This is RPG-ology #101: Continuity, for April 2026.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Continuity, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
As part of my regular work for Valdron Inc, I [oversee oversaw] our Tip of the Week site. Each week we post[ed] a new game tip, which appear[sed] on web sites across the Internet. I [write wrote] many of those tips, and the rest I [get got] from other people willing to share their thoughts with me.
I suppose it was when we had passed fifty or sixty tips that I began to realize I needed a better way to brainstorm, to come up with new tips that weren’t retreads of the old tips. What I decided to do was create categories, not by deciding what categories should exist but by reading through all the past tips and extrapolating the general areas to which they related. Once I had done that, I would be able to read over all the old tips related to, say, creating ambiance, and think about whether there were other things I had done to create ambiance that could be added to the list. Today the list of tips approaches two hundred.
One of the categories I recognized is something I’ve dubbed continuity. Since all words have multiple meanings, it may help to provide my definition of this one. I know that in movies, continuity means that things are consistent from scene to scene. If a character gets a cut over his right eye in one scene, we expect that it will still be there in the next. But although it is possible to make continuity errors of that sort in role playing games (changing the names of characters, or the locations of rooms or objects because you forgot what you said), that’s not what I meant. Continuity, as I am using it, is that feeling of a continuing story, that events in the future have followed from those in the past, that the story is going somewhere, that everything is somehow, at least loosely, connected.
There [are were] a lot of tips archived on the site which address[ed] ways to encourage this. They range[d] from writing a history and reading the most recent sections before play begins to creating an arch-nemesis who recurs behind the scenes in several adventures, foreshadowing planned future adventures, breaking at cliffhangers, keeping a calendar of what has happened, recording changes made by characters which other characters may later find, and using treasure items from one adventure as the starting point for another. In all these things, the players are given the feeling that the story is connected.
Continuity might have been a problem in this series. After all, each episode promises that the next will be different, yet overall it is supposed to be the same. It is supposed to be about the creative process, about ways to enhance our games, whether with practical nuts-and-bolts suggestions or esoteric idea generators or–well, we never really put a limit on what could be used to that end. It might be that in pursuing so many threads, we wind up with a tangle. Yet perhaps there is continuity here. One of the small ways we have maintained continuity is by looking back, each quarter, at the past twelve articles. As we complete fifteen months, it is time to do so again.
- Characterization was the first entry in the new year. It spoke of ways to give nuances of personality to your non-player characters through voices, mannerisms, and similar shortcuts.
- We examined the history of Cash next, looking at money through the ages and providing some practical ideas about how the kind of money your characters use could be used to spice up the game.
- Speaking of money, our next column discussed how to divide it into Shares. This challenged several assumptions about how these things are done, and offered some ideas on how to do them which are less common.
- Props examined why so many of us use props and costumes and set decorations in our games. This article specifically recalled something from an earlier one, Derivative; and as it suggested the use of such props not merely to set mood but to bring characters to life, it in some ways reminded of Characterization a few weeks before.
- Comparisons took us into the realm of game mechanics, suggesting that the choice of the best weapon in a game was partly subjective, but partly objective, and that players should use the mechanics of the game to understand what it is their characters actually see.
- The earlier article Characterization was again recalled in Name-monics, remembering that there are many tricks which can be used by the referee to help remember information he’s going to need at his fingertips during play; but that one of the best of these is to write information that is easy to remember.
- Expanding attempted to suggest a way to generate ideas for scenarios by taking one thing and making it the main thing. It mentioned a number of scenarios that have been mentioned in previous articles.
- Stars would seem to be one of the more esoteric efforts. Laced with bits of other people’s poetry, it challenged us to try to bring the awe our ancestors felt toward the heavens into our fantasy characters.
- We followed this with the much more mundane discussion of Paperwork. This was back to the practical, looking at ways to organize the information and the papers on which it is printed.
- One of the people mentioned in Paperwork appeared again in Clones. This article not only hearkened back to Name-monics (which in turn connected it to Characterization), that article had foreshadowed this one, mentioning that the core idea of this–using people you know as characters in your game worlds–was so much more than just a mnemonic device.
- Flies and Fairies took us back into mechanics, with a different focus on the ideas presented in Comparisons, as it considered the intricate ways in which protection and durability interact in making characters survivable.
- Last [
weekmonth] we talked about Plague. Like the awe for the Stars, we found in this something often absent from our games–a recurring theme in these columns, but always with fresh aspects.
[Thirteen weeks About a year] ago in Celebrations we considered why and how we celebrate, and looked back at the previous year; if you look again, you will find that continuity exists as, in much the same way as these, articles recall each other, relate to similar ideas, sometimes foreshadow each other. Thus the series has a kind of continuity, holding together as a continuation of the same story, despite the diversity that exists from week to week.
Every game can capture continuity somehow. It can be in the nature of the world, the people who populate it, the kinds of adventures they have. I imagine someone is skeptical; someone is thinking that it would not be possible to bring continuity into their games, because things keep changing. I once thought that continuity would be a problem in Multiverser. After all, not only do the characters leap from universe to universe, genre to genre, milieu to milieu, they are frequently, nay, usually in different universes, genres, and milieus [from each other]. How could such a game have any continuity at all? What I discovered, and the reason the game took the name Multiverser, is that the story is about the characters. It is the continuing story of their imaginary lives. They carry their skills, abilities, equipment, and, above all, ideas with them. The continuity is created because they take each new and different experience and connect it within themselves as part of their lives. Universes are lost; some are destroyed. Characters continue, creating a story not about the universes but about themselves. Continuity is maintained. By understanding how it is, I can enhance it. By enhancing it, I increase the players’ impression that this is all part of one story, all going somewhere, coming from the past toward an as yet unknown future which they will in part create and in part experience. That is the value it holds.
[Next week, something different.]
Previous article: Plague.
Next article: Objectives.