(Message ryand:183)
Date:    Wed, 26 Aug 1998 16:56:02 PDT
To:      <l5rrpginfo@frpg.com>
From:    "Ryan S. Dancey" <RyanD@frpg.com>
Subject: RE: What to tell the public

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> Why *do* designers/publishers feel the need to "protect us from
> ourselves"?

1.  We want to make money by selling you the answers to your questions.
This is a for profit business, and we make that profit by supplying you with
little bits of the story at a time in exchange for cash.

2.  We're not exactly sure what happened to person X, where item Y is, or
what the true history of Z is.  There are a lot of people, each with a
creative input, who will get together and determine once and for all the
"truth" of those matters before they appear in a for-sale item.  Until that
happens, no matter how much Wick, or Ree, or myself, or any of the other
people involved >want< something to be "cannon" - it's not cannon.

3.  The RPG is one component in an increasingly diverse product mix.
Revealing "secrets" in one source effectively reveals that secret in all the
material.  In order to maintain a high degree of suspense across the many
products featuring the Emerald Empire IP, we need to hold the line on what
we say and what we don't to maximize the marketing value of secrets revealed
across as many products as appropriate.

> There are snippets and seeds in City of Lies and Night of 1,000 Screams
> that seem to point to the Tomb of Iuchiban. But they all say things like
> "but I can't tell you about that yet". Why?

Because none of those things are integral to the ongoing story or to the
products in which they are featured.  They're all "teasers" of products to
come and interesting plot hooks that will reward your players for paying
attention.  We've announced a Tomb of Iuchiban product.  If you want to go
ahead and design your own Tomb and your own backstory for Iuchiban and the
Bloodspeakers - more power to you.  The materials in CoL and Nof1KScreams
won't interfere with that effort one iota.  When the announced products ship
and people ask why your game doesn't conform to the published materials,
just tell them it's your version of Rokugan and it's a bit different from
ours.

But for those people who are waiting to read (and maybe play) in Iuchiban's
"real" Tomb, the power of building suspense will aid the marketing effort to
get them to shell out hard earned cash for that product instead of something
else on the shelves.

An analogy:  If George Lucas published the entire screenplay for SW:1 right
now, along with photos of the costumes, the sets and the ships, would the
initial interest in the movie be reduced?  Yes, of course it would.  Many
people are really into the "hype and surprise" of a big unveiling of a
property when it's done correctly.

There's >huge< portions of the RPG that we have no intention of ever doing
anything with.  There's bandits to chase, honor to assuage, politics to
embroil and monsters to kill all over Rokugan.  You and your players are
interested in things like the Bloodswords, the Scorpion Coup, Iuchiban, etc.
>because< we're making them mysterious and hyping them, not >in spite< of
those efforts.

Ryan


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