At the risk of derailing slightly, let me run off on the Star Wars tangent a bit, but to make a point, I hope. The problem with midichlorians isn't exactly that it's an answer to a question no one asked, although that's part of it. Watching the original SW films, you get a pretty good idea of the force and how it works. It fits into traditional fantasy ideas. It's got some religion and ritual mixed up in it, and some mysticism, and some bit of wizards and magicians. It's not exactly any of those things, but it's close enough to fit comfortably into those mental patterns. So while people may have been curious to know more about the force, they wanted to know about it while still keeping it within those boundaries that they had come to accept it under. What they didn't want was to be told that it's not this mystical religion, it's psuedo-babble science. That not only ruins the mystery which was a fun part of the original idea, but it also turns it into something entirely different. We didn't want to know about that force, we wanted to know about the one that we already thought we understood.
This is all true, but I guess I didn't really explain my bit very well. Did you ever read Calvin and Hobbes? There was a particular "Noodle Incident" that was the most imfamous thing that Calvin ever did, and it's referred to a handful of times throughout the strip. It's never explained. In one of his anthologies after the strip was over, Watterson remarked (to paraphrase) "of course I never answered what the Noodle Incident was, because nothing I could think up would ever compared to the crazy stuff that people were imagining in their heads." The thing about most ideas like that is that the half-formed ideas in people's heads seem like so much
more. As soon as you start shining light on something like that, it's like "oh, that's all."
The Force is particularly mystical when you have this sense that nobody completely understands it, and so your mind fills in all these blanks in ways that appeal to you specifically. If you look at the tiny bits of story for AI War, the reason they work so well is their very brevity, I think. And lots of other games, mostly classic games, are like that also. Most books do it. Whatever your lore is, you have to always hold some of it back, because readers or players need to feel like the world is larger than they know. One problem with the Star Wars prequels is that they tried to answer all of the backstory/lore questions from the original trilogy, without raising any new and interesting issues to go with them. In the real world we never understand the entirety of how the world works, and we all know and on some level accept this, and so when fiction presents us a "this is everything you need to know about all of this" answer to big questions, that fiction seems paper thin.
My two cents.
So, that said, I would like to know a bit more about the Ilari and what they're doing and why there are some that seem to be good and some that are jerks, and I'd like to know what they have to do with the deep. Keeping them mysterious while dribbling out little bits of information is fine. Usually less is more, in these sorts of situations. But I don't want to be told that they're some dilithium crystals that fell out of the USS Enterprise while it was flying over the planet 500 years ago. Not that giving fantasy concept a more scientific explanation is a bad thing, it can lead to some really interesting stories, just... don't do it badly, I guess is the point. George Lucas shouldn't be allowed to touch Star Wars any more, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, this is all good points.
That aside, I'd be interested in optionally learning more about the various time periods. I mean if you imagine someone thrust into this sort of situation with a settlement full of people from all sorts of times, that's exactly what they'd talk about. Once you got the basics of survival out of the way and sat down at the campfire for the night, I'm sure I'd be asking 'So, what is life like in the robot future? Does your history record what happened to humans? Where do baby robots come from?' and so on.
A lot of that we're trying to seed in through NPC dialogue rather than explicitly through mysteries, but if that doesn't seem like enough then we can circle back to some mysteries later.
And it never hurts to throw in plot threads that may not connect to much and then fill them out later if people get really curious. Put in off-hand references to your own version of the 'Clone Wars', and then just leave it hanging out there. If people are really curious, you can fill in the back story as needed. If not, it just remains as a neat reference to make the world feel more alive. (Just don't let George Lucas write it when you do fill out that back story.)
Yeah, that's a good point. We have a ton of stuff like that, but we'll just have to put in some references rather than trying to make them full-out mysteries. Because at this point, nobody
cares, heh. But if we tempt them for a few years, they might like to know a little more. I for one very much wanted to know about Vader's fall and the Clone Wars, they just completely wrote it wrong. Among other issues.
