Pyramid Pick
Continuum: Roleplaying in The Yet
Published by Aetherco/Dreamcatcher
Written by Barbara Manui, Chris Adams, and David Fooden
232 pages, $19.95
Some games are well known for their background material. Vampire and Shadowrun, for example, have beautifully described worlds. Other games are respected for innovative mechanics, perfectly suited to the game's style. Fans often cite The Adventures of Baron Munchausen for this quality. Rarely are there games with both brilliantly original worlds and mechanics to match. Continuum, the new game from Aetherco and Dreamcatcher Multimedia, is one such game.Continuum is a time travel game, but the basic premise is all it has in common with any previous such game. The designers of this game have spent years thinking about the genre. Manui, Adams, and Fooden have come up with a compelling and internally consistent description of time travel and its implications. For example, if there were a time machine, say the designers, wouldn't one of the first things the inventor of such a machine would do be to travel into the future to find a better machine? Therefore, says the game, the travel method used throughout space-time would be (except for the prototype) the optimal method. Hence, the mechanism of "spanning," which is the ultimate in time travel. It is instantaneous, perfectly effective, and uses no machinery.
Characters in Continuum are all spanners. Each beginning spanner has a mentor, a teacher and advisor in this new world . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: November 5, 1999
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