Metaplot

I'm enjoying a piece of cheesecake and an espresso after my lunch. I've got settings, timelines, and Metaplot on my mind. Last night I converted my ODT files to Google Docs so I can edit them on my phone at times like this. Today I sorted some of them into a folder for settings that I'd like to write up later, so I'm thinking about what I don't like about other settings.

I think constantly advancing timelines are terrible. I saw it as a customer when I was into "Legend of the Five Rings" and I had to deal with it as a writer when I was working on the Iron Kingdoms setting books. The second volume was seriously delayed because a book for the war game was released that advanced the time line and we had to re - write a lot (and cut out a lot of good material) to follow that.

It just struck me as really stupid to constantly make each book redundant or incompatible. If you're making a war game about Europe, you wouldn't write army books set in different years, but fantasy and Sci Fi games too often do that.

Here are the stats for the Prussians in 1770. Now here are the stats for the French under Napoleon. And the Russians in the Crimean War. Here are the British in WWI: they have machine guns and tanks, so those poor Prussians don't stand a chance. Oh, here's an update for the Russian army list. Now they have commisars and tanks (and by the way, Prussia is gone now).

What's the point of adding more detail to a setting if it's at a different time than the other details? If your campaign follows the same locations at the same time, it's not a problem, but it's a serious problem if you don't want to follow that one path.

If you wanted to play an Iron Kingdoms campaign set in Llael before Khador invaded, too bad! We threw that material away because the book about the invasion came out before we finished the setting book. If you want a Llaelese campaign, you're going to be freedom fighters resisting Khador's occupation.

I never played in Hârn but I heard that they avoided this problem by explicitly not describing anything in the world that happens after a certain date. The books provide background and detail, but they won't contradict your campaign by introducing new events. That seems like the best way to handle things to me.

Possible futures can be described (i.e. "Here's how a war between A and B might go" or "new technologies that might come up soon"), but as soon as you pick one path to follow with the official Metaplot, you cut off all the other options.