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Chronomancer (AD&D Fantasy Roleplaying)

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Chronomancer is an AD&D (2nd edition) sourcebook that came out in 1995. This book provides all of the rules for a new wizard school, Chronomancy, a wizard who manipulates time. This book has everything, from kits, new spells and new equipment, to rules for altering the timestream, guardians of the trimestream, monsters of the timestream, and notes on adventuring in time.

Yep, this is quite a resource, and it's rather too bad that it didn't take off more than it did. In truth, adventuring in time is harder on the Dungeon Master than adventuring is space (TSR's SpellJammer) is, so this book is not for the faint of heart. But, if you are looking for some rules to open up some absolutely fascinating possibilities in your AD&D campaign, then this is the book for you. Complete, and quite different, I highly recommend this book to all fans of AD&D!

Here's one of the most sought-after AD&D supplements ever created - this one gives you unparalleled new horizons for adventure, because it adds the most powerful element of magic ever devised - time travel! Unfortunately, this character class was considered to be so over-powered and disruptive that the supplement will never be reprinted. Which is a shame, because this amazing book will give you thousands of new adventures, and is the perfect way to expand a campaign. The 96-page book includes: chronomancer experience, kits, subclasses, the nature of time in AD&D, timestreams, paradoxes, changing history, proficiencies, the Protectors, chronomancer spells, rules for desigining worlds of science fantasy, and more. Spectacular stuff! If you have the ability to curb a powerful character with balancing flaws, making a more rounded and interesting individual, a full-fledged Chronomancer will open up infinite realms of adventure possibilities.

The complete book of chronomancers

For a long time I followed the role of time travel in Ad&d products. Of course it plays a major role in the Dragonlance setting and in other worlds have seen chronomancers sporadicly, but in my own campaign I found out that it was difficult to introduce time travel because once your players start to see time travel as a way of correcting their errors, your game balance goes right out the window. Weis and Hickman can fool around with their own world and even got to destroy the old Krynn, but my players won't accept that their favorite inn doesn't exist any more or that the Rashiman rule Thay now. The complete book of chronomancers gives you great options for campaign angles and for the price there really are some useful ideas in the book but my problem wasn't solved. I know that is something a DM has to solve with creativity but I was hoping for some support from the rulebooks. The best thing about the book is that the spells are so abstract that it gives you the oppurtunity to really mess with your players heads and make their brain muscle hurt. When confronted with the same NPC's but from different timezones it's bound to become chaos. The discription of the demi plane of time is usefull, because it restores the balance between the headache brain adventure and the adventure hack and slack problems. All in all I'm glad I bought this book in stead of just an other novel because if not for the players, it makes the game more interesting for the DM because suddenly you have a book filled with angels your players never expect. If you don't use those angles to often your players won't abuse this new development and enjoy it as well.

This book is structured more or less as the other AD&D Handbooks, but is divided into a Players and a DM section. It includes the Chronomancer class, some sub-classes and kits, spells, new equipment and new proficiencies; and everything is OK upto this point. Then comes an explanation on the Demiplane of Time, an abstract concept with quite a few inconsistencies and gaps which will have you rereading quite a few times. Overall, the book holds potential to expand your campaign in exciting new ways, it kept me awake many hours only considering the possibilities... if I get my DM to allow it, for it also has the potential to easily disrupt and/or unbalance a campaign.