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Ayrik
Great Reader
Canada
7968 Posts |
 Posted - 28 Feb 2011 : 08:47:10
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Time could be governed by Ao, far too important (or the consequences too dire) to allow some underling within his quibbling pantheon to mishandle it.
This question has actually come up in my gaming so I allocated the "portfolio" of Time to the Night Serpent, Dendar.
My logic is that Dendar exists to consume the world/cosmos at the end of time, and her hunger compels her to hasten timeflow as much as possible. Yet she is also compelled (by the laws of the aptly-named Fugue) to follow the decrees of Ao and Jergal/Myrkul/Cyric/Kelemvor (whose interests do not include immediate destruction of the world) and she is thus prohibited from allowing the flow of time to be changed or interrupted in the Realms. She sustains herself and grows stronger by abusing a technicality which allows her to manipulate timeflow freely in dreams and nightmares (they are "outside" the Realms).
Various Faerūnian deities (or powerful demons, devils, hags) sometimes manage to bribe Dendar with terrified soul candy to gain her temporal manipulations (within the "detectable" maximum limits imposed on her power). Thus far (in my campaign) this has included Dendar exercising her powers to "stretch time thin" where it surrounded a critical Realms-spanning fulcrum event, making it more easily influenced - forever - by external forces (like my villain and PCs). Likewise, Dendar could probably make time "thicker" around certain events, so they'd be incredibly resilient to any attempts to change them. She can also make time flow at slightly differing rates in different regions, provided the "balance" remains constant; this might sometimes make unavoidably "fated" events happen in different sequences with possibly very different outcomes (imagine one nation's mighty army taking "longer" to reach the battlefield).
Fortunately, Dendar is tremendously lazy and gluttonous, and she spends most of her time sleeping.
It is also assumed that Dendar can have some influence on temporal divinations: meaning she can "reorder" distant past and future events so they become somewhat distorted or obscured with what she wants (or doesn't want) to be seen; this has served as a possible reason why nobody sees the deaths of the goddess of magic, etc. (Some very, very few exceptional prophets and diviners can divine the ultimate truth behind Dendar's deceptions; though they never emerge with their sanity fully intact after experiencing the many-layered nightmares Dendar uses to protect her secrets. Thus we have mad prophets and seers like Augathra, Cyric, and perhaps even Alaundo; Halaster, Laeral, and Elminster, too, may have been mentally imbalanced partly through their accumulated exposure to Dendar's foul essence.)
None of this is canon. |
[/Ayrik] |
Edited by - Ayrik on 28 Feb 2011 09:19:04 |
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Time travel
