Sometimes you want to take your characters on a little side trip, to experience another side of life. To do this, the occasional fiddling with reality is necessary.

"Star Trek" has a lot of fun with this. Holodeck episodes (especially the ones in which there's a glitch and all of a sudden simulation becomes too real), mind-control hallucinations, parallel universes, time travel ... we've seen it all.

This sort of thing works best when you take already established characters and send them elsewhere or elsewhen. It doesn't have the same impact with new characters, you want to explore another side of something already well-known.

It's not so much of an impact to introduce the "evil twin" or bring in the alternate future counterpart of a new character. The familiarity has to be there for the contrast to stand out.

The DS9 tribble episode wouldn't have been nearly such a kick if Jadzia, O'Brien, and the rest had gone to some other tribble-infested incident in the past; it was the new look at the old story that made it a winner.

Messing around with timelines, multiple dimensions, and other alternities is a challenge for any writer or GM. The opportunities to foul something up increase dramatically. Done wrong, it's doom. Done right, it's an utter blast.

For me, it's all about repercussions. How a single act or decision can set the path, and how vastly different events might have gone if that single act or decision had been otherwise.

I've experimented with it in games and in fiction, and each time it has been a daunting challenge at first because the moment you start changing things, you are hit one after another with those repercussions.

The ability to look at one small change and see how it affects the rest of everything requires a quick and flexible outlook ... if I'd trained my body as much as I've trained my mind, I could be a gymnast by now!

There are many ways of playing with reality, and all of them have their own uses and drawbacks.

Illusion and Deception

These are usually the product of an outside agency, happening either by accident (holodeck malfunction; the Despair Squid from my all-time favorite episode of "Red Dwarf") or deliberately (Cardassian interrogation techniques).

The purpose of the deliberate kind is to confuse the mind, usually in hopes of gleaning some information or tricking the character into doing something that he or she normally would not do.

Whoever is responsible for this is not going to be able to make a perfect facade. The slip-ups and inconsistencies that eventually tip the character off to this not being the world he or she knows are vital to the plot, letting the character break the spell and return to proper reality.

This method was well-handled in the Gargoyles episode "Future Tense," in which the trickster Puck fashions a fake future in an effort to convince Goliath to give up the Phoenix Gate (which I'll be mentioning again under time travel).

The future that Puck creates is limited by Puck's knowledge, and the clues are there -- Puck didn't know that Demona had joined forces with Thailog in Paris, hence the faltering pause and hurried phony-sounding line about the "Clone Wars" (could Puck be a Star Wars fan?).

To accomplish these sorts of scenarios, the GM or writer will want to begin convincingly, keep it convincing while the character goes through the initial "this can't be happening" phase, and only when the character has come to a tentative acceptance, start dropping the hints and making those careful, deliberate mistakes.

The methods for altering realities differ depending on the setting. In a fantasy world, magic is the answer, with spells of illusion and mind control. In futuristic worlds, the same things can be accomplished through technological compounds and devices. Modern day explanations could be drug-induced hallucination, and the sophisticated mind control of which Dean Koontz is so fond. And in any genre, there's always the option of psychic powers.

Another possibility that may present itself is that of hypnosis. As someone who has been through hypnotherapy, I have some personal experience with it and can say that it is not at all as it is perceived to be.

For one thing, the subject remains conscious throughout and remembers all that transpires. For another, regression recall is not nearly as detailed and exact as we've come to believe from books and movies.

Thirdly, people cannot be programmed with 'commands'; the stage hypnotists who drag their victims up on stage and tell them that at the end of the show when they hear a bell ring they'll cluck like a chicken or sing like Tina Turner are not relying on hypnotic suggestion. They're relying on the human desire to please.

If you ever see a stage hypnotist, watch how he or she selects the subjects. The ones I've seen will go through the crowd, eliminating those who seem to be resisting, and choose those who are willing to play along. Those people might trick themselves into saying that they couldn't help it, that it was beyond their control, but that's not the case.

Of course, my personal experience has only been with therapy-level hypnosis; I'm inclined to believe that with the aid of the drugs about which Dean Koontz writes so chillingly and well, a deeper level of control could be obtained ...

Dreams and Visions

My games over the past several years have all wound up involving dreams, divination, and visions of the future. I enjoy this because it gives me a chance to play out possibilities but still give the characters the chance to change them.

I avoid books and games that rely on predestination and prophecy, in which the future is unchangeable and destiny is immutable. When I do use prophecies, I leave them open to creative interpretation and intend them as warnings rather than sentences (in the judge-and-jury sense of the word). It's fine to predict what may happen, but even delivering the warning to make someone aware of it begins the process of change anyway ... the wave-particle theory of soothsaying: by looking into the future, you're already changing it.

I have also been known to occasionally make use of dreams and visions to torture the characters, not by showing them what might happen but by showing them what already has, or is happening right now, while they're powerless to alter events. That's just plain cruel, I'm the first to admit it (though I'd be seconded by plenty of my players, I'm sure).

Dreams and visions can be useful as a guiding tool to nudge characters in the right direction, but there needs to be a mechanism in place. A reasonable, plausible explanation as for why this is happening. All of us may have hunches from time to time, or dreams that seem prophetic, but if that sort of thing is going to be a common occurrence in your game or story, there needs to be a reason -- "the Force is strong in my family" -- some sort of plausible mechanism.

One snag with making these things a part of your game is that pretty soon, you'll have players wanting them on demand. Divination skills or spells are common in fantasy worlds, though the reliability of them is up to the GM. And you'll want to be careful that the PCs don't get too good at it, or you'll never be able to catch them by surprise. Forewarned is forearmed, after all.

Dimension Hopping

An episode of Red Dwarf that introduced a ship that could break the dimension barrier, revealing there to be a limitless number of universes all branching off from one another at key points. It also introduced Ace Rimmer, what a guy, Arnold's alter ego.

Of course, that episode did have one major glaring flaw that's always bugged me -- the three million years that passed while Lister was in stasis. Ace's ship didn't just cross between dimensions, it had to jump three million years into the future too, in order to meet that Rimmer.

Anyway ...

This category is what I call "playing what if." What if this had happened this way instead of that way. Here is where most of the repercussions happen. One single event can be so crucial that it alters everything coming after.

In my fanfiction story "What Might Have Been," I decided to take a look at what could have happened in the Gargoyles universe if Goliath had elected to remain awake instead of having the Magus turn him to stone. That one act, that one choice, set off a chain reaction that would reverberate down through a thousand years. It was frightening how much was changed. Everything was changed.

Even more complicated than just stepping outside to look at an alternate dimension is bringing characters across, either to meet their other selves or putting them into the bodies of their other selves.

I did this in a game; the characters had been adventuring for several years by then and gotten quite accomplished. So I did a little divine-magical tweaking and had them all wake up in the bodies of themselves as they might have been if one critical event had never taken place.

Repercussions ... one of them woke to find that instead of spurning his childhood sweetheart so cruelly that she'd gone off to become his worst enemy, he was married to her (and the skunk took advantage of it, too <g>).

Oh, they were just wild to find their way home ... but I bounced them around a bit first (inspired by a ST:TNG episode in which something similar happened to Lt. Worf, not one to deal graciously with the inexplicable).

If you intend to do something like this, my advice to you is to plan it out very carefully. Try to think through and chase down all those repercussions. Keep notes ... and if you do goof it all up but are quick enough, you can have it all have been the scheme of some enemy wizard or other hostile agency, and make it look like you meant it just that way, if you're lucky!

Time Travel

"You won't, because you didn't. Time travel's funny that way." -- David Xanatos, "Vows."

Hoo, boy ... this is the toughie.

The first thing to do if planning to include time travel in your story or game is to decide which method you're using.

These are all assuming that the perspective is from the point of view and time of origin of the traveler.

Time travel is possible to the past only -- "The Terminator."
Time travel is possible to the future only -- "Lightning," by Dean Koontz.
Time travel is possible to past or future -- "Back to the Future" movies.
History can be changed -- "Back to the Future."
History cannot be changed -- "The Terminator" ... first movie, anyway.
The future can be changed but the past cannot -- "Lightning."

I promised we'd talk about the Phoenix Gate, a magical time travel device. In "Gargoyles," the view of time travel is the fifth choice listed above. History cannot be altered. Everything fits together.

This has led to some ferocious debates among the fandom, and I've come to realize that there seem to be two main types of people -- those for whom the concept makes perfect sense, and those for whom it makes no sense. Not much middle ground.

By way of example:

The character of the Archmage, in the episode "Long Way 'Til Morning," gets knocked into a chasm (the stereotypical villain-snuffer that I griped about in a previous column).

In a subsequent episode, "Avalon 1-3," we find out that at the moment before impact, the Archmage's future self arrived with the Phoenix Gate, stopped his present-self's fall, and whisked him away to continue his evildoings in another era.

The two types of thinkers see it as such:

How could he save himself when he died?
He didn't die because he saved himself!

And the arguments go 'round and 'round.

I fall into the second category, those for whom it makes perfect sense.

Now, if the Archmage had died, if the heroes had gone down into the chasm and found his battered broken lifeless body, then okay, I'd say he could not come back and save himself.

But they didn't; so he was never conclusively dead. That lucky omission made the later story possible.

Another form of what could also be called time-travel involves taking the characters out of the timestream for a while. This is seen in Gargoyles as well, with the mystic island of Avalon where one hour passes for every day in the outer world. It's a popular theme in folklore, where a single night among the wee folk can mean seven years going by.

I've used a form of this in my game as well (sprung it on the same poor characters that I subjected to the dimension-hopping experiment). I trapped them in the fairy realm for what to them was a little while, but when they got out they found it was twenty years later, and in fact they were rescued by their own grown children.

What that meant for me was a lot of work on those darn repercussions again; I had to think of everything that took place over those twenty years. It was hard, but it was worth it.

Conclusion

We can keep track of more than one reality at a time. In addition to the regular one in which we live, most of us can also attend to the reality taking place in whatever book we're reading at the moment. Many of us follow episodic television shows, whether a soap opera or a prime time drama or an animated show.

Gamers tend to take it a step further, being also able to attend to all the game worlds in which they're currently involved. Writers working on more than one series at a time have to pay attention to those realities as well as everything else.

It all adds up to a lot of mental and creative juggling, and when you start fiddling around with evil twins from a mirror dimension, visitors from the future, and things like that, you drastically increase the stuff you've got to think about.

I'd say, if you're feeling comfortable and confident with your world and have trained yourself to be a flexible thinker, give it a try! When it works, it's a thrill like none other.

When I wrote "What Might Have Been," I put something in the footnotes to the effect of: "If just one person at one point in this story slaps his or her forehead and exclaims 'Of course!' at realizing the ramifications, then I've done what I set out to do."

Let that be your goal -- that sensation of "Of course!"

Next month, in keeping with the spirit of the season, the topic is horror. In this column, I'll be looking at the many ways of incorporating scary stuff into fiction and games, and ways to create the mood to frighten.

-- Christine Morgan

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