[Torg] Future Tech & Time Travel (Tech Axiom, 4 of 4)

[Jones Jasyn]

Future Tech

The Tech axiom based around tools which work according to physical laws. Such laws include Newton’s Laws of Motion, thermodynamics, biology and heredity, physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics, and so forth.

As the Axiom rises, we move from tools based on physical laws to tools which themselves change physical laws. At its height, in Tech 21, all tools operate by altering how the physical world acts. For example, by increasing the coefficient of friction to a near-infinite value, two dissimilar pieces of matter can be permanently and irrevocably bonded (at least, until another tool turns the effect off.)

It has been asserted by some Torg fans that “Axiom 33” allows anything and so is indistinguishable from axiom to axiom. This author cannot disagree more. One of the primary goals of this redesign has been to give flavored “super-axiom” benchmarks, so that Tech and Magic can both achieve incredible effects, which differ in tone and feel but which fit the nature of their respective axioms.

Tech tools, no matter the Axiom, are never magical, even if it seems so to bystanders or elderly science fiction authors.

Time Travel

One of the more problematic issues in Torg has been time travel. Because the main campaign didn’t focus on it (or feature it at all), it wasn’t a standard part of the game, and was only shoehorned into the Tech axiom as an afterthought. No other axiom has an entry for time travel.

In looking at the Tech axiom and other axioms, the question of whether to allow time travel at all and, if so, where it fits has been difficult to adjudicate precisely. In this instance, the fictional sources that are the basis of so much of Torg are not very illuminating.

H.G. Wells’ Time Machine was Tech 19. In the Back to the Future movies, Doc Brown’s first time machine (the DeLorean) was Tech 23, his second (the train) Tech 19. The time machine from Dean R. Koontz’s Lightning Road was Tech 21. The Terminator’s was Tech 26. Bill and Ted’s was a phone booth of unknown technological advancement. In the Dragonlance: Legends trilogy, Tasselhoff Burrfoot journeys through time with the aid of a magical device, and Richard Collier’s (from Time after Time) wasn’t even a device, but a state of mind.

These are all valid examples, yet introducing time machines at Tech 19 would be disastrous (and placing time travel solely under the Tech axiom leaves out time travel spells, miracles, or psionic abilities). One specific entry on one axiom chart at an unattainable axiom level makes time travel useless, it may as well not be there at all. But how else to reflect time travel stories?

Time travel devices exist at many axiom levels, and even in axioms other than Tech. This is because time travel is a genre (in the literary sense, not the Torg sense), it isn’t a specific tool. As such, time travel is not something that should be in the axiom charts at all (accordingly, all mentions of time travel have been removed from this axiom chart).

Treating time travel this way allows it to be possible whenever the gamemaster- not the players- wishes to introduce it. He can introduce any means of time travel he wishes: miracles, psi, magic, tech, weird science, the Occult, etc.

Time travel occurs as the as the gamemaster wishes, therefore it works the way he wants, and he can duplicate any time travel story he desires. (The time travel information from the R&E, ppg. 138-139 might also be helpful.)
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Jasyn Jones
jasynj (at) gmail (dot) com

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Check out my Torg webpage, Storm Knights:
web.me.com/stormknights/