On Timelines

Timelines are the philosophical envisioning of the flow of time from one point to another, as established by the Great Houses during the creation of history.

In more mundane terms: A timeline is a chronological sequence of events. Timelines can be made by era, century, year, month, week, day and even an hour. They can be made for a single person, group, city, or even country. In a timeline, there are moments which represent the most important events in the life, be they few and far between or plentiful.

By researching a timeline, the researcher can learn the major events which have happened, or in some cases, will happen, along that particular line. Typically, timelines do not include all of the events of the subject’s ‘life,’ but only the events that will change at least one thing concrete or abstract if affected.

Altering a timeline has much the same affect as altering a river; you may end up destroying a city, wiping out a civilization, killing crops, etc. In short, any number of things could happen, but the river is no longer flowing along its original course. While minor changes to history may have no lasting affect on the Web of Time (imagine throwing a decent sized boulder into a river, and then watching the flow reform around it), it is still frowned upon to do so, especially considered the current absence of any major Time-Active Power with the ability to police causality as the Great Houses once did, though the Coalition intends to fill this role.

It should be noted that alternate timelines are not the same thing as parallel universes, as even timelines that have been forcibly split off from Base Reality still exist in the same universe as its parent timeline, while parallel universes are actually separate universes from our own.