
Introducing Ragamuffin
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1994, in general, was a pretty bad year for roleplayers on the
Internet. In my mind, at least, it'll be remembered as the year
that TSR sent their threatening letters to all those FTP
administrators, causing megabytes of freely-donated, fan-authored
material to be dumped into the proverbial bit-bucket.

But in some ways, it was a good year.

TSR's action caused pretty much everyone to come to the swift
realization that RPG publishers, particularly the big ones,
aren't in business for the development of the hobby. They're in
this for the money, and the bigger they get, and the more suits
they hire, the more true that becomes.

That's when many netters realized that the only way to truly have
a safe-haven for the development of fan-authored rpg supplements
would be to develop fan-authored rpgs. Fudge and DragonNet were
perhaps the first to gain any degree of popularity, however,
while DragonNet focused on the fantasy genre, and Fudge heralded
itself as generic, nobody was really tackling the SF-genre, at
least not in a way that was catching on.

So by November, I figured that maybe it would be a good idea to
start exploring this avenue, and by May of the following year,
after releasing a preliminary draft of the TSR/Copyright saga, I
came up with the initial concept for the game: Earth in Ruins, a
vengeful humanity on the run. Part of the premise, I think, came
to me as a result of the horrific news reports concerning the War
in Bosnia. I remember the nation standing by as news of rape-
camps and mass-executions filtered through the media. How would
Earth feel, if locked in a situation even remotely similar: a
superior force, kicking us around while the rest of the aliens
stand-by, horror-struck but unwilling to intervene? Humanity,
then, could be likened to a homeless waif, a pitiful orphan of
galactic politics: a ragamuffin, if you will.

So for the past year, I've shared this premise with various
people on the net who seemed interested in developing it further,
and though we've gotten stalled on numerous occasions as I got to
working on other nefarious projects, this is something that we
will eventually complete. Too much work has already been invested
to turn back now. And besides... we're having fun.

Jim Vassilakos
jimv@empirenet.com

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