[SEED] The Doom of Gallifrey

[Matt Johnston]

To be honest I'm a little confused about the whole Time Locked thing. So Gallifrey is destroyed and the Doctor is the 'last' of the Time Lords. So, this means one of two things.

1) There must be opportunity to bump into Gallifreyans out there in time - some of them are out there fixing things, observing things. Gallifreyans who are doomed. You'll meet them, talk to them and you know that at some point they're dead. Do you tell them you know about their demise? Will they try to escape?

2) The Time War destroyed the Gallifreyans and, sadly, undid a lot of their positive work. The Doctor's work remains because he remains. But there's a lot of things out there which are happening, which have happened and which have yet to happen. Would it be too much to give the survivor Time Lords, your players, a list of potential areas which need fixed? Areas fixed by the previous administration...and then unfixed...by the Time War.

[Curufea]

Time Lock I pretty much assume to be "lies to children" to use a Pratchett term - a simplification to cover things until you one day may or may not have time to explain to someone old enough to understand.
Gallifrey is pretty much immune to time travel changes and is kept out of the regular flow of time. It's Grenwich MeanTime for the Web of Time.

1) Yep - pretty much. In fact this is covered slightly in the Miles book "Alien Bodies" where a war-time Time Lord meets up with the Doctor. It's pretty much covered in the Laws of Time as a very big "no".

2) The Time Lords actively maintained the Web of Time - in the TV series they occasionally interfered by sending the Doctor to do things. In the books they're more active in preventing time active races from screwing up the True History too much. It won't just be the Time War than unfixes things - with no policing force, any time active race will be able to screw up the timelines now.

[Rel Fexive]

I think it must be that you can't meet anyone (else) from Gallifrey any more - when they still existed, the 'present day' of the Time Lords has always been coterminous (being the same in extent; coextensive in range or scope) with all of time; this means that until they go somewhen, they haven't been there yet, if you see what I mean. And because they obeyed the laws of time no one time travelled and met anyone from the past or future of Gallifrey either. So now they're gone they can't appear in any place or time every again, but they had still always visited anywhere they've already been to, if that makes any sense

But all that aside, I think both of those are great story ideas

[Marnal]

Looking over what the EU says about the Time War I've developed a theory as to what 'Time Locked' means.

Everytime a battle is fought in a time war it boosts the ambient crystalization of history. Making it even harder for someone to go back in time and change them again. As long as your side wins this is a good thing and using Chaotic Limiters both sides of the War tried to boost things so that their victories remained permanent.

Chaotic Limiters adjust the time machine's crew's effect on History by changing their reality quotient. They are set for lower settings for scouting missions and higher settings for assaults.

If a battle is fought over and over eventually the amount of crystalization becomes so great that no time machine can penetrat to change events. That battle is effectively over and the combatants move on to new targets. Thus by the end of the War every time machine would be locked out of every battle that was ever fought. Hence Time Lock.

- Marnal Gate

"I was told by the producer that the
guiding principle was to make the
scripts complex enough to keep the
Kids interested and simple enough for
the Adults to understand!"
-Douglas Adams on writing Doctor Who

For Everything about the TARDIS check out
www.whoniverse.net/tardis/

For all things Gallifreyan check out
meshyfish.com/~roo/index.html
roo.scificities.com/

[Curufea]

Nice! Because otherwise it's very difficult to stop time travellers.

[Rel Fexive]

It's like the Observer Effect, then; once enough people have seen it, it becomes unchangeable.

[giftedmunchkin]

Or a bit like the RPG's definition of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect (which I'm given to understand varies from source to source, along with much of Doctor Who). People travelled back in time to the War so many times over and over again that eventually it became literally impossible to do anything.

To be honest, though, I thought the Time Lock was just a natural extension of the way the Time Lords protect Gallifrey's history from being altered - the Time War was a HUGE part of Gallifrey's history, so naturally it couldn't be altered.

[THE \/ince]

Marnal, excellent definition. Where did you get this from, or did you come up with it?

Either way, have a Karma for all your good work.

THE \/ince

[Marnal]

Most of that explanation from "The Book of the War", specifically the entries on Chaotic Limiter and Utterlost IIRC.

I just tied it into the historical crystalization terminology use the Virgin New Adventures series and added a pinch of "Father's Day" for taste.



- Marnal Gate