Continuum (role-playing Game) - Terms

Terms

Spanner
Anyone who travels in time. C°ntinuum's time-travel technology requires no external device and only the exercise of one's will to function.
The Continuum
The society of time-travelers who believe that the timeline cannot (and thus should not) be changed. Whether this is true or if it is this way because the Inheritors want a stable existence is unclear. In the Nªrcissist 0.7 playtest document, they are called the Swarm by Crashers, in reference to the way they act in great numbers with little strategy.
Narcissists
The members of the society that opposes the Continuum, believing that the timeline can and should be changed. In the Nªrcissist 0.7 playtest document, they are shown to also believe in a continuous multiverse, and their efforts to escape into it via time travel lead to their being called Crashers; their poor reputation is shown to be the result of the Continuum perceiving this as only attempts to undermine the stability of reality.
Up/down
Up and down refer to the absolute future and past, as distinct from a time traveler's subjective experience of time. For example, the year 2000 is "up" from the year 1990. Use of the words comes from visualizing the Big Bang as the ultimate "bottom" of space-time.
Slipshank
A time-travel technique where your future self gives your current self something. This accrues a small amount of Frag until you actually perform the action. For example, a spanner sitting in front of the television may be thirsty, but not want to get up. She may then reach under the chair, find a beer, and drink it. It is now necessary for her to, at some point in her yet, get a beer, travel back in time, and place it under the sofa, and she will have a small amount of frag until she does.
Yet
A spanner's personal future timeline. What history knows you've done, but isn't in your 'age'. You have 'yet' to do it. "When I slipshanked myself that beer, putting a beer under the chair went into my Yet."
Age
A spanner's subjective past, in contrast with the world's (which is down). For example, a spanner who ate a cookie on Tuesday, immediately time-traveled to Sunday, then might say on Monday, "I ate our last cookie a day up and a day ago of age. Make sure you don't take it before I eat it, okay?" The "day up" indicates that today is Monday and the cookie will be eaten on Tuesday. The "day of age" indicates that the spanner remembers eating the cookie one day ago in his personal timeline.
Gemini Incident
Encountering yourself. This is risky, because if the event happens differently the "second" time, there is potential for paradox and frag.

Read more about this topic:  Continuum (role-playing Game)

Famous quotes containing the word terms:

    Certainly for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.
    Walter Pater (1839–1894)

    Before I get through with you, you will have a clear case for divorce and so will my wife. Now, the first thing to do is arrange for a settlement. You take the children, your husband takes the house, Junior burns down the house, you take the insurance and I take you!
    S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Arthur Sheekman, Will Johnstone, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Monkey Business, terms for a divorce settlement proposed while trying to woo Lucille Briggs (Thelma Todd)

    But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.”
    Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)