Traveller is a solid SF game with a hard SF engine, but it doesn't fare that well as a fantasy game - even though it can easily be retooled for that purpose, generally nobody thinks of doing so because of the prevalence of many other fantasy engines available, including but not restricted to
Legend.
Legend, on the other hand, can be set in a SF milieu as easily as it can do horror, Westerns and many other genres - and it needs no major retooling to do so. The versatility of the basic engine has already been shown by its predecessor, BRP, and its tolerance to stretching as witnessed by its incorporation into the defunct
Ringworld and
Superworld RPGs. I've got both; just because they tanked, it doesn't mean the systems didn't work.
The problems with
Superworld arose due to an egregious lack of support for the product, and a distinctly lacklustre presence in a market which had already been cornered by systems such as
Champions and of course
Mutants and Masterminds - not to mention the licensed products based on the established four-colour rags.
Superworld felt like the poor man's
Champions, and its internal art certainly did it no favours.
And
Ringworld was the victim of such unbelievably bad marketing that its failure to thrive should be held up as an exemplar in the annals of marketing failure. Priced at a hilariously exorbitant (at the time) £30, and £24 for just the one supplement
The Ringworld Companion, this game was doomed, like Superworld, to obsolescence almost from its conception - as if failure has been bred into it. At least ICE's
Spacemaster lasted a little better, and managed to get a few years out of the products and a good score of supplements before it faced into gaming obscurity.
So yes, I am a student of gaming history - perhaps moreso than most, because I've looked keenly at the failures as much as the successes, and so if I was looking to launch a product I'd be checking out the competition and asking the following basic questions:-
1. Do the competition have anything like this?
2. If not, have they tried and failed? (Or tried and died - I am not kidding; gaming companies have vanished for showing the slightest hesitation)
3. If so, what's the thing that really makes their product sell and sell?
4. What's the weak point - the can at the base of the stack, the bag of soft fruits at the bottom of a shopping bag full of tin cans?
5. All their hype aside, do they have people working for them
who believe in their product? Who are their Wunderkinder - the ones whose presence just drives the rest along, like the recent
Secrets of The Ancients?
6. Do we have Wunderkinder of our own?
7. Why the hell aren't we using them?
8. Money and pricing considerations aside, how do we get the customers to flock to our banner?
9. And once they've bought the core book, how can we maximise the population of True Believers who will buy every book and product we can make?
So.
When I talk about the possibilities of launching something like a SF product for Legend ... believe me, I know as well as the next guy what the RL consequences of failure will be. Been there, seen it, done it.
And I'd rather risk a failure than play it safe and do nothing.
However, my name is Alex Greene, not Matthew Sprange, and I'm in this armchair all the way over here, well away from the Mongoose Nerve Centre, so what can I do?
