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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8681047" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 109: July 1995part 4/5Threads of Legend: As with the Shadowrun living setting, the Earthdawn material is not being managed by the RPGA itself, but just two passionate volunteers. I do not envy the work they'll have to put in to keep it going. They are going for quite different approaches though. While Shadowrun embraced the strictly mission based approach to tournament adventures that the format encourages anyway, our Earthdawn admin is actually encouraging you to come up with detailed backstories and roleplay your characters with mechanical rewards for doing so. You get bonus legend points at character generation for the quality of your backstory, you need to write a short story to justify it if you want to become a questor, and you also have to do so if you want to research spells or magic items in downtime or get rid of horror marks & curses. Basically, they're going to be swamped with bad gaming fiction every downtime, and possibly complaints about favouritism for giving some people more points than others for judgements of subjective writing quality. I'm having flashbacks to my time in WoD city by night online games. An interestingly different approach to any of the other Living settings, that has the potential for a greater amount of roleplaying and immersion if done well, but also looks like much more work to manage, particularly between conventions. I hope he gets enough enthusiastic players to make it worthwhile, but not so many he has to cut down on the RPG elements to keep it functioning at all and the whole thing loses that personal touch. Definitely looking forward to seeing what, if any followups this gets, and if other future Living settings will follow in his footsteps by putting a bit more trust in the hands of the players to write their own stories.The Living Galaxy: Roger's reprisal of the alternate history theme concentrates on one that should be very familiar to all of us by now. Dystopian worlds ravaged by disease. Be it a particularly virulent flu variant, black death, anthrax, HIV becoming airborne or some completely new horror developed in lab, crossing over from another species or being released from melting ice, they can pop up any time and our social structures are woefully unequipped to deal with them even if there is a cure because the way you fight them is counterintuitive to people who treat everything as a physical battle to macho your way through or a social challenge to be negotiated with. A few years of even a less lethal one shows you just how fragile civilisation really is. Then there's the dangers of a meteor strike or volcanic eruption that devastates everything within hundreds of miles and covers the whole world in ash, resulting in years of reduced temperatures and starvation because the sun is blocked out, which has also happened in the past and will happen again, it's just a question of when. But as we just saw with the Earthdawn stuff, the aftermath of a natural disaster is rich ground for adventurers to explore, take the bits that are still functional and do new things with them without any strong central authorities regulating and taxing everything. It's just a question of how you survive the intervening bit and if you can manage to protect anything else in the process. So he's not saying anything new, but the words have new resonance due to the way real life has gone lately, and our greater knowledge of how people really react to a large scale existential emergency. How will that affect the game scenarios and movies of the future and make them different from the 90's predictions of disaster?</blockquote>

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