C°ntinuum: Roleplaying in the Yet and Nªrcissist: Crash Free
This is a much-forgotten game franchise with unique lore. Continuum/Narcissist is a roleplaying game setting that theorizes what the world would be like if there were multiple civilizations from Earth's history that had become capable of time travel. The players are either Continuum members, who want to stay on this time line, or Narcissists, who want to make their own time lines. Either way they've made a potent enemy. There are three main groups. Last on the timeline are The Inheritors, who live in the far future after space travel allowed off-world civilizations, and who are only interested in coming back here when they have to keep the timeline headed in a direction that one day will allow The Inheritors to exist. At the other (early) end of humanity is Antidesertium, the inspiration for legends about ancient technologically advanced civilizations, who were wiped out by a weapon that created the Sahara Desert and an ice age. In-between are the Societies, which you would recognize from recorded history, but that are secretly governed by a time-travelling government conspiracy who keep everything between the other two civilizations as mundane as they can manage. That means, unless you go thousands of years from where you were born, you're in a no-man's-land surrounded by a war in outer space. Good luck finding a physical rulebook. (The layout of their books sucks anyway.) Continuum is hard enough to find, but the Narcissist core rule book was only ever released online as a .PDF because the developers went backrupt before they could publish paper copies. They're hard to find physical copies of and they predate .PDFs becoming commonplace for roleplaying, so running a game is harder than one would expect. The obvious workaround was for the authors to paraphrase that book's content to the extent that the game can't be run, but that a player could prepare themselves to play with someone who has either of the physical core rule books. (Each of the two options had independent core book releases, allowing either to work as the core rules for roleplaying.) Then the authors can run the game with prepared players.
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