The Timekeepers

The Timekeepers Sect is a rough group formed out of The Priests of The West and dedicated to documenting and maintaining the Network Time Protocol (NTP), one of the core spells responsible for binding the Realm in coherence. NTP synchronizes time, creating a web of shared reality across the Realm. This is the essential condition for trust and communication among participants of Rough Telepathy. Without NTP (or its equivalent functional spell) fear, fractiousness, and dissolution of the Realm would be inevitable.

NTP is a supplicant spell, relying on an external source of ground truth for its basic functioning. To establish time, NTP consults the Temporal Oracles, which govern the truth of the time. NTP is responsible for spreading knowledge of exact Oracular time, without alteration, to all participants in The Realm.

The Merchants and the Warring Kingdoms rely on The Realm are particularly reliant on NTP, as a shared reality and the trust this enables is a necessary condition for any transaction.

While essential, NTP is a worryingly rough and waning spell. As incanted colloquially, it cannot affirm the correctness of the time it asserts, nor can it affirm the trustworthiness of its source. The average NTP incantation can divine only that its source claims to be connected at some or another distance to a Temporal Oracle. But it does not know this for sure. (While The Guardian’s have created cryptographic spells for divining both correctness and confirming the trustworthiness of a sources, these spells are complex and difficult to coordinate, and thus are rarely used in practice.)

David Mills, founder of the Timekeepers Sect, debuted NTP as a functional spell at The National Computer Conference (an early Ritual Festival) June 4, 1979