First, I just want to ask if anyone knows more about what's going on with respect to the death of magic? Is it in one of the sourcebooks somewhere or is this just something that cropped up during LG?
I had the idea that perhaps it's not that magic is fading, so much as being surpressed temporarily. Much the way the tide goes out just before a tsunami, magic could be thinning in response to an oncoming "wave" that's about to crest over the entire cosmos.
This could make for a really nifty campaign where the players get to deal with questions like the origin of magic itself!
There could be someone or something behind it (a certain banished god comes to mind), but then again, perhaps it's a natural, recurring event and the players have to deal with the fallout rather than prevent the oncoming catastrophe.
Or to be more precise, the atlas book, A Guide to the World of Greyhawk, was written by a character called the Savant-Sage in CY 576. The Guide has no game statistics in it, except for references to alignments (which people on Oerth and D&D in general seem to be aware of), and it's presented as the third volume of an encyclopedia written in the City of Greyhawk in that era.
Pluffet Smedger, 400 years later, found a copy of that enclopedia (it had been unearthed in the lair of an apparently scholarly illithid) and decided to turn it into a roleplaying game. Thus the Glossography, the part of the boxed set with game stats.
We glean a little of Pluffet Smedger's Oerth from the introduction. Magic, in Smedger's time, is a fading art, but not completely lost. The time of the Savant-Sage is thought of as the Epoch of Magic.
The introduction to the book is apparently written in Oerth's 20th century, about (if the same dating system is used) 1000 years after Smedger's time or 1400 years after the Savant-Sage. Magic is by that time entirely gone, and little believed in.
Exactly why the Epoch of Magic ended was not revealed, and it's questionable whether Gary Gygax had anything to do with the introduction, which was written by Steve Winter and Alan Hammack. The difference between Oerth and Earth is vague in the intro, too, as the book was apparently published by TSR inc. Should we assume that Oerth somehow became modern Earth? That seems absurd, as the continents are so different in shape, but it's possible that this is what Winter and Hammack had in mind. It's also possible that 20th century Oerth has an RPG company called TSR. It's a parallel world, after all.
There's also an article in Dragon #277 called "Greyhawk 2000," which detailed the setting in the 21st century C.Y. In that article, although technology had increased to the same level as 21st century Earth, magic was still as strong as ever. Apparently Tharizdun's doom had been somehow avoided.
Still, the idea that Oerth's magic is fading has been mentioned elsewhere, in the Dragon article on Boccob, in the Polyhedron article on Boccob for 2e, and in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer's Boccob writeup as well ("He sees that Oerth's magic is declining and will eventually fade away; he suspects that Tharizdun is responsible.") In fact, nearly every recent mention suggests that Tharizdun is responsible for magic bleeding out of the world.
There are also "fading lands" described in the From the Ashes boxed set, places of substantial magical power that have evolved into demiplanes as they slowly fade from the Material Plane.
Another theory was elucidated by Glenn Dammerung here, where he surmises that the destabilization of Tovag Baragu has caused the Oerth to "wobble" into other realities, causing shifts in natural law.
On Hallowed Ground for 2e Planescape suggested that Oerth itself was dying (for reasons unknown), but it's possible that this, too, was really a reference to Oerth's magic. I kind of like the idea, borrowed from Jack Vance, that magic in the world is actually increasing as the sun dims and the world ages, reality becoming more frail and unstable as the world descends into senility.
The same issue tells of a magical academy known as the Pilopraptis School, founded by a technological race of time-travellers from the far future. The teachers are all constructs of some sort, and it's hypothesized that they were sent to teach magic to humans in order to affect the future.
The conclusion, then, is clear: the people of the magic-dead future Oerth have found a way - probably one-shot - to send emissaries to the past to increase the level of magic and quality of magical instruction in order to prevent magic from dying in the first place. The oards from the old UK module Where Chaos Reigns come to mind as a good model for these.
I wouldn't be surprised if the spellweavers have some interest in this either, either in preserving magic or inadvertently destroying it.
Unfortunately, it won't work in my campaign. I've established that time cannot be changed (essentially, everything has already happened - if you go back in time, you already have and were part of that timeline). It would make more sense to find out that by sending these things into the past, they actually CAUSED the decline in magic they were trying to prevent.
Heh heh! Glad to see that years of watching Star Trek haven't ruined everybody's understanding of the linear nature of time!
For myself, I view magical energy as any other resouce, collectively it pools as it were and mages "dip" into it or priests are given access by their patron.
Simply put; since the Twin Cataclysm the reservoir is low and needs time to rebuild its volume. Ofcourse the modern users aren't aware and only see the dwindling, when they compare the magic available in the past.
Sadly the modern users and conflicts of the modern age are a further drain on the magical energy, delaying the recovery of pre-cataclyism magic.
My 2 coppers...
It took them some time to escape find the chronomancer at St. Cuthbert's Mercy Medical Center in the Old City.
Heh heh! Glad to see that years of watching Star Trek haven't ruined everybody's understanding of the linear nature of time!
Well, there are a number of models for possible time-travel. It's a bit off-topic, so I'll just point you to Wikipedia's entry as well as the short story, The Men Who Killed Muhammad by Alfred Bester (yes, the one who's name the Babylon 5 character was based on).
Suffice to say that the model you suggest is only one of many, and two primary models: static timeline and diverging timelines. Either one could be used in a Greyhawk campaign, though the various time magics in 3.5 seem to imply a diverging timelines model.
Well, there are a number of models for possible time-travel.
Oh, one side note on that: yes, most fiction, including Star Trek, Dr. Who, etc. gets it "wrong"; that is to say, mixes static and non-static mechanics in the same story or imposes limitations that are either contradictory or without any clearly defined physical or character-driven reason.
The only fiction that I've read or watched that worked consistently and explained their limitations were: 1) the aforementioned short story by Bester which introduced about 6 mechanics for time travel, all consistent 2) Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (but not Bogus Journey) 3) and one short story that I think was by Harlan Ellison about a man who realizes that he's stranded himself in a tangent timeline and done no good for the people he was trying to "save".
A Greyhawk where time travelers returned to save the future would be perfectly reasonable, but flawed (and they should probably realize that it's flawed if they can develop time-travel technologically), since they would run into the problem of item 3 above. That is, assuming a diverging timeline, they could create a timeline in which magic is preserved, but that doesn't change the fate of the people they left behind in the original timeline... they will continue to live out their years without magic. This is essentially the Back to the Future chalkboard model (which is inconsistently applied to the story after that scene, but works internally).
All of an Instant by Richard Garfinkle is also a very good, very consistent view of time travel that's very unlike any I've seen anywhere else, seeing time as more like a four-dimensional ocean than a branching tree. Time travelers are portrayed as immortal four-dimensional beings composed of every moment of their lives strung together, like very long and very narrow serpents. When they suffer wounds while battling one another (over control of the origin of humanity), their trains of instants become shorter and shorter, so very wounded time travelers may be only a few instants long, unable to formulate coherent thoughts before having to start over at the beginning of their short lifespans. The great sea of time changes continuously with every movement the time travelers make, often radically, though from the three-dimensional perspective of non-time travelers they can't sense the difference.
In the latter model, time travellers could indeed change the future by traveling in the past, though a rival tribe of time travellers would likely change it again soon after, and the futurians would remember the change as having always been. In the former model, a group of constructs couldn't change the future from the perspective of those who sent them, but they could change it from their own perspective, which might be enough to satisfy themselves.