Continuum 2026

I had a good time at Continuum last year, so decided to book the entire weekend this time. No costume parties this time, just games. I booked a half day off work. My plan was to finish work at 12:30pm and get in the shower before driving over, which should give me enough time to sign up for an afternoon game and eat lunch before things started at 2pm. And my husband was free for the weekend so I was going to bring him along with me.

At 12:20pm my husband called out that he was having a quick shower. That was fine; he'd be out in about 10 minutes and I could still have my shower. Then there came a housewide thump as the electricity tripped.

By the time I'd managed to shut down my work laptop (still running off its battery, unlike the monitors and other peripherals), washed those parts I considered essential for going amongst other humans in cold water and filled my hair with dry shampoo, it was rather later than I planned. I left my husband at home to call the electrician and made it to Cranfield just in time to buy a sandwich and sign up for a game.

Game 1: Dragonbane

With only a short time to peruse the available games, I spotted a game of Dragonbane with space for one more and went for it. This turned out to be The Magistrate’s Gambit, the Free RPG Day scenario from Free League, a 2 hour tournament game with a timer. I enjoyed the last one of these I played, The Sinking Tower, but this one I liked even more, with more puzzles (and fairer puzzles) and less combat focus.

Technically we did complete all our objectives except the one about being discrete. The person who we were supposed to be keeping our activities hidden from was, shall we say, extremely aware of our presence by the end. I'm not sure how many points that would be worth - but at least we did finish on time.

With the game finishing early I had plenty of time to buy a meal ticket for that night's barbecue. The sausages weren't quite as good as the ones at ChaosiumCon but still a decent meal. I made some new friends over dinner, but unfortunately since they were standard convention gamers, I absolutely could not recognise them again.

Game 2: Call of Cthulhu

There's Call of Cthulhu...and then there's Call of Cthulhu with CJ Romer. Moonwashed College Halls is a scenario I've been looking forward to getting to play in, as it features students in the 1980s, and his last 1980s students scenario, Shared House, was an absolute hoot.

I played Laura, a pretty student whose four male best friends all had a crush on her, so while we did investigate the mystery of the haunted dorm room (and rather unexpectedly dealt with everything rather effectively) the most important thing was of course, who managed to pull at the Halloween disco.

This was one player's first ever game of Call of Cthulhu. Was this a typical experience? Well, it was a typical CJ experience!

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I decided to skip Saturday morning games. The previous night's game had gone on fairly late, and I decided I'd rather have the sleep. So I woke up at 10am, dry shampooed my hair again, left my husband at home to deal with the boiler engineer (for it was the boiler which had tripped the electrics) and headed back to Cranfield.

Game 3: Matrons of Mystery

It was tough deciding what to pitch, particularly since I don't know this con well enough yet to really know what goes down well, but since Simon Burley periodically reminds me I'm supposed to promote my own stuff, I decided to run Matrons of Mystery, specifically my holiday park themed scenario Chalet Grave, originally written to run at ConTingency.

This scenario requires determining why the Matrons are all at a holiday park together. On this occasion, after Gladys, Violet, Doris and Nettie had introduced themselves, it was clear what had happened. Their various children and other relatives had teamed up to send Mum/Aunty away to the seaside for a few days in the hope that getting them out of their village would stop them getting mixed up in murders. Which of course it did not.

Game 4: Call of Cthulhu

There were quite a few appealing games on Saturday night, but on arriving at the sign-up board I decided on There is no ‘I’ in Cthulhu, a modern day scenario about a group of people going on a management retreat. It turned out to be GMed by one of the people I met at the Friday barbecue, so as long as he's wearing a name badge the next time I see him, there's a chance I might remember him.

I picked up the extremely stressed Mara Kline, there to learn about work/life balance after multiple attempts to get out of going. While initially sceptical, she started warming to at least some of her fellow delegates as the retreat went on - and sure, she might have been dead at the end (we ended on a cliffhanger) - but overall I think it was a positive experience for her.

The highlight of this was absolutely the other players for completely leaning in on the corporate horror of training and team building events. Great stuff. 

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The next morning dawned. More dry shampoo. By this time my hair was probably more powder than hair. My husband stayed at home in case the boiler engineer was able to get the necessary part that day. Once again I was skipping morning games but this time I had other plans.

Seminar: War Helms and Weapon Dancers

I'm something of an archaeology enthusiast (part of my first degree is archaeology) so I was excited to see a seminar on the imagery of the Sutton Hoo helmet. This was fascinating stuff, educational and funny, and accompanied by some of the coolest props I've ever seen at a convention: museum grade replicas of the Sutton Hoo helmet and a variety of other artefacts.

During my degree I gave a seminar on Saxon garnet jewellery for the archaeomaterials course, and some of these replicas were of the artefacts I discussed in that seminar. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into reproducing these works of art.

Game 5: Call of Cthulhu

Once again there were quite a few options for the afternoon games, but spotting two of my friends signed up for a game of classic era Cthulhu I decided to give that one a go. We were the members of the Miskatonic University Astronomy Society, off on a field trip to a remote area with the opportunity to use a proper reflecting telescope in an observatory. Naturally it turned out that our host had observed a bit more than anticipated. A classic scenario in both era and ending, since by the end we had all either gone mad or exploded.

Game 6: Call of Cthulhu: Campfire Tales

I wasn't sure if I was going to stick around for the final session. If the boiler had been fixed by then, I might not have. But it hadn't, and there was another CJ Romer game with space: Jennings and the Ghost.

It's been a while since I'd read a Jennings book (I think I might have borrowed one from my dad) but I figured I knew the British boarding school story genre overall well enough to get by without the specifics. Jennings and Darbishire themselves were played by two players who actually did remember them well, while I picked up Venables. Along with Atkinson, Temple and Bromwich Major, we investigated strange noises, attempted murders and ghastly visions in the playing fields, although naturally the most horrific part was when we had to talk to a girl. Credit must go to Atkinson for his decision to create an overpowered cattle prod for self defence purposes, which came in remarkably useful in the denouement.

All in all, everything I could have hoped for and a fantastic conclusion to the convention.

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So once again I had a good time, and will book again next year, and possibly run more than one game as well - but obviously if you've got this far, what you really want to know is that the boiler got fixed on Monday and I finally got to wash my hair. 

Continuum 2025

 Continuum is a con that seems to have been running for quite a long time. It was previously held in Leicester, but last year suddenly found themselves in need of a new venue and moved to the University of Cranfield's conference centre. So having enjoyed the venue at ChaosiumCon, I decided to give this one a shot as well.

I decided to skip the Friday. I was planning on driving in and out each day, and that would mean an extra round trip (40 minutes each way). Also there was a costume party on the Friday night, and while I do love dressing up, I felt I wanted greater familiarity with the con before getting involved in that kind of thing. So it was Saturday morning when I arrived in Cranfield. Check in was very simple. My name was crossed off the list and I was handed my badge and a choice of lanyards, depending on my willingness to be photographed. I love this idea. Many people like taking photos of their groups at cons, and being able to see at a glance that someone doesn't want to be in the picture made for a much simpler time getting photos done.

With sign-up for morning games having happened already when I arrived, there wasn't much left. I signed up for the one game I could find with space. Then unexpectedly ran into one of my friends from Concrete Cow, also there for the first time, and we had time for a chat before the games started.

Game 1: Fallen London

I was vaguely aware of Fallen London as a browser based video game, and knew there was an RPG in the works because I'm on the Magpie Games discord, but other than that knew nothing.

The setting was a stand-out part of the game, and it's inspired me to give the browser game a go. There was quite a long description at the start, as I wasn't the only person who hadn't played the browser game and needed getting up to speed. I particularly like the rubbery men; squishy boneless people with squid-like heads attempting to live alongside humans.

I was expecting PBTA given Magpie's involvement, but with the browser game already having its own system, a lot of that clearly had to translate over to the RPG. At the core was a fairly simple dice pool system, rather like YZE but with 5 and 6 both counting as success. Things got more complicated when we got into skill levels, with Adept in particular foxing a lot of the group. I think I had it figured out by the end, but I'm still not sure. Hopefully that's something that the full game will make a bit clearer.

The group was all unfamiliar faces but I felt like I was in good company already. An excellent start to the gaming.

The convention was advertising build your own burritos for lunch, but at £12 I felt it was rather more than I wanted to either eat or pay. Instead I walked round to the Co-op, where I got a reduced to clear sandwich for the excellent price of £1.99. Then I ran into another friend, and had another nice chat which included some excellent tips on how to mount a particularly finicky miniature in a way that would prevent its spindly legs from collapsing again.

Game 2: Liminal

I wasn't going to go to a con and not pitch any games, and given that my newest Liminal scenario, Blood, Sweat and Tears, all takes place within a few miles of Cranfield, I decided to give it a shot. By lunchtime the sign-up sheet had filled up, and another group took on the mystery of why a P-division detective had been found dead when she was supposed to be on holiday.

I've run this enough times that it should all run smoothly, and apart from the fact that I am terrible at naming my NPCs and still had one unnamed character in this scenario, it did. In fact, we were done in 3 hours, rather less than the assigned slot time, but I'd always rather underrun than overrun. A lovely group of players who all brought their own energy to the pre-gens, including one old friend who spends enough time GMing that it's an absolute privilege to get him as a player.

Evening game sign-up happened at 6.30pm. Apparently there'd been a bit of a scrum on the Friday, but on Saturday we formed an orderly queue. By now any readers won't be surprised to hear that I ran into another old friend and had a nice chat. Except this time it was two old friends. And £17 for the evening meal was a rather more appealing prospect than lunch, so I had an enjoyable meal of lasagne, chicken in some kind of white sauce, potato wedges, garlic bread and some really nice green beans.

Game 3: Shiver

I picked this game for three reasons: the GM, who I always enjoy gaming with, the premise, which involved dinosaurs in a park, possibly of the Jurassic variety, and because I'd heard of Shiver plenty of times but never played it.

The custom d6s have symbols on each side corresponding to the characters' skill, and the system is a dice pool where you roll a number of custom dice equal to the skill level and aim to get the symbol for that skill. Naturally, like all dice pool systems, the dice are absolute bastards, but it is slightly mitigated by bonus talent dice which have some extra chances to succeed on them.

One thing I did like is that the skill you use often depends what equipment you're using. While unarmed combat is done with Grit, my character's worst skill, she became a lot more effective when picking up a weapon that used Smarts.

One thing I didn't like is that combat was a bit of a slog. Most weapons did 2 damage while my big two handed Smarts weapon did 4. While I don't know the monsters' exact stats, I do know we fought a group of four monsters where three of them had over 10 hit points and one had over 15. In theory we could have rolled criticals (two extra successes on top of the challenge rating for the monster) and done a bunch of extra damage, which would have speeded it up a lot, but in practice, see above about dice being bastards. Add in that each monster had the potential to do a reaction each time it got hit, meaning an extra dice roll any time we didn't fail, and we ended up with a fight which did not have the cinematic feel that the game aims to create.

The scenario was a fun one, very obviously based on a certain dinosaur franchise but soon diverging to a whole different kind of totally preventable disaster. It's the scenario for the game's Blockbuster starter set, and I think it's well worth a go. However, it does claim that it takes 2-4 hours to run. This is a lie. The GM had already cut out a whole chapter, and we ended up having to skim over some more to get to the end before our four hour slot was over and we had to leave.

Overall I liked Shiver as a system and would play it again, but between it requiring its own custom dice and my reservations with the combat, it's not going to be my first pick for cinematic action when Savage Worlds exists.

I decided not to play a game on the Sunday morning, in favour of getting more sleep, and take my chances with what was left for the afternoon games. I considered the seminars that were on offer, but not being a Runequest enthusiast, I wasn't sure there was anything there that would interest me, so had a look around the trade hall instead.

I took another walk to the Co-op for lunch, but was less lucky with the meal deals this time. All the sandwiches were gone, as were all the pasties in the flavours I like. But I did manage to get a sausage roll and a pain au raisin, and sat out in the sunshine to eat them before heading back in for the afternoon game.

Game 4: Rivers of London

What was left was Rivers of London, rather to my surprise as I'm used to that game booking up rather fast. It remains my favourite version of BRP, cutting out giant skill lists in favour of a slimmed down set of general skills and specialist expert skills. While I still think Liminal is a better urban fantasy game, this is still something I consider a reliable con pick.

This was a brilliant scenario, incorporating the multicultural nature of London, current events, history, the magic of the book series, and a classic children's book, to tell a strange story that began with a simple witness statement and escalated drastically. Probably the best RoL scenario I've played, which is saying a lot given how good all the others were.

One thing the GM did which I really liked was to give us two copies of every handout. With five players there was still a certain amount of reading over shoulders going on, but it really helped speed things up. Something I should try myself in future.

Then we had the closing ceremony, despite the fact that the con still had a whole game slot to go.

Sunday evening's dinner was a Sunday roast. Not quite what I was hoping for, given that the chicken was for some reason spicy, but you can't go wrong with a roast potato.

Game 5: The Walking Dead

With many people heading off early so as to not have to take time off on Monday, Sunday night's offerings were rather more sparse. I'd never watched The Walking Dead, but figured Free League games tend to be well put together and the basic zombie apocalypse concept was easy enough to grasp.

Mechanically it turned out to be very similar to Alien, except that instead of panic rolls, 1s on the stress dice caused walker-related events such as increased threat level, larger swarms or individual attacks. I was thoroughly impressed by how the game handles walker swarms, presenting them as a group challenge rather than individual combats. Hopefully the new version of Alien will incorporate this mechanic, as I can see it proving useful there as well. While I obviously can't compare it to the source material, as a zombie apocalypse game in general it's very well done.

We all had a background giving us connections to the other PCs, which resulted in some entertaining dialogue as another player repeatedly suggested using my character as bait to distract the walkers and I complained bitterly about having to rescue him when the rest of the party weren't ready to abandon him.

By the end we'd successfully dealt with the threat, rescued two people, and survived two trips to the critical injury table, despite the dice being, as previous noted re: YZE games, bastards. We were all done by 11pm, but with the drive home ahead of me, that suited me just fine.

Reflections

I had a great time. I was worried that I wouldn't know anyone (or would only know a very small number of people) but obviously this was not an issue - there were familiar faces everywhere. And even if there hadn't been, all the new people I met in my games were great.

There were a bunch of freeform larps running at the same time as the tabletop games. I have no idea how these work, but there are apparently some shorter ones that can be played in an hour, so maybe if I find myself with time to spare next time I'll see if I can try one out and see what it's like. Obviously I'm an experienced larper, but with my experience being primarily camping and foam swords larp, I don't really know what to expect beyond what one person told me - like tabletop except walking around the room.

I plan to be back next year. And in the interests of avoiding any scrums, I'll aim to pitch a game in the first slot.