Pyramid Review
Further Information: A Gamemaster's Treasury of Time (for Continuum RPG)
Published by Aetherco/Dreamcatcher Multimedia Inc.
96 pages; $15.00
If you've read or played Continuum, Aetherco's role-playing game of time travel, you know the mantra sung by characters you meet from far-flung points in the timestream who can't afford to give away too much information about the future: "Further information is not available here." Instead, they've placed it in Further Information, the new supplement for the line.
Some individuals are selected to become spanners, time travelers who strive to protect the timeline from the Narcissists. The Narcissists are an opposing breed of travelers who lack a spanner's cautious nature and who don't care that their oft-paradoxical actions may fragment history. Since the timestream is rife with spanners and Narcissists, there's a whole secret history that, until now, has been drawn with somewhat indistinct lines. Further Information throws things into sharp relief.
The first part of the book is mostly comprised of practical advice for the Continuum gamemaster. Time travel is a headache in any game, and while Continuum has done a wonderful job making the concept a feasible and gameable part of the environment, there are still as many questions to be asked as there are permutations of the genre. Player characters get a certain number of contacts with their past or future selves, so how do the players and the GM make . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: January 5, 2001
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