Time Walk

School chronomancy [teleportation]; Level time mage 9

CASTING

Casting Time 1 round

EFFECT

Range personal and touch
Target the character and touched objects or other touched willing creatures weighing up to 50 lb./level
Duration instantaneous
Saving Throw none and Will negates (object); Spell Resistance no and yes (object)

DESCRIPTION

A far more powerful version of the bend space and time spell, this spell instantly transports the character to the same location, but to a different time. Interplanar travel is not possible, and the spell fails on any plane where time is meaningless. The character can bring along objects and willing creatures totaling up to 50 pounds per caster level. Unwilling creatures cannot be affected by this spell. Only objects held or in use (attended) by another person receive saving throws and spell resistance.

To cast this spell, the character must be able to state the arrival time accurately, down to the minute. The spell never transports the caster and companions to the precise minute desired, but it cannot function at all without a specific minute in time to target. This “drift” effect of not arriving at the precise time desired grows with the “distance” through time (measured in years, months, and weeks) traveled. Thus, a caster teleporting to last month arrives closer to her goal than one traveling 250 years. The minimum temporal distance traveled is 1 day, so this spell is not useful for going back to the beginning of a melee that is still progressing.

This spell requires some knowledge of the destination time, so it cannot transport anyone into the future since the future is entirely unknown to the caster. Even spells that give knowledge of the future cannot give definite enough knowledge to allow this spell to work. It is possible to use this spell to travel forward in time, but only to the point in the caster’s life when the caster first went back in time. Since the caster may not know exactly what is transpiring at the destination time, prudent time-travelers prepare for the worst. The errors in arrival for this spell occur in time rather than in location, since the character does not change locations at all. To see how closely the character arrives to the planned arrival time, consult this table:

Table: Time Walk

Add or subtract the temporal drift to the destination time to determine the exact time of arrival. Mishaps result in the spell failing and the character taking 1 point of Intelligence damage for every 10 years of expected time travel due to the mental bombardment that time travel brings with it. Thus, a character trying to transport through 100 years would take 10 points of Intelligence damage. Intelligence can be reduced to 0 through this damage (but not lower).

In the case that a traveler meets himself, the two travelers instantly lose control and attack each other with every ability and item at their disposal. However, should a traveler die while traveling in the past, the traveler’s body immediately vanishes from the point of time it traveled to and returns to the point where the spell was cast at the time that the spell was cast. In other words, if a traveler perishes in a fire, the instant that the traveler died in that fire is the instant in which the traveler is no longer in that time period, and the body is never found within that location since it returns to the moment of time in which the traveler finished the spell and began time traveling.

This spell cannot be crafted into scrolls or any other wondrous items and requires the caster to be a Time Mage of at least level 17.