Quote:
Originally Posted by MrTim
I don't suppose you'd feel comfortable elaborating on that statement?
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Smade's Planet has had some controversy:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=2882 and so was removed in RoF.
I liked Smade's Planet, and my feeling was that the Sword Worlds and a lot of other planet names were also homages, so my own
preference was to address that by adding a back story that specifically recognized the world as named from science fiction, then to modify the background to explain its low population and neutral status in a way that was not a Jack Vance rip off, but still explained its low population and the existence of a small family-run government. It also gave me some details of how the Solomani Rim War actually ended, and I liked the idea of a face-to-face diplomatic meeting between the two military leaders, especially given how their legacies and families would shape the sector in the coming century.
At the same time, I left in some hooks so the name could conceivably be changed to the world name given in Rim of Fire by 1121.
In
Rim of Fire - which I found was generally really good - I nevertheless felt that a few too many worlds followed a story that was "the colony was great, then the Solomani Movement arrived and things went to hell". Being a Terran by ancestry I felt the need to tell another side of the story, so my version of a few worlds, such as Prometheus, is nicer to the Solomani then to the Imperium.
One world in Rim of Fire is a planet with a plastic bag around it, an ancient artifact, added in GURPS to explain how it had a decent atmosphere despite a very small size. My feeling and those of the FFE advisers was that such an artifact would likely have been mentioned in earlier canon if it was real, and that it was out of character for the Ancients to create something like that in the Rim (where they were usually a bit quieter). The simpler solution was to adjust the planetary UPP a little. In deference to the story, however, I crafted an explanation for the "rumor" and also used it to address issues of Solomani culture and tourism.
Incidentally, there are so many homages in Solomani Rim (the original book)'s names that I felt when doing each writeup I had to do google searches of the planet to ensure that any other names of added geographic features, etc. were also in the same spirit, without being rip offs. These helped out in one or two cases where planet names referenced obscure cultural memes I was unaware of.