Kontextmaschine

7th September 2017

Post reblogged from Misery Loves Company with 145 notes

apricops:
Every time I see one of those posts about “where are the fantasy stories with even remotely realistic economies and politics!” I glance over to the scattered notes and snippets I’ve made for Exactly That Story and get wracked with those why-aren’t-you-following-your-dreams shivers.
For the third edition of the Exalted rpg, they went to a lot of trouble to cajole the guy who developed the first edition to come back and write some material for the book, and he totally didn’t give a shit since he’d been doing other things for ten years at that point. He’s an economist now, so the biggest contiguous contribution he made was like two pages that just talk about about currency denominations, coinage, and seignorage in the game’s fantasy setting and how those things related to factional politics, and they cut basically the entire section because people do not want to read two pages of that in the core setting chapter of a high fantasy adventure game.
This was the same game line that hired an actual marine historian to write the book about seafaring and thus got a huge amount of material about shipboard chains of command, hull and rigging types, naval watch scheduling, and so on. I loved that book unironically, but you basically can’t use that sort of material because 95% of people will just totally skip your weird Moby Dick style digressions into whale physiology or whatever.
Anyway, regarding your specific story: if the Silmarillion teaches anything, it’s that sufficiently detailed worldbuilding can overcome the need to actually write readable fiction.

The best corporate finance text I’ve ever seen was a Shadowrun sourcebook

Tagged: shadowrun 90s90s90s