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Are the PCs aware that history has been rearranged? After all, they should logically be living with the consequences of Alaznist's actions in the past if the Scepter of Ages is involved.
If the past has been altered in some way, then the records in the timelocked city of Crystilan should be clearly divergent from the history that the PCs grew up with. Whatever they discover in that library should go against what they were taught in school/informed of by their elders/however else PCs might get knowledge (history) ranks.
The only alternative is that Alaznist's historical alterations have yet to take effect for some reason, and if that is the case I would like to know the "input delay" of historical tampering in order to figure out what's going on here.
Will this be explained in part 6? Does somebody at Paizo have a manuscript written somewhere pinning down how time travel functions with the Scepter of Ages? More than anything, I just want an explanation so I can figure out how to run this adventure properly.
Creative Director
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The PCs are indeed aware that history has been altered, but that's because they're part of the reason why history is being altered—their future actions in part 6 of the adventure path gives them a bit of "immunity" to having their memories being completely rewritten, and thus helps explain why those PCs and not any other heroes are the right ones to be on this adventure path in the first place.
They're not COMPLETELY immune though, which is why there's the penalties to Knowledge (history) checks and other stuff that's been mentioned in the adventures as things unfold.
When the PCs go to Crystilan/Xin-Edasseril, they'll be able to use that city's untampered books to match with what they know to pinpoint the seven points in the past that time has been damaged, and then will be able to travel to those points—that is all handled in the 6th adventure though.
The actual full-on ramifications of Alaznist's historical tamperings have present day effects that take place as the 6th adventure begins. When the PCs leave Xin-Edasseril and destroy Crystialn and restore the city to the current era, they emerge into a Varisia that is VERY different, to the extent that they'll need to very quickly go about the process of traveling to the demiplane of time to start setting things right. All of that is handled in book 6.
The point of adventure 5 is that the records in Crystilan are immune to these tamperings, though; since they're locked "outside of time" then any changes to the timeline of Golarion's history aren't going to be reflected in anything going on in adventure 5.
The exact methods by which time travel functions with the Scepter of Ages is handled off-screen. The PCs don't use that artifact to travel through time—they use another method, as detailed in Adventure 6.
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The PCs are indeed aware that history has been altered, but that's because they're part of the reason why history is being altered—their future actions in part 6 of the adventure path gives them a bit of "immunity" to having their memories being completely rewritten, and thus helps explain why those PCs and not any other heroes are the right ones to be on this adventure path in the first place.
This is giving me soooooo many flashbacks to Chrono Compendium discussions on time travel theory. Anyone else remember Traveller's Immunity and Time Bastard Hypothesis and a font of other crazy theories on intratemporal relations? @_@
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The actual full-on ramifications of Alaznist's historical tamperings have present day effects that take place as the 6th adventure begins. When the PCs leave Xin-Edasseril and destroy Crystialn and restore the city to the current era, they emerge into a Varisia that is VERY different, to the extent that they'll need to very quickly go about the process of traveling to the demiplane of time to start setting things right. All of that is handled in book 6.
If historical tampering was involved, shouldn't it have been apparent from book 1? Or have the adventures been taking place in such insufficient locations so far that we wouldn't have noticed any changes?
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Creative Director
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The actual full-on ramifications of Alaznist's historical tamperings have present day effects that take place as the 6th adventure begins. When the PCs leave Xin-Edasseril and destroy Crystialn and restore the city to the current era, they emerge into a Varisia that is VERY different, to the extent that they'll need to very quickly go about the process of traveling to the demiplane of time to start setting things right. All of that is handled in book 6.If historical tampering was involved, shouldn't it have been apparent from book 1? Or have the adventures been taking place in such insufficient locations so far that we wouldn't have noticed any changes?
The more you have time travel and historical tampering alter the past, the more difficult it is to tell a story set in the present. To a certain extent, time isn't linear, and the ripples that go forward into the future from the ancient past when Alaznist changes them "land" not in the present day that the PCs live in when they're 1st level, but instead land when they're higher level—during the last half of book 5, more or less, so that when they emerge from that adventure into book 6, they do so into a vastly different Varisia and have no choice, really, but to go back in time at that point to fix things. Think of it, if you will, as time itself creating its own method of self-correction, by allowing the PCs the chance to fix things once they're potentially powerful enough. Whether or not they succeed depends on if your PCs make it through to the end of the campaign, of course!
I could have instead had time changes affect the present day world from the start of the first adventure, but the problem there is that catapults the PCs into an entirely different campaign setting from the one we've been building up over the past 12 years or so, and that'd be pretty disappointing to spend an entire climax to this trilogy not being able to revisit plots and characters and locations established in the first two adventure paths... not to say potentially invalidating some or even all of the various other books we've published along the way which assume a different world than the one that could have been generated with an altered timeline.
It's the core problem with time travel plots, really. Butterfly effects can super easily invalidate entire campaign setting lines. I wasn't interested in starting an entirely new setting just for one AP. And I think the climax that Greg and I engineered in book 6 is pretty awesome in and of itself!