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Old 06-07-2018, 10:48 AM   #81
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: THS 2120!

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Originally Posted by Shostak View Post
My
Since we don't know much about dark matter, it pretty much gives gamers free rein to imagine all sorts of nifty possibilities. n.
Actually, dark matter isn't a good choice even just for technobabble in this area. We fo know things about it and one of those is that it does not seem to interact with normal matter except through gravity. It doesn't even seem to interact with other dark matter except through gravity.

So it's not a blank slate for the imagination.
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Old 06-21-2018, 04:46 PM   #82
David L Pulver
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Default Re: THS 2120!

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
I thought it was the point to make THS the most optimistic setting 100 years in the future possible without getting silly. How closely SJG got with that is of course arguable as with all things opinion, but I assumed all levers set to 100% optimism was a setting goal and feature.
My goal was to avoid superscience (known violations of physical law) and to have an interplanetary rather than interstellar setting that assumed a continuity of current nation states and a lack of apocalypse on Earth. This made the setting somewhat original, as the majority of prior interplanetary transhumanist settings in sf novels had previously assumed something like Eclipse Phase, where, as in Schismatrix or Varley's Nine Worlds or Vacuum Flowers or what have you, Earth had generally been abandoned/eaten/destroyed.

Other than that, my goal while writing it was to have it reflect a combination of many of the visions of space advocates and transhumanists (hence the title). I was not consciously trying to be optimistic or pessimistic, however the combination of the desire to see transhumanistic tropes like uploading or AI plus space colonization tropes with my other decision to retain continuity of present institutions such as nation states and a sizable "baseline" human population naturally limited the amount of dystopia that could be introduced.

The other major factor was that SJ Games did not want to trust an outsider to act as a full line developer. As such, while I came up with the outlines, titles, and concepts for all books in the line, after they were handed over to their authors I was not given the same level of editorial control. This meant that the authors of individual books were generally free to go their own way.

Examples of key changes from my original concepts included:

* the strong US element and accelerated timeline on Mars, whose population and level of development became much higher than the Chinese-dominated frontier on a partly-terraformed world I had been envisioning

* the greatly increased number and population of O'Neil-style space colonies <partly the result of the decision to make it a multi-author book: everyone wanted to add their own big thing!>

* a less detailed focus on Earth's fifth wave societies than I had initially expected (mostly because Fifth Wave changed from being "the book about how to run living and adventuring in 5W worlds" to "the book about Earth").

To accommodate this I then had to rewrite portions of the core book based on early material that was submitted. The result was in many ways a much richer, denser, more detailed, and more unpredictable setting thanks to the many contributions from individual authors, but the final result also skewed from my original concepts in several areas.
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Old 06-21-2018, 06:07 PM   #83
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Default Re: THS 2120!

It's still, even with my criticism, very good. They're pretty much the only setting books I love reading through even now sans gaming group.
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Old 06-22-2018, 10:59 AM   #84
David L Pulver
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Default Re: THS 2120!

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It's still, even with my criticism, very good. They're pretty much the only setting books I love reading through even now sans gaming group.
Thanks - glad you enjoy them!
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Old 06-22-2018, 11:01 AM   #85
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Default Re: THS 2120!

Did you ever look at GURPS Terradyne as a starting point?
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Old 06-22-2018, 02:08 PM   #86
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Default Re: THS 2120!

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Did you ever look at GURPS Terradyne as a starting point?
It's less where that book starts than its failure to end up. Still, it makes an interesting alternate world for a THS/IW crossover game.
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