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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8608640" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 99: September 1994part 5/5The Living Galaxy: Many people dream of going to space to escape the rules and regulations of modern society and start a new life. However, there is a big flaw in that logic. If anything, you need to have even stricter regulations just to survive in a place where the atmosphere is poison or nonexistent, as one breach could kill everyone. Gun control is almost definitely going to be a  thing, and certain things that would get trivial punishments on land could be capital offences. If a spaceship or station is owned by a private company rather than a government, the odds of things getting dystopian increase even further, as profit-driven capitalism tends to be pretty ruthless even with external government restraining it. When all the infrastructure belongs to the company and you can't even quit without being able to pay for your trip to somewhere else, the worst excesses of company towns are likely to show up. This is one future that seems just as plausible now, looking at the spacebound ambitions of Elon Musk and the way he treats employees on earth. Another way space travel is likely to be far stricter than earth is quarantine and vaccination procedures. Bringing a new disease onto an enclosed environment full of people who haven't had any exposure to anything like it in years could devastate the whole community, so new arrivals may well face several days of complete isolation and a battery of tests. Anyone who rankles at mask wearing in the modern day is unlikely to be able to get through all the training and regulations needed to get chosen for a space mission. So this is a pessimistic, realism heavy bit of writing that feels more like the old ARES articles than a TSR one. Space travel in the real world is not going to be all laser guns, zero-g acrobatics and fast-paced adventure hijinks, but a rigid experience in which you're just a small part in a bigger organism you can't survive outside of and your schedule is strictly planned years in advance. A fairly interesting article that still holds up decades later, but obviously isn't particularly fun gaming. Like strictly tracking encumbrance and rations, it might be interesting for a while, but eventually you'll want some fantastical macguffins that bypass at least some of that hassle to get a sense of progression. After all, we have to deal with enough of this tedium in the real world. An issue that's weirdly heavy on the low-key realism heavy aspects of worldbuilding for multiple settings and systems, to the point where it overdoes it for my tastes. All buildup and no payoff makes jack a dull boy, and this material needs trimming down a fair bit to make progress in a session. Let's find out just how much of next issue should have been left on the chopping block as well.</blockquote>

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