There's ostensibly a metaplot involving the people responsible for sending Luci to corrupt Bean, though it's unclear why it's important to sway a princess who isn't even in line for the throne of her bankrupt kingdom.
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The metaplot is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting. Major official story events that change the world, or simply move important non- player characters from one place to another, are part of the metaplot for a game. For example, White Wolf Game Studio's World of Darkness was brought to an end by major events in the metaplot as part of the Time of Judgment. Because of events like this, many gaming groups choose to ignore the metaplot for a game entirely.
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Metaplot information is usually included within gaming products such as rule books and modules as they are released. Major events in the metaplot are often used to explain changes in the rules in between versions of the games, as was the case in White Wolf's World of Darkness and in Wizard of the Coast's Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance.
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The fourth edition setting presents a much abridged and somewhat different backstory that alludes to the original metaplot but doesn't explicitly reference it. Little is known in-game about the history of Athas and what is known is largely myth, legend, and/or the propaganda of the sorcerer-kings. The fourth edition metaplot describes three ages: the Green Age, the Red Age, and the Desert Age or the Age of the Sorcerer-Kings. As with the original metaplot, the Green Age is earliest visible sign of civilization but suggests that rare tales tell of an earlier age, possibly the Blue Age.
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From the official website of the Magnus Archives The podcast is initially presented as a horror anthology but slowly reveals a more complex metaplot over the course of 5 seasons.
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Negation War was a comic book series published by CrossGen Comics, and serving as a culmination of the metaplots of nearly all of CrossGen's other titles. It was cancelled after only two issues, in spring 2004, before the company declared bankruptcy and ended production on all their titles. It was intended to answer many, if not all, of the questions surrounding CrossGen's metaplot, allowing the company to move on to new titles and perhaps a new company-wide metaplot.
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Troy Denning's Prism Pentad novels brought sweeping changes to the metaplot of Dark Sun and were also closely tied to playable adventure modules such as DS1: Freedom (1991) and DSQ1: Road to Urik (1992). This trend continued with the adventure modules tying directly into Denning's fiction and vice versa. The culmination of the tangled metaplot was summarized in Beyond The Prism Pentad (1995) in preparation for the release of the revised and expanded boxed set, released a few months later, which presented the setting after the events of the modules and novels. Some advances in the metaplot were controversial among fans as releases such as Mind Lords of the Last Sea and Windriders of the Jagged Cliffs explicitly introduced more science fiction elements, such as the lifeshaping magics of the halflings, that had previously only been hinted at.
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As part of the Time of Judgment event, the ending to the World of Darkness series, White Wolf concluded the Kindred of the East metaplot with adventures published in the book World of Darkness: Time of Judgment.
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The Storyteller System was discontinued in 2003 after completing the metaplot building up since Vampire: The Masquerade. It was replaced by the Storytelling System, a more streamlined rule set. The Storytelling System premiered in The World of Darkness in 2004.
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In 2008, Athas.org released a new edition of the Dark Sun campaign setting for the 3.5 rules. This edition picks up the metaplot two years after the Wanderer's discovery of the Last Sea. Following prophesied signs, Dregoth takes to the surface and makes his bid for true divinity.
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In 2018 was released Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition, also known as V5. Development of the new edition was led by game designer Kenneth Hite, Martin Ericsson and Karim Muammar, and was distributed by Modiphius Entertainment. This edition contains new and overhauled rules, and has updated the metaplot to the year 2018 in the World of Darkness.
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The Magnus Archives has been praised by critics and reviewers. The development of the lengthy metaplot and the voice acting by Jonathan Sims in his role as the archivist Jonathan Sims received particular praise. The Magnus Archives has appeared on numerous Top Horror Podcast and Top Fiction lists from publications such as The A.V. Club, GamesRadar, Cosmopolitan, The Verge and more since 2016.
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The game is set in the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century. The canonical year for the first edition of Deadlands is 1876. A later supplement, Tales o' Terror, advances the game's backstory and metaplot ahead one year, to 1877. The second edition of Deadlands uses the updated backstory of 1877 as the canonical starting point.
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Dark Sun's extensive metaplot spans several fictional ages into its past and is described by a fictional narrator called the Wanderer who presents an in-game account of Athas's history in their Wanderer's Journal. According to this account the planet progressed through several ages roughly corresponding to the color of the sun and the state of the planet.Slavicsek, Bill. Dark Sun Campaign Setting: Expanded And Revised.
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FanPro licensed Shadowrun in early 2001, and Boyle took over as Line Editor. FanPro got Shadowrun going again almost immediately, and Boyle's biggest concern was continuing the metaplot. Boyle also tried out something new: the downloadable "Shadowrun Missions", which were overseen by Rich Osterhout in their first season. Boyle started working on a few edition of Shadowrun around 2003, having decided that the game needed simplification, which was published as Shadowrun, Fourth Edition (2005).
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Brown's Player's Guide to Greyhawk and Roger E. Moore's Return of the Eight and The Adventure Begins returned TSR to Greyhawk, and according to Shannon Appelcline "moved the setting's metaplot well beyond the Greyhawk Wars to a new era that that was lighter and more magical than that of From the Ashes". Brown left TSR in August 1997, and did work for Fast Forward Entertainment from 2002-2003. She has also written educational nonfiction books for middle schoolers.
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This book also updated Fate Chips to work with the Savage Worlds system. This book marked a first for Great White Games in that it is the first setting book published without a scripted or plot point campaign. The publisher has hinted that four complete plot point campaign books will be released for Deadlands: Reloaded, each focusing on certain regions and events in the metaplot of the game. In 2009 the first of these campaigns, The Flood, was released.
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Wizard of the Coast returned to TSR's original setting, Greyhawk, in 1998 with Player's Guide to Greyhawk (1998) by Anne Brown and Return of the Eight (1998) and The Adventure Begins (1998) by Moore; these three books moved Greyhawk's metaplot well beyond the Greyhawk Wars to a new era. The Adventure Begins won the 1998 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Supplement. Moore left Wizards of the Coast in late 2000. Moore is a past member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
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Orpheus is a role playing game by White Wolf Game Studio, set in a microcosm of the World of Darkness. Unlike the other World of Darkness game lines, Orpheus has a specifically planned metaplot and a set number of books that were published. Although it uses the same system as White Wolf's other games, ghosts and spirits are the exclusive focus of this story. Other supernatural creatures in the World of Darkness are strongly discouraged from entering the events of Orpheus.
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Players have a choice of six "Orders" for their characters to join. Each Order possesses a mastery over a specific "Aptitude", a category of psionic powers. Each Order is based in a specific geographic location, often the homeland of its founder, and is heavily influenced by local culture. Actually, there are eight "Orders" in the Trinity Universe, but one only became playable after some metaplot hooks made it so, and the other has almost been exterminated by the year where the playable timeline begins.
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The end of the Green Age is described similarly to the original metaplot. The Green Age gave way to the more recent Red Age, a time of profound war and strife that left the world a blasted, desolate waste. Game play begins during the Desert Age, similarly to 2nd edition, with the world a barren wasteland and its few remaining habitable places being lorded over by the sorcerer-kings. Sorcerer-king Kalak of Tyr has been assassinated and the liberation of Tyr has sparked a glimmer of hope and renewal in the Tyr Region.
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A side-bar briefly describes the true history of Athas, which differs slightly from the original. First, the gods were destroyed or driven away from Athas by malevolent elementals known as primordials. The loss of true gods created a fault in the world that allowed for the potential for arcane magic, which Rajaat discovers; the remainder of the metaplot up to the modern era is similar to 2nd edition. The Tyr Region remains the only bastion of civilization on Athas but is tyrannically ruled by the sorcerer-kings.
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The setting was also the first TSR setting to come with an established metaplot out of the box. Dark Suns popularity endured long after the setting was no longer supported, with a lively online community developing around it. Only third-party material was produced for the third edition D&D; rules, but a new official edition of Dark Sun was released in 2010 for the fourth edition. Dark Sun has been mentioned by developers, most notably Mike Mearls, and appeared in psionics playtest materials for Dungeons & Dragons for the fifth edition of the game.
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Dark Sun was not officially supported by the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but Paizo Publishing and the fans at Athas.org kept the setting alive through the use of the Open Game License issued by Wizards of the Coast. David Noonan created an updated version of the setting for Paizo in 2004 that was published in Dragon magazine and Dungeon magazine that presented rules for 3rd edition. This version took place three hundred years after the last published setting details and sought to return the setting's metaplot to something closer to the original boxed set.
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The second edition moved the setting from Vimary to Capal (another city), advancing the history of the world by 15 years. It also finally revealed the whole course of the metaplot, allowing Gamemasters to weave their own stories rather than wait to find out how the world would change. Though plans to follow up the second edition with more supplemental books have been discussed, there have been no further releases yet. Since 2004, many of the Tribe 8 rulebooks and supplements books are available as PDF downloads on DrivethruRPG.
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Fourth Edition is described as a reworking of the game mechanics, with redundancies eliminated, and a simpler success level system. The game world is advanced five years, past the end of the Barsaive-Thera War, in order to clear dangling threads in the metaplot and open the game world to new stories. The first Fourth Edition title—the Player's Guide—was released in early 2015. In 2014 FASA Corporation also gave permission for Impact Miniatures to return the original Heartbreaker Hobbies & Games Official Earthdawn Miniatures range to production.
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The events of Negation War revolve around the invasion of CrossGen's Sigilverse, i.e. the mainstream universe where all the other titles take place, by the forces of an alternate universe known as the Negation. The Sigil-Bearers, the protagonists of the core titles, led by the Atlantean Danik, are brought together to serve the purpose for which the Sigil was created: to fight off the Negation, led by the god-emperor Charon and his new consort/queen Evinlea. Negation War reveals some of the key mysteries of the CrossGen metaplot, continuing from the revelations of the later issues of Negation.
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Although many of the Fallen truly are criminal, many have also been cast out from the Tribes due to their inability to deal with the unjust society that the Fatimas have built. They are heretics, warriors, dreamers, and leaders who hope to build something even when society has abandoned them. The game has a strong metaplot, which tells the tale of the Fallen's struggle with the Tribes, the demonic Z'bri who had destroyed the world before, and also with themselves. It focuses on themes of spirituality, horror, and the cost of hope in a world that has gone terribly wrong.
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Dark Sun is an original Dungeons & Dragons (D&D;) campaign setting set in the fictional, post-apocalyptic desert world of Athas. Dark Sun featured an innovative metaplot, influential art work, dark themes, and a genre-bending take on traditional fantasy role-playing. The product line began with the original Dark Sun Boxed Set released for D&D;'s 2nd edition in 1991, originally ran until 1996, and was one of TSR's most successful releases. Dark Sun deviated from the feudalistic backdrops of its Tolkienesque pseudo- medieval contemporaries, such as Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, in favor of a composite of dark fantasy, planetary romance, and the Dying Earth subgenre.
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Dark Sun's second edition metaplot was advanced through its novels and adventure modules. During this era TSR began to expand metaplots in other settings, such as Forgotten Realms, but Dark Sun pioneered the matching of fiction and adventure modules to engender and advance metaplots. The original 1991 boxed set begins at the end of the Brown Age (the Age of the Sorcerer-Kings) with the former Champions of Rajaat now tyrannically ruling over the few pockets of civilization left in the Tyr Region. These city-states tightly control the few remaining reservoirs of fresh water, the food supply, and other precious resources such as obsidian or iron.
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Dodger is one of the characters in Shadowrun, an elven hacker; his romantic involvement with semi-autonomous knowbot Morgan spurs her into full self-consciousness and turns her into one of the setting's first true AIs, launching a far-reaching chain of events that still largely define the metaplot twenty in-character (fifteen real) years later. In the Bewitched episode, "The Phrase is Familiar", Tabitha's tutor uses witchcraft to make the Artful Dodger come out of Oliver Twist. In this episode he steals Samantha's ring, Darrin's watch, and the cufflinks of a client of Darrin's advertising company. The literary magazine Artful Dodge was named after the character.
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The metaplot of the franchise is centered on a purportedly extinct humanoid alien race called the . It was first conceptualized during the pre-production of The Super Dimension Fortress Macross when the creators were researching cultural studies to develop concepts used in the plot. According to official sources, the Protoculture was the first advanced humanoid race in the universe—advanced Protoculture civilization started 500,000 years ago—and is the creator of the Zentradi and homo sapiens. Phases of colonization resulted in the establishment of an "Interstellar Republic", (similar to a galactic empire) which covers much of the Milky Way galaxy 2800 years after Protoculture civilization started (498,000 years ago).
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JTAS #9 (1981) GDW developed their metaplot for Traveller by describing the start of a war with an alien species named the Zhodani. GDW's original magazine ended with The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society #24 (1984); it was soon replaced with a new magazine, Challenge, which continued JTAS' numbering with issue #25 (1986) but covered all of GDW's games, not just Traveller. Imperium Games published Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society #25 in 1996, and published their second and final issue of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society in 1997. The magazine was revived by Imperium Games after GDW closed its doors, and JTAS 25 and 26 were published before that publisher ceased operations.
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At the point the source material lays out for play the beginning of the Age of Heroes when the sorcerer-king's hold on the Tyr Region has recently been challenged with the assassination of Kalak of Tyr in a slave rebellion led by Rikus, Agis, Neeva, Tithian, and Sadira. Over the course of the adventure modules and the novels the metaplot advances radically, changing the Tyr Region with Rikus, Agis, Neeva, Tithian, and Sadira (from the novels), or the player characters at the center of the changes. Borys the Dragon is killed by Rikus and Sadira. Sadira becomes the first sun-wizard through the use of the Pristine Tower, putting her at a level of power equal to the sorcerer-kings.
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FanPro licensed Shadowrun in early 2001, and Boyle took over as Line Editor, and six months later, FanPro licensed Battletech as well and hired Randall Bills to continue with his job as Battletech Line Editor; that made Bills FanPro LLC's second and only other employee. FanPro LLC also began expanding into translations of German RPGs, their first being The Dark Eye (2003), a translation of Germany's top fantasy RPG, Das Schwarze Auge (1984) – which had recently been released in a fourth edition (2002) by the German Fantasy Productions. The Dark Eye, like FanPro's FASA lines, depended on a metaplot, this one advanced through adventures and Fantasy Productions' Aventurische Bote magazine. However, The Dark Eye did not sell well, and was not further supported by FanPro LLC as a result.
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