I have something of a dysfunctional relationship to AD&D. Let's call it . . . toxic nostalgia. Every time I see or handle (or yes, read) one of these old books, it's like this visceral sense memory. I'm instantly transported back in time, to when I was a teenager . . . and then shortly thereafter I remember all the reasons I hated being a teenager.
I first learned of the existence of Chronomancer (Loren Coleman) approximately one month ago, but as soon as I did, the lingering bit of teenager inside me immediately activated and tracked down a copy. And now, the adult me has to explain (to both you and myself) why that was a bad idea.
And it's tricky, because the main thing that's wrong with Chronomancer is just that it's AD&D. It does stuff like introduce the Temporal Champion class, a spellcaster/warrior hybrid that specializes in time manipulation magic and the ability minimums to qualify are Intelligence 17, Wisdom 16, Strength 15, and Constitution 14. And, it's like, are we just openly cheating at character creation now? Is that the state of Dungeons & Dragons circa 1995? Or maybe the game was just designed around the assumption that you'd only get to play the character you want one time out of nine (that's how many tries it took me to roll the necessary stats using the 4d6, drop lowest method that would not become standard until 3rd edition).
So there's this open question of how much I'm willing to tolerate AD&D's system nonsense for the sake of a high concept and it turns out the answer is "basically not at all." In a way, my toxic nostalgia is vindicated. Chronomancer is exactly the sort of book 13-year-old me would have gone absolutely feral over and exactly the sort of book that 20-year-old me would have been completely jaded about. Reading it for the first time in my forties leaves me largely confused as to why it exists at all.
See, the titular Chronomancer class is a wizard variant that knows unique spells related to the Demiplane of Time (and there is an extremely important discussion here about why that name is inappropriate and a better term would be "The Temporal Prime," but I can't be mad at it, because there's a dark part of my heart that understands why we should really be calling Time Elementals "Time Dimensionals" instead.) These spells allow the Chronomancer to travel into the past and future as early as level 3. And I don't need it explained to me why someone would want to play a time-travelling wizard. What I need explained to me is why you would ever run a campaign where only some of the characters are time-travelling wizards.
It's such a classic D&D blunder. Making a character class out of what should have been a campaign model. I want to believe that Chronomancer was conceived, written, and published entirely independently of the video game Chrono Trigger and the timing (no pun intended) is tight enough for this to plausible (Chrono Trigger was released March of 1995, Chronomancer was published in August of 1995), but a treacherous part of me thinks, "OMG, what if it wasn't?"
Because I can get behind that particular brand of corporate cynicism. Take one of the best jrpgs ever made and file the serial numbers off for a D&D game? Absolutely beautiful. But it kind of depresses me to think that they were deliberately trying to imitate Chrono Trigger . . . and missed the point so badly. Nooo! We're supposed to be a band of plucky heroes dashing around through time, trying to avert some terrible doom by finding and defeating it while it's still weak enough to be killed. Why are you telling me about the extremely abstract perils of this monochrome transit tunnel?
There's this weird assumption that the players' time (no pun intended) in the Temporal Prime (which is basically a big fog cloud with "timestreams" running through it - travel through time is effected by moving up and down said streams) is going to receive a lot of focus in the game, though maybe the book is just assuming that once the characters are back inside the normal flow of time, the DM can take things from there. So the new information we need are the logistics of the time travel process itself. AD&D could be like that, assuming that a mechanics-parsing puzzle (such as figuring out how long you have to travel up the timestream to get to a particular time) was the most engaging form of gameplay, even when DMs would be better served by a discussion of storytelling tropes. And I will give Chronomancer credit, it did get there eventually. The last chapter, with its discussion of how magic and technology might vary over time, and its sample setting, showing the same kingdom in four different time periods, was exactly what I'd want out of a D&D time-travel supplement. However, it's only partial credit, because that chapter was exactly as long as the previous chapter - one of the most tedious collections of highly-specific spell interactions I've ever read.
I think, overall, the most valuable thing I got from Chronomancer was a permission structure to run a time-travel fantasy game with AD&D, which isn't something I particularly need nowadays, but it would have done me a lot of good in the late 90s. I admire the book's audacity, if nothing else.
Ukss Contribution: My absolute favorite thing in this book is the addition of day planners to the equipment section. It's just such an un-D&D piece of equipment, and if the book had leaned more into the idea that the PCs' time travel shenanigans would become so complicated they'd need to carry a heavily annotated calendar with them at all times, well I'd have been positively delighted. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a one-off.
So I'm going with my runner-up - the suggestion that in the future, magic would become so advanced that they'll teach low level spells in public schools. It's a pretty unusual way of looking at magic - that there could be a standardized magical education that doesn't need something as specialized as a "magic school."
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