Reality Quakes

[shkspr1048]

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the idea of reality quakes. Could anyone help explain this phenomenon to me, preferably in laymen's terms?

[Flyndaran]

Reality changes, but not just from that moment on. But it changes the past as well.
The most common type is the ret-conning of comic books. When origin stories change, and everyone acts as if that has always been the way it was.

In gurps terms there might still be objects or people from that no longer true past hanging on.

[Anaraxes]

Settings with parallel worlds or time travel (like Infinite Worlds) imply that there's a way to change the future, or split off a parallel world, that's different in perhaps large ways, or maybe small ones.

A "reality quake" is a natural occurrence of this process. The timeline isn't absolutely stable, and might change even in the absence of intentional tampering.

Most people usually don't know about a reality quake. The timeline changes, and everyone's memories along with it. Most people remember everything always having been in the new configuration. Some people -- like PCs --are special, and might remember the old past. Also, reality quakes often leave little oddities or hints of the old configuration behind -- artifacts, small inconsistencies, etc. They're not 100% thorough. That, of course, gives the PCs clues and hints as to what happened.

[shkspr1048]

So from a story perspective, a reality quake is largely a plot device for including anomalous elements in a campaign; it's a Secret History hidden not by any agency within the timeline, but forged by external forces and as such can only be recognized when one is outside of time itself.

Does that about sum it up?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by shkspr1048

So from a story perspective, a reality quake is largely a plot device for including anomalous elements in a campaign; it's a Secret History hidden not by any agency within the timeline, but forged by external forces and as such can only be recognized when one is outside of time itself.

Does that about sum it up?

Its certainly one way for one to happen.
It also is a way to just rewrite history and is sued in stories (comics mostly as said above) to let the author just change things. Maybe he did not like the way previous author did it, maybe times have changed and maybe he just wants to stir things up.
It can be done by someeone or an agency within the timeline though.
the latest retcon DC Comics had was created by the Flash changing time then undoing it but not getting it quite right.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by shkspr1048

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the idea of reality quakes. Could anyone help explain this phenomenon to me, preferably in laymen's terms?

Neil Gaiman gives a perfect example in his story, "A Dream of a Thousand Cats."

A mother cat whose kittens have been taken from her is distressed by their absence, and has a dream that reveals to her why she lost them. In the dream, she learns of a time when cats were enormous, the size of lions today, perhaps, and men were much smaller creatures, smaller than hobbit, and the natural prey of cats. Cats might actually be affectionate to men much of the time, but every once in a while they would get hungry, or playful, and then a man would die, painfully.

But there was a man who told all the other men (and women, I presume) that they should dream that men were large, and were the masters of the world, and cats were tiny, harmless pets. And a great number of men did so; and Dream made it true. Not just that things changed, and suddenly men were big and cats small, but that things changed backward, and suddenly men had always been big and cats had always been small. A reality quake changes history backward, not just forward.

And then the truth is revealed to this cat, and she's told that if she can get a thousand cats to dream together, the change can be unchanged and cats can rule again. So she spends her life telling other cats to dream with her. But, the story ends, when did a thousand cats ever all agree to do anything?

It's the finest parable about libertarianism I've ever seen.

Note that this version has all of reality and history being turned over. But in some versions, a reality quake turns over part of history and leaves other parts, and there are seams and fault lines visible where things don't fit.

One of my fancies is that when, in the New Testament, Jesus is born into the house of David, the ruling dynasty of the vanished kingdom of Israel, Jesus is what Ken Hite calls an irruptor: An intrusion into our history from a different history. Because it's really not straightforward to make Israel's history, as described in the Old Testament, fit together with the history of the ancient Near East as we know it from Mesopotamian and Egyptian and Hittite and Persian records. So what if Jesus came into being, out of a different history, and brought the history of Israel along with him, retroactively, so that suddenly there had always been the land of Israel—but the seams between Israel's history and gentile history were still there? And when historians look back they discover puzzles over dating and names and so on.

Bill Stoddard

[shkspr1048]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Neil Gaiman gives a perfect example in his story, "A Dream of a Thousand Cats."

---snip snip---

Bill Stoddard

Okay, that explains it (on an objective level, at least), but however well that works with nations and history, Hite also mentions things like natural laws. How might the man "on the street" see this sort of thing (my mind goes to H.P. Lovecraft's characters when the see "Things That Should Not Be", but also to your perplexed Biblical historians)?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by shkspr1048

Okay, that explains it (on an objective level, at least), but however well that works with nations and history, Hite also mentions things like natural laws. How might the man "on the street" see this sort of thing (my mind goes to H.P. Lovecraft's characters when the see "Things That Should Not Be", but also to your perplexed Biblical historians)?

Well, the metaphysics of that is more complex!

I think what you would have to say is that the idea of "natural laws" doesn't quite fit into this sort of model. What you have instead is that natural law is historically relative. Each history has its own set of natural laws. And when one history irrupts into another, it may bring bits of its own natural laws into it; or it may actually cover up the other history's natural laws, and leave only bits of them sticking out.

So, for example, perhaps the Shroud of Turin is a pragmaclast. Or the Holy Grail, though it no longer seems to be extant.

You can take a lot of superhero origin stories as involving pragmaclasts. Dr. Fate's father finds an ancient helmet in a tomb in Mesopotamia; the original Green Lantern finds a lantern made of a mysterious green metal unknown to science, brought over from China; Steve Trevor crashes on a mysterious island inhabited only by women, and one of the women comes back to America with him. All relics of histories that the mundane world doesn't acknowledge.

I ran a crypto supers campaign based on that model, some years back. One of its high points was the heroes, in the 1920s, tracking a minor German political leader as he rode in the ghost of a U-boat to the sunken ruins of Atlantis and retrieved the One Ring of Power, which they then had to get away from him. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[David Johnston2]

Most normal people have their memories altered so they are oblivious to what happened. But they may stumble across a bible that contains the Gospel of Simon Magus, a dollar bill with Benedict Arnold's face on it or a picture of themselves as the opposite sex, and it will look like a cunningly crafted hoax...or they might stumble across a crashed "alien spaceship" except that it was really a relic from a history where tech was more advanced.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Most normal people have their memories altered so they are oblivious to what happened. But they may stumble across a bible that contains the Gospel of Simon Magus, a dollar bill with Benedict Arnold's face on it or a picture of themselves as the opposite sex, and it will look like a cunningly crafted hoax...or they might stumble across a crashed "alien spaceship" except that it was really a relic from a history where tech was more advanced.

Or acquire a set of magic spectacles that allow them to find and translate ancient documents. . . .

Bill Stoddard