Technically, the EU may be unsupported now, but it still exists on millions of bookshelves and in the owners of the bookshelves’ heads. Also, I’m unclear as to what’s supported and what isn’t now, not to mention what to call the supported stuff.
As to the more recent mainstream of Star Wars material, I haven’t seen any of that — not even trailers — so I can’t speak of it.
Here’s what a 3 hour (including setup and never reading the rules before) session with 6 people came up with: http://i.imgur.com/o8Kp0.png
I’d say play with 4, to keep the downtime/crosstalk to a minimum.
Also, Robbins’ Kingdom is an even better prescriptive rpg (where most player actions must cleave closely to the instructions) that follows a Kingdom through crisis and crossroads. http://www.lamemage.com/kingdom/
The link to Analogue: A Hate Story is broken: it has an extra quotation mark on the end of the address.
This sounds like “Historical Materialism: The Role Playing Game”.
I don’t think that’s unintended, as the devs have talked about how their games, especially Crusader Kings, have the ability to generate coherent historical narratives arising naturally from the mechanics of the game. It’s a more realistic kind of history too, being generated by the interplay of dynamic systems, rather than the usual narrative of history as driven by powerful individuals that dominates popular historiography. Paradox even started developing a fantasy RPG (now unfortunately cancelled) where the overall story is created by the player’s actions, rather than an external imposition from the developers.
Somebody was inevitably going to make this comment.
Maybe I’m old, but Traveller’s universe was very much in the mold of the Poul Anderson’s Flandry books, which were about the inevitable breakdown of the Galactic Empire. The books were, of course, in turn modeled on the fall of the Roman Empire.
As an aside, it should be pointed out that “cliched” settings are used not because of laziness (okay, not always because of laziness), but because they allow the author to gain the benefit of the knowledge and emotional touchstones that the reader has amassed over a lifetime. King Arthur’s sword is more powerful than Fred sword because it automatically evokes the dozens, if not hundreds of memories that the reader has gathered from their first steps until adulthood.
Traveller’s universe worked for those educated in the Western tradition because they felt the tragedy of the darkness that would swallow history for a millenia. Why? Because we’d all studied the fall of the Roman empire as children.
Of course, as we as a people become more diverse, we cannot count on a common cultural heritage that will have meaning for almost everyone. References become shallower when the audience are only passingly familiar with the mythology (and make no mistake, the emotional heart of history is based far more on mythology than fact).
And then, yes, rather a work resonating with deeply felt sentiments, it becomes a pat shortcut. Echoes of the fall of Troy no longer summon the memories of heartbreak at the tragedy of hubris, heroism, and desire, but instead are short for “the hero is going to sneak in past the bad guys” because that’s all it means to much of the audience.
I do not denigrate Microscrope - it sounds like a fascinating game. But we can appreciate such a game without giving short shrift to those works that used the common knowledge of their audience to give their worlds far greater emotional depth than a story unanchored by the reader’s past could ever hope to achieve.
Why does Cory use Disneyland? Because for his audience, it evokes.
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