Episode 3: I played to much Monopoly
In this episode I talk about a few of the Mega Corporations in the United Americas. I give a general description of what they do. The biggest reason is that this could lead players to creating their own way in the world. Players do not have to be apart of these corporations but its there if they do.
-NovaSoft-
Software company that is used world wide, also they gather information and sell it.
-MediCorp-
Bio Company that helps create the new ways of healing and safty of people in the field and out in space.
-AeroTech-
Help create the space fairing ships and eventually creates ships for the EDF.
Tags: Corporations, Game
April 12th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Nice juicy podcast. I think that for each Era, there needs to be a set baseline archetypical role filling niche. How that niche is filled depends on the actions that have come before. In this podcast, you described a few megacorps, ironically having trouble remembering one of the names. I suggest that those are really just place holder names and the actual name, and specification for them depend on what came before. So AeroTech may be the actual Megacorp name, but more likely it describes the niche. There is a software niche. There is a medical niche. There is a space tech niche. All of those niches need to be filled in order to progress to the next era. You can have baseline (default) corporations filling those niches, but the ‘Rise of the Megacorps’ era may start with fledgling corps where there is no clear dominant leader in the niche. The players can act towards filling that niche.
The ‘Exploring the Solar System’ era would have a different set of niches that need to be filled. The ‘Leap to the Stars’ era has still other niches. These niches need to be sufficiently broad that the results of prior eras don’t eliminate the succeeding eras. So, if space exploration is hindered in the Rise of the Megacorps, it should still exist in a smaller way. Possibly just unmanned probes. If that gets tanked, the leap to the stars may require ‘friendly’ alien interference, or uncovering stargates or something. The niches have to get filled somehow, and if you don’t want to rely on deus ex machina, then the final era with time travel could explain how the niches get filled and why there is an intelligence behind WHY they need to be filled.
From a gaming stand point, the players can be a team trying to fill a niche. When they are done, they could then play another team, in the same era, filling another niche or even a rival. They could then see how their actions in the first niche affect their current niche filling role. The meta assumption here is that at some point far into the future, someone with time travel has pushed an agenda to fill a niche in a certain way. The players don’t need to be the time travelers themselves, but the GM could provide nudges in some direction. Time travel and manipulating the past is a tricky thing, you don’t always get the results you expect.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:14 am
OK CJ, you scare me on how much our minds think alike. There is actually a grand design behind it all, or far quite a bit of it. I was thinking that the Niche filled by the Megacorps would evolve with the story.