Sunday, December 23, 2007

References for Continuum

Prior to the "Blink" episode of the new Doctor Who, there were really only two mass-media sources to reference when explaining Continuum's take on Causality and the cool things it let you do...
  • 12 Monkeys. This film is a great example, as long as you double-check that the player understood the ending. Sadly, most people don't "get it" on the first viewing. 8 out of 10 first-time viewers think the lady on the plane prevents the plague from ever happening.
  • Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. The classic and most widely-known internally-consistent time-travel tale. Yet you hate using it as your primary example because it makes potential players think the game is set up to be a comedy. You'd also never want your Continuum players hauling all those historical figures through time, as it'd Frag everyone.
Very little in the body of (TV/movie) Time-Travel stories is internally-consistent. Those two (and Blink) are the only ones that are executed properly and follow the same causality laws as Continuum. Assuming the potential player understood what was really happening in 12 Monkeys, those three sources will do a great job of explaining the laws of time-travel. B&T is indispensable for explaining Slipshank. Blink is packed with great ideas.

Other things that you'd like to use as references for Continuum, actually turn out to be bad ideas...
  • Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. The sequel to Excellent Adventure has the same drawback as the original, in that it's funnier than Continuum and never shows Frag. Then it muddies the picture further by bringing in all that baggage about the Grim Reaper and the Underworld. B&TEA could take place in the Continuum setting with a GM who handles Frag very softly and subtly. B&TBJ is clearly and definitively set in a totally different universe than Continuum.
  • Primer. The characters suffer nerve deterioration and random bleeding, giving you perfect examples of Frag. This film is filled with intentionally-created paradoxes (not just plot holes like most time-travel films), and handles them all with a set of internally-consistent laws of time-travel. But the time-travel laws it's being so consistent with are quite distinctly different from the ones in Continuum. The timeline is mutable, and characters can choose to just live with their Frag. Primer would give you a good insight to how Continuum's Narcissists think the universe works.
  • Back to the Future. The bit where you see Marty's hand turn transparent is a great example of extreme Frag. Problem is, at the end of the film he's happy with his still-radically-altered future. If it were a Continuum game, he'd have a ton of unresolved Frag and the future wouldn't have changed. As a Continuum PC, he'd have to go back in time again and solve that.
  • BttF 2 & 3. As if the that weren't enough of a problem, the sequels then break their own time-travel laws, thereby exacerbating the flaws of the original.
  • Star Trek. Let's not even go there. This will screw your characters up big time.
  • Momento isn't about time-travel at all. It's just damn cool and appeals to the same part of the brain that seeks consistency in time-travel theory. I'm sure I'll use those tattoos in a game one day.

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