What is Altaerra?
The original thought was that it was marketing guy’s play on “Alternate Terra”. Hence the added tag line “Are you ready to be a player?” – clearly I’ve been spending too much time with those marketing folks…
As you surely noticed, the spelling is also reminiscent of the old Taera campaign (I guess it’s hard to let go…). Let’s just say I like to keep my options open.
But I’m getting ahead of myself and not really answering the question…what is Altaerra. The involvement of a marketing guy (fictional or otherwise) in the naming isn’t coincidental. The core concept behind Altaerra is that of an alternate earth-type planet. Imagine if the world of World of Warcraft were a real place. Imagine if “players” were actually actors (the old definition of player) sent to this world to (as Matthew Woodring Stover, author of Heroes Die, from whom this concept is blatantly ripped off, says), “die in interesting ways”. Now imagine if the thoughts and actions of these players were recorded and broadcast to an eager world as the ultimate form of reality TV – brutal entertainment for a slightly dystopian future Earth. Imagine that a MMORPG based on the alternate world has taken the internet by storm – largely because of a whisper campaign that claims “if you’re good enough, you too can be a player…”. Now imagine that you are such a player…having been selected as a teen, educated in Altaerran history and culture, trained as a fighter or rogue or to access that strange altaerran force known as the fey, and finally transferred to Altaerra through an Everett Shift (to be more fully defined in upcoming posts…) to find yourself at last in a fantastical world of elves, dragons and orcs.
Clearly, there’s lots left to be fleshed out with this core concept but I think this captures the core idea. In future posts I plan to expand on (among other things…)
- the history of Altaerra…
- who lives on Altaerra and how they got there…
- how Altaerran history is intertwined with the future of this world…
- just what the Everett effect is and how it works…
- how and why I think this concept will help manage some of the meta game issues we ran into in the Taera campaign…
That’s just a preliminary list….For now, I welcome your comments – let me know what you think – intrigued? Bored? Think it’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? Now’s the time to let me know…
This entry was posted on February 8, 2008 at 5:22 am and is filed under metagame. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
February 14, 2008 at 4:47 pm
That would be a cool concept for a character, a marketing guy! He could defeat monsters by creating cool catch phrases that stick in the monsters mind and drive them nuts.
February 16, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Didn’t Jim play a character like that once? I seem to remember something about the “face of evil…”