Red Scholar's Wake Q6: Gaming

NeilNjae

The gaming question. What parts of this book would make it into your games? The setting? The culture? The technology? Politics? Romance?

What game engine would you use to play a game of "The Red Scholar's Wake"? Would you play such a game?

Apocryphal

The one interesting thing I think she did explore was the use of family pronouns, so I’d be intrigued to develop that in a setting. The basic plot is usable, too, though it really needs dressing up in terms of setting, characters, and backstory to make it compelling.

clash_bowley

I would like to take the Vietnamese space culture and viciously and rudely appropriate it for a particular world's culture. It would be interesting to explore. As for game engines, I won't bother answering that!

RichardAbbott

I suspect that a gaming group would find themselves creatively enhancing some of the very scanty descriptions and making something much more immersive.

clash_bowley

To be fair, a western SF writer doesn't have to explain their projected SF culture in detail. Hints here and there go a long way, because we live in that culture and can project from known underpinnings. Would a Vietnamese person require more than what she has supplied? I know only a little about the culture, enough to at least know it was Vietnamese in origin and not Laotian or Cambodian, and found her references perfectly adequate.

RichardAbbott

That's a good point - we manage pretty well with Roadside Picnic or the one we all read about the magic school (the name escapes me) by Russian / Soviet authors, presumably as there's still enough points of contact that we get the drift. And we did OK with the Mexican one a while back, or the Chinese martial arts one. But this feels like it's several steps further away.

Apocryphal

Another factor here is that this novel isn’t her first in this setting, so quite possibly much more is revealed in other works. But of course we only have this one to judge by.