Yesterday, on the Margaret Weis Productions website, we announced the Table of Contents and that there will be a slight delay for the corebook release. We anticipate that the PDF will still be released in February but the print books will likely come out in March. We’ve had a lot of comments so far about the Table of Contents and I’d like to expand, very briefly, on one of them by giving you our general approach to setting.
There are over 200 planets and moons in the ‘Verse split across three regions of space in five systems. The Firefly television show primarily takes place in the Red Sun, White Sun, and Georgia Systems. While the Border and Rim Worlds have less towns and cities to speak of, the Core Planets are bursting with setting. Just Persephone, for example, which the crew visited in the “Serenity (Pilot)” and “Shindig” is similar to Earth-That-Was. With this much setting, the question on how to address that became a technical one. What was the best way to reinforce the locations from the television show and expand the canon in context for the game?
For us, the answer was to present the setting in context throughout the entire corebook and our rules. Distinctions and Signature Assets, which are crucial for players, ships, and Major Gamemaster characters, are all themed with aspects of the ‘Verse. Instead of giving fans an atlas that was separate from the rules, we opted to integrate game material with what already existed for the core rulebook. We start with the Introduction that gives you an overview and get more specific from there. The Episode Guide is a deep dive into each show and gives you in game examples, characters, and rules that relate to each episode. From there, the Find a Crew chapter reinforces the series again by providing rules for the main cast. Then, we separated out the 24 archetypes by the region they hail from. The odd duck there is Persephone which is technically in the White Sun System but is commonly thought of as a Border Planet. The Find a Ship chapter focuses on the vehicles and boats; you’ll find more horses, for example, on a Border Planet than you will in the technologically-rich Core.
From there, we focus on the rules to play the game and finish with a GM’s chapter that includes a guide to building your own location. The Episode we provide, called “What’s Yours Is Mine”, has a setting-related section that offers ten to twelve locations to flesh out Sweethome’s mining town. In this way, we have opted to make the setting more interactive. As the line progresses, we can (and have through Echoes of War) offer more setting. But for the corebook? Focusing on the beloved TV series was crucial to this game and all that we do stems from what you find here.
If you have more questions about setting, please feel free to ping me. I’ll be writing up a more in-depth post about this for the company blog.
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