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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8227639" data-attributes="member: 42582">That is the nature of writing fiction.Serial fiction is replete with mysteries that are presented to the audience without an answer having been written. An example in super-hero comics is Wolverine - we as readers gradually learn that his claws are part of him (not his suit), that he is named Logan, that he is old, etc.But when it is first introduced that Wolverine speaks Japanese, and someone (Kitty? I can't remember) expresses surprise, does Chris Claremont or anyone else know the answer? No! It is a mystery, though: in the fiction there is a specific explanation.In Star Wars, Ben Kenobi obviously has a mysterious past. How did he end up on Tatooine? In possession of Luke's father's lightsabre? We the audience don't know. I'm pretty sure that at that point George Lucas hadn't written an answer yet.In HPL's mythos fiction, various beings travelled at various times in the distant past to earth. When, exactly? For what reasons, exactly? The stories don't answer all these questions. These mysteries are not resolved within the scope of the stories that present them.This is part of how fiction, especially but not only serial fiction, works: it points to elements of the imagined people, places and events that have not yet been authored or presented to the audience.Now if one thinks of solving a mystery in a RPG as more like solving a crossword puzzle, or unravelling an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, then the existence of a specific answer matters. But as the examples I have given in the preceding paragraphs show, these are not the only sorts of mystery that can exist.If a living world means a setting where the GM writes more fiction about it then is ever used in play, then I don't run a living world. To me that seems an odd definition.I understand a living world to mean one in which there is understood - in terms of framing, consequence narration, flavour and colour, and other ways in which the fiction is presented and experienced in play - that there is more to the world than the immediate situation.Moldvay Basic and Tunnels & Trolls do not advocate living world gaming in this sense (or at least in the case of T&T, presents it as an optional extra): in these RPGs the world, for play purposes, is the dungeon. Thus, for instance, one will not encounter NPCs whose reason for being in the dungeon, as that emerges in play, is connected to something that matters to them beyond the dungeon.Modules like S2 White Plume Mountain and C2 The Ghost Tower of Inverness and C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and X2 Castle Amber are all examples of this style. The events and setting are essentially self-contained and self-referential. Any allusions to anything beyond the dungeon has no bearing on how the dungeon is engaged with and beaten. (Eg in S2 the stolen weapons have owners in the City of Greyhawk; but nothing in the module depends upon, or is changed by, those facts of ownership. It's just set-dressing and backstory.)A published scenario that contrasts with this, which I have run, is OA7 Test of the Samurai. In this scenario the motivations of the principal NPCs only make sense relative to a larger world that is implicated by, but not fully set out in, the module. The PCs' interaction with that world is understood to generate downstream consequences - eg if the PCs upset a certain NPC in place 1, day 1 then at place X, day Y the PCs might encounter agents of that NPC trying to seek revenge for the slight.That is what I understand to be the meaning of a living world.My first question is, how do you know all these things?Why would the attack have serious implications? And why would news spread? Perhaps the attack is kept secret.As for economics: Would the increased demand for munitions manufacture, coupled with the blockading of exports from the world under attack, boost or subdue other economic activity? Would the affect on trade by any more or less than the affect on trade of the depression on Tara (just to pick an arbitrary possible occurrence on an arbitrarily-chosen industrial world)? What about droughts on important agricultural worlds?You have chosen one arbitrary event that might be happening in the galaxy - an attack that figured in actual play at my table - without asking about the myriad other events that might be just as significant but that you haven't asked about because they never became foregrounded in play. If our game hadn't featured the armada it would have featured something else that you and I haven't thought of yet. And then in this thread you'd be asking me about that event as part of the "living world".Would they? Australia was at war from 1939 to 1945, and much of that war was a naval war and involved the armadas of various nations. I don't think mercenaries flocked to Australia in that time.The way, in Classic Traveller, it is determined who the PCs encounter is via a combination of GM decision-making and random rolls. While on the planet under attack, the PCs encountered (by dint of random rolls) some refugees fleeing one country on the world for another. The full backstory to that has never been established, but it seems pretty clear that the country from which they were refugees was allied to the Imperium against the country to which they were fleeing, and that their flight was connected to the reasons for the conflict - ie the politics of psionics.I don't see that hypothetical encounters with mercenaries are markers of a "living world" in a way that actual encounters with refugees are not.I'm sure it would. I didn't doubt that it would. I asked why would I do it?I can narrate the PCs' story, including in a fashion which brings to light the effects that other events are having on their circumstances (eg their are refugees fleeing from one country to another), without preauthoring fiction that arbitrarily highlights one out of the myriad events taking place in the galaxy that might have such effects.</blockquote>

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