19-NOV-2025

1220

I think I have a theory of how it should work.

Each Pop and Locality is equipped with a Timeline. Timelines are sequences of a shared pool of Events which are Simultaneous across those timelines but not necessarily across others. When an event occurs, all those present for it mark it in their timeline as an event.

Each Locality is part of a Region, multiple Regions are part of a World, and a World has a special timeline that all inhabitants of that World share. The World Timeline (“Worldline”) contains every event that happens in the world on a shared reference clock; but other worlds can proceed at different paces to it. So for my setup I currently have 4 worlds:

1. Eret
2. Ynn
3. Stygia
4. The IM’s lair

Time moves differently in Ynn, but is synced with Eret in the other cases. Each Worldline advances according to GM Fiat; generally, instead, timelines calculate where they should be on the other timeline when travelling between worlds. Take this simpler example:

So if a Pop is in World A, then enters World B and stays for 1 hour on world B, then returns to World A, they will return at T1 = T0 + 0.5h, where T0 is the time of the previous event on world A. If they wait an hour on A, then return to B, they will arrive at T1+2h, or T0+2.5h.

So long as we know the sequence of events undertaken by a Pop, we can always calculate where we should arrive on the target timeline.

The goal is to just keep a consistent history of each Pop, the timeline of each world is just a function of the relationship between two timeline’s clock-speed and the events which cause them to co-align. Events get tagged with the Locality they occur in, and the Worldlines are thus calculated. An event has a Start time local to its worldline, which will account for gaps.

This creates a final structure like this:

• Universe
  • Eret
    • Upper Carpathia
    • Ulm
    • Edom
    • Corinth
  • Ynn
    • 3x Eret
  • Stygia
    • 1x Eret
  • The IM’s Lair
    • 1x Eret

With connections such that Eret is the Hub, and the others are spokes, which simplifies the matrix above.

It is possible, likely even, that this will allow for paradoxes. That’s intentional. When a pardox occurs, the worlds should split into new, independent worlds, with that Event representing the branching point. Any timeline can split. This occurs naturally as people travel across different worlds.

This model also allows for pseudorelativistic effects between worlds, since travel is ‘instant’ inasmuch as there is no space to travel, but the two worlds run their clocks at ‘different rates’ so things change slightly as you move ‘further away’. The relative clock speed on Mercury, for instance, is somewhat slower than an equivalent clock on Earth, losing about 1 minute every 50 years or so, but varying considerably in the exact rate of exchange between an terran minute and a mercurial one. This would model that as a fixed ratio (though in actuality it is not fixed, but based on the relative positions of the various involved bodies. A future enhancement might turn the relativity matrix above into a dynamically calculated function, but that’d require additional work to make the various ‘worlds’ more like physical objects.