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Time In The Wyld

The Wyld does follow some rules, more or less. However, these rules are altered by the people that live within the Wyld, rather than by fundamental natures of being. One of the effects of this is the passage of time - within the seas of formless chaos, time passes as quickly or slowly as characters require. Of course, to the people of Creation, time is a constant, and the interaction between these two natures can lead to friction. The following is a series of guidelines for easily deciding how much time passes in the Wyld.

Pure Chaos

Within Pure Chaos, time is entirely random. Out here, for every scene that passes, the characters will spend an entirely variable amount of time. Similarly, there are always scenes taking place, with no 'empty time' outside of dramatically long events. If the Storyteller absolutely must decide on a timeline - don't.

Deep Wyld

It takes one day to traverse a waypoint, under normal circumstances. Creation understands this, on some level. Because of this, whenever a character leaves a waypoint, a single day passes in Creation.

However, the nature of the Wyld is such that it may take more or less than one day to traverse a waypoint. Each waypoint represents a scene of activity, and thus the scene is the basic unit of time within the Wyld. Every scene that passes takes up one day of real time in Creation. If the characters spend a week treking across a mountain with nothing interrupting them, they will emerge in Creation one day later. If, on the other hand, they engage in a perilous swordfight, climb a mountain, and then navigate a labyrinth in the space of an afternoon, they will return to Creation to find that three days have passed. Wise Exalts can take advantage of this to compress large amounts of training time into a single montage, but they must take care; a single wandering beast can suddenly increase the time they must spend in the Wyld.

The Middlemarches

The Middlemarches operate in much the same way as the Deep Wyld, but the effect becomes less pronounced by their proximity to Creation. Here, characters should add the amount of relative time spent in the Wyld in a scene to the one day that a waypoint should represent, and then halve the total. This average amount is how much time passes in Creation.

Fair Folk freeholds are always considered to be Middlemarch domains; however, their tightly-packed Waypoints may take significantly less than one day in Creation to traverse. Storytellers should decide exactly how much they want this effect to be notable.

Bordermarches

The Bordermarches, on the other hand, are practically Creation. Time distortion is significantly reduced. In the Bordermarches, characters cannot end up spending more than half again or less than two-thirds the relative time that a scene takes, no matter how long that may be. For example, a six-day training montage will still take a full four days, despite covering a single scene, and if the characters cross a waypoint in one hour, only one and a half hours will pass in Creation.

Charms

Characters who use Charms to speed their movement through waypoints affect both relative and actual Creation-time - for example, a character who travels at 30 mph through Charms or sorcery can cover one waypoint each hour, during which one hour will pass in Creation.