Timespell - Playtest version 

v1 27 Dec 2020 

Intro 
In Timespell, you play elite agents fighting a multi-dimensional Time War originating from an 
Apotheosis, one of the successful and powerful paradigms at the singularity apexs of the 
timelines. Each Apotheosis wants its ideals to reign supreme up and down the timestream.  
 
You serve on diverse missions to twist and wrestle the time currents to your end. Sometimes you 
warp in fifteen minutes early to lay waste to two entire advanced orbital battle fleets, bringing 
cruisers crashing to devastate the planet below, ending a space empire. Other times you infiltrate 
for the purpose of removing one specific linchpin around which a history evolves: a doctor who 
develops a necessary vaccine; the anarchist who starts a war. And sometimes you find yourself 
embedded for a lifetime, subtly pushing an entire people to migrate west or adopt a cultural 
practice important for the development of your own past. 
 
But—you have a problem.  
 
You might be falling in love with an agent on the other side.  
 
You are a carefully honed tool, and you should not be susceptible to this kind of emotional 
outbreak. If your handlers find out, they would certainly rewrite you. If this strange emotion is 
merely a ploy from one of the competing Apotheoses, they could use your weakness to unravel 
your homeland from the fabric of time.  
 
While the Weaver watches, you plan your next moves carefully. 

Assemble… 
… two to five fellow time travelers, paper and tools for writing, and two six-sided dice that you can 
tell apart. Choose now which of these dice is your Volition Die and which is your Schema die. 
 
One player takes the guise of the Weaver. The rest of the players are known as agents. The 
Weaver and agents work together to develop the multitude of timelines explored. The Weaver 
details the hazards and oversees the rules of this universe as the agents wrestle with their 
awakening emotions and the inherent dangers and opportunities. 

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Volition & Schema 
Agent, you were purposefully created as an elite fighter in an all-consuming shadow time war.  
When asked to roll, agents roll both the Schema Die and the Volition Die. The higher one 
determines whether your agent is following their carefully encoded instructions, specially grown 
instincts or personality indoctrination, or whether they are ruled by awakening emotions and 
sensations unknown and unpredictable.  
 
The Schema Die is your training, programming, battle-software, fiber-optic nerves and tensi-steel 
muscles or genetically engineered senses—the trappings of your high tech origins that are 
mission driven to an effective and efficient extreme. The Volition Die is the awakening of 
whatever core of human experience, self-determination and emotion is still buried deep within 
the psyche of your agent. 
 
To understand how much your Schema or Volition dominates in a situation, subtract the lower 
result from the higher. If your Volition Die is 5 and your Schema die is 3, your result is 2 Volition. 
 
Agents are not designed to have self-determination outside of the interest of their Apotheosis, 
but as their emotional selves awaken and gain awareness, they gather additional Volition score. 
This is added to the Volition Dice before noting which is higher and subtracting one from the 
other. The Volition score starts at 0 and may never fall below 0. 
 
Most agents have some sort of bonus to their Schema Die stemming from the conditions under 
which they were created or trained, and what they are best suited for. This is a mandatory 
addition, reflecting the reflexive nature of this programming. Only one bonus may be added to 
the Schema Die for any roll, regardless of how many apply. 
 
After applying bonuses, if the difference is zero, the player who rolled must choose either a ​1 
Volition o​ r a ​1 Schema​ result. 
 
Finally, everyone’s Apotheosis begins with a score of 3, representing the strength and reach of 
that organization across the timeweave. If you fail and your Apotheosis loses a timeline, reduce 
this by one. If you succeed and it wins a timeline, raise it by one. If your Apotheosis reaches zero, 
your timeline is unmade and you disappear. 

Apotheosis 
Time agent players choose who is best described by the following paradigm: 
 
● You have been grown, incorporated with the essence and expression of all things grown, 
in the carefully curated garden of the Natural Utopia.  

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 ○ When your work has something to do with controlling the natural world, you must 
add +3 Schema 
 
● You were born and raised as a time agent, expertly molded to blend into any branch on 
the time stream by the ruthless and uncompromising World State.  
○ When your work requires guile and deception, you must add +3 Schema 
 
● You were decanted, fully formed from a tube, a genetic perfection suited especially for 
the tasks at hand, a servant of the Biological Imperative  
○ When you work has something to do with operating beyond the limits of physical 
endurance, you must add +3 Schema 
 
● You were assembled and compiled, artificial intelligence and machine around an organic 
core processor designed and manufactured by the Technological Singularity. 
○ When your work is mechanical or technological, you must add +3 Schema 
 
● Perhaps flawed from the beginning, you cunningly hide fragile seeds of individuality and 
empathy behind your highly effective supersoldier veil. 
○ You start with 2 Volition, and must add this to any roll you make. 
 
You have two scores to keep track of.  
 
Your Volition is a measure of the strength of your inner emotions and self-determination, and how 
they may get in the way of the work you need to do. Unless otherwise noted, your Volition starts 
at zero. 
 
Your Apotheosis is a measure of how powerful and far reaching your masters are, and it starts 
with a score of three. 
 
Go around the table and ask leading questions of each other about your Apotheoses - what 
makes each singular and unique? What does it do to warp Agent bodies and minds into perfect 
soldiers? What happened on the last mission that caused this unexpected awakening? 

Predestination 

Moves of Volition & Schema 

You are a Time Agent, an elite soldier with the singular purpose to cut the threads out of the 
timeweave that threaten your Apotheosis, but deep inside you is the remnant of some beating 
heart or seed of a soul from your human origins. As you act up and down the weave of time, you 

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may enjoy or revel in the fight, the killing, the pain and victory—but your emotional awakening 
brings something new, unknown and uncertain. 
 
This game is regimented, telling the specific story of your emotional awakening through sabotage 
and secret communications from other time agents who are also in the grips of their own 
empathetic metamorphoses. There is nothing shackling you to linear time, but this emotional 
journey is predestined.  
 
Your encounters follow this pattern: 
● The Saboteur chooses you as the recipient of both their sabotage and their heartfelt 
message.  
○ The first Saboteur is always the Agent with the highest Volition score, or the 
Weaver’s choice if all agents have equal Volition. 
● The Weaver presents your deployment, describing a moment in time that when adjusted 
precisely will lead that branch in the direction of your Apotheosis. 
● You either ​live a timeline o ​ r​ execute a mission​, depending on whether Volition or 
Schema is dominant. In collaboration with the Weaver, you describe what happens, 
possibly working to avoid ​confronting mortal danger. 
● At an opportune moment, the Saboteur claims their sabotage of your mission, describing 
what they did to foil the mission. They describe where you find their message, and how it 
is read.  
● The Saboteur narrates or describes their message, a letter, complete with direct address, 
discussion of shared business, conclusion and valediction.  
● You roll to ​interpret an emotive message​ to understand how strongly or wrongly it 
affects you. 
● Then you become the next Saboteur, choosing your target of interest. 
 
Sometimes your actions and reactions create a Tangle, a dangerous paradox or loose end in the 
warp and weft of the timeweave. As the Weaver scuttles to examine and fix these time faults, 
they may impose further perils upon you or other time agents as you continue your missions and 
ultimately seek to escape the watchful gaze of your Apotheosis. 

Deployment 
This deployment will be sabotaged by another agent. These elite soldiers hold many successes 
wound through the branches of time, but this saga tracks their failures.  
 
Each deployment, the Weaver describes the unique contours of this new timeline and the 
specificity of the mission, and asks questions of the agent to ascertain how their travels through 
time are wearing on them. Here are some prompts, but time is infinite and so are the possibilities: 
● How does the world outside of your creche twist your understanding of reality? 
● What about your rigid schema has warped you so much that you no longer fit? 

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 ● What resonance do you feel in your heart with the world outside your timeline that you 
can’t quite name? 
● What unrealized fear seeps in as you prepare for your deployment? 
● What unexpected burst of emotion, a new awakening, do you feel this time out in the 
field? 

Live a Timeline or Execute a Mission 

As the Agent carries out their mission, they either Live a Timeline, embedding thoroughly and 
completely, with the opportunity to learn deeply but with the risk of getting lost in the basic 
nature of those bound to live out one continuity, or they can Execute a Mission, remaining at a 
cold and calculated distance, maintaining efficacy at the expense of nuance and subtlety.  
 
The Weaver presents a tapestry of situation and circumstance, being sure to develop unique 
features that distinguish this timeline, and the particulars of the agent’s mission. The moment in 
time should be distinguished from any other, deciding whether it’s in the far flung future, the 
distant prehistoric past, or an alternative anywhere between (never our own branch in time). The 
mission should be a specific task: the meeting of an unlikely pair, the unexpected failure of a 
stable empire, the death of a seemingly inconsequential inventor, the sudden arising or decline 
of a fringe cult. 
 
The agent rolls the dice to understand how the mission progresses. At this point, they also 
decide if they apply their paradigm bonus to their Schema die, and keep that in mind when 
describing the mission. They describe their planning, approach and process, and step by step 
how they reach a conclusion of the mission. The Weaver may also fill in further detail, helping to 
shape the alternate reality in physicality, culture, and character. 
 
When the agent starts their mission, they roll and consider the following... 

Table: Live a Timeline or Execute a Mission 

1 Volition—​ The Weaver describes how your path is fraught with danger and you describe how 
you struggle and retreat. You lose one Volition. 
2-3 Volition— ​ choose 1 from the Volition list 
3+ Volition— ​ 2 from the Volition list 
● Your careful approach ensures that your Apotheosis does not lose this timeline and 
reduce its strength by one. 
● You avoid confronting mortal danger on this mission. 
● Your clever and innovative approach does not leave a Tangle in the timeweave. 
 
1 Schema​—What mortal danger must you confront before you finish your mission? 
2-3 Schema​—Choose 1 from the schema list. 
3+ Schema​—Choose 2 from the schema list. 

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 ● You need not confront mortal danger on this mission. 
● Your precise approach compartmentalizes your emotional growth and you do not lose 
one Volition. 
● You do not leave behind a Tangle in the timeweave through your deft operations. 

Confront Mortal Danger 

Only the most extreme threats can actually slow a time agent. The Weaver may also resolve a 
Tangle in the timeweave by describing how any agent involved in a mission or scene faces a 
mortal danger. 
 
If an agent utilized their paradigm when ​living a timeline or executing a mission​, they must use it 
again here. 
 
When your agent faces a physical, psychic, cosmic, or other threat to their survival, roll and 
consider the following... 

Table: Confront Mortal Danger 

1 Volition—​ Your Apotheosis loses its grasp on this timeline, reducing its power. In addition, 
choose 1: 
● You suffer harm. 
● Tell us how the danger disrupts your mission, though you escape harm. Ask the Weaver 
how this creates a new Tangle in the timeweave.  
2-3 Volition— ​ Choose 1 
● You suffer harm. The pain of defeat creates an awakening in you, a question of whether 
this could have been avoidable had your conditioning been different, raising your Volition 
by one. 
● Through your failure, your Apotheosis loses its grasp on this timeline, reducing its power 
by one. 
4+ Volition— ​ Tell us how, through some stroke of luck, determination, or skill, you manage to 
avoid the danger despite your detachment from your carefully designed soldier’s instincts. Your 
Volition raises by one, and choose 1: 
● Your intuition in danger leads you through the twists and turns of time, and you remove 
one Tangle from the timeweave. If there are no Tangles, you leave one behind instead. 
● You exploit a flaw in the system to give yourself more freedom by ridding this timeline of 
your Apotheosis, decreasing its power by one. 
 
1 Schema​—You suffer harm. Tell us how you recover yourself enough to go on. 
2-3 Schema​—Describe how you overcome the danger. Choose 2 from the schema list.  
4+ Schema​—Describe how you overcome the danger. Choose 3 from the schema list. 
● You don’t suffer harm. 

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 ● Your Apotheosis gains strength in this timeline, increasing its power by one, if it hasn’t 
already. 
● The existential threat does not create an awakening in you giving you 1 Volition. 
● This conflict does not rip the fabric of the timeweave and create a Tangle. 

Infiltrate and Contact 

A saboteur's original goal is to derail the mission and make contact, at first in this order. While it 
starts in animosity, continued contact between agents deepens a shared connection and grows 
an odd intimacy. Until the very end the agents never expose themselves to each other directly, 
possibly only catching glimpses of one another and revealing their presence on past missions. 
They are evenly matched and unwilling to risk the existential threat that any confrontation would 
create. 
 
A saboteur’s messages must always be tightly coded, destroyed upon receipt, never readable 
again except by the ever-watchful Weaver, lest a superior discover some infiltration or fault. 
Messages can take creative forms: 
● Hidden in the random screen static of a mission-defeating computer virus; 
● In the pattern of flames from a particular tree felled for firewood, or written into its rings, 
grown over many hundreds of season; 
● The green tea leaves chewed by katydids in the bottom of a glass of a merchant’s 
hand-harvested stash; 
● In the pattern of lightning in a carefully seeded storm as viewed from one lonely 
mountain-top;  
● As the exclamations from the neighborhood kids playing ball, in fragments heard only 
passing by on the parcel-delivery route. 
● A hand-written parchment, burned after reading and the ashes scattered into the mulch. 
 
Dear Saboteur, 
Letters have a structure. Start with your direct address, and discuss shared business. It’s not 
imperative to follow, but it helps keep your thoughts together. It’s okay if you have many things 
to say. I have been watching you for a long time. You have probably even seen me, if you recall 
that time in Branch 34b. Few could, and fewer would catch my eye. Finally, conclude: These 
letters speak from the heart, and the heart is rarely rational. 
Yours Truly, 
The Weaver 
 
Saboteurs should lean on fellow players to help refine the delivery of their messages until they 
are an act of poetic beauty in and of themselves, created and destroyed upon receipt. 
 
Each time a saboteur leaves a message in a sabotaged mission they increase the intensity of 
their letters. They are also tunneling through time, manipulating it to help the secure delivery of 

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their message, and the Weaver may resolve a Tangle by asking them to ​live a timeline or 
execute a mission​. In this case, the agent’s Apotheosis will not gain or lose power. 
 
Relationship intensities follow this path:  
 
1. Taunting and Gloating​ - Oh, how you revel in foiling your enemy’s best laid plans. Tell 
them how you observed unnoticed and unequivocally destroyed their chances at this 
crucial juncture. You do not let them see you. 
 
2. Questioning​ - Suddenly self-reflective, you face an existential question about your need to 
make contact, what it means for you as an operative, and why you have a fascination with 
this enemy agent. You are compelled to explain it.  
 
3. Curious -​ You feel a rising curiosity about how the other side lives. What makes them this 
way? You want to reflect that on your own creation, molding, and training into this super 
soldier. Maybe you can learn something about yourself from their irrational approach. 
 
4. Infatuated ​- Never have you felt this kind of attraction to anyone else. Your creche-mates 
and you are close as siblings, at the same time close as stones standing next to each 
other, but this is something else unfelt and unrecognized except in the depths of your 
component material. A tugging, a longing, a need for contact. It’s possible you even 
revealed yourself to them, secretly disguised to help personally deliver this message. 
 
5. In Love​ - You are compromised. It’s only a matter of time before your superiors detect this 
abnormality, your reduced functionality. You can only think of escaping this grinding and 
endless war. You make plans to rendezvous... 
 
The first letter any agent sends is​ taunting and gloating;​ we can’t blame agents for such an 
immature socialization—they have much to learn. Each successive letter is the next level of 
emotional connection.  
 
When an agent receives a letter, they roll to ​interpret an emotive message​, to determine how 
well their carefully crafted psyche can handle such a sentimental message. 
 
Sending a love letter, the final tier of relationship intensity, signals the beginning of the end. At 
this moment, all agents have the opportunity to run or be caught by their Apotheosis. Each agent 
narrates a love letter to another agent. Then all agents roll to ​escape the timestream​ together.  
 
If there are more than two agents operating across the timeweave, they may not sabotage the 
same agent twice in a row, and they may not sabotage an agent already contacted until that 
agent replies. Agents are having an emotional awakening, but they are not obsessive. This helps 
spread the emotional burden around. 

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Interpret an Emotive Message 
Agents are fine tuned to display sympathetic behavior for those missions that require a delicate 
touch of infiltration or embedding within a timeline, a sort of camouflage for a deadly hunter. They 
are ill equipped, whether by design or by accident, to receive a message emotionally addressed 
to them. 
 
If an agent utilized their paradigm when ​living a timeline or executing a mission​, they must use it 
again here. 
 
When your agent receives an emotive message, roll to try to control your lurching humors... 

Table: Interpret an Emotive Message 

1 Volition​—Describe how the message brings new emotions that are too strong for your tailored 
and precise synapses. What emotional outburst imperils you? You gain one Volition but leave 
behind a Tangle of feelings reverberating across time. 
2-3 Volition​—Describe how the letter lands for you. Choose 1 from the Volition list. 
4+ Volition​—Describe how the letter touches your soul. Choose 2 from the Volition list. 
● You gain one Volition. 
● In the storm of feelings that overwhelm you, you are able to avoid creating a Tangle as 
you fall back through time. 
● You are able to control your distraction and salvage what you can from the mission, to 
avoid reducing the strength of your Apotheosis by one. 
 
1 Schema— ​ Describe how the letter awakens something unknowable in you and scrambles your 
instincts. Choose 2 from the Schema list 
2+ Schema— ​ Describe how the letter unbalances you, almost breaking your stride. Choose 1 from 
the Schema list. 
● You do not leave behind a Tangle. 
● You do not lose one Volition, minimum zero. 
● You are unable to hide your failure here, and you feel the scrutiny from your superiors. 
Your Apotheosis grows in power by one. 

Getting Injured 
You can choose each of these options once per game: 
● A crippling defeat echoes across several of your timelines rewrites one of your core 
experiences. How are you a different person? 
● A surgical strike burns through you and destroys something in your Apotheosis. How 
does the disarray affect your past and future deployments?  
● A true strike unravels your Origin and you are unmade. Memories of you gain the 
translucency of dreams.  

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If an Apotheosis is reduced to zero, that entire timeline dissipates, and the agent disappears.  

Escape the time stream 

When one or more pairs have reached the deepest connection possible, an agent has died, or 
the Weaver otherwise decides to end Time, your Agents try to escape the time stream together.  
● Where and in what timeline do they plan to meet? 
● What promises have they made to each other? 
● How do they plan to escape the iron grips of their Apotheoses? 
 
The Weaver may use this moment to resolve any lingering Tangles, requiring agents to ​confront 
mortal danger​ as they wind through time in their attempt to escape the Apotheoses. 
 
After any Tangles are resolved, escaping agents may roll their dice, and add their Volition​ ​to the 
Volition die their Apotheosis strength to their Schema die, representing the strength of their 
Apotheosis and how much of a grasp it still has on them. Subtract the lower from the higher. 

Table: Escape the Time Stream 

1 Volition​—You make it out of the grasp of the Apotheosis, but their hooks in you and your 
psyche tear and reverberate; your emotions exist in a perpetual fracturing fractal spiral, leaving 
you adrift and distant, even as you make your way to safety with your love. 
2-3 Volition​—You make your way to your safe haven. Though you spend the rest of your days 
with your love, it is always with one eye over your shoulder expecting your Apotheosis to catch 
up with you. 
4+ Volition​—You escape to your safe haven, unseen and unfollowed, to live the rest of your days 
in peace, always discovering new beauty in yourself and your love. 
 
1 Schema— ​ You are captured by the Apotheosis and imprisoned, studied to reveal the flaws in 
your conditioning so they may not be made again, and you are left to feel and feel and feel. 
2+ Schema— ​ You are hard reset by your Apotheosis after your clear malfunction. The memories 
of your connections remain as odd and formless dreams, though you soldier on. 
 
After the agents either escape or are captured, look to the Apotheosis with the highest score. 
This particular expression of singularity and sophistication is dominant across the time weave. 
Agents and the Weaver alike may describe how this colors the past and future timelines. 

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Weaving 
The Weaver describes the unique details of the different timestream missions that agents embark 
on. As the agents stumble toward their emotional awakening, the Weaver gains opportunities to 
put more obstacles and uncertainties in their path as they create paradoxes, inconsistencies and 
anomalies that Tangle the timeweave. 
 
Each mission takes place in a new branch of time, and as the Weaver describes each agent’s 
mission, they should take special care to distinguish this timeline from our own experiences as 
players. The Weaver also introduces the mission’s objective. They support the agent in 
describing how they work to complete it, and the saboteur with how they undermine and 
ultimately ruin it. 
 
Whenever the agent players must choose options from a list, options left unchosen are fair game. 
For example, if they do not choose, “this conflict does not rip the fabric of the timeweave and 
create a Tangle,” then you as the Weaver have the option to narrate the damage to the weave of 
time and collect a Tangle. 
 
It’s hard to say whether or not the Weaver walks a predestined path, but they do have some 
specific roles when interacting with individuals and specific timelines, no matter how exceptional. 
The Weaver is: 
● A primary source of inspiration for the diversity, weirdness and strange similarities across 
timelines. Dig deep into the distant past, the far future, and nearby alternate realities to 
find idiosyncratic descriptions of the reality that the agents find.  
● Defining missions that agents undertake in these different locales. These should be oddly 
specific goals that allow them the opportunity to engage with the setting how they desire 
- whether that is as a single strike or a long embedded effort.  
● Contributing to the agents’ imaginations of the world and the flow of the game. 
● Unraveling Tangles whenever it makes for a good story or provides disruption for the 
agents. 

Tangles in Time 
Waging a war across the threads of time has the opportunity to create disturbances known as 
Tangles, representing paradoxes or other tears in the fabric of reality. The Weaver works to 
disentangle and resolve these faults.  
 
To resolve a Tangle, the Weaver can make several moves, along with describing how the Tangle 
returns in this moment: 
● Ask an agent avoiding danger to instead ​confront mortal danger​.  
● Ask any saboteur to roll to ​live a timeline or execute a mission​ while planting a message,  

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 ● Ask agents ​escaping the time stream ​to roll to ​confront mortal danger​, usually that 
presented by their own Apotheosis trying to stop them. 
 
When an agent or saboteur is facing a Tangle, they may not create a new one. 

Timespell is… 
Written by Jacob Wolf Lefton, for whom Wolfspell unironically resonates so much. 
 
Timespell is a deep appreciation of ​This Is How You Lose the Time War,​ a science fiction 
epistolary novel by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone wrapped in the beautiful poetry of the 
tabletop roleplaying game ​Wolfspell​ by Epidiah Ravachol, found at ​WorldsWithoutMaster.com​. 
 
This is a playtest draft. Comments appreciated to ​jacob@jacoblefton.com​. 

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