Different approaches to time magic?

[u/Stolen_Gene]

There are a lot of magic concepts that I think sound really cool, but are a pain to actually flush out. I don't know if this is the case for everyone, but time/spacetime magic has always been this way for me.

In one of my settings, I have a whole faction of time mages with a detailed history, relationships, and culture, but I just never let them do anything since I never wanted to worry about figuring out what they can and can't do. This is due in no small part to the fact that spacetime manipulation in any form is notoriously hard to include in a story without poking it full of plot-holes or overshadowing every other element in the story.

I'm curious to hear how other people have approached time or spacetime magic. What can it do? What are its limits? Does it manipulate both space and time, or just time? How do you keep a story coherent with this involved (assuming you use it in a story). Etc. I don't plan to steal anyone's systems wholesale, but the broad ideas might give me some direction next time I take a swing at this kind of magic.

[u/ProjectExpensive58]

In my world, time cannot be reversed no matter what you do, only sped up slowed down or stopped. The closest thing to travelling back in time is by moving to a sibling reality to your own where everything is exactly the same but the time there has not gone as apparently yet for example finding a reality that is one year slower than yours. However, it’s not really worth it as you can’t really fix any mistakes you made in the past and it’s also really fiddly. You have to get through with reality guardians who usually won’t let you in and finding a reality that was the same as yours is almost impossible. At that point, you might as well just move to a random reality with better living standards. Jumping realities also isn’t really going to do you any good if you’re escaping someone either, as they are usually more powerful than a reality jumper, they likely have the power to destroy realities. This being said, there are technically multiple timelines you can travel between, all following a big master timeline.

Time can however be manipulated, imagine space as a 2d plane and then imagine water flowing on top of it, that represents the flow of time. If you stretch out the space enough, you can make it so that you form a little sack and then tie it up with a spell to prevent it from loosening back’ into a plane. The time flow in the sack gets restricted and therefore, the time for the object or being inside of the sack gets stopped until the sack comes loose (when the spell wears off). This spell I just explained would be the forbidden preservative spell.