# C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet tags: #game/rpg/continuum ![[Continuum - Roleplaying in The Yet (cover).jpg|600]] Time travel is a skill, not a machine. That's the whole gimmick of **C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet**, and it's the smartest thing the 1990s ever did with a d10. The designers' logic is unimpeachable: if a time machine existed, the first thing anyone would do is hop ahead and grab a better one, so the only machine worth having is the one already in use—you. Players are *spanners*, ordinary people who've been tapped on the shoulder and invited into the Continuum, a civilization of time travelers that has quietly existed across all of human history (and then some). You span by simply deciding to be somewhere else in spacetime. No gadgets, no Delorean, no time-cop bureaucracy. The Continuum keeps causality honest the way any old-boy network does: with a code of conduct called the Maxims—Information is All, Respect Your Elders, Measure Twice Cut Once, Never Fight for a Lost Cause, which is to say the rules mostly protect whoever's been around longest—a cosmic to-do list called the *Yet*, and a cheerful willingness to frag anyone who steps out of line. ## Core Resolution Mechanics Characters run on three attributes—Body, Mind, and Quick—rated 1 to 7, with 3 the human average and 7 basically a demigod. Skills hang off those attributes and carry a title (Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, Grandmaster) plus a Time Index that tells you how long it takes to actually learn them, because in a game about time travel, learning *is* the currency. You want to be good at something? Go spend a decade doing it. That's the whole game in a nutshell, and the Time Index is the game's polite way of reminding you that you're a small cog in a very patient machine. The core roll is beautifully simple, and thank god, because the rest of the book is not: roll a d10 and subtract the result from the rating you're rolling against. Positive, you succeed. Negative, you fail. Zero, you squeak by. A natural 1 always succeeds. Modifiers just nudge the rating. The flavor lives in the special rolls: a Victory (double 1) is a moment of impossible luck; a Grace (roll exactly your rating) means a fellow spanner quietly reached back through time to lend a hand; a Blunder (double 10) is the universe laughing at you in front of everyone. The real machinery is time itself. Your *Span* is your rank as a traveler—Span 1 to Span 5 and beyond—and it sets how far in years and miles you can jump and how much you can haul. Mess with causality and you rack up *Frag* (0 to 7), paradox made personal; leave it unhandled and you stop being seen around much, which is a polite way of saying you stop existing. The enemies are *Narcissists*—time travelers who decided the rules don't apply to them and will happily attack your timeline to get what they want. Which is to say, the only honest time travelers in the book. Combat, naturally, is *Time Combat*, and it's the densest, most glorious headache in the book. It's the kind of system that makes you keep a spreadsheet, and I mean that as a compliment—mostly because the alternative is the universe quietly deciding you never happened. ## Edition Changes **C°ntinuum** came out in 1999 from Aetherco/Dreamcatcher and never got a second edition—it didn't need one, and frankly the book is already hard enough to read without a revision. The companion volume **Further Information: A Gamemaster's Treasury of Time** (2000) fleshes out the lost civilizations spanners haunt. The planned sequel, **Narcissist: Crash Free**, was announced and then vanished into the aether; only playtest drafts survive, and one of the writers has cheerfully admitted those drafts bear little resemblance to what the finished game would have been. So it goes with games about time: some things never arrive. # References - [Official Continuum page - Aetherco](http://www.aetherco.com/continuum/) - [Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(role-playing_game)) - [Pyramid Pick: Continuum - Pyramid](http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=1199) - [Review of Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet - RPGnet](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_2692.phtml) - [CONTINUUM: Roleplaying in The Yet (used copies) - AbeBooks](https://www.abebooks.com/9781929312009/CONTINUUM-Roleplaying-Adams-Chris-Holliday-1929312008/plp)