Dallbun fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Oct 25, 2017

• Mike Pondsmith, hands down the coolest human being who ever worked in tabletop, writes Cyberpunk and Cyberpunk 2020.
  
• Looking for their next hit, Wizards of the Coast buys the license and has Richard Garfield - yes, that Richard Garfield - design the Netrunner CCG.
  
• The Netrunner CCG is a critical success but sales never really take off, WotC eventually shelves the product line.
  
• Fantasy Flight Games picks up the Netrunner game and mechanics - minus the setting, which has reverted to Pondsmith - from WotC. They marry it to the Android setting from their popular board game of the same name and make the first true LCG.
  
• The Android: Netrunner LCG is a critical AND commercial success, and helps FFG land bigger licenses for their RPG lines, including Star Wars and L5R (which will also become an LCG).
  
• FFG decides to sell a version of the base system it uses for Star Wars and L5R, it does very well.
  
• Fantasy Flight Games announces it will publish an Android TTRPG to synthesize the success of its card game and generic RPG line.

RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Oct 25, 2017

Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Oct 26, 2017

Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Oct 26, 2017

• Arcadia - Covers the entirety of Europe to Siberia, except the UK because apparently even in Eden there has been a poorly thought out Brexit. The layout of the realm is basically any medieval European fairy tale of hamlets and somehow dark forests full of adventures and secrets. This realm existed for 195 million years before evil existed and nobody investigated the place? This is what you get for having a realm of heaven follow monarchs who are fae folk
  
• Asgard - Covers “Scandanavian Countries to Germany” with no explanation for if that’s as the crow flies or around the baltic or an apology for retconning the geography of Arcadia. It is otherwise an unremarkable land consisting entirely of Viking culture stereotypes, down to having so much fighting some “darker souls” can be overlooked among their number and Odin is their leader. This makes the second realm ruled by Ahura Mazda where evil is just allowed to exist for no real reason
  
• The Commonwealth of Atlantis - This covers the majority of the Northeastern United States and contains the capital of Eden where a great host of souls from all over Eden come to make decisions as a group. Remember, though, there’s no way to directly traverse from one realm of Eden to the other without jumping into a raging spirit storm, traveling the Earth, and then killing yourself in the right spot so coordinating travel for these meetings must be hard. For a fun pre-9/11 bit there is a great ruined tower of Babel here bombed out by GODHEAD, but there are two new towers guarded by Ahura Mazda called the World Financial Plaza.
  
• Avalon - This is the smallest realm in the game, as it only covers the British Isles, and consists of a single, 10 mile square castle. Are there doors in its North Ireland portion that open to nothing, dropping you straight into Limbo? We’ll never know because this section is tiny and mostly concerned with telling you that this is like the exact same realm as Avalon, except here there ruler King Arthur, who is apparently a real person, is missing
  
• Bharat- This is India. It is the oldest part of Eden so why Ahura Mazda moved to Atlantis is unclear. The people here are described as deeply spiritual pacifists following countless traditions who make great cloth, so obviously a lot of effort went into this section.
  
• El Dorado - Mexico and Central America, this realm is nothing but ruins in jungles and a massive casino known as El Dorado. Their ruling government is made up of “Dons” and is called the Junta. I don’t like this road you’re going down, TLE.
  
• Guinee - The parts of Louisiana that Britney Spears isn’t from and some Caribbean Islands. Somehow in a world where God directly creates all matter and also explicitly isn’t George W. Bush, their capital city sank underneath a lake and Ahura Mazda shrugged it’s shoulders and told the inhabitants to work it out. Further, this actually might be a Hell (not Earth, the other kind of hell) and to further cement this fact the leaders of this place have known connections to the Hells. Despite this fact Ahura Mazda’s followers don’t investigate it and there is somehow a tourist economy, so I’m beginning to suspect Ahura Mazda is easy to bribe
  
• Midian - Israel, Palestine, and parts of Egypt. Was a Hell during the Crusades but now has been brought back into the neutral column. They used to be ruled by a group called “The True Sanhedrin” but aren’t anymore probably because that's really confusing to have two completely different groups that aren’t actually Sanhedrins in your game
  
• Oz - The game uses 40 words to define the borders of this region instead of just saying “The U.S. Midwest”. This whole region is just Frank Baum’s Oz with some geographic changes so TLE can claim that Frank Baum got inspiration for his book from this section of Eden through a process not discussed and that would probably undermine even more gameplay mechanics. They are ruled by a W.I.Z.A.R.D. and this time, unfortunately, the acronym stands for something; World Israel Zion Associated Research Directory. Yes, the secret Jew conspiracy is alive and well in a little old land called Oz
  
• Pangea - You know, I was glossing over your weird undercurrent of uninformed stereotype racism and Jewish global conspiracies but are you kidding me at this point, TLE? I can’t believe they published this realm that is the entirety of South America and Africa. It’s capital city is listed as “none”. Its culture is listed as “eat or be eaten”. It is paternally protected by souls from other Edens to keep it from ever progressing so that it can remain “wild and free” forever. It’s predominant religion are people in the jungle in “crackpot tribal sects”. In summary: gently caress You, TLE
  
• Samarkand - Remember how Xibalba the hell didn’t include Mexico City? This realm doesn’t include Samarkand, a real, actual city that half a million currently living human beings call home. Instead, this area is the middle east not covered by Midian, but the countries listed don’t include Iran or anything west of Iran, so they actually not only failed to include the actual city in this realm but also all of the cultures directly associated with it historically. Congrats, TLE, on being that terrible at geography. The rest of the description of this region is basically a highlight reel of Edward Said’s nightmares and the inhabitants are destroying their region by mining the lucrative resources that pour out of the ground.
  
• Xanadu - You know what, I’m still really mad at you TLE about your weird racism. I don’t care that this area covers the entire Pacific Rim, you literally just made your Africa analog a backwards place of no importance where the only economy is big game hunting. Who gives a poo poo that this place’s primary export is technology, or is ruled by Kubla Khan or whatever you want me to think about.
  
  
  I’m so glad CGI art has improved tremendously since 2001. Seriously, guess what this is supposed to be
  Art by: Brian Bradley
  
  I want to take a break now, not just because I’m mad at the simmering undercurrent present in TLE, but because now we come to the part where the game falls apart. In about ten paragraphs the game invalidates the other 195 pages of writing, see below for the final sub-realm of the game:
  
  
• Omikoshi - Technically this is part of Xanadu but it’s broken out in TLE as a psuedo-realm all by itself for good reason. Remember how we recently found out any soul can freely travel from Eden to Earth and that kind of sorta undermines the game’s core conceit? What if we just went whole hog and wrote something that didn’t undermine our setting so much as undo it? The rest of this update is how much I hate Omikoshi.
  
  The Omikoshi is a virtual representation of Eden written in the quaternary language Shingon* to communicate with the the scripting language which Ahura Mazda and Eden are made and defined by. By editing the Omikoshi you can make any change in Eden that you want at any time, with the sole exception of changing or deleting another soul. Souls can travel to the Omikoshi and treat it like an MMO so there is a completely parallel, equally real Eden that you can live in if you want that can also edit and modify the actual Eden.
  
  Not only can you make edits at any time, you can make anything you want in the simulation and from there export it back to Eden. To repeat, the only thing Omikoshi can’t do is edit souls, but it can make literally everything all of the economies of Eden operate on, more land, change the properties of all matter, and anything else you want. The game doesn’t even make a mention that you can’t edit Ahura Mazda, in fact instead explicitly pointing out he’s written in the same code language Omikoshi runs on.
  
  If the ability to kill Ahura Mazda with a quick registry edit wasn’t powerful enough, you can use the Omikoshi to instantly travel from Eden to any device on Earth that has internet access. The game then starts a paragraph telling us that non-messiah souls can’t make it to Earth this way without dying, but later ignores that and says all souls can hang out in cyberspace on Earth and control most data hardware and can be copied out of the devices by anyone on the other end with the requisite skill so I think player characters are actually worse at traveling between the two worlds than the average soul with a decent internet connection.
  
  By the way, we’re not done yet with how broken Omikoshi is. See, it turns out that Earth runs on the same code base, it just has encrypting or hashing or something that prevents easy editing. Immediately after introducing this limitation, the game states that Omikoshi still works well enough to edit pretty much anything on Earth temporarily before GODHEAD restores the area to last known working version after about a week or two and that the researchers who work on the Omikoshi have made solid progress into GODHEAD’s code changes and will soon be able to change Earth at will just like they do Eden.
  
  
  All in favor of ignoring the Omikoshi?
  Art by: Clayton Graham
  
  What is even the point of the entire game if the Omikoshi exists? With it, in Eden alone, you can do the following things
  
• Toggle off Ahura Mazda
  
• Delete all Hells, instantly dumping the entire army of GODHEAD back into Earth
  
• Disable all incoming souls on whatever ports you no longer want available
  
• Route all soul traffic as you see fit
  
• Build anything you want from literally nothing
  
• Travel back and forth from Earth freely and instantly
  
• Build infinite Omikoshis to crack Earth’s encryption scheme, then delete GODHEAD