Month: April 2019

So, with the recent release of the first teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode IX, we learn that the movie’s official title is Rise of Skywalker, and that Ian Mcdiarmid will be back as Palpatine. Meanwhile people are scratching their heads, wondering how it’s possible that he could somehow be alive after we see him disintegrated in the bowels of the second Death Star. The fan theory I’m going to float is that while Palpatine may be in the movie, he isn’t back from the dead, cloned, or somehow otherwise present in the current story. It’s a flashback. And while this is just a fan theory, I am one of the people who figured out the big twist ending in The Sixth Sense within the first ten minutes of the movie, and I often irritate my wife by figuring out plot twists well before they happen. In other words, I’m pretty good with narrative structure. In fact, I’ve worked as a narrative designer for what was a major video game studio, but I digress.

In The Force Awakens, we see Rey suddenly come into force powers she never knew she had. She said that it felt like it had just woken up inside her, and then with literally no training she was doing things that it took other jedi years to learn. This was a clue that there is something interesting and unique about her origin.

The next clue comes from earlier in the same movie, when Rey touches Luke’s lightsaber. As we all remember, that lightsaber had originally belonged to Anakin Skywalker, and then was given to Luke by Obi One in A New Hope. Luke loses this lightsaber on Bespin while fighting Darth Vader. The presence of the lightsaber and her obvious and unexplained connection to it provide us with another clue.

Moving on to The Last Jedi, Rey goes to the dark side cave because she feels that she’ll be able to learn something about her parents. What she sees there however are just endless copies of herself. Now, it could be argued that this might just be mirroring a scene in Empire Strikes Back where Luke sees his own face in Vader’s helmet, I mean this is a dark side cave after all, but it’s also possible that what the force was showing her was the she’s her own parent.

Wait… what?

It’s the original trilogy and Empire Strikes Back has just ended with Luke deciding it would be better to let himself fall to his death than join Darth Vader. Palpatine still wants to take another Skywalker as his new apprentice. He knows Vader is going to reach a point soon where he’s going to turn on him and he’ll be forced to destroy him. Vader says as much when he confronts Luke on Bespin. It’s inevitable, and Palpatine has had to arrange the death of at least one former apprentice, Count Dooku. He’s also not so convinced that Luke can be turned. Despite this, somehow, Luke’s lightsaber is recovered, and if his lightsaber is recovered, odds are pretty good they found his hand too. That means they had his DNA, and in Star Wars if you have someone’s DNA, you can clone them.

We also know that clones can be altered. In Attack of the Clones, we find out that the clone army are clones of Jango Fett who have been altered to mature faster and be better soldiers. We also find out that everybody’s favorite anti-hero, Boba Fett, was unusual in that he was an unaltered clone of Jango that he took as a son. In other words, just because Rey isn’t male doesn’t mean that she can’e be an altered clone of Luke. It also means that Disney didn’t have to go out and cast the new lead as someone who looks remarkably similar to a younger Mark Hamill.

So, Palpatine being back in Episode IX will be a flashback that will show the truth of her origin, which is that the Empire clones her. When the Empire fell, she was likely too young to remember anything, and she was adopted, either by someone who was with the Empire, or by some junk dealers who found her later on. Kylo Ren wasn’t lying when he said that her parents were nobody, but they weren’t her real parents. Either he is unaware of this, or he was intentionally trying to deceive her.

Also, if Rey is a clone of Luke then it makes sense that she would feel a connection to the lightsaber and that it would awaken latent force powers within her. Maybe a clone wouldn’t have the same memories as the being it was made from, but the force is a kind of magic, and maybe that magic was already developed within her because Luke had already developed his own force skills before he lost the hand. Or maybe it’s just that potent Skywalker blood.

To support all this, I’m going to say that Disney isn’t stupid. There has been this narrative about the production of these movies that Rian Johnson just jumped in and did his own thing with the characters without any oversight. JJ Abrams has said as much.

We’re supposed to believe this? Really?

Disney paid $4 billion to buy up the Star Wars franchise, and we’re supposed to believe that the producers of these movies didn’t get together and figure out everyone’s backstory and major plot twists ahead of time? This is an utterly ridiculous narrative. It’s a total red herring. And they’re trying to sell it to us to mislead us and keep us from jumping to this conclusion. It’s so easy to just shrug and tell us that Rian Johnson screwed it all up. That might be how they did things with the original trilogy (they decided that Leia’s Luke’s sister while they were making Return of the Jedi), and I think they’re trying to convince us that they’re flying by the seat of their pants now. But I don’t buy it. This is too important for Disney to get right, and they’re deceiving the fans when they tell us that they didn’t coordinate the major plot points of the movies well ahead of time.
They want the movie to come out and then they’ll smile and say they planned it this way all along, and oh boy did we have you going!

Or at least that’s my take. I could always be wrong, but at least my personal fan theory is supported and is internally consistent from a narrative perspective.

I’ve been saying quietly on forums and posts for years, and I usually get the half-hearted head nod followed by, “But really it is.” No it’s not! Too many times I see people evaluating RPG campaign setting products and saying things like, “The city population sizes are too large for medieval cities,” or “People there sure seem to speak with a modern American dialect,” or “That weapon isn’t historically authentic, so this is wrong,” or… I could go on and on. Look, if you’re searching for modern make believe that is intended to bring historical authenticity, check out the Society for Creative Anachronism. But if we’re talking about gaming, there are so many inherent differences between “standard fantasy worlds” and medieval Europe that you can just stop with that argument.

Let’s start with the obvious, and most important differences between fantasy and medieval Europe: magic and monsters. There were literally no monsters, nor was there any magic in medieval Europe. This is important, because both of these things are drastic game changers. Magic allows you to do things like cure injuries and disease instantly. It allows you to travel to far-away places in the blink of an eye. It allows you to lay an enemy low from a distance without having to do so much as fire an arrow. Think about the implications of this realistically.

Magic that allows you to heal people better than modern medicine does means that people will live longer and there will be a much reduced rate of infant mortality and child deaths. This means population sizes will be larger. You could always make the argument that the peasants wouldn’t be able to afford treatment, which is a modern conservative way of viewing health care, but the fact is that most of these “medical treatments” come from clerics in service to gods of good or neutral alignment, which means they aren’t going to turn people away because they simply don’t have the money. Magic aside, even if you do compare it to medieval Europe, Rome had a population of 1 million in 100 BC, Alexandria Egypt had a population of 1 million in 100 BC, Constantinople had a population of 600,000 in 600 AD. In other words, even in a world without modern healthcare or magic, we still had massive cities with a million people or more in this world.

Next, let’s look at magical travel. We’re talking about a world where a wizard can cast a spell and be halfway across the world, where there are magical gates that allow people to instantly travel from one continent to another, or even from one plane to another. There are those who believe that including people of color in fantasy is just some “SJW crap.” Actually no. In a world where people are just as mobile as they are today, if not more so, the only way you would have a culturally and racially homogeneous society is if the people of that society rejected racial integration. You might even be inclined to imagine that this would be the case, but getting back to actual history, the exact opposite was true. With things like the Roman Empire and the Silk Road, the major ancient and medieval cultural centers had a variety of peoples present. When Rome conquered parts of Africa, the people there were not subjugated, they were brought into the Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire came to England, people of African descent were already a part of it, and there were black people in England. Trade, likewise, brought people together from far away lands. The merchant was far more interested in accumulating wealth than worrying that someone from Asia doesn’t belong in their lands. In other words, if history was multi-cultural, so too should fantasy be, and to a greater extent because individual mobility is greater.

And this brings me back to people who like to argue that what we think of as a broadsword isn’t really a broadsword, a mace isn’t really what we think of as a mace, and so on. The fact is that regardless of historical fact, there is a cultural understanding of what these things are, even if they aren’t historically accurate. People know what you’re talking about when you say they’ve come across a certain object even if it had a different name somewhere back in time in our own world. Trying to argue historical accuracy is like swimming against the current of a river–you’re going to put a lot of effort into it and not change anybody’s mind. And furthermore, nobody really cares, because fantasy gaming is not meant to be a reflection of actual history. The same goes for using modern-speak in your games. There’s really no reason that your character is going to speak like a character out of Shakespeare unless there’s some weird cultural reason the place he or she came from does that. It’s a game. You don’t need to do embarrassingly poor English accents. You don’t need to do funny voices. Just do the character.

Finally, let’s examine how out of place some historically accurate things that do carry over into fantasy gaming can be; for instance, the walled city. Erecting thick, durable walls around cities made a lot of sense in the middle ages, because invading armies had to come by ground. They had to march or they had to sail. There was no air force. In a fantasy world this is not true. Enemies can ride dragons, griffons, or they can simply teleport past the walls. In fact, a smart warlord would take full advantage of every monster they can tame and spell they can get their warlords to learn, because it only makes sense to conquer your enemy by the most efficient means possible (incidentally, that’s why the good old US of A maintains the largest, most technologically advanced military in the world).

So the bottom line is this: fantasy is not, and is not supposed to be a historical simulation. Inaccuracies are a part of the world that has been imagined for us, starting with the likes of Tolkien, and perpetuated by Gary Gygax, Weis and Hickman, Salvatore, and even George R. R. Martin. You’re welcome to do it how you want at your table, but while you’re at it you had better get rid of dwarves, elves, dragonborn, tieflings, dragons, magic, etc., etc., and you had better add things like the bubonic plague, the Catholic church (yes, that means you can forget about polytheism too) , and the idea that anyone who isn’t born into nobility can go off and have adventures.

One of the things I will be doing with Cobalt Kingdoms is to create the world where society is structured in a way that is realistic given the realities of that world. All but the most xenophobic cities will be a melting pot of people who look different from one another. In some ways, magic will be harnessed for the public good, but the most powerful concentrations of magic will still be reserved for the most powerful individuals who are lucky enough to have come into possession (or inherited) the locations where the ley lines intersect. Population sizes will vary wildly based on location, just as they do in the modern day. It will also have a rich history of toppled empires dating back thousands of years, and each will have its own style of artwork and architecture that will carry forward, both in terms modern styles in different locations of the world, as well as treasures to be found. Some might accuse me of perpetuating some agenda, but the fact is that I’m simply going to try and put out something that makes logical sense given the tropes that are built into the game.