NWoD: Time Travel and History Altering

[NooDM]

I cannot seem to find this anywhere so I am unsure how it works to begin with in WoD in general, never mind Mage specific cases. I know it really comes down to GM Fiat, but I want to know if this has already been answered in the material.

Ultimately:
Can history be altered with time travel?
Does it create a new universe/timeline?
Or do I have to Trick the Time Loop (and my past self) to cause any change?


My means of attempting this will be through use of the Summoners book to bring an Anachronism from the Realm of Arcadia. It is the last session of this mini campaign so we all have to bring the A game.
I have Time=5 Fate=3 Space=2 & Gnosis=2 (Free pass as Gnosis was set in stone at Character Gen (I might be able to make it Gnosis 3 with the Experience I have).

[AuraTwilight]

It's seriously up to your GM. This has never been officially addressed.

[Thanqol]

It's seriously up to your GM. This has never been officially addressed.

It has, actually! In both Demon The Descent and Imperial Mysteries.

It's a remarkably fun explanation. Time travel is possible. There is no such thing as the sanctity of the timeline or a time paradox. Cause and effect is part of the Lie. You can make changes as big as you want and the timeline shifts to accommodate that.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Demon's Seattle thing was more... there are certain points in which one can travel through to a "splinter" of Seattle frozen in that set bit of time, iirc.

[Geostationary]

There is that, but they actually do mention it a few times in the book, including a sidebar in the storytelling section (and of course when discussing Seattle). There's nothing sufficient Infrastructure can't do, and they realize that time travel is one of those things players like to try doing.

[JeenLeen]

This by definition is not canon, but the fan-made Genius: the Transgression has some interesting time travel mechanics. You can time travel and make minor changes without difficulty or risk of paradoxes killing yourself, but to make massive changes requires an investment of energy and/or Willpower to make it stick. Some changes might be too massive (I think-not certain), and whatever you do undoes itself or something similar causes a similar end result.

Also, there is a police force that patrols time travel, but they're inept/corrupt/impersonated to enough of a degree that it's hard to keep things from getting crazy. That might be a bit more silly than you'd like, but you could replace it with powerful Time archmages or something like that who are trying to keep things from getting messed up.

[Scipio_77]

WoD is very much in the hands of the storyteller, so it is impossible to answer.

When a player in my mage chronicle tried to mess with time, he was thrown into a paradox universe (a bar) with the devil (represented by perfect corporate lawyer Harry, squash player extraordinaire) and physics (represented by pale rider Gabriel, violent brute and generally very deadly). Things got complicated after that.

[NooDM]

Thanks very much for these informative bits of info, of course Demons and Imperial Mysteries - the 2 books I don't seem to have - contain the needed info, my luck I guess

I am aware that it ultimately comes down to Rule 0, it is the Storyteller's (ST) world after all. Any depiction can work as all the nWoD books to me have the feel of Unreliable Narrator as no one has the whole picture anyway (Not even the ST themselves if they don't want to know).
I wanted to ask to see what the main material said on the matter of time travel, as some STs prefer to use the material that already exists or at least be inspired by it.

For those interested in how my game went, the game ended with us killing the Gatekeeper. I had asked the ST what would happen if I had to use my backup plan (the summoning plan), it turns out the summoned Anachronism (Fae) couldn't blatantly alter history (such as killing the Gatekeeper 30 years before the game chronicle happened) as "other interested parties" would fight against it and undo the efforts.
They could, however, allow me to change small details outside of what I had witnessed (see Tricked Out Time on TV Tropes). I also asked if I could have gotten immunity to aging during the time period I sent myself back. With the promise to keep this Anachronism on "speed dial" should I ever need help again. The ST said that would work.

Nice to know the one Arcanthus Mage has a backup plan that would work.

Thanks very much all for letting me know some pdfs I need to get my hands on, and one I need to read over again (Love mad science), and for giving me some idea of how it works.
P.S. What entities other than the Genius Time Police would likely try to undo such efforts?

[Cirrylius]

Archmages have the most to do with large-scale reality rewrites and preventions of said rewrites.

When a mage rises to the Supernal and becomes an archmage, they typically don't understand immediately the consequences of being fully present in what is, basically, the universe's source code- and the code isn't immutable.

Imagine walking through a library with open and closed books everywhere- on the shelves, walls, ceiling, and floor- looking through some, and returning home... only to realize that when you were there, some mud on your shoes obscured the encyclopedia entry of, say, your genealogy , and now that you're back, your family doesn't exist, nobody has any idea who you are, including the local Concilium, and you have no property or legal identity. You're fine, but as far as the entire cosmos is concerned (with the exception of Supernal creatures and any other archmages hiding in their own astral soul-treehouses) you were never born. Now imagine that instead of one family's history, it could have been virtually any person, place, thing, or idea that you might have accidentally stepped on. Then break out in a cold sweat.

Mages can also totally do this^ on purpose, later on, in a less bull-in-a-china-shop fashion, but since there are a number of stupefyingly powerful spirits in the Supernal which jealously guard the supernatural nature of their charges on earth (i.e. vampires, werewolves, etc.), as well as several organizations of other archmages chilling in their own reality-shift-proof bunkers, if you try to make/unmake something too abhorrent/vital to their goals or interests, they'll just move in and fix things to their liking- which is why stuff like eliminating the Gauntlet or changing the course of human evolution to include rampant psychic abilities don't work out.

Whether or not they'll give a s**t if the Nazis won WW2, though, is debatable.