View Single Post
Old 06-24-2008, 02:20 AM   #9
Phil Masters
 
Phil Masters's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: U.K.
Default Re: Stuff I'd like to see in Pyramid

Quote:
Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog
Plus, a support article for a technical book may require more checking. If HANS writes an article on guns based on High-Tech, Steven only has to see "Hans" and "High-Tech" and he knows it's going to hit a minimum yet high standard. Same with me writing Martial Arts articles.

You can bypass this more easily if you're a good writer - Phil Masters has cranked out a couple of Martial Arts-based articles since the book came out - but it's a slower process.
Thanks for the compliment, but I think that there's a difference between those two books. Martial Arts is, among many other fine things, a toolkit. If you want to create a completely imaginary martial art, you can use elementary bits and pieces from the book, put them together with some (hopefully) atmospheric prose, and (if you've obeyed the toolkit rules) nobody can say that the result is "wrong". The thing is completely imaginary.

High-Tech, on the other hand, is a book more or less entirely about the real world. Writing an add-on to that requires real-world knowledge and, yes, fact checking. So would writing an article about a real world martial art (which I wouldn't attempt, because I'm really not qualified).

If we ever get to see the 4e firearms design system which Hans and David have tinkered with, and if it's as good as I'd expect, then anyone could write stuff about imaginary firearms statted up using that system. (Okay, well, the guns in Britannica-6 were roughed out with Hans's aid...) Likewise, when Thaumatology appears, I hope that we'll see a bunch of new magical styles, designed using that toolkit, and I don't particularly expect to have any say about the subject.

There's also a tendency to assume that stuff about fictional settings requires checking by the original creator, but that's weaker. I like to run Transhuman Space material past David if possible, but I can get away with not doing so...
__________________
--
Phil Masters
My Home Page.
My Self-Publications: On Warehouse 23 and On DriveThruRPG.

Last edited by Phil Masters; 06-24-2008 at 02:24 AM.
Phil Masters is offline   Reply With Quote