline recoheres and 2040 that he allegedly did not reach exists. Then he did reach it despite what we thought before. If we maintain that the trip can happen then there is no snap-back in 2030. If it can not happen we need what is called a ‘banana peel mechanism’. There must be a strategically placed banana peel in the CD timeline, upon which Oldie slips, bumps his head and loses his memory before he can jump to 2040. We saw this mechanism at work in the fixed timeline theory. To paraphrase Mr. Young, Time is a very clever gentleman if it can do all that.

Replacement causes

It isn’t time travel unless the traveler arrives in his own past. That means he can impact his own life; and that means we need a theory that addresses what happens when someone impacts his own life.

In a bootstrap scenario a traveler does change his own life, but only to make it what it was. What one really wishes is to change the course of events into something other than what is remembered. The challenge is to make new events happen to the same person that made the changes, to transmute the time traveler into his younger self. What is vaguely imagined is exiting the flow of time, improving events in the past and then re-entering time as the same person under new circumstances. There are two visions of this re-entry. You can relive your own life from the time the changes were made, or you can skip part of it and slide back into the new you at a later date.

Both scenarios miss the target. Someone has to live through the new life, and if it is not you the only way to slide into it is to displace that new person. If on the other hand, you regress back into childhood and relive your life, then it is the old self that is displaced. In this version of the dream the memories of time travel vanish but its effects linger on. Perhaps, they retain some supernatural influence reminiscent of reincarnations in Buddhism with forgotten past lives and karma. But dreams have the luxury of ignoring logic. In the light of day, it what is asked can not be delivered, it is a logical impossibility. But it can be approximated.

Parallel worlds do the next best thing. They duplicate a person into a changer and a changee: the older traveler makes changes that affect his younger duplicate. This duplication destroys the possibility of changing own past even if you start with exactly the same past. The replacement theory tries to mitigate the problem using snap-backs. In my opinion, it does not succeed.

Duplication still happens as attested to by descriptions of infinity loops and sawtoth snaps, where the older and the younger self have separate origins. Spontaneous snap-backs are unleashed to save the appearences by preventing a meeting between them when they are of the same age. In N-jumps replacement causes are generated to make it look like the older and the younger self are one and the same. But all of this is smoke and mirrors. Having observed the original timeline, we know better. The true old self is gone, vanished into oblivion. The younger traveler growing up, jumping back and changing himself is a sleight of hand, an optical illusion like wheels of a car appearing to roll backwards in old movies.

In a way, the replacement theory fails better than its alternatives. If duplication does not produce an illusion of transmutation the entire timeline gets punished by being aborted at the original travel date. The replacement theory is a crime and punishment story with causality as the victim, time traveler as the perpetrator and Time itself as the police, the judge and the executioner. Many oddities of the theory can be traced to this forcing of Time into roles that it fiercly resists to perform.

Identity crisis

The time traveler in the timeline that marks the final, stable history of the world knows nothing about any previous history of the world… This time traveler has no first-hand knowledge of the original history; that version of him was erased…

It is rather mysterious how exactly the old traveler transforms into his replacement. In the new timeline everything is done by the new traveler who originates in it. The old one is shut down as soon as the old traveler steps out of it. So where exactly did he go, or rather wherewhen did he perform the changes that created the stable timeline with everything performed by his replacement? This is supposed to be explained by the spreadsheet illustration: “Although the cause of the value at A1 has changed, the value itself has remained the same, and all the values springing from it are likewise preserved”. If it means what I think it means, we have another optical illusion.

In the ‘first run’ along the new timeline it was the impostor (as in visitor from another timeline) that instructed the authentic youngster on the fine points of building time machines. After that he conveniently leaves the scene. As the youngster grows up and jumps back we get a ‘second run’. He ends up ‘having the same value although not the same cause’ as the impostor, and now instructs himself on the subject. Of course, we are not allowed to think about it this way, because the timeline is complete in its eternal glory and there are no ‘runs’.

As a result, there is no particular occasion at which the replacement happens or a process by which it happens. This reminds me a common experience of making two lampposts look like one by keeping them in the same line of sight. Identity of indiscernibles hardly applies to physical objects. Besides, I would argue that even metaphysically entities with different causes are discernible.

The curse of parallel worlds

Mr. Young sees duplication as a hallmark of parallel worlds and dismisses them as non-time-travel. Although I agree that traditional parallel worlds are probably not time travel, this broadening of the concept goes too far. According to the strictures of Mr. Young’s definition, his own theory is not time travel. Let me demonstrate.

Consider an N-jump: the original timeline terminates in 2030 and the jump takes the traveler back to 2000. This is the branch point. Replacement timeline then proceeds unhindered into the future. Since the original timeline is gone into oblivion the traveler can not return to it, but he can travel freely along the new timeline. Sounds familiar?
One may object that in parallel worlds the old timeline still exists, while here it is obliterated. First of all, in some versions of parallel worlds only one timeline can be active. But more importantly, if it is impossible to access the old timeline the question of its existence is a moot point.

In parallel worlds you could go back to the branch point and reactivate the abandoned timeline. You simply need to undo the changes made there. Well, under the replacement theory you can also jump back to 2000 and undo what you did. This will reproduce the old timeline in its fullness including the snap-back in 2030. Technically, this is a ‘new’ timeline while in the parallel worlds you reactivated an ‘old one’. But you will be none the wiser unless you are a philosopher preoccupied with identity of indiscernibles. I trust that the reader can perform similar analysis on infinity loops and sawtooth snaps.

Of course, 30 years into the new timeline our brave new traveler will go back to the branch point to satify the N-jump requirement. Then he can finally rest and admire his(?) handiwork. But do we really know that? Or perhaps, he deactivated the new branch and created a newer one just like it? Who knows, and more importantly who cares. In one respect, admitting the second and subsequent branches is an improvement since it would resolve the identity crisis discussed earlier.

As long as two theories make the same predictions their differences are irrelevant. In terms of predictions, the replacement theory is a variant of branching parallel worlds (broadly construed) with return to the branch one creates.
The only remaining distinction are the snap-backs that cap failed branches, but they are not particularly vital. The spirit is preserved if failed acausal branches are allowed to play out, they are just second class citizens.

Temporal kinetics

The idea of replacement causes seems to be the right one for time travel. If the past can be changed and existing causes removed the only way to preserve causality is to replace them. But the enforcemant mechanism of snap-backs is not only incompatible with relativity and quantum mechanics, but also almost inevitably leads to the pathology of trapped time. Snap-backs themselves should be replaced by more plausible physical processes.

A close analogy is the Le Chatelier principle in chemistry: if a system at equilibrium experiences a change, then the equilibrium shifts to counter-act the imposed change. Le Chatelier principle can predict outcomes of chemical reactions but it does not explain them. To explain the shift one needs to understand physical mechanisms that enforce it. Taken at face value, the principle seems to ascribe to a chemical system a mind of its own. In reality, it is a corollary of perfectly mindless equations of chemical kinetics. Now replace a system at equilibrium with a causal timeline, a change with a causality violation and counter-action with snap-backs that seek to establish a new equilibrium. To wit,

Le Chatelier principle of time travel: If causality is violated by a time travel event, then the timeline shifts to counter-act the violation.

This is the driving motive of the replacement theory, but its implementation there is only a first approximation. To continue the analogy, shift in the chemical equilibrium is not instantaneous. If we solve the kinetic equations we discover that in the process of shifting the system undergoes transient stages that are not equilibria. We can also trace chemical forces that drive the shift.

Temporal kinetics is what I am after. Non-equilibria are acausal timelines that appear as intermediate stages between causal ones. Mr. Young has such high intolerance of them that he is aborting them in the womb at the cost of spontaneous snap-backs with all their dubious physics and supernatural baggage. I am not so radical: as transient objects acausal timelines are not that threatening. We also have to account for a possibility that a new equilibrium can not be attained. In this case I would rather have a succession of acausal timelines than endless snaps and trapped time.

But most importantly, I would like to trace the mechanisms by which time polices itself. Anthropomorphic detection of causal violations with abrupt abortion of the violators at an arbitrary date is hardly satisfactory. It is plausible that in the extended theory we will see key features of the replacement theory reproduced, but the point is that they ought to be explained. Resistance of time to causal violations can not be postulated, it has to be derived. We need a mechanism by which time drives events within timelines towards restoration of causality.

Middle course

In the article Toward Two-Dimensional Time recently posted on Outpost Mr. Young suggests a possible alternative to the replacement theory. In the new theory once root changes are made in 2000 the entire timeline instantly changes to incorporate their consequences. If you kill yourself back in 2000 you will produce a history where your time machine was never built, and your murderous trip never took place. Time will follow through on all the consequnces and wipe out the old you from 2000 as well. But then who is going to kill the young you? Do we get an endless oscillation between two timelines again? Mr. Young himself finds this theory wanting.

But the problem with it is exactly the opposite of the previous one. In the replacement theory timelines are too rigid and snap back if time travelers fail to promptly replace uncaused causes. In the two-dimensional theory they are too flexible with no regard for existing events. There is no resistance at all to making changes, they can be made at will and spread across time instantly. In the replacement theory there is so much resistance that any residual violation snaps time’s back. Perhaps we should follow Daedalus’s advice to Icarus and fly the middle course.

The idea is that there ought to be temporal resistance to changes that do not conform with the future already in place. A good model of such resistance should explain how acausal timelines manage to recohere themselves. If a traveler or his successors fail to restore causality on their own there ought to be a mechanism that compels them or others to do so.

Let us apply this idea to the grandfather paradox. If you go back and kill yourself the timeline will start incorporating this change. Taken to the extreme, it should erase your presence completely. However, the previous history where you were in place, will resist alteration. Since time is not a reasoning entity it will likely take a path of least resistance, i.e. make minimal changes that restore causality. Your spot may be filled by others, they replace you as causes of events already in place. Since you conveniently removed yourself from the timeline in 2030 this does seem like an economical solution. Your double presence in 2000 remains a wrinkle to be smoothed out, but again someone else may take your place as your childhood killer.

This holds assuming that you did not go back after the self-killing but put a gun to your own head. Your return would change things. Now you are alive before 2000 and after 2030 but not in between. This will not do. It makes sense that the wave of changes is strongest near the point of origin, by 2030 it loses some of its strength. In contrast, your return to 2030 triggers a much stronger backlash wave. The two will have to balance out on events between 2000 and 2030. In the final stable timeline your childhood wound is not fatal and you recover to make your ill-conceived trip in 2030.

Working out a physical mechanism behind the time waves is beyond the scope of this article, but it does seem to be a worthy undertaking. It will allow a better reconstruction of time travel plots that do not easily conform to a bootstrap scenario. This includes stories where time seems to resist travelers’ efforts to change it as in the movies Deja Vu and Time Machine. It will also handle multiple interlocking time jumps more robustly and perhaps satisfy our curiosity as to what history ends up persisting. An example is the Terminator series, where the replacement theory predicts infinity loops over minor inconsistencies and does not tell us who ultimately has the timeline, the Skynet or John Connor.

The author is known for, among other things, his web site Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies, and its exposition and defense of the Replacement Theory of time travel.  In this article he explores the possibility of an alternate theory of time.  The article is presented here at Gaming Outpost for comment and discussion, with the expectation that it will be added to that web site after a reasonable period for comment.

Many have written to me mentioning Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories, and I have written back to say first that I had not read them and second that I did not do analyses of books for a variety of reasons.  This past year, though (2008), one of my readers decided to mail me a copy of the complete collected stories, along with some other science fiction and fantasy books he thought would round out my familiarity with the literary side of the genre (and I did and still do thank him for that).  I read it, and would say that to some degree I enjoyed it; they are good stories well told.  They do not, however, fit into any model of time travel familiar to me.

This led me to wonder whether there was a plausible model of time travel I had missed.  I long pondered what sort of description of time might make Anderson’s stories plausible, and began to tinker with a model I am presenting here.  I still will not analyze books, and am not going to do so here.  I merely wondered whether the Time Patrol stories might become possible with a different model, whether Anderson actually had a clear, coherent, and plausible theory of time and time travel from which he was working, and whether I could discover it.  This is not, then, an analysis of those stories, but only an effort to develop an alternate conception of time in which stories like those, if not those stories, might be conceptually possible.

Model Failure

In Anderson’s world, people travel to the past all the time–but most of them do so because they work for an organization dedicated to preventing changes to the past.  It seems that the day people, somewhere in our future, discovered time travel, they were visited by people from a yet much more distant future, an incomprehensibly distant future, who had a vested interest in preventing change to the past, and so informed those earliest inventors of the technology that they were now drafted into a temporal police force to prevent anyone else from using their technology to change the world.  They also recruited at least a few people from earlier times, including several from the twentieth century, to work as researchers, historians, and enforcers.  These were provided with the equipment needed to travel through time, and given life extension therapy so that others from their own age would not wonder either why they aged so quickly or where they were all the time.

Even a causal reader of this site should recognize that such a scenario is not possible under any of the familiar models of time.  Bear with a brief exposition of the flaws.

Under fixed time, perhaps the most popular model of time travel, the people in the future are wasting their efforts trying to preserve the past, because the past cannot be changed–all effects of all time travel events are already part of history, and those who will at some point in the future travel to the past in some sense have already done so, have already arrived in the past.  The time patrol itself is nonsense, as it is enforcing rules that cannot be broken by attempting to break them.  One might was well organize a police force to enforce gravity, and say that in their efforts to enforce the law of gravity they are permitted to break it.  Of course, Anderson’s stories would be rather boring in that case.  That’s not to say that you can’t tell an interesting story in fixed time–only that a story about a police force that attempts to correct changes made to history before they become serious problems is not such a story.

Parallel and divergent dimension theory is vexed by the problems outlined in The Two Brothers:  Why Parallel Dimension Theory Is Not Time Travel.  Notably, our future society that is attempting to preserve itself is simply creating other universes.  As with fixed time, the society of the future cannot be changed–in this case, because its history is fixed, and the time traveler is tampering with someone else’s history.  Further, if we assume that someone from the future has traveled to the past and created a new universe in which that future society does not exist, then someone else from that future “fixes” the universe such that that society is restored, we have gone from having one universe in which that future society exists to having three universes–one in which the future society existed and was never endangered, one in which the future society never existed and never would have come into existence, and one in which the future society came into existence because after a traveler from the future tampered with history, someone else tampered with history again.

Even more problematic for telling such tales under the parallel/divergent dimensions theory is the problem created by the linear nature of each such dimension.  Although Back to the Future Part II is a disaster of a time travel story, it gets this part right:  once Doc and Marty are in a divergent dimension, they cannot go forward to the point from which the time traveler departed to correct the problem, but only backward to the root where the change occurred.  Once a change has been made in the past that would destroy the society of the future, there is no society in that future who can detect and correct this.  In that dimension, that society never came into existence.

The replacement theory–the theory supported by this site–also rejects such a concept.  For there to be any future universe, all anomalies must already have resolved. Let us suppose that the future society lives in twenty thousand A.D.; let us suppose that time travel is discovered in three thousand A.D.  If our time travelers in three thousand travel to two thousand and completely alter history between two thousand and three thousand, maybe they will destroy time, and maybe they will be very lucky and preserve time–but by twenty thousand, that’s all ancient history, more ancient to them than the earliest Egyptian inscriptions are to us.  Whatever that society is, it became that because of whatever changes were made to history by all time travelers before then.  Their intervention cannot prevent settled history from changing, because for them the changed version is and has always been the settled version.  They exist because of every change that was made, not in spite of these.  There is, again, nothing to protect.

Yet the stories seem plausible.  It suggests that there is a way of understanding time that does not fit any of these models.

Dimensionality

The solution that seems to be in view is to perceive time in two dimensions.

On one level, this is similar to the conception of time outlined in The Spreadsheet Illustration of Temporal Anomalies–similar enough that the reader should understand that concept before attempting to grasp this one.  In short, there is a sense in which all of history occurs metaphysically simultaneously.  The future is not unformed, merely undiscovered; the past is not unalterable, merely known.  If there is a change in 2000, there is a consequent change in 3000, an immediate change because the events in 3000 are in direct causal dependency upon the events of 2000.  It does not take a thousand years for the change to occur; it takes a thousand years for us to reach the place in time where the change occurs.

Each of the popular theories of time travel treats this problem differently, but in each case it can be comprehended by visualizing time as if it were space.  In the fixed time theory, that space is unidimensional:  time exists in a continuous line from the past to the future, and cannot be altered.  With the parallel and divergent dimension theories, there are multiple timelines lying alongside each other, and travelers leaving one arrive in another.  This is the concept of sideways time, suggested in a John Pertwee Dr. Who episode and exploited in Sliders.  In this conception, these parallel or divergent universes exist temporally “alongside” each other, but are disconnected save by the acts of time travelers, who are really dimension hoppers.  Also, the past is immutable, but the future is being created.

The replacement theory gives the impression of two-dimensional time, but it does not support the conception.  Rather, as with fixed time, it maintains that there is only one history of the world–but that it might be altered, and if it is then there is still only one history of the world, the other having existed only in some metaphysical past, something like the program on your video recorder that you erased to record another.  Still, the description of history in this case involves tracing causal lines to determine whether the past still supports the future which supports the past.  The past can be changed, but once it is, nothing from the original past remains.

For Time Patrol to work, there needs to be two-dimensional time.  Time moves from the past to the future, as is familiar to all of us; but it also moves laterally, from one version of history to another.  Yet lateral versions of history still exist, and anything which originated in one can continue to exist in another.

Fixed and Fluid

What ought to make this work is the interaction between chronological time and lateral time.  Having accepted that chronological history all exists simultaneously, and that time is merely the way we experience it, we can understand that a change in 2000 could cause an immediate change in twenty thousand.  We would have to wait until we reached twenty thousand to see that change, but there are people in twenty thousand whose lives would change immediately.

The problem is, no one in twenty thousand would know that history had changed.  It would always have been thus–unless there is another aspect to time.

That other aspect would be the lateral.  This rests on the notion that change requires a medium within which to occur.  In history, change occurs through chronological time:  I drop my pen now, and it hits the floor now.  We are accepting that this is perception, that the falling and landing of the pen are accomplished instantaneously in various points in time.  Yet if we involve time travel, and we eliminate at least some of the conception of time as the medium in which changes occur (because we are now looking at global changes, changes which occur instantly across all of time), it might be asked how that change can happen.  The answer then is lateral time.  With each tick of lateral time, the history of the universe is established; if a time traveler from a previous tick makes a change to the past of this one, the entire history of this tick forms to accommodate that change, but still accommodates causes which have moved from the previous tick into this one.

That means that time is not really moving “forward” toward the end of history, but it is really moving “sideways” from iteration to iteration of all of history.  Anyone who moves backward in time also moves sideways, into a subsequent iteration of the entire history of the world.  He might undo his own birth, but this paradox is inconsequential, since his birth still exists in the iteration of history from which he came, a spatio-temporal location as real yet inaccessible to him as yesterday is to us.

The Disappointment

Unfortunately, this does not solve the notions promulgated in Anderson’s work.

As noted in connection with parallel and divergent dimension theory, the problem still remains that in any iteration of history in which the desired future society is destroyed, it does not exist.  Thus it cannot send enforcers back to correct a problem that it cannot detect.

Anderson’s answer to this seems plausible on its face.  Time Patrol training facilities exist in an era in the distant past–prehistoric past, dinosaur past.  This facility includes among its resources everything that is known about the future history of the world, and specifically what events are thought to be important in establishing the existence of the future society which sponsors their work.  Since this facility exists at a point prior to any known ventures to the past, it continues to exist despite changes made in its future.  Since it can still possess information and personnel and equipment which were delivered from the future of one iteration of time, the shifts in the existence of the future society will not impact its ability to perform its mission.

The problem is finding the relationship between historic time and lateral time.  Think of it this way:  those who are stationed in the past are charged with preserving the future whose records they have in their files.  The moment some change in that future is detected, one of their own must undertake to identify the change, determine how to restore what would be as near as possible to the original history, and travel to whatever point in time this repair can be implemented.  But it is that aspect of knowing when the future has been changed.

From the perspective of historic time, the answer seems to be either that it will be changed or it will not be changed at a particular moment.  Our theory of two-dimensional time, though, suggests that there is an original history of the universe in which no time travel events ever occurred, and then “when” someone traveled to the past, we moved laterally across time to the altered history.  That lateral shift, though, is not something we can perceive or experience; it also is not something that happens at a specific moment in the historic timeline:  it happens to all of history simultaneously.  Thus at time L1, the original history of the world, no one can detect any change in history.  Then at time L2, following the “first” time travel event, everyone who can detect such events detects that one simultaneously.

To clarify, let us suppose that the time patrol base in the past exists for a thousand years.  In the L1 moment, no one ever detected any change in the history of the world.  Then as we moved to the L2 moment, a change occurred.  That change became detectable–but it was detectable simultaneously through every second of those thousand years.  Then the L3 moment occurs, due to another trip through time, and both changes are detectable for that entire thousand years.  More significantly, those who live in the time patrol base when it reaches L3 cannot know which of the two detected anomalies occurred first.  Further, those who live at year 1 have no means of knowing whether they are actually detecting a change made by their own people at year 5.  In fact, every time someone is sent back to the base, it creates a detectable anomaly, a change in the history of the world, a next tick on the lateral timeline.  Without a complete roster of everyone who was recruited and sent for training, the people at year 1 cannot sort out who is what.

You might think it a simple enough matter for the people at year 1000 to send a that complete roster to the people at year 1, so that they can use that to compare against whatever they detect.  The problem is, as time moves laterally the information at year 1000 will change but the information already sent to year 1 will not–otherwise, the record of the history of the future society these people are trying to preserve would also change, and they could not know whether history had changed or not, or what it was they were trying to preserve.  In order for the people at year 1 to have current information, the people at year 1000 must send back an update with ever click of lateral time.  That, though, is impossible.  Even were we to suppose that our time travelers have a way of detecting clicks of lateral time, they cannot act in lateral time, only in linear time.  They can send a roster back from the earliest lateral moment in which they have that roster, but in order to send an updated roster they would have to be able to send both rosters simultaneously.  Again, if we assume that having sent the one roster at L1 they automatically will have sent the most currently updated roster at L1000, we must also assume that whatever history of the world was sent back from the distant future is that version that exists at L1000, having been updated by virtue of the fact that the people in that future will have sent the most current version.

Too, this ignores the detail that the very sending of the current roster is itself an event, a change to history which needs to be recorded on the roster of those events which are to be ignored.

The concept of lateral time does not solve the problems created by the Time Patrol stories, nor does it appear to resolve any other problems.  My impression is that the replacement theory is still the best theory.  However, I offer this as a starting point for any readers who think there might be something of value here, and invite you to make your suggestions for how this might be brought to a functional theory of time.  I am available by e-mail, but would prefer to have such discussions publicly, and so invite anyone interested in posting at the official Multiverser forum at Gaming Outpost, where there are at least a few persons interested in such discussions.

I have of late been ignoring the role playing theory discussions on the Web.  This is not because I chose to leave them but that they left me–the places where I was participating shut down those parts of their discussions and recommended that those interested in continuing the discussion do so in other places.  My schedule already overburdened, I did not attempt to tackle these larger areas in which what I would have considered discussion on point was considerably diluted by other topics.

However, one of those discussions wandered into an area I do visit periodically–and unfortunately ended before I was aware of it.  Still, I was not satisfied with the conclusion–or perhaps lack of conclusion–reached in the conversation I read, and the desire to provide a response (I hesitate to say “an answer”) has stayed with me for a few weeks.  I’ve not written a Gaming Outpost article for a while, but thought that I would address the matter here and see where that leads.

The discussion came to my attention in a thread entitled [Legends of Alyria] Traits! Traits! on the Dark Omen Games forum of The Forge.  That thread cites several previous threads in an ongoing discussion concerning how “Traits” are used as a game mechanic in various games, and noting two distinct mechanical applications.  Respected theoretician and game designer Ron Edwards brought the discussion to the Dark Omen Games forum because their game Legends of Alyria uses traits in an effective way in play, and so provided context for the discussion.  The issue at stake is how the use of traits is controlled in play.

To clarify this, the example of Legends of Alyria will help.  In that game, characters have three attributes and some number of traits.  Ron explains thus:

Traits are always defined as attitudes, expressed as a way to do something; for instance, they cannot be neutral abilities (good climber) or people (my brother).

Examples of traits might include fear of heights, love for a friend, self-effacing, proud of combat skill. 

In play, all conflict is between player characters.  When such a conflict arises, each player selects a character attribute (of his own character) on which to rely for resolution of the conflict.  This provides the target number for the other player to roll for success.  Each player then has the opportunity to invoke a trait, of either participating character, to replace either target attribute, provided that the involvement of that trait is supported by the flow of the narrative to that point.  One could, for a crude example, invoke an adversary’s fear of heights to his detriment if the conflict occurs in the web above the Citadel, but not if it occurs in the library of The Ark.  Love for friends could be invoked if it can reasonably be established that there is already a recognizable benefit or threat to one of the friends of the character, but such a factor cannot be invented on the spot–the player cannot decide abruptly that he is holding someone hostage without having established actions to capture that individual in advance.

Edwards makes the distinction between “Before” and “After” trait use.  Legends of Alyria, as he understands it (and author/designer Seth Ben-Ezra later confirms), is in the “Before” category.  This means, as noted, that the inclusion of the trait must be based on facts already established in the Shared Imagined Space (SIS in the cited thread).  Using his example, if I have the trait “Quick-witted” and I wish to rely on that for resolution, I must be in a situation where my use of my wit has been established in action in play, or I cannot use it.  The “After” category allows traits to be invoked without any established connection to the current situation, requiring only that if the character is then successful, the narration must incorporate how this trait led to the desired outcome.  Thus a character trying to climb a cliff face might in an “After” design invoke “Quick-witted” as the trait by which he hopes to succeed, and thereafter someone must determine how his wits enabled him to do so.

The question Edwards raises at that point is the one that caught my attention:

I’m not sure whether my own previous play or Seth’s play has been entirely faithful to that, but the trouble is, both groups are Trait-friendly, which means we have been making it work without knowing how or why.

He continues pointing up aspects of the problem:

There’s also an important issue hidden [here]. I’m talking now about the common constraint, or attempted constraint, of having the trait be plausible when used. I think this phrasing is actually code for a lot of different things….

The puzzle for me is that it’s never been an issue during play, but it’s also clear, upon looking at it (in its myriad forms throughout game texts) that the instructions themselves are not providing actual procedures to keep it from being an issue.

Even with “before,” explaining it isn’t as easy as I’d originally thought. For one thing, the trap exists of the always-there always-useful Trait. For another, apparently a number of groups fall into the problem of “sing for my supper,” in that a player feels he or she must put on an elaborate thespian act in order to get the bonus. With “after,” it’s hard too. If I can activate my “quick” trait and thus bring my quickness into things, then it’s basically always on-call unless some mechanical limit applies (as in “use once per session” or some equivalent). This is especially tricky when Traits are either qualities like quickness (which are in many cases redundant with other mechanics like a Speed attribute) or whole allied-characters….

I intend to reflect as accurately and critically as possible on how these mechanics play during our Alyria game….The thing is, I don’t anticipate any problems with them, so the question is, why is that?

Seth Ben-Ezra responded, noting:

I had to think pretty hard about the fictional constraint bit, because I don’t recall it ever having been problematic. Though, it might be better to express the Trait constraint as either being the result of previous actions taken or being a reasonable response to the conflict at hand.

He continues, recognizing the same uncertainty:

I still haven’t discussed why this works in our group. As Ron said, my group is a Trait-friendly group. How did this happen?

At this point, the best that I can figure is that our group has a lot of experience together…, which has resulted in a synchronizing of our aesthetic vision. Hmm. “Synchronizing” might be too strong. Perhaps “harmonizing” of our aesthetic vision might be a better way to put it. At this point, we generally know what the group will accept and what it won’t. I’m guessing that Ron’s group is similar.

It has taken us a while to get to that point, though. I wonder if applicability rulings on Traits is something that needs to be vested in a GM with the understanding that he is speaking for the group. I’m thinking here of a Sorcerer GM’s responsibility to hand out bonus dice. Sure, this is the GM’s job, but he is supposed to be aware of the “sense of the table” and respond accordingly. Perhaps Trait adjudication for “before” style games needs to be formally stated in this way.

The problem is summarized, not resolved, by Edwards:

I think we’re in the same boat in terms of not being able to articulate this well. You’re pretty much saying “we can do it because we can do it.” The closest I came to breaking out of that was in describing demo play, and that may not be the best indicator of what I, and you, are doing, or what our groups are doing, in the context of an ongoing social and creative situation. And to make it more difficult, clearly the process occurred a long time ago while playing some other game, so it’s probably not possible to observe us now to see how such an understanding can be brought about.

To make it even crazily more difficult, we’re not only talking about one kind of Trait usage, but about a group understanding of the range of Trait use, such that we can pick up games with widely differing approaches to the concept and make any of them work, without even knowing that we’re processing them differently. I mean, for ten years, you and I have been dissecting out role-playing processes with every ounce of self-reflection and critical thinking we can muster, and neither of us recognized this entire issue until Markus pointed it out.

Their discussion continues, involving several others, for what prints out as nine pages of small type.  However, it did not seem to resolve this essential issue:  how is trait use constrained in practice during play?  Yet it seems to me that the answer lies in the discussion of the question.  Perhaps as Edwards and Ben-Ezra admit, they have resolved the problem so long ago that it has not been a problem for them, and thus they cannot recall how it was resolved.  The moderator closed the thread before I was aware that it was open (I had a bad month or so from Thanksgiving to New Years, and must have missed every one of my regular Thursday visits to that forum), and I was left wondering whether I had an answer they had overlooked.

It seemed easiest, for some reason, to put my answer here.  Abstract theory posts are still welcome here, and they’re the sort I tend to write–I think much more about how people think than about what they do.

I think that that thing around which Edwards, Ben-Ezra, and others were all talking could be described, in a phrase, as the inherent limitation of credibility dictated by the social contract.

There is often (or at least, has been in the past) a significant amount of freestyle role playing happening in Internet chat rooms.  My experience with these dates from Quantum Link, the online service designed specifically for Commodore 64 users whose operators eventually launched America Online.  There were many chat rooms with specific characteristics in those days.  One of the outstanding ones was the Red Dragon Inn.  There, fantasy gamers appeared as invincible characters from any milieu and announced what they were doing.  There was a clear one-upmanship happening, as no participant (and I hesitate to call them players) would ever admit that any other was superior, and so all these incredible magical, psionic, technological, and body-based powers were bouncing around the room wreaking great havoc in the first breath, and being completely undone by someone else in the next–perhaps something like this:

• Brakkus:  I fireball at the bar; the glass of the mirror and the bottles melts, the alcoholic liquor flaring up and lighting the room.
• Mentat:  Seeing the fireball, I focus my crygenesis on it, chilling it to a simple sphere of light which harmlessly illumines the room.  Then I telekinetically left Brakkus from his place and pin him to the ceiling.
• Brakkus:  As Mentat attempts to grab me, I phase shift to a parallel dimension so that only an illusory form of me remains in the room, and there is nothing to grab.

Nothing was ever resolvable, and I learned a great deal about how not to play role playing games from those visits.  It was truly much more enjoyable to visit the various coffee house chatrooms, where one imagined music playing while talking with other visitors over hot beverages.

The point is, what constrains trait use in Legends of Alyria is, ultimately, exactly the same thing that prevents Dungeons & Dragons players from inventing secret escape hatches:  the social contract apportions credibility such that each player can say so much and no more.

That is certainly nothing new nor anything original.  I wrote of it in Theory 101:  System and the Shared Imagined Space.  Others deserve credit for recognizing this aspect of role playing games, that events are resolved according to the social contract, the interactions of the players in ways structured by specific rules which determine what can be posited into the shared imagined space by each of them.  I do not think this is stating something new.

However, it surprises me, given that understanding, that the process is not also equally clear.  The social contract is developed through the social process.  Every participant gains an inherent understanding of exactly what the social contract allows, primarily by observing and following each other’s examples.  If one player tends to up the ante, taking more liberties with what is permitted in the use of traits, one of two things happen.  Either everyone else follows suit, using these parameters as the new definition of what is permissible, or the group balks and disallows the use of the trait as a group.  It will often devolve into a brief discussion:

• “I’m using my fast reflexes trait”
• “Wait–you can’t use fast reflexes here”
• “Oh, I don’t know–I think maybe he can.  What are you envisioning?”

The consensus is reached as to whether this use is reasonable within the shared imagined space, and it further defines the standard within the social contract concerning limits of credibility in relation to trait use.

Of course, the “rules”, including whether the trait must previously have been established in the situation (Edwards’ “Before” case) or can be incorporated in subsequent narration (the “After” case), are part of this.  They remain as authority, as described in the aforementioned Theory 101 article, something objective to which players can appeal in forming the social response.  Players gain credibility for their statements by appealing to these authorities.  Thus when the “fast reflexes” trait is called, someone can state that the rules require trait use to be “plausible when used”, and on that basis assert that the “fast reflexes” trait is not plausible in the present context and so should not be permitted.  The rule does not answer the problem–rules never do, it is the interpretive application of rules by those given credibility to make those interpretations in play that provide the answers–but it gives a basis for the group to determine whether the first player has the credibility to invoke that trait.

It is my hope that this recognition both of the role of social contract in trait use, as in rules applications generally, and of the formation of social contract through social interaction, will help our understanding of game design and play.

Thank you for your consideration of these ideas.  I invite response in our Gaming Outpost Roleplaying discussion forum or by e-mail.