[Torg] Fiction and Reality (Genre and Being Real, 2 of 6)

[Kansas Jim]

On 2/13/2010 11:10 PM, Jasyn wrote:

> On Feb 13, 2010, at 9:02 PM, Travis James Hall wrote:

>>> Why does Earth have legends of Atlantis? Because on some
>>> other Earth in some other cosm, Atlantis (or something much
>>> like it) really existed. Our fiction doesn't determine their
>>> reality, their realities have molded our fiction.

>> I recall that a Torg rulebook or sourcebook somewhere mentions that
>> high levels of Possibility Energy allow people to better imagine alternate
>> possible realities.

> Cool, another plank undergirding my assertion.

It is, in fact, straight out of "The Chekov Strain". In other posts (see 
below) Jasyn uses it as a possible source of the 'Core Earth created 
other realities' concept which is not correct. There is one brief part 
of the story where Wu Han considers that as a possibility but he 
dismisses it in favor of sticking with his original explanation, which 
gets repeated several times, that CE's huge surplus of PE enables them 
to imagine realities other than their own.

In a followup Jasyn also wrote:

> The reason I wasn't sure is that "The Chekov Solution" (from the Torg anthologies) posits the exact opposite situation: Wu Han is troubled because his behavior was caused by CE fiction, and racist fiction at that. This story may be where people gleaned the "CE created realities", and because it's by Greg Gorden (IIRC), the chief designer of Torg, it seems as official as nearly anything else.

It was by Christopher Kubasik, who does have a credit in the original 
rulebook for "additional mythos and system work", but I doubt if anyone 
gives the story credence simply because of that.

-- 
Kansas Jim, Torg guru (ksjim (at) sdc (dot) org)
Torg website: http://www.sdc.org/~ksjim/index.html