RETROACTIVE CONTINUITY IN GAMING
By Jonathan Nolan
(c) 2002
Retroactive continuity is the practice of assuming that fictional world is real and that therefore it has a history which must be consistent.
From this simple hypothesis flows the whole rich field in modern comics of attempting to reconcile the inconsistencies in the stories of favourite superheroes. These inconsistencies are usually just caused by poor writing and editing, but sometimes they are also due to an original idea being revisited deliberately and either explained (badly) or altered (badly) so that questions remain. An example of this familiar to a lot of people would be the change in Oz out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the character's first appearance as a werewolf he had a pretty hokey and old-fashioned wolf head mask. In the later appearances when the show had more money for effects and had more time to flesh out its own universe quite deliberately, Oz's werewolf appearance was a lot stranger, more unformed and horrific. This simple change is exactly the sort of change that, although any normal fan understands the real-world reasons for, may call for an explanation within the universe.
So it is with roleplaying games.
Some games, especially for example RuneQuest, betray longterm fans with constant inconsistent changes that simply cannot be reconciled. These sorts of changes prevent loyalty building up for the game world or "franchise".
Dungeons and Dragons has, prior to the current version of the game, avoided this problem by clearly separating the powerful and important characters in published adventures and rulebooks from a particular version of those rules. This allowed fans to create detailed histories of particular game universes that really needed little or no knowledge of the rules to understand.
A gamemaster or dungeonmaster should at least try and create some background for the world the adventures are to be set in. One way of doing this is to look at the modules or adventures published for the game system you are going to use, and incorporate some of the heroes and villains from those stories into the world as you will run it.
For example, even if the events in Skarda's Mirror written for original D&D arel ong over in your campaign, those events, if they occurred, will be part of the background of the world. Veteran adventurers might have been involved in that quest years before; perhaps the adventure was a century or more ago: in which case maybe Skarda's actual Mirror is to be found for sale in some Bazaar of the Bizarre somewhere...
This raises the related topic of he flavour of a campaign world. It is a mistake to simply lift a flavour wholesale from a movie, comic or book. It is better to seed a world with a flavour, then let other influences also add to the look and feel of the game. For instance, if a series of modules that are to be played could be seen to relate to another earlier group of modules that are not going to be used, a gamemaster could speculate that there has been a change in politics, culture or dominance of the different races between the hypothetical earlier era of the unused adventures and the era of the adventures to be used.
