Continuum 2025:  Fri 25th July - Mon 28th July

Sunday 27th July

After a much better night’s sleep, I was able to wake up early. Breakfast as the same as yesterday. Good with the same subtle differences from what you’d expect. Because I’d been was so early I was able to compose an extended Social Media post about my personal struggles with the Saturday night game system.

I’d been avoiding the crowding at the noticeboards, so I hadn’t carefully selected my games - signing up for ones with remaining player slots. Maybe a game where you played cats in historical Japan wouldn’t have been my first choice but it turned out to be an absolute blast.

The Referee had based her game around historical Japanese artistic representations of cats but she’d also found some disturbing Japanese depictions of other creatures which she worked into an engaging scenario.

At one point I suggested she use the whiteboard in the room and it became a focal point for a major section of the game.

She clearly loved cats as shown by her dice tray:

We finished a bit early and - for the first time - I was able to investigate the lunch options. (Breakfast and Dinner were prepaid.) The choice is either a Burger or Burrito in the restaurant (£12) or a meal deal of supermarket style Sandwich, wrap or baguette with drink and snack in the bar (£8).

I grabbed a sandwich meal deal which I took back to my room and was able to finish off my social media post from the morning and do my blog post about Saturday.

The afternoon game was “The Rivers of London”. Again, avoiding the crush, I’d just picked a game with open slots. It’s not something I would have looked at for a first choice. It was another excellent game session. Based on books I hadn’t read, but you could see why people wanted a game based on them. It’s a really good paranormal investigation setting based in contemporary London. A clear and engaging system - basically streamlined Call of Cthulhu. A really good Referee who had crafted a clever (too clever for me) paranormal mystery based around an actual historical book. (He had an actual copy at the table.) And - again - friendly, engaging and exceptionally clever players who managed to crack a mystery which would have left my head spinning. Great fun.

Evening meal was a sort of take on Sunday lunch. It was of reasonable quality and “did the job”. Dessert was…….a tiny tub of Ice Cream.

The game I’d offered to run had garnered no players. So I took down the sheet and signed up for the last available slot on the board. This was a Monty Python Role-playing game run by yet another luminary of the UK role-playing scene and White Dwarf Alumni.

No complaints here.

I have strong views on games based on existing properties. Personally if I was designing a Monty Python game I would have a taken a different tack. But, as I said, we had a seminal Referee and the group of players was excellent. To be honest, I reckon you could have given any of us a blank sheet of paper and told us to make up a scenario on the spot, we could have busked a great session with the rest of this group.

A great end to a great convention. So I’ll try not to complain that it ran over until fifteen minutes after midnight.