Continuum 2023

I’ve just returned from a wonderful weekend playing games and seeing old friends at Continuum 2023. Continuum is held in Leicester at one of the university halls of residence.

Continuum originally started back in 1992 under a different name: Convulsion. I don’t go to it as often as I might like (it often clashes with family holidays), but this year everything worked out, so I packed up my bags on Friday morning and headed down.

Friday

I arrived at about three, checked in and picked up my keys before dumping everything in my room and heading to the bar to find friends. 

University accommodation - bringing back memories

My room was clean and felt reasonably spacious. It was en-suite and was a significant improvement on the accommodation I remember from my university days, but it wasn’t as plush as a hotel room. (But it was much cheaper, so there’s that.) 

I found the single bed a little uncomfortable. I’m sure my twenty-year-old self wouldn’t have noticed, but I’m pickier about mattresses now that I’m older.

Hillfolk

My first game of the con was Hillfolk (which I discussed here and here). I’ll go into the game in more detail in a later post, but this was the best session of the convention for me by far. The players leaned into the drama, and I had little to do apart from watching them play.

None of the players had played Hillfolk before, but three had backed the Kickstarter. Like me, their copies had sat on the shelf unplayed. I suspect that may change, and I will certainly run it again.

Hillfolk

After Hillfolk, I caught up with more friends at the bar and retired to bed after midnight. 

Saturday

After not enough sleep (it doesn’t matter what time I go to bed, I always wake around 6 am, if not before), I had the traditional Continuum breakfast in the hall canteen. The canteen was great – three cooked meals a day if you wanted it. The food was fine – it wasn’t great (it was university food, after all), but it was filling, there was plenty of it, and it wasn’t too expensive.

I had nothing scheduled for Saturday morning, and none of the games (with free slots) appealed, so I played board games and chatted with friends.

After lunch, I headed over to Shirley House, a large, detached house that I guess the university uses for accommodation and Continuum uses for freeforms. It’s a great venue with several medium-sized rooms so that you can spread out.

Veterans Day

After lunch, I played a low-power superhero in Veterans Day (written by Clare Gardner, Mike Grace, Alex Helm, Martin Jones, Adrian Smith, and Mike Snowden). My power was that I could jam radio signals (and a secret one). My game was okay – I struggled with engaging with the bigger plots. I think that was a combination of poor playing by me and a character that felt a little too much on the periphery. 

Highlights included the crazy alien big plot, planning to bring Christianity to the aliens, and figuring out some of the mysteries in my background.

A few simple things would have improved my game – another character I could trust, a slightly more coherent character sheet, and a couple of characters who suspected me of having a secret superpower.

Party like it’s 1993

Saturday evening saw Mark Galeoti’s Party Like It’s 1993, where I played a low-level crook in 1993 Berlin. The game was set in an East German underground nightclub. Coincidentally, the lights in the venue were faulty and kept going off while the electrician came to fix them. That only added to the nightclubby atmosphere.

I went into the game with some concerns – I knew only four other people (one of whom I didn’t really know and another I didn’t trust). But it seemed that was the same for everyone – nobody seemed to know many others, and everyone was playing their cards close to their chests. But that didn’t matter – everyone was in the same boat and trying to find out as much as they could without giving too much away.

Highlights included organising the darts tournament (it’s interesting how such a simple thing brought me great pleasure), being saved (or stitched up – it was difficult to tell) by Kris, the shonky (but larp-safe) dartboard (for which I blame East Germany), and the surprise reveal at the end (well, it surprised me).

Sunday

Fiasco

I facilitated a five-player game of Fiasco on Sunday, using the Folly and Fortune Regency playset. We had an arranged marriage, a secret engagement and plenty of scandal. It was a lot of fun – but it wasn’t quite as good as Hillfolk on Friday.

Fiasco

Ghosts… It’s not Ibsen

My last game of Continuum was the one I was approaching with trepidation. Ghosts… It’s not Ibsen is written by Fiona Lloyd and based on the Ghosts BBC TV series. In the TV series, the ghosts can normally only speak to other ghosts, and the living can only normally talk to the living. The only exception is the character of Alison, who can see (and hear) the ghosts after a bump on the head.

So how would a freeform work when half of the players can’t interact with the other half? When I picked up my character sheet, it was marked with, “You can’t see or hear anyone wearing a green badge.” Uh oh.

On top of that, there wasn’t much to my character sheet. I had broken my mother out from her rubbish care home (which had barred me from visiting), and I was on the run – and heading to my sister’s, where she and her husband had come into possession of an enormous old house. But that was it – I didn’t have any traditional freeform goals. I was just “there”.

But it was great.

The GMs staged our entrances, giving me time to meet Petra, explain why I was there, and bring our mother in. I ignored the ghosts (which was fun but not easy, especially when they accused me of being a leper).

About thirty minutes in, one of the other players found a device that let anyone interact with the ghosts – and once we did that, it wasn’t long before we just interacted with them anyway (as that restriction eventually became irritating). The one change I’d make would be to introduce a plot element (maybe a ritual) using the device that makes the ghosts visible until the end of the game.

Highlights included uncovering the history and backstory (there was so much backstory!) and helping the ghosts learn more about themselves and those who left them behind.

So sometimes it’s worth going into a game with low expectations. That way, they can only delight you!

Back to normality

And after Ghosts, it was time for a final cafeteria meal before I headed back north and to home.