Further Information Is Available

I forgot to mention it at the time, but, a couple weeks ago, I wandered into my local gamestore, and what should I see upon the used shelf? A $4 copy of Further Information: A Gamemaster's Treasury Of Time, the awesome supplement for the Continuum RPG. I've wanted this book for a while, but never actually found it for sale, as it had a fairly small print run.

It starts off with about 10 pages of really good GMing advice, including troubleshooting for various problems that stem from the fact that the characters can time-travel but the players can't. After that, there's a collection of time-saving charts and indexes -- I typed most of the data up into hand-outs and cheat sheets for my campaign, but it would have been nice to have this back in the day. New skills, a new strategem for Time Combat, several additional weapons, and some tricks you can do with spanning round out this section.

The remainder of the book covers history from the Libran to Aquarian ages, 12969 BC to 2200 AD. Technology, cultures, corners, narcissists, plothooks, etc. I sure could have used that in a few eras of my own campaign. 3 whole pages devoted to the history of horsemanship. Sweet, sweet, book. Before I got this book, I'd never dream of running a game past Span Two - which is a shame because the game has some amazing potential when the characters can hop a thousand years in a blink of the eye. Having this book to fall back on means you won't just fold the campaign when the PCs randomly dive into Vielavayan, circa 6000BC, to carry the fight to the enemy during the height of The Midwives Crisis, half way through the session. Instead, you'll take a 5 minute "smoke break" while the GM reads one page of a book and finds all the facts he needs to sell that era. Normally, I blow off the official backgrounds of most games and wing it, but Continuum is a game where you can't always do that. Verisimilitude and internal consistancy are of the utmost importance in Continuum - and this book offers some pretty robust tools to cover the GM's butt.

I'm very pleased to add Further Information to my collection, especially at the bargain price of $4 for a used copy in great condition. Score!