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CºNTINUUM: Roleplaying in The Yet
Price: $19.99
Publisher: Aetherco www.aetherco.com
Size: 232 Pages
ISDN: 1929312008
If you're interested in time travel in your roleplaying, you've probably heard of CºNTINUUM. If you haven't, well, consider this review a public service.
CºNTINUUM is the first game based on time travel that thought about all the implications of such an ability. For example, the authors realized that once a society develops time travel, they can hop ahead a few years to get the next (better) model of time travel equipment, and keep doing that until they get the best possible equipment. So every time traveller starts out with the absolute best equipment. Though most time travellers -- called "spanners" in the book -- don't know how it works (my guess is nanotech), each spanner can pretty much span time (i.e. time travel) at will. No equipment needed. After all, that's the best impovement on equipment of all: to be given the ability so that no tools are needed, and so it can't be taken away from you.
CºNTINUUM is filled with insights like this. The authors acknowledge that the ability to move through time also includes the ability to teleport. (After all, the Earth isn't in the same place on 2002-01-13 as it is in 1444-01-13...) The authors figure out ways to use English to refer to time-travel issues without re-writing the rules of grammar, and have even thought of a clever way for spanners to identify each other, plus a clever phrase for when you can't explain something to someone, either because of paradox or because you don't know: "Further information is not to be found here."
Admittedly, some of the mechanics require a bit of mind-bending. But that's the case with any good time-travel game, since CºNTINUUM doesn't cheap out and forbid you from doing things like meeting yourself. The mechanic for meeting yourself is quite interesting, actually. When it first happens, the GM plays your "elder" -- the version of you that has lived longer along his personal timeline -- and the incident goes into your "Yet", things that you haven't done yet in your personal timeline, but you know you have to do sometime in your personal future in order to avoid frag (paradox). Later on, you play your elder self, using your notes to properly re-construct the incident, with the GM playing your younger version. (You don't have to get it exactly. It's assumed that the character took more detailed notes than the player.)
But even if you don't like the mechanics for time travel (and all the record-keeping it entails), it's the little details, like the way spanners identify each other, to how to handle meeting yourself, that make this game more than worth the money. Even if I ran a game where I wasn't worried about paradox, I'd use a lot of the conventions in CºNTINUUM, including most of the slang. Some people have complained about the different sub-factions of the CºNTINUUM that PCs have to join, but to me, what makes the game interesting is all the things that apply to all spanners, especially the small details. Even if you disagree with some of the choices the authors made, it will get you thinking about all the details required to make a time-travel game really live.
In the meantime: What time is it?
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