The Continuum roleplaying game has been in existence for about five years now officially, and there are many elements of the game system that have aspects to them that make the players, and GMs, think a little bit. This Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page is designed to answer some of the commonly asked questions about one of the more complex Continuum game elements - fragmentation, or frag.
The out-of-game answer is that you feel frag when the GM says you feel frag. Usually he has a good reason why you feel it when you do, and usually you'll think, "Oh, yeah, of course I feel frag now."
For instance, let's say you're in your room today at 12:00. You read a book for an hour. Then, at 1:00, you span Down to 12:30 in your room. Oops! Frag! You know your elder didn't span in at 12:30, so you've created an As/As Not. This will make you feel frag. Now, it's *possible* that you're not "destined" to fix it until years in your Yet, but it's much, much more likely that you'll feel the frag the moment you arrive at 12:30. And when you feel it, you won't be wondering why you felt it at that moment!
Sometimes, frag will seem to "just happen" out of nowhere. Someone is attacking your Age. Why does it hit you now? Because now is the time you're supposed to do something about it. Fixing the frag was in your Yet until you caught up with it.
If a spanner has frag, fixing it is in his Yet. He can either inform a friend (i.e., the Continuum) of his dilemma, getting the event performed (see the book, "The Beer Crisis of William & Edward", pg. 55), or asks/investigates around to find out what the problem is, and performs the action himself. Either are in keeping with the Third Maxim, since reporting frag is as responsible as "fixing" it directly.
This is why the As/As Not has such a vague name, since it is both a point and a probability. It's related to the eternal question of when frag "occurs" or is felt. Liz Holliday asked Chris Adams how it was possible for someone to be called to an unrelated event far away. After his roundabout explanation, she hit on what he was after: "Spooky action at a distance", the tendency for any two particles, once polarised, to react to each other's shift in polarity, even when separated and isolated from each other. Certainly all of us are related to all the events of our lives.
Spanners can affect this when events are "disturbed", and so feel the (un)subtle urge of frag (again, see FI pg. 10). Levellers can do nothing about As/As Nots and so experience deja vu. (Not the fake-y deja vu as presented in movies like The Matrix, but the actual sensation of remembering having remembered an event, however minor, As it is taking place.)
It's a floating point of GM control whether to pin the location of the As/As Not down before the player does, or not. Certainly a roleplayed Oracle or Froon would pin down an As/As Not as sure as pinning down the location of a quantum particle collapses its wave-function. But heavy physics-speak aside, think of it as a wandering monster in a very narrow corridor that some PC has to enter sooner or later. The GM can move it around or roll its position randomly when encountered, but it's in there somewhere.
Theoretically, a GM could even let players get away with a large number of causal loops for awhile, and then just dump them with a pile of frag all at once, claiming that that was "when" they have to fix it all. But that defeats players' innate sense of fair play, and punishment in increments works just as well as reward in increments; see Call of Cthulhu's Sanity points, for example.
A Narcissist decides he hates a particular spanner, and frags him. Let's say the Narcissist steals the spanner's Cheerios five minutes before he eats them. Now the spanner is fragged: to the spanner, it's part of the universe that he ate his Cheerios. The narcissist is fine: to him, it's part of the universe that the spanner *didn't* eat his Cheerios, because they were stolen.
Now, the spanner has two options to cure frag. He can try to frag the Narcissist back, or he can try to repair his frag without affecting anyone else's. First, let's look at the case in question: throwing frag back at the Narcissist. The spanner goes to the moment a second after the Narcissist steals the Cheerios, surprises him, and knocks him out. The Narcissist moved on from this point, so he's not stopped (in a Time Combat), but he's been fragged: his timeline of successfully stealing the Cheerios is being interfered with. The spanner replaces the Cheerios and removes the unconscious body of the Narcissist seconds after the event, and the spanner's junior enters and enjoys his breakfast. The spanner's frag is gone: the causality of his Age is back to what it is supposed to be. However, the Narcissist remains fragged. To him, part of the universe (the part where he steals the Cheerios) is broken. That's how you transfer frag at an As/As Not. You prevent the frag from ever occurring to you, and frag the opponent at the same moment.
Of course, there's a nicer way to do it. If you feel pity for the Narcissist, you might pop in with another box of Cheerios a second after he leaves and put the box where it belongs. Your causality is restored, and the Narcissist got away with the Cheerios just as he remembers. No one is fragged.
The issue of the As/As Not is what effect sentient force has on the universe. To all intents and purposes, levellers are objects as are the furniture. In any example of a spanner having to race around to fix a goof (through hypnosis) or a deliberate attempt to frag someone or something, the TV set and the chair do not have to fix their frag. So objects never "suffer" more than a point of frag at a time - and only if they're at the As/As Not.
Remember that many effects assumed to be universal constants by new spanners (like "The timeline cannot be changed" or "Changing time frags oneself") are actually the results of the sentient force applied by the Continuum.
If this were to be a trick question, then perhaps Alice chooses a hot dog for lunch, and her elder is also there (a minute earlier) choosing a hamburger for dinner. There would be no frag, but Alice has a Gemini to sort out. Of course, Bob would have seen both, and your absence of that information is what makes that a clever twist. Otherwise, the question is one of Rendezvous, which is addressed in the opening pages of Further Information, because Alice is there making a meal. However, Alice is a player character spanner, too.
Properly, a GM should not *play* Alice or make her meal decisions for her, especially in such close quarters as five minutes Up in a kitchen, since Alice's player is there. The sequence should be:
Bob spans out.
The GM turns to Alice, and asks what she does. If she hangs out, she
can tell Bob what she wants to eat, avoiding the discrepancy altogether.
But maybe she spans off elsewhen, too!
Bob spans in and either continues play with Alice, or sees an empty
kitchen. (Naturally, if a player character's player is entirely absent
from the game session, the GM must go ahead and play the character
- no way to avoid that in the game, against determined spanners. But
then the GM alone is setting Bob and Alice up for frag if he describes
two conflicting actions from an NPC or PC he's playing for the night.)
It is possible for Bob to spy on Alice (I'm sure many games have fun with the privacy issue). But this is little different from other rpgs when a PC is spying on another: the GM doesn't just invent what happens, the players do. The only exception is meeting a elder *self* (not an elder of another player character, although it's very possible to be present for another spanner's Gemini). Wise GMs ensure that the elder is plainly older or otherwise different enough to make it tough for players to simply go and be the elder immediately.
Finally, if the incident was played exactly as you describe, Bob is fragged, but it's his own fault. First Maxim: Information is All. If Alice declares she's making hot dogs, Bob has to point out that hamburgers are in her Yet, or get burned. Naturally, if Alice ignores her chrony, they both get a point of frag, one that will be tough to mend. A comparative example from level life would be if Alice is at the wheel of the car, stopped at a stop sign at a dangerous blind intersection. From the passenger seat, Bob can see the reflection of a convoy of eighteen wheelers barrelling down on them in some nearby shop window. This is not noticed by Alice, who decides to go. Does Bob scream "Stop"? Oh yes, yes he does.
You might Frune. Maybe your elder knows someone who knows someone who happens to know that you *do* find the As/As Not and fix it, and how you do it. This information might trickle its way back to you. Perhaps when you win the Time Combat, you tell your Mentor and he reports it to the Scribes, and the you in the Time Combat goes to a Scribe for help.
I would tend to agree that Oracling (researching) the As/As Not would be unlikely to be successful, but it's probably not impossible. Using your span book as a guide, you might do research on various places you've been, and maybe someone happened to take a photograph of your blue tie, when you know perfectly well that it's supposed to be red . Or, since Emily had to watch Jimmy for a while, Jimmy might be able to uncover this tail in his research.
He could go to his Mentor and ask him to Dream up an answer, but that seems a rather unsatisfying Deus Ex Machina way to end every investigation. However, it is in the nature of the Continuum to help out chronies when they can't help themselves. If Jimmy fails to figure out what's happened, going to his Mentor (or his chronies) would be the right thing to do. It's important to not forget that sometimes Mentors fail, too! Unless he has specific plans concerning this, the GM should roll for the Mentor's chance to Oracle or Frune, too! Then the mentor might need to call upon some of his own higher-span friends...
A spanner is not omniscient, certainly not about his Yet. This is both good (absolute foreknowledge is burdensome and maddening) and bad ("how did I cause/get that frag?")
While mistakes happen (see Continuum , "The Beer Crisis of William & Edward", pg. 55) they're usually between friendly spanners, and are easily rectified. It's hardly necessary for the GM to invent such events, when novice spanners are "learning the ropes" in a busy corner full of Span Ones.
This is also why it's *very* important to "call ahead" before stomping around a distant corner: An unknown spanner making even one serious mistake might be thought a Narcissist. Time Combat may commence if you're overly secretive with the local corner! But between the First and Third Maxims, the Societies and the Continuum function very smoothly.
Consider this: every time a hypnotic suggestion is applied without the suggestee being able to remember, how much Age do they lose? An Internal Clock might help, but not if the Hypnosis were hostile - a victim might even get a post-hypnotic suggestion to have amnesia under the right circumstances. How much Age will that be? Little wonder the Scribes are all over this and discourage its use. (But since it exists in the real world, we can hardly write it out of the game, can we?)
If you feel frag, do something about it. If you don't, it's likely that someone else will fix the problem, but he may not consider whether the solution fixes your frag or not. Then you've either got to come up with a very clever patch, or frag someone else in trying to fix your own.
It's unlikely that you'll feel frag, go about your business for a while, and then stop feeling frag. It's possible though: your interaction with others and your feeling of frag may eventually lead to the solution despite your lack of effort ("You see Frank today? He looks like someone's fragged him! Maybe we should help him..."). But don't count on it.
Killing Hitler's grandfather wouldn't be as bad as killing Hitler himself. There are far fewer people directly dependent on the conception of Hitler's parents than on the adult life of Hitler himself. The narcissist would still be fragging lots of people, though, and these would take care of him before the frag could spread to people closer to Hitler.
If millions and millions of spanners in Hitler's locality suddenly decided not to fix the frag (something that would just never happen), then yes, eventually the frag would reach a spanner watching the History Channel. But in the Continuum, this is as improbable as all of the air in a room spontaneously moving out the window, leaving a vacuum. Not statistically impossible, but it's not going to happen, either. And you can be sure that all Hitler-related localities are closely guarded!
Why is this frag? Because I didn't experience my elder appearing in the living room at 12:30, and yet here I am anyway! I know for a fact that no one entered the room at 12:30, but I also know for a fact that *I* entered the room at 12:30. This is a contradiction, and my frag is a result of me needing to do whatever is necessary to prevent it from being a contradiction. Somehow, I have to account for the fact that I *do* span in at 12:30, yet I didn't experience myself spanning in.
So here I am, the elder at 12:30 in the living room. My junior looks up at me, and says, "Hi," and waits for me to say something to him. I feel the frag, and want to fix it. "Wait right here," I tell him (and he'll obey, because of the Second Maxim).
I span to the kitchen at 9:00, where and when I know my mentor is having breakfast. I tell him what I did, and after a bit of annoyed muttering, he agrees to go with me and fix the problem. The two of us span to the living room at 12:31.
We find my junior still sitting there obediently. My mentor walks up to him. "Your elder just fragged himself," he says to my junior. "I'm going to have to hypnotize you to fix it." My junior looks rather dismayed, but agrees to be hypnotized. My mentor pulls out a convenient little Aquarian gadget to help with the process, and puts my junior in a trance.
"You are getting sleeeeepppyyyyyyyy (etc.). You will forget about my arrival and the arrival of your elder just now. We never showed up. You just sat here watching TV. Now watch this." He pulls out a videotape and pops it into the VCR, and it's the commercial I wanted to see. "When your show is over, you'll want to go Down to 12:30 to watch this commercial more closely. You won't realize that this will cause you frag."
And so on and on. By 12:40, my junior is sitting back, watching TV, not realizing that he ever saw us. I was there watching this, and I realize that this is exactly what happened to me, but I don't remember any of it. With my frag fixed, my mentor and I span away, leaving my junior to watch the rest of his show.
Now, why would any of this frag the mentor? It wouldn't. There is nothing at all in his Age that is being contradicted. He never experienced an event that didn't happen. What he did was provide the crucial event to make what I experienced as the junior match what I experienced as the elder. My junior just didn't remember he'd seen it, because he'd been hypnotized not to.
If he wanted to, my mentor could even use his amazing powers of hypnosis to remove the memory block. If he did this, I'd suddenly remember being the junior and seeing my elder and my mentor showing up and hypnotizing me. Remembering this wouldn't frag me or anything, because it's what happened, and nothing is contradicted.
There is this very common perception that frag is what you feel when you exist as a paradox. You must remember that ultimately, there are no paradoxes: every *potential* paradox is fixed by someone. If there are no paradoxes, then frag cannot be that which you feel due to the existence of a paradox. Frag is a physical sensation caused by having the need to fix the problem in your Yet.
If the Rendezvous-ing spanners already know what the narc looks like, one could imagine the accidental narc being shot to death in the midst of the Rendezvous, then the Continuum going to the trouble of erasing all memory of the unfortunate affair from the spanners. Or the angry, fragged spanner elders fragging the poor cretin out at every point in spacetime before he spans off to appear before their juniors at the Rendezvous. Very sad narc, indeed.
Doing it by design is another matter - the narc might or might not be fragged with the rest (depending on his knowledge of the Rendezvous) - but he would certainly be expecting retaliation, and could prepare accordingly.
As for "how badly", the Frag Tables (Continuum , page 129) apply to Time Combat as written; otherwise start with 1 point for each spanner affected.
Special thanks to Chris Adams, Dave Fooden, Barbara Manui, David Trimboli, and the folks on the Continuum Mailing List for their help in the compiling of this FAQ information.