CºNTINUUM™ and NªRCISSIST™
GENCON 2000 Game
Track
NEW YORK
- Updated AD 2000 05.12
As promised in ad copy in the
GenCon pregistration book, here are the CºNTINUUM and
NªRCISSIST games we're scheduing in Milwaukee August 10 - 13. The following have not been assigned codes, nor have times
been confirmed yet by Wizards, and we are planning addiitonal events. Gamemasters that wish to write and/or run events at GenCon
should contact us ASAP. And please stop back, as we are updating as we know
more!
Download the prereg event listings at
Wizards! (766k PDF)
NOTE: The prereg book contains no CºNTINUUM event listings; all such events will be posted here:
Thursday August 10
5:00 PM 3 hrs 45 min
The Big Bang: Crashers
(Round 1 of 2)
Description. You've defeated the Swarm corner at 1950s MIT– even captured one. Now you get to play nice to the people
you killed as you set up a corner in the same area of spacetime... The dreaded Quicker are undoubtedly around trying to destroy
you while you prepare to receive a Prince of Yrnë to lead and guide you. For his goal is the most noble of all: Expose the
lies of the Swarm to their very agents, and unravel their tyranny throughout Time. Beginning characters (provided). First of two
rounds.
Game system: NªRCISSIST / CºNTINUUM cross-over
9:00 PM 3 hrs 45 min
The Big Bang: Quicker
(Round 1 of 2)
Description. You're prt of the elite of the elite– the Quicker, the Continuum's causality-masters. The local corner in the
1950s Cambridge has been overwjelmed by narcissists– that's bad, since the MIT physics lb and its many discoveries must exist. It
gets worse: word comes Down that a Prince of Antedesertium is involved– and that one of you has treason in your Yet. Span 2
characters (provided). First of two rounds.
Game system: CºNTINUUM / NªRCISSIST cross-over
Saturday August 12
10:00 AM 1 hr. 45 min.
Plum Pudding and Other Such
1 Round
Description. Charles Dickens has writer's block– and as if that weren't dangerous enough, he really is seeing ghosts! Make
sure he survives to publish his greatest works, while ferreting out other hazards to the timeline in 1840s England. And discover why
Christmas in August makes perfect sense to a time traveller. Beginning characters (provided).
Game system: CºNTINUUM
Sunday August 13
5:00 PM (4 PM?) 3 hrs. (or 3 hrs. 45 min)
The Big Bang: Final Round
(Round 2 of 2)
Description. The two teams plot their mutual destruction! Is there only one universe– or an infinite number of them? More
important– can you survive against other players' nefariousness!?
Game system: CºNTINUUM / NªRCISSIST cross-over
FURTHER INFORMATION
Still In The Yet
NEW YORK
- Updated AD 2000 04.29
Ed. note: FURTHER INFORMATION has enjoyed a debut printing
at Gencon 2000, is now going to press for a regular print run. -AD 2000.08.18
The release date of FURTHER INFORMATION, the first supplement for
CºNTINUUMTM, has been further delayed. Co-designer Chris Adams explains: "Our layout-meister
says it's another two weeks from reaching press. FURTHER INFORMATION is different from the ordinary supplement as it has had
to reinvent and demonstrate on every page how the Continuum perceives the last 14,000 years. All the same, I take responsibility for
the delay, as I should have seen the complications ahead of time, and scheduled more carefully. Apologies to fans and distributors
alike for the postponments."
"FURTHER INFORMATION is designed to allow CºNTINUUM gamemasters an edge on their ever-inventive players. "It
contains a lot of the stuff we wanted in the main book, but couldn't fit since it was already crammed to bursting," says Adams. "But
this way we have a separate book of GM notes and adventure hooks along with plenty of Big Picture information to make the GM's
high-Span NPCs sound more authoritative about what lay in the depths of time." Most of the book is devoted to exploring some of the
forgotten peoples and civilizations the last 16,000 years holds, as well as the means for players to design their own.
For all interested parties, here are the stats:
FURTHER INFORMATION: A Gamemaster's Treasury of Time 96 ppg. perfectbound US$15.95 ISBN 1-929312-01-6
"I knew naming it after the phrase 'Further information isn't available here' would produce weird karma," comments Adams. Layout is
nearing completion, and it will be announced on this page when the book reaches the press.
Impact on NªRCISSIST Debut
FURTHER INFORMATION is the only Aetherco/Dreamcatcher book scheduled to release before the sequel game NªRCISSIST:
Crash Free, and time spent on it has impacted the time spent so far on NªRCISSIST. It's still scheduled to debut at
GenCon 2000, but stay tuned to this page and the NªRCISSIST
pages for updates as we approach summertime.
Beyond Adventure
Features CºNTINUUMTM
Other CºNTINUUM Features Springing Up Around Net
AD 1999.12.27 Revised AD 2000.02.12, 06.21
Beyond Adventure, the online recreation magazine, featured
CºNTINUUM as its January 2000 cover.
As the Spotlight of the "MIND" half of Beyond Adventure, CºNTINUUM was reviewed, an authors' interview was posted,
as was a special exclusive sneak peek from the upcoming FURTHER INFORMATION: details on one of the Continuum's many ancient
societies– the Maihur Riki of 10000 BC.
Other magazines and fans are also contributing interest to the CºNTINUUM lines of games:
John Kahane seems to have posted the first fan site for
CºNTINUUM; he has also convinced WebRPG.com to open a
CºNTINUUM Forum on their site
S. Ben Melhuish, self-described "dilettante gamer" and owner of the pile.org
website has set up an unofficial CºNTINUUM mailist for fans of the game. Anyone interested in signing up may do so by
sending a blank message to continuum-rpg-l-subscribe@topica.com.
Purple Dragon, a German review site, gave away a copy of
CºNTINUUM in an online contest.
And Pyramid magazine made CºNTINUUM a Pyramid pick
in November. Our thanks goes out to all the fans, pros and critics that made 1999 our best year to date!
Bring the
Jubliee
NEW YORK
- AD 1999.12.31
Late last week, the bishop of Rome, John Paul II, set about opening special ceremonial doors of four churches in his
care, in celebration of an important anniversary. The papers reported how he has looked forward to this task since his election in
1978. This should come as no surprise– while his tasks and travels around the globe have been his calling, the work of this new
year is his job.
A year ago, a year and many many thousands of miles from here, I wrote of the advent of
1999. While the end of the 1900s has long been
pictured as a horrific fin-de-siecle, the twenty-hundreds have fought a rude battle with the imaginations of writers and futurists.
Mary Shelley saw a plague annihilating mankind by 2100, while many others like Clarke believe if we survived past 1999, we were home
free, we would be star-children at last. We know the debates will come, debates of the absolute power over all life and death we
possess, and none of us know the result. A coauthor on our games,
Dave Fooden, is going to go around to parties in a silver jumpsuit,
explaining, "Everyone in the year 2000 is supposed to wear silver jumpsuits." All this only proves our paucity of certitude, our
unwillingness to become the future. We really have no uniform expression for 2000. Our checks are more blank. Each and every merchant
and media has its own logotype, its own playful reworking of the number, creating a market indifference despite the efforts of so many
to cash in. We have no name for the coming decade.
We welcome the milestone, but we are in danger of standing by it too long. It's become hard to voice our next destination.
John Man points out in his Atlas of the Year 1000 how the last millennium was perceived as such by only a fraction of mankind, and mankind managed along without worrying. Muslims have
and yet count their years from the Hegira, lunisolar requirements have long determined the Hebrew year, Asia has dozens of different
calendars, as did the Mayans, Aztecs, Celts, and on and on. Over the past several centuries we've endured leap-year fixes,
Revolutionary Calendars that vanish as fast as they are invented, and the promulgation of the era by scientists otherwise disdainful
of the religion from which it came. Over the last several years, academics and curators have been ever busy trying to make the
calendar safe for a multicultural audience, with "Common Era" and "Before Common Era" instead of AD and BC. We have been indulged with
calculations over the past year, on the calendar list, and by Stephen Jay Gould and
other sage pundits, carefully and amusingly explaining it all to us, again and again. And tied to the celebrated millennium bug are a
host of solutions, from patches for Windows 95, to the advent of
Greenwich net time to help us amalgamate toward the
collective conscious. There's even our own styling of the year as the "Aquarian Cusp". Yet none of these have anything to do with
what the number actually means.
These two thousand years only count the years that Christ has reigned. It doesn't matter that the era only came into wider use
after its own 800s. It doesn't matter that Exiguus and Bede missed the timing of their liege lord's birth by months and years. As
much as people's feelings matter, in peace and in war, tweaking the name of the era is of no real consequence, because it still
counts only one thing. It doesn't matter whether Jesus "is born again at different times into every world", as Manu Eleihu describes
the theory. It doesn't matter what day he was born, any more that it matters what day he died. It doesn't matter whether you have pure
Christian faith, livid hatred of that faith's old oppressions, or the daily shrug. The number count is only of the years his subjects
accept as his rule. They are anno domini. They are the regnal years of a king. That's all it means, that's all it stands for.
And that's all it ever truly will.
So in going forth from here, we can choose to focus on events of the last century or even the last decade, to see man's progress
or regress; to make some modern sense of all things. But those numbers are still there, and they're on the same string as that
two-thousand. We sit here at an end of days, and begin judging ourselves.
But it's not just about Karol Wojtyla, rushing around, doing last-minute work for his boss. Nearly every human, certainly every
sane one, wants that number to keep ticking up. For their children, and for all their grandchildren.
Long Live The King.
–CHRIS ADAMS
NEW YORK
December 31 AD 1999.
with love to Elizabeth
O X2K
Alliance Distribution Picks Up CºNTINUUMTM
AD 1999.12.27
Alliance Distribution
has picked up Aetherco/Dreamcatcher's line of time travel games.
In keeping with their policy of having every game on the market in stock, Alliance contacted Aetherco/Dreamcatcher earlier this
year to ensure that their regular customers would receive the releases of our CºNTINUUM and
NªRCISSIST rulebooks in the most timely fashion. We're
delighted to be carred by Alliance, and we trust this makes it even easier for the growing number of retailers around North America to
carry our lines.
Retailers can contact us directly for any pre-release products or support, and can obtain
CºNTINUUM from Alliance, or any of our other fine distributors.
Manui & Adams and Fooden on Gentile, April 13
The
CºNTINUUM Championship was held earlier this month; a three-round
elimination in which players portrayed the same characters through three ranks
of Span. The winner: Alexander Iwanow playing the Dreamer character Raina Hart,
through three aliases and 33 years of Age.
