Modular Cidri
 

I was thinking about how nice it would be to have a "World Book" for Cidri. However, It occurred to me that the World of Cidri is too large ever to be entirely mapped in any satisfactory way but might best be detailed in a Modular fashion (like my idea for Death Test.)

The existence of the Gates means that different parts of that gigantic planet don't have have to adjoin one another or even be on the same side of the planet to interact with one another.

Perhaps supplements like the old "Citybook" series from Flying Buffalo might be possible, where each book details several interesting cities or locales which could be slotted into every TFT Gamemasters own personal Cidri, as desired.

Re: Modular Cidri
 

Great idea!

I'd love to see those in a microgame format, like Jim Kane suggested for splat books!

Re: Modular Cidri - Product format?
 

Hi Chris, Zot, everyone.
Chris, I agree that this idea would be nice.

But my main point is with Zot. What WOULD be the idea format for SJG to release adventures / city guide / world building materials for Cidri / villages, type material for TFT?

GURPS didn't release all that many adventures. The ones that they did were slim booklets typically about 64 pages. (I grabbed the first one to hand, "For Love of Mother Not" by W.G. Armintrout, for the Humanx Commonwealth ficton. It was in fact 64 pages.)

However, it likely would be easier to release adventures as downloadable content on W23. Unless there are physical components, a text & art only product is far cheaper to publish that way. (Also in Texas, they tax businesses for inventory held in warehouses!)

Thinking about SJG product line, I'm not sure that slim microgames are a good fit for them.

Unless TFT does a lot better than I expect, I don't think we will see many physical products soon. (Most RPG players I know are wedded to their favourite systems, and a lot of TFT fans have moved on to GURPS. I hope that the old fans will be enough to allow the Kickstarter to succeed. But those that want rule light RPG's have lots of offerings. Big games have their fans and the RPG product is not moving fast enough to encourage game stores to risk shelf space on a new system. I'm just not sure where a tonne of new fans would come from.)

Anyway, events may well prove me wrong, but I expect that most new TFT products will be downloadable content for the near future.

Warm regards, Rick.

Re: Modular Cidri - Product format?
 

If it can work economically, I would really love to see as many expansions use the pocket box format as possible, just because that's how Melee and Wizard first came out (albeit bags instead of plastic boxes).

Thinking about PDFs, I looked up the dimensions it looks like the rules are on 8 x 7 inch pieces of paper, folded in half. Scaling the PDF for printout on 8 1/2 x 11 landscape, would result in an 8 1/2 x 9.7 inch image, so there'd be an extra 0.6 inch left/right margin and the text and images would be a bit bigger.

If they must be normal RPG-sized books though, I'll still buy them :).

Re: Modular Cidri
 

This seems like the perfect place for GMs to 'strut their stuff' as world creators.

Have a Nifty idea? Write it up using the RAW with any house rules at the end as optional rules. .pdf would be easier on SJ and if you want it in a smaller format you can always copy it to your choice of text editor and do the reformatting yourself.

Re: Modular Cidri
 

My read is that it isn't even a single world... due to the gates, many of the "unreachable places by land" are on other worlds... last campaign I ran, I assumed the following for Cidri:

1) Cidri spans 6 worlds in a Keplerler rosette, each member being in the L4 of one, L5 of another, and L3 of a third. The "Morning Star" is actually another 6th of Cidri.

2) Each world is roughly density 3 rather than earth's 5... giving a 23.4 megameters diameter instead of Earth's 17.4 Mm.

3) each world has a moon in tidelock, and largely they're in synch... but this provides a clue as to which when crossing, as the moons local position varies by an apparent 60°, 120°, or 180°, depending upon which one ends up upon

This gives a relative surface area of 6*1.57^3 earth surfaces, or 23.3 earths of surface area, and a base horizon at 1.7m (eye-height) of about 6.8 km, vs Earth's roughly 4.7 km. (A hobb at 1.0 and a dwarf at 1.3 are 5.2 and 5.9 km, respectively.)

Re: Modular Cidri
 

Hi ak_aramis,
I also thought that Cidri was multiple worlds. Your campaign sounds interesting!

Warm regards, Rick

Re: Modular Cidri
 

Correct. This is the idea originally expressed in TFT:ITL; wherein Cidri is described as a gigantic "polyglot" - generally accepted to mean a larger world which is made of a multitude of smaller worlds.

JK

Re: Modular Cidri
 

Polyglot has specific linguistic connotations and denotation. It means, according to the dictionary installed with MacOS, "knowing or using several languages."

So, all it means in the reference is "Many languages are present and used on Cidri"...

Re: Modular Cidri
 

Actually, Cidri is described in the introduction to In the Labyrinth....

"... WHAT Cidri is. Certainly no ordinary planet, Cidri is BIG. No complete map ofits surface is known. The standard work, compiled two hundred years ago by the Imperial College of Cartographers at Predimuskity, shows 48 continents (defined as land masses of over 5,000,000 square km.); five of these are in excess of 60,000,000 square km. Almost half the known surface of Cidri is covered with water; most of its seas are dotted with islands. Yet even the great Book of Maps lists nine hundred and eleven locations which cannot be found within the known area - including the mountain city of Paska-Dal, which (by Gate) has carried on commerce with gem merchants everywhere for at least four
hundred years.
Yet build it the Mnoren did - a whole enormous world.
And, having built it, they peopled it. Farmers, technicians, servants, guards, slaves, stowaways . . . plants for gardens, jungles, and fields . . . animals for companions, food, hunting, or to balance the thousands of ecologies interweaving across the planet . . . creatures great and small from every one of the worlds they knew."

So clearly it is a single gigantic planet. Nevertheless, due to the existence of the Gates, there no reason that connections with other planets can't exist.