![]() ![]() “I always liked Holden because he was the least like me human that I could possibly write about,” Franck said. Those characters include Amos Burton, Alex Kamal, Naomi Nagata, Shed Garvey and James Holden. We just borrowed a few different personality elements.” But they’re quite radically different than what they were, in some cases very radically different than they were in the game. “We borrowed a couple characters from our d20 game, with the permission of the players. “In our game, the crew of the Rocinante had 12 people in it,” said Franck, referring to the stolen Martian Navy ship that Leviathan Wakes’ protagonists make off with early in the novel. In fact, it was Abraham’s own d20-based character who would go on to become Joe Miller, the fedora-clad Star Helix Security detective played by Thomas Jane. That’s where he met Daniel Abraham, who soon became one of the players around his table. It’s because the rule system was very ‘today,’ so no laser guns, no plasma weapons.”Īround the same time, Franck moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Which is why The Expanse feels very grounded in today. “I just used d20 Modern,” Franck said, “and then kind of added my own futuristic stuff. He credits that game for inspiring the gritty, lived-in feel of his world. So I still owned everything I came up with, and I just kept playing around with it.”įrom there, Franck adapted the pitch to the d20 Modern Roleplaying Game, a system published by Wizards of the Coast in 2002. The Chinese company apparently didn’t realize that developing an MMO was a $100 million project, and once they did realize that, they sort of just backed away quietly. That’s how I came up with what eventually turned into The Expanse. “A friend of mine asked me to come up with a pitch that she was going to take to her uncle, who was associated with a Chinese company that wanted to make an MMO. ” Left to right: founder and president of Green Ronin Publishing Chris Pramas, authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and lead designer Steve Kenson. “It was right before Eve Online came out. “The Expanse started out as a pitch for an MMO,” Ty Franck told Polygon. Instead, it was turned into a niche massively multiplayer online game in China. ![]() No wonder it spawned a popular television series, whose fourth season was recently picked up by Amazon Prime.īut, in an alternate universe, The Expanse never became a TV show. It’s a story of political intrigue, but also a classic spacefaring adventure. Caught in the middle are the Belters, humans who, for generations, have grown up in industrial centers far from the central planets with little-to-no gravity. ![]() In that universe, the citizens of Earth are allied together under the United Nations against the citizens of Mars. The Expanse book series, which began with 2011’s Leviathan Wakes, focuses on a humanity’s plight several hundred years in the future. Corey together, to discuss the lost history of their Hugo-nominated series and their ongoing Kickstarter campaign for The Expanse Roleplaying Game. Polygon sat down with Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, who write under the pen name S. Now, with the help of Green Ronin Publishing, it’s going legit. The Expanse, the wildly popular series of science fiction books that became a beloved Syfy television show, was at one point a homebrew tabletop role-playing campaign. ![]()
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