Continuities & Eras
The Continuity is the soul of a build. It states the premise, the end state, who the power belongs to, and — critically — what is and is not inside this storyline. Everything you add hangs off that line.
The canon-scope tool
The most important field on a continuity is canon scope, where you declare, in plain prose, what is IN and what is OUT. This is not flavour; it is a working rule. When a player reaches for something outside the cutoff, it simply is not there. Keeping this a blunt, explicit list is what frees you from fighting continuity arguments at the table — you decided the line ahead of time, and the fiction holds it.
The shipped line
The shipped continuity, The Aether Story, draws its line deliberately and early. It covers the Ultimis / Group 935 / 935-era material: Tunguska, Der Riese, the Moon, Green Run and Buried up through 2035, and Origins as the unresolved recursion. Its canon scope names the post-Black-Ops-III material — Primis, the Blood of the Dead crew, Der Eisendrache onward, the Chaos storyline, and the Dark Aether — as out. That is a deliberate scope judgment, not a gap in the research. The storyline after Black Ops III expands fast: it doubles the cast, reopens settled questions, and rewrites the meaning of events this continuity treats as fixed. A canon that large is harder to run and much harder to break, and a loop that cannot be broken is not a game.
So the shipped continuity draws its line where the story is still tight enough to hold at a table. That is a feature. It is also the reason the wall exists at all — so that a builder who loves the later material can put it in its own continuity and run it properly, instead of bolting it onto one that was never shaped for it.
Leave eras to builders
Here is the part to hold onto: that line is this continuity's line, not the system's. The Continuity type is era-agnostic. Nothing in the machinery cares what decade, what canon, or what publisher's far future you want to build. You can create a continuity for the modern day, for the post-Moon broken Earth, for the Cold War, for the Dark Aether, or for an entirely invented place — and the wall works the same way.
Two rules keep multiple eras from colliding:
- Give each era its own continuity, with its own canon scope drawn at the level you actually know. It is better to cut a big, clean line than to hand-wave a blurry one.
- Keep content walled behind the continuity field. Anything tagged to one continuity stays out of another's play unless the world state points there. If you do not want two eras mixing, never tag a shared file to both.
You are not required to know every era. Build the ones you know, and draw each line honestly. A builder who knows only the pre-Moon stuff and a builder who knows only the Dark Aether stuff can both use this same project without breaking each other's building.
Writing a good continuity
- Premise in one paragraph: who is fighting what, and over what. If you cannot say it in one paragraph, you do not know it yet.
- End state: where the storyline heads if nobody interferes. This is what makes escalation feel authored instead of random.
- Timeline anchors: the fixed events in order, each marked immutable or not. These tell you — and future GMs — what has already happened. Marking something immutable is a promise the loop forces it to happen; use it sparingly, because it is the bar that "escaping the loop" must clear.
- Tone guidance and origin of the dead: the two fields that tell a new GM how this world should feel and what the horde actually is. Write these like you are handing the table its emotional contract.
Power source and the anomaly label
Every continuity names a power source the dead answer to, and an anomaly label — the in-world name for exposure to it. The engine calls it exposure; your characters call it Element 115 sickness, or Dark Aether bleed, or whatever you name it. Consistent naming here is half the immersion, and it is one field away.