QUOTE (Bull @ Jan 3 2012, 09:17 PM)
Heh. Never discount that as an option either.
For old-timers it sucks, but it's totally natural, and if it didn't happen, the game would quickly get stale and insular. Ideally, old ideas would be brought to their chosen completion while whole new ideas are brought to the fore, and it's actually
amazing how well SR has managed to succeed at doing this, despite all the hand-changing and talent-rotation. But, yeah, it's
hard to look back at some choice Jordan Weisman made 20 years ago that even
he doesn't remember the reason for, and try to keep following it wherever it was headed.
One of the major barriers seems to be that a
huge amount of smaller metaplot information was simply
never recorded, because who writes down every idea they offhandedly write into their book, just on the off chance that someone will need to see it through in 20 years? [I'm told this has gotten
much better over the years, though; I don't think early writers really thought it'd last this long, or if it did, that someone else would be doing the writing.
] When Earthdawn was changing hands, we ran down Lou Prosperi [currently the
documentation manager for fucking Oracle, so not exactly someone who doesn't know how to take notes! - and just wrung him dry of everything he'd ever thought of but never written down. It still took
months. Besides, a lot of new writers haven't even
read all the old material, 'cause why would they? But if Nigel - what is this, old school name-dropping day or something? I'm weird - drops some hint in some paragraph of NAN2, some asshole like me is going to expect
some writer who wasn't even born when the book was written to see it through to its logical conclusion.
Of course, that's because some asshole like me would have written it all down just in case, but will they make me the doc manager at Oracle? Nooo.