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Originally Posted by DAT
What other things would you consider changing?
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Perhaps oddly, one of the things I find most dated is the armguns. They were very briefly being proposed as the Wave of the Future, but as far as I can see it came down to a couple of enthusiastic press releases. Just as to me H. Beam Piper's work is more dated by the universality of cocktail hour (600 years in the future, but only 40 years old when Piper was writing it) than it is by company structures that have been around for rather longer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vicky_molokh
Instead, admit that THS is a divergent timeline, let go of presentism, and put in a blatant divergence point somewhere between 1960s (like Prey 2017 did) and 2000 (nice round date).
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This is a bit tricky, though, because judging by reported sales figures the moment you label an SF setting as "we can't get there from the present day" it loses its appeal for an awful lot of people. (Forumites, clearly, are not a representative sample of the market.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by vicky_molokh
Make the setting live up to its name. Make it more transhuman and more space. I find it really embarrassing that a setting named Transhuman Space is underwhelming compared to its spiritual descendant both in the transhuman and the space segment, despite the descendant being in recovery after an apocalypse and THS having the solid foundation to bootstrap itself into . . . space.
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Here I very much agree. Though part of the problem is that
Fifth Wave and
Cities on the Edge are good books that one wants to use!
I don't like the
Eclipse Phase approach of taking away Earth. But I think that a more modern approach to the game design (one that
starts with "you are X who do Y") could put the focus squarely on not-Earth.