Setting
Timelords begins at the End of Time. A doomed race, known as "The Designers", gifted in both psionics and sciences set about escaping their fate as the inevitable end of the universe encroached. Eventually, they discover time travel, and use this knowledge to move their entire solar system backwards in time to when the universe is about 15 billion years old. The actual Designers have never been seen by humans. After attempting to create powerful new life forms, they created "Lucifer", a sentient being that led the destruction of the Designer race and caused the dispersion of Designer technology across the universe.
The pinnacle of their achievements was the "Matrix", a small time-travel device, the size and shape of a 20-sided die, weighing about 3 pounds. The Matrix could be used for personal time travel, as an energy source, and other things only hinted at by the rule books. It is one of these Matrix devices that the players of the game find to begin their adventure.
The actual game setting is virtually limitless. As a time travel game, characters may find themselves at any time in Earth history, past or future. Space travel is also a possibility, with some modules taking place on space ships or other planets. The game also hints at the idea of traveling to alternate universes, where mental powers, magic, or alternate technologies exist, opening up the possibility for fantasy, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, or any other game setting the players may want.
The game solves the problem of time travel paradox by creating multiple universes which players can jump across. For example, if a player were to go back in time to kill his own grandfather (the Grandfather Paradox), this would only create a parallel universe where his grandfather was dead, but the original universe where he is alive still exists. This also gives opportunities for players to meet alternate universe versions of themselves, and even to replace characters that may have died.
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“The world is ... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not “inhabit” only “the inner man,” or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
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