History TabletopGame / ContinuumRoleplayingInTheYet

* ForWantOfANail: Since more overt actions like killing an opponent's grandfather in Time Combat tend to frag hundreds if not thousands of spanners, most Time Combat mechanics focus on smaller stuff. Stealing an opponent's newspaper three days Down is a surprisingly effective way to frag them into non-sentience, with ''really'' ugly long-term effects for every other spanner the now-fragged target had in the Yet.

* HistoricalInJoke: Strongly encouraged. See Ki-Kung-Shi's airplane, Joan of Arc, the Count Saint-Germain, most Persons of Note from the fraternities.

* TheFuture: Up to AD 2221 is fair game, albeit a little heavy on the nanotech and implied CrystalSpiresAndTogas. Going past AD 2222 is not advised, and all eras beyond AD 2400 are the realm of the Inheritors and the Exalted. Further information is not available here. [[spoiler: The futury contained in the GM section indicates that humans do indeed reach a post scarcity society, but the path is pretty nasty. Included are a third world war that culminates in the mass deployment of psionic weapons and nanites, a period of decadence where immortal proto-inheritors entertain themselves with gory but nonlethal war and torture, and culminating in those who don't join the group mind and join the inheritors being rounded up for study in what amount to wildlife preserves.]]

* NeverTheSelvesShallMeet: Averted to hell and back. Meeting yourself is called a Gemini incident, and they're ''expected'' of spanners. Quite often, actually: fulfilling a randomly determined number of Gemini's is a requirement for increasing span. [[UpToEleven Joan of Arc is notable even among spanners, since she makes up 98% of the police force of Atlantis.]]

* TemporalDuplication: Any experienced time traveler has the occasional "Gemini incident" and needs to know how to coordinate their Elder and Junior versions to avoid TemporalParadox. Taken UpToEleven with Joan of Arc, whose temporal duplicates make up 98% of {{Atlantis}}'s police force.

* StableTimeLoop: Setting these up and fulfilling them makes up almost all of the action in the game. It's common enough, in fact, that a particular {{koan}} used to describe the phenomenon is "The Universe is." This means that information can exist without a first cause, such as being told something by your future self, and later telling it to your past self without ever ''independently'' learning the information. This is intentionally allowed by the frag rules. Physical objects, like a letter to your past self with the information written on it, DO need a first cause, though, and removing it is a point of frag for you that's difficult to fix.
** The Continuum believes that ''all of history'' is a StableTimeLoop -- the Inheritor civilization exists for the entirety of space-time before the Continuum (all the way back to the outpost at the Big Bang known as "Cold Storage") and after. Human history needs to exist in order to be the physical origin of the Inheritors, but the ''information'' they need to exist -- the actual invention of time travel as a technology -- has no origin; the Hour of the Inheritance is simply humanity's distant descendants deciding they're ready to learn the secret.
** [[spoiler: Which is then subverted by ''Narcissist'', which claims all of this is a lie -- there is an original inventor of time travel, Betne Rebu, First King of Yrnë, and ''turning'' his timeline into a "metastable state" where the Continuum has always existed is [[MyGreatestFailure his greatest mistake]].]]

* OmniscientMoralityLicense: The Exalted and Inheritors are not bound by the Five Maxims and can [[IDidWhatIHadToDo do whatever they need to do]] to protect the timestream. [[spoiler:To look at it another way, they have a different understanding of the Five Maxims. They can be trusted with perfect information of the future because they won't act improperly with it, they don't have to keep a span book because they all have perfect memory, they have full discretion when dealing with {{Masquerade}} breaches, and if they rehabilitate or execute a badly-fragged spanner, they're not fighting for or against an individual Lost Cause, they're fighting ''for the Continuum''.]]

* LivingOnBorrowedTime: If you die, the GM can rule that you spanned out... but ''you still saw how you died''. It's in your Yet. YouCantFightFate this time. At some point you have to span back to that moment, close the loop, and die. In game terms, the character can gain one more rank, but eventually they're either going to have to make the trip or be fragged out of existence - there's no escaping it. [[spoiler: Unless you engage in [[FakingTheDead shenanigans]] to [[TrickedOutTime reconcile your survival with the information]]. These tricks are illegal for Continuum spanners - ''not'' impossible or against the inheritors, just illegal - but widely practiced by Narcissists. Some of them will leave a corpse of themselves from a parallel universe, which always fools the Foxhorns, and usually even the Quicker.]]

** It's mentioned that, since leveller authorities have no hope of constraining a spanner, some spanners decide to abuse them freely, including theft, rape and murder. The Continuum is more or less okay with this, so long as you don't break ''their'' laws (which govern social behavior [[WhatMeasureIsANonSuper within spanner civilization]], not between spanners and levellers or crashers). ''However'', the book also mentions that there's a [[JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope short step]] between abandoning social taboos and abandoning the Maxims.
*** The general attitude of Spanner society to the abuse of Levelers by Spanners is the same as most things in Spanner civilization: if you have a problem with it, [[FigureItOutYourself do something about it yourself.]]

* LivingOnBorrowedTime: If you die, the GM can rule that you spanned out... but ''you still saw how you died''. It's in your Yet. YouCantFightFate this time. At some point you have to span back to that moment, close the loop, and die. In game terms, the character can gain one more rank, but eventually they're either going to have to make the trip or be fragged out of existence - there's no escaping it. [[spoiler: Unless you engage in [[FakingTheDead shenanigans]] to [[TrickedOutTime reconcile your survival with the information]]. These tricks are illegal for Continuum spanners, but widely practiced by Narcissists. Some of them will leave a corpse of themselves from a parallel universe, which always fools the Foxhorns, and usually even the Quicker.]]

* UnreliableNarrator: Taken together, the Continuum and Narcissist books present the same world with somewhat different time travel rules. Each side has theories and explanations for the other side's time travel rules, but ultimately one side is telling the truth and the other isn't.

* IHaveManyNames: Any spanner who makes it above Span One will go through a bunch of pseudonyms while interacting with levellers, but spanners also typically go through multiple actual names they use with their chronies in the Continuum across their Age. The example PC in the book does this step-by-step as she reclaims her Irish-American roots -- she was born Cynthia Carmichael, changes her surname to Cynthia Stirling as a Span Two, and becomes Seana Stirling as an Exalted.

* DirectLineToTheAuthor: The rulebooks claim that the authors of the game received their information from the spanners (time travelers) whose adventures are the basis for the game. The Atlantean Councils believe that it will assist humanity in acclimating to the time-travelling civilization that they'll enter 224 years later.

* LiteraryAgentHypothesis: Any inaccuracies in either history or future predictions are handwaved away in the text by saying the ''Continuum'' rulebook was written to be deliberately inaccurate to help prepare levellers for the Hour of Inheritance without actually burdening their Yets with things they're not ready to know.

* TeleportSpam: As often pointed out by the creators of the game, starting characters in ''Continuum'' are more powerful than most characters in RPGs ever get, with the ''unlimited'' ability to "span levelly" (teleport spatially without TimeTravel, appearing in a new place exactly one second later) within a one-mile radius. It's already extremely difficult for the GM to think of mundane situations that pose any threat to even a Span One character, much less an experienced player who's achieved Span Three or Four, which is one reason Time Combat is so abstract and is a matter of messing with someone's known timeline from a distance more than it is actual fighting.