Anachronism

Yes, it sounds cool and for the most, if you are aware, it is cool. The ability to spot these elements are pretty out of this world. There was a group of people near Sardinia, it was 1212. If someone took a real good look, they might have noticed a boy, yet he was wearing a pair of jeans and a Timex. There was a witness, her name was Thea Beckman. Yet it does not end well, the bulk of these minors ended up with William of Posqueres and were shipped to Tunis to become slaves. They never ended anywhere near the Crusades. There is also the alleged setting of the Key of all intelligence. It is a British thing. The key is a tablet like device, it needs to be filled with encryption elements by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6. Only then will the wielder be able to unlock one special computer to add to it, it is its own system, never linking to anything, at the bottom of the sea, a system with more security than the crown jewels in the tower. But these elements are mere window dressing. Anachronism is a dangerous thing, it is an even weirder concept. 

To see this we need to consider Anachronism, it means “a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned”. Yet when you dig deeper there is positive anachronism and negative anachronism. An example of positive anachronism is not about time travel, it is when something resurfaces. Something like the Irish Crown Jewels, or the poems of the poet Sappho. They were lost in the past, yet there is no indication that they are permanently lost. Negative anachronism is different, it is the stage of elements found at crusades, the setting of Celestrium found in a lab, or perhaps the Hsin Yu, a Chinese steamer sunk in 1916 where 1,000 died. What is more interesting is that dives allegedly revealed that the steamer allegedly had a support system to fit a mortar, one that would not be seen until WW2, that would be (if enough evidence found) a case of Negative Anachronism. Yet in all these years there is only one game on the subject (to some sort of degree). It was Psygnosis who released Chronoquest in 1988. Yet in RPG’s it has never happened. I got this idea, where we need to see an RPG, just like any other. Yet in the game we find books, certain books that have a second side, like the the other side of a page, but it contains some form of a puzzle, not merely opening the ‘page’, it could involve breaking or ripping the page, it could be folding the page and removing a part and remove the item. The item could be anything, more likely an anachronism that alters all, almost like an SD card, but when this item is added in the right place, the anachronism adjusts time without paradox elements. Suddenly we see art is added, items are added and optionally devices are added. The NPC’s are unaware, but we see the difference and now we see the start of a much larger field of play. Consider that someone prevented Leila Denmark form living, removing her stops the bacterium Bordetella Pertussis from being invented from 1926 to 1953, the WW2 statistics take a drastic turn and it would hit US troops in Korea to an almost disastrous degree. Now a person like Leila Denmark is a massive impact, the inventor of the Asphalt cutter not as much, but the timelines still shift. Now consider an RPG where your game world is in danger, a lot more than you know and even as you are like the NPC’s unaware of some things, the stage you are in, you get to learn that things were removed and you get to repair some of it, or all of it. And this is where the game takes a turn. I wrote earlier “it contains some form of a puzzle, not merely opening the ‘page’, it could involve breaking or ripping the page, it could be folding the page and removing a part and remove the item”, so when you break the page open the wrong way, the information is warped. So instead of merely resetting the life of the maker of the Asphalt cutter, he remains alone, so what comes next is lessened and optionally someone else comes up with the goods and as such the economy of your land is changed. It is interesting that a concept as powerful as anachronism was never added to any RPG game. I wonder if someone will take up that slack in a decent way. 

#JustSaying