The Laws of Magic: Part 7 of 8
Hi folks! Sorry for the major delay in getting the Sixth Law posted up. We were busy running around as part of Evil Hat Productions at a number of summer conventions—and we even managed to come back with some awards under our belt for Spirit of the Century: the Ogre Cave 2006 Best RPG award, the Indie RPG Awards RPG of the Year 2006, and the Silver Ennie for Best Rules. We’re psyched!
But enough about us, here’s…
The Sixth Law
So far in the Dresden Files, we’ve seen precious little of this Law in action, in great part because if someone is breaking it, he’s doing so in a way that fits right into Harry Dresden’s non-time-traveling story.
Still, it’s clear that mucking about with time is another one of those “don’t mess with the natural order” things. We just don’t know what the consequences are likely to be, even though we can speculate. There are the classics, straight out of science fiction—paradoxes, traveling back in time to stop someone bad from coming into power, altering the course of human history for better or worse, questions about alternate universes, the “elasticity” of time, all of that—but due to the nature of this sort of magic, it’s a difficult topic for finding concrete conclusions.
Similarly, we can reasonably anticipate what breaking this Law would do to the practitioner who broke it. We know what holding power over life and death can do to a necromancer; imagine the effect it would have on the personality of a chronomancer (for lack of a better term), who can skip right past death and go straight for the “cause something to wink out of existence” trump card.
It’s bad news, and worse yet it’s the kind of dark cloud that has an even darker lining. How do you catch someone in the act of time travel? How do you enforce the Sixth Law in a way that’s meaningful? How do you prove the crime so you can prosecute the criminal? Are the Wardens even equipped to take on a threat of this kind? And how much of our present day is already formed by the meddlesome acts of a wizard who thought he knew what he was doing? We’ve already talked about how the body and the mind are too complex to alter successfully, without trauma—now take that up several orders of magnitude to contemplate the complexity of time itself, and what a single, blundering human agent might do if he had the power to change its flow? What sorts of cracks might form in the universe at such an unnatural strain?
When it comes down to it, only a very small number of White Council members truly have the authority to do something about the Sixth Law (quite a number more might have the power, but this is explicitly a case of authority). The Blackstaff, a quasi-secret role filled by a senior wizard of the Council, is empowered to break all seven of the Laws should he see fit, but when it comes right down to it he’s essentially just a heavy brought in to fix the biggest of problems by any means necessary. The real guardian of time is the Gatekeeper, the senior member of the White Council entrusted with watching over the Outer Gates (we’ll talk more about those in the Seventh Law). While as far as we know he doesn’t have the blanket authority to break the Laws of Magic that the Blackstaff enjoys, he does peer deep into the flow of time, foreseeing events that are yet to come—or even receiving communications from his future self. Such communications are always very indirect and unspecific. The Gatekeeper can’t pass much real, factual information back from the future, assumedly because doing so would introduce a paradox, or at least cause events to unfold that shouldn’t. All he can really do is subtly nudge people who might be able to do something about those future circumstances in the right direction, and then let things unfold without his guiding hand upon them. In the end, we have to pray that’s enough.
Do these sorts of actions by the Gatekeeper break the Sixth Law, or merely skirt it? Probably not since he’s not “swimming against” the flow of time so much as observing it and warning about what he sees ahead. Regardless, it’s clear he has the authority to do it, even if the rest of us might not.
Slowing Down, Speeding Up
If a wizard uses magic to speed time up or slow time down, is he swimming against the flow? Probably not. Most magic that works this way is achieved by messing around with perceptions rather than actually laying hold on time itself and pressing the fast forward or slow-mo button. Mages have gotten short bursts of speed in the past by speeding up their own perceptions and then channeling some extra juice into their body to get it to move and react faster than usual. While that isn’t a violation of the Sixth Law, it’s definitely tough of the spellcaster who tries it—there’s plenty of risk of fried synapses or physical trauma from pushing the body and brain too hard, too fast.
In your game
Right now, drawing solely from the books of The Dresden Files, we don’t have a lot to go on as far as what it means to try to swim against the flow of time. This means, for the purposes of your own game, what time travel means and what sorts of problems it introduces are in your hands, to be decided by the folks sitting at your table.
Of course, the easiest decision is to avoid time travel capers entirely. And that’s a pretty good one to make; a lot of games can get completely derailed by time travel if it’s not a part of the core “mission” of the game. And the Sixth Law at least exists to encourage the players not to attempt it themselves, so you can still bring in a time-meddling wizard from the future (or the past!) as an antagonist. If this is your comfort zone, try to keep time antics pretty simple. Even one single incidence of it can be a big spider’s web—difficult to get out of, and liable to cause everything to shake about once you start to twitch.
But for some games it might be fun to move the Sixth Law front and center. Maybe your game is all about a secret, elite team of Wardens answerable only to the Gatekeeper, acting as his time police, charged with the job of taking on the threats that no one else can—all while operating under a prohibition against breaking the Sixth Law themselves. How do you fight fire with fire when you don’t even have a match?
If you’re looking for a grey area to explore, here’s one: the Sixth Law is a prohibition on swimming against the flow of time. What about swimming with it? It might be entirely kosher to jump forward in time (assuming you can figure out how to do it). But will your local Warden see it that way? And how badly will you want to head back once you get there? (Ultimately, Proven Guilty suggests that it’s not a violation, but how you play it in your game is up to you.)
Whenever someone in your game wants to break this Law, they should do it with the group’s consensus. Time travel has the power to wreck storylines more thoroughly than even a Third Law violation does, especially if you decide to bring in notions of alternate realities that need to be invented often on the fly and in the moment. If you’re the one looking to break the Sixth Law, you should be ready to step up and shoulder some of the responsibility to make this work without wrecking anyone else’s fun.
From a game POV, you have to be careful with time travel, it represents nearly limitless potential power to change anything and everything…unless the flow of events is fixed and whatever the time traveller does is just part of what ‘always was’. The Dresdenverse does not appear to work that way, though.
Niven’s Law of Time Travel should also be kept in mind by anyone discussing time travel, more or less it is:
“If time travel into the past is possible, AND if altering the past is possible, then time travel will never be discovered in the universe in question.”
His argument is that if you can change the past, every trip into the past changes it at least a little, wiping out the ‘former’ present and creating a new time-line. Someone from that time-line will sooner or later discover time travel, use it, and thus wipe it out and create a third time line, and on and on, UNTIL by chance some time-line is formed in which time travel, though possible, happens never to be discovered. That time line doesn’t get wiped out, and since the ‘earlier’ time lines have ceased to ever have existed…it’s perfectly accurate to call this one the only one and time travel was never discovered.