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Hi good people of dakka,

The cosmic disaster at the center of ME's setting is basically an environmental catastrophe on a cosmic scale, forcing mass evacuations and igniting countless conflicts as people struggle to survive.

We live in strange and disturbing times. In the USA particularly but also much of the northern hemisphere in general, we haven't yet reached the social tipping point where a majority of people fully accept the reality of climate change and realize what it means for the places they live in. Right now people are still moving to Arizona and buying beachfront property in Florida, for example. It boggles the mind.

When we do reach that tipping point - perhaps accelerated by home insurance companies pulling out of increasingly volatile regions, as they are starting to do in the States - there's going to be mass external and internal migration from places with dangerous temperatures and vanishing water supplies to the places that are predicted to weather climate change better. For some, that will mean trying to emigrate to the US and Canada from South America, while for others it will mean leaving places like Arizona for the upper midwest, northwest, and east coast. It's already happening in some places, but it's going to happen globally on a scale that eclipses anything we've seen so far.

At that point, Maelstrom's Edge is going to be the Sci Fi game universe most relevant to contemporary events. One could argue that it already is, but in our current age of climate change denial, appreciation of that fact is muted. The only caveat is that in ME, the cause of the expanding Maelstrom is unknown, whereas scientists have confirmed human responsibility for climate change. (Some would argue, including me, that "human" is much too broad a generalization that spreads blame for climate change much too universally, but we're not supposed to get into political arguments on dakka, so I'll leave it at that.) The parallel would have been even more pointed if, say, ME's humanity had made Cybel energy their primary energy source, and their reckless and exponentially expanding use of Cybel energy had triggered the Maelstrom. Still, ME's world of environmental catastrophe causing turmoil and mass migration looks more and more like life on planet Earth.

It's weird. In terms of reflecting the reality of humanity's greatest threat to itself, Maelstrom's Edge is bang on time. It's just ahead of its time in terms of humanity's full recognition of and response to that threat.

I guess expanding maelstrom denialism must be rampant in ME's universe, with oligarchs and politicians using propaganda to convince their citizens that the Maelstrom doesn't exist while they buy private doomsday bunkers for themselves on Planet New Zealand.

Thanks for the compliments! I know that when we were developing the idea, there was no intention to make the Maelstrom a direct reflection of climate change, there is absolutely no question that the way people choose to handle (or disassociate from) the dire consequences of climate change is a very accurate way to imagine how people living in the MEdge universe cope with the idea of the Maelstrom. For the vast, vast majority of people alive in the Spiral Arm, the Maelstrom will not threaten their planet in their lifetime, and therefore they are able to just put its immeasurable threat in the back of their minds and go about their daily lives. Sure they have to deal with refugees, shortages, increased violence, etc, but all that can be compartmentalized as just more 'tough times'.

As for the origins of the Maelstrom, when it erupted it essentially took out much of the centralized 'history' repositories of the Spiral Arm, the cause of it are unknown, but that definitely leaves the door open to the fact that it could have been caused by humanity.

Thanks for the interesting response!