Pharniel's page

Absolutely! That's the most interesting part of the Gap to me, and has been since the beginning—the Gap is in many ways based off the experiences of a friend of mine who was in a car accident and got total amnesia.

It was stated that The Gap also included corruption of knowledge storage media (books, etc.) - has that been changed to just memories?

How much space is dedicated to The Gap as a setting item & DM information? It seems to be the central mystery in the setting but given the constraints & distance between the event and the now it seems highly difficult to meaningfully engage with in a way that doesn't feel cheap.

You had immortal and neigh immortal creatures of unimaginable power live through it who haven't been able to do anything about it for centuries, it's going to take some work to engage with it without feeling like Special PC Snowflakes or the major NPC powers (including the gods) holding the Idiot Stick to keep them from coming up with the same idea.

So how much space is being planned for it since the StarFarer society seems to be wholly dedicated to engaging with it?

Woooooooooooooo! Finally not on a Phone!

So...avoiding NSFW links...

The boardgame tiles, minis, etc. are mostly bog standard Dark Fantasy. There's frequent Horrible Fates with a fair amount of insanity, body horror and general violation, most of it not specifically sexual.

It's a pretty badass boardgame. Much fun. Very frustrating & challenging.

The.....issues...people have are usually discovered in the fluff & art for the game.
Let's be frank here - the art style and aesthetic for the pinups is "Naga was underdeveloped and overclothed" and the general direction is "Bosche & Geiger were onto something, but it's a bit too subtle, innit?"

Many of the art pieces in the book are excellent displays of artistic talent but the tone and design is 80's heavy metal album covers or Boris Vallejo paintings if he was into gore. And when a woman is being devoured, or dismembered there's a tendency to make it a sexy dismemberment.

Spidiclese is the best in-game example of what I like to call 'spot the fetish this mini is designed around" - It's a giant spider /thing/ who has a 'lure' that it uses to attract survivors. The lure is a sexy dismembered torso of a woman.

The really squik stuff has been memoryholed from the store and gallery, the links work but you have to go directly to the link, and since the kingdom death store & gallery are /also/ the lore book most are gone.

All are moderately to exceedingly NSFW - look up 'Ammo Slave' for the most conventional example (Fetish - Nonconsensual slavery, humiliation & sexual objectification). The Ammo Slave is gone, but the Great Hunter (including naked crossbow attendant) is still about.

Then you have the entire Holy Lands & Mother series are..yeah. Aside from the Wet Nurse most are totally SFW. Until you read how you get to be a mother. You get to be a Grand Mother by surviving having your womb "prepared" by the Holy Entity (a process few survive) after being 'attended to' by a Wetnurse for a bit so that you can give birth to monsters.

Again, some of that is still on the website (http://gallery.kingdomdeath.com/Grand-Mother - it's SFW) - but you have to know the exact URL to get there. The lore for the Mother is missing, but the gallery is still there.

It's entirely possible that many of the super-squick stuff will be retconned, but I doubt it. The game is up front about what kind of material it wants to cover.

Whoa, senpai noticed me.

For the record, My primary objection was not the bare inert thigh, just the method. Boots and a skirt would have been resonable, if not ideal, and boots and phoenix chaps would be consistent with the world, if a bit more Sin City strip club scene. The way the clothes were though? They would have had to have been tailored in that fashion, making them the "sexy adventurer costume" pants, strategically open and hard as hell to put on and maintain.

Glad you changed it.

I like the Valeros and Kayra, but why did poor Mer have to lose the crotch to her pants?

Does this also mean we'll be treated to a KMD Preacher or Distraction style mini for Seoni?

i think a lot of names and generalities of culture survived the Gap, over the centuries since there has been a lot of rebuilding and redefining what certain concepts mean in each culture but i bet the game play kicks off at the start of a "new age" when people finally have the stability and means to start digging into the past and finding out what exactly it was that hit them. you could set a game earlier i suppose if you want to focus on surviving the fall but this is about the rise afterwards. at least, thats the impression i have gotten so far.

We'll have to see. On the face of it "star wars by way of spelljammer" isn't a hard sell for my group, it'll depend on The Twist that makes investigation suddenly possible that hasn't existed for the past 15 generations.

They touch on this in the recent Polygon interview, "Imagine if you woke up one day," Sutter said, "and you still have all your knowledge, and you still have roughly a sense of who you are, but you have no real memory of your past. After The Gap, whole nations knew that they are at war with other nations, but they didn't really remember why. People might have recognised their wives or their children, but they didn't have any specific memories of how or when they got together. That event is far in the past of Starfinder, but it’s nonetheless played havoc on the setting. Society has just sort of reshaped itself and that, to me, is a very interesting question." So there was a collapse but now, after several centuries, things have normalized a bit.

I get it's an interesting question, because it is, but it seems...superfluous? Like...either it matters in the here now, in which case the book is going to have to spend a goodly amount of pages trying to convey what was lost vs. what wasn't and the consequences of how adjudicating one way shapes your game adding in a significant amount of complexity that the setting becomes about The Gap by default

Now..by 'fiddly details' let me go through this thought experiment -
It's december 25h, 2016 and you wake up with no idea what's going on. you have a vague sense of if where you are is 'home' or not, can sorta recognize close relatives (parents, children, spouses) and have all your technical skills.
The question yet answered is "what records are gone?" - if it's anything related to history then your music is gone, your e-mail is deleted, all the documents on your hdd are gone, video games are gone (credits, copyright dates yo), actually your OS is probably gone as well because historical information is in the code.
Phone numbers are gone - they're actually smart numbers that convey geographic information, and you can't remember your name.
You can't celebrate christmass, even if the bible isn't blank, because it's not in the bible it's in a bunch of media works that provide historical clues.
You probably can't even celebrate the new year because calendars give tons of information and would have to be expunged.
You have no access to your bank accounts, because financial history is even more information dense than a mere calendar.
You don't know where you work, you have the food findable in your house. You can drive a car, which is fine, until you run out of gas because you don't know how to actually refill the gas stations.
You better hope little notes to one's self about where trucks, boats and other deliveries are going because basically 20% of the Earth's population is going to starve or freeze over the next three months or so as utilities fail, the economy has been vaporized, and farmers have no idea what they planed to plant for the coming year. That would require climate data & weather patterns which, again, are information dense. The world descends into warlords with production capacities cut in half and you'd be lucky to stop at 18th century levels of technology as about 80% of the world's population dies.

And that's us, with modern equipment and knowledge. You do that to an agrarian society at war? It's Bronze Age collapse all over again.

To whit - There aren't 'empires suddenly at war' because to have an empire you'd have to have people that know each other more than at the squad level and other people wearing the same uniform or the same flag. TO have a war you'd have to have troops moving coherently against each other. What you've got now is roving banks of, well, bandits hungry, armed and trained in violence. You have no songs, because traditionally they'd speak to historical events. Tax rolls are blank, pursers don't remember where coin is hid or maybe they just run off with the money or get cut down by the generals and knights who suddenly are freed from emotional, cultural and legal ties to the rulers and as the strongest and most powerful take over.

Culture, by the way The Gap is currently explained, is expunged.

If culture and nationality isn't expunged then it's going to start getting very, very, very complex on 'well, what exactly did survive?' while also not being enough information that several centuries of determined investigators with access to magic and super science couldn't have put things back together.

Like...the book is going to have to sell me on what this setting feature brings to the table because so far it just looks like another nightmare thing to try to engage with.

How did society not utterly collapse from the gap?
It appears that there's a hard line where no info exists - even documents.
So no one's got any orders, there's no shipping manifests, medical reports, star charts, etc.

Like, how did people not die of untreated medical conditions that were wow from their memory? Or while contours/planets not starve because of production failures?