The Time Traveller’s Companion

Being a Time Lord meant more than simply having a good education, political power and a pompous title. The Rassilon Imprimatur actually changed the body of a Gallifreyan on a genetic level, force-evolving them from mere terrestrial beings into creatures of time, itself. Many of the benefits from this are covered in the Time Lord Trait, but there are a host of other benefits as well, including bodily regeneration, the ability to symbiotically link to a TARDIS and the ability to survive for short periods in the Vortex without immediate dissolution. Most importantly of all, Time Lords are ‘mapped’ onto the Vortex by their genetic investiture. This means, in effect, that a Time Lord’s ‘reality’ is much more solid than other, more ephemeral beings, and as a consequence is that much harder to change or erase. Even taking earlier incarnations out of their respective timelines serves only to weaken a Time Lord rather than erase them outright, and the Blinovitch Limitation field around a time-knapped earlier incarnation is so strong that it is very difficult to do any permanent harm to them. This gives a Time Lord time to locate the source of their problem and hopefully correct it before too much damage can be done to their permanent timeline.