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The Jonathan Tweet Review
Note: The following review is for Man, Myth, & Machine. This is a
game that is currently on hiatus as I work on the Outsider Chronicles. Many
thanks to Jonathan, who is one of the developers of D&D 3rd Edition. You can
find Jonathon's personal web site at www.jonathantweet.com.
Man, Myth, & Machine<tm>, by Keith W. Sears, is "Worldbook One" for the SOL, the Omniversal Roleplaying System<tm>, also by Sears. Both are published by Heraldic Game Design. My copy is an Alpha Preview. Sears plans to release the Beta Preview and the Final Version. The Alpha Preview is (naturally) skimpy, but it's already worthy of comment.
Keith has envisioned a science fiction/fantasy setting that is excellent for roleplaying. In a momentary, worldwide catastrophe, people were given the power to make their unconscious wishes come true. Now the catastrophe is over, and the fun begins. The brilliance of this setting for roleplaying comes from the several problems it solves:
1) Continuity. The GM can invent just about anything and justify it with the phrase "someone unconsciously wished for it." Unlike so many world settings in which the GM has to hurt the continuity or limit his or her creative freedom (I had a rough time with
Glorantha, for example), in MM&M, just about anything goes.
2) Justification of
Cliches. Lots of players want to be able to play or encounter standard types of things: elves, vampires, dungeons, laser guns, whatever. How do you justify a world whose components just happen to fit what the gamers want to be and see? Why, the world was shaped by unconscious desires! So all cliches are justified. You can focus on form and worry less about function. (Mark Rein*Hagen and I tried to solve the same problem with out first collaboration, an RPG in which belief shaped reality. It did the same thing that MM&M does, except that belief continued to shape reality during the game, making the whole setting feel groundless. By making the catastrophe momentary, Sears lets belief shape reality while keeping current reality grounded.)
3) Mixing genres. It's fun, and in the MM&M setting it's "realistic" (that is, it's a logical result of the premise of the "wish wave"). In fact, the players and GMs can bring in stuff from any genre, not just fantasy and SF. It can be horror, pulp, superhero, MTV, whatever.
One major question remains open as Sears takes the game to its final version: how much of the freedom that I rave about is going to remain? It's possible that Sears could use all this freedom *for himself*, nail down the world design, and leave the GM toeing the line (as is done in most RPGs with extensive settings). I hope that he'll provide specifics and background without constraining the GM's own imagination too much. I can't tell from the Alpha Preview how much freedom the Final Version will leave the player.
MM&M uses Sears' SOL mechanics. I don't like universal game systems, so I'm just not going to comment on how well these mechanics work.
You can contact Keith Sears and Heraldic Game Design at
[email protected].
Or:
1013 W Virginia Ave
Peoria, IL 61604
MM&M (Alpha Version) is 18 pp, full-size, $3.
-Jonathan Tweet
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