XXVc Notebook

William Tracy... J'ACCUSE!

I noticed that, somehow, the supplement The Inner Worlds, by one William Tracy, managed to break not one, but three cardinal rules of XXVc. Let's have a look at them, won't we?

First we have the appearance of telepathy. Now I have nothing against psionics, but part of the draw of XXVc is that it's hard sci-fi. Yes, it is. That means everything should have a basis is scientific fact. Telepathy is not one of those things and I'm not really sure why they decided to allow it in the game at such late date. Maybe they had a change of heart due to low sales. Who knows? In any case, the telepathy-that-should-not-be is strangely implemented in the game, which I'll get to next.

The second offense is Stupid Mutation and is directly related to the appearance of telepathy. You see, it turns out that the "background radiation" on Mercury has caused a mutation in, get this, the cat and rat population. Yes, that's right- Itchy & Scratchy have psychic powers. This is just plain silly for a number of reasons. Maybe the author foresaw an adventure wherein the heroes have to stop the overthrow of Mercury by the Rat Empire. Also surprising is that some very nice groundwork was already laid for mutations in the earlier Earth in the 25th Century supplement, where they explain that, in effect, this ain't Gamma World*.

The third problem with The Inner Worlds is the startling introduction of artificial gravity. The original authors go to great lengths to accommodate for the fact that arti-grav (wink) is, so far as is known by modern science by me, an impossibility and no amount of clever technobabble is going to change that. The basis of the rocketship rules lay in that fact. The effects of zero gravity on the human (and not-so-human) body is even taken into account in the main rules. In other words, artificial gravity could literally break the game.

Luckily, all of these offenses are easy enough to remove. And so, I shall.

*I'll be looking at XXVc's relationship to Gamma World in a later post.