The excellent fiction setting, Mythic, has been running for 46 years. It encompasses over 600 novels and short stories, many guidebooks explaining the lore, several detailed and explored continents, and many large-scale events which took the battles of real players to influence the direction of campaigns.

While having nowhere near the amount of story and lore as The Far Reaches, or Crix War, or Wonders of the Cosmos, it’s still an incredible amount of reading one must do to fully understand the setting. Some aliens are arguing that it’s too much, and that barrier to entry is generally the big complaint for new players.

But rather than restart, remake, or reboot the setting, as has been done historically, the fine folks of the Artidum Corporation have consulted the eluid authors of the Garula Writer’s Guild.

The eluid have been making art for centuries, and they’ve learned there’s a soft limit on how much content mortals are willing to read through. They find that, in serialized fiction, 30 years is the upper limit.

The issue is conveyance. How is a new reader supposed to get into a setting with 600 books, all of which are interconnected with a tight continuity?

The eluid say to split the setting into distinct story arcs, such as a self-contained trilogy of books.

But Mythic is so interconnected, because they need to sell models, that it can’t be unwound.

So last year they made The Warden Crisis, a six novel series which tied up all the story lines and finished the setting.

This year they released Mythic Second Edition, which continues the setting 1,500 years in the future. There are only a handful of remaining characters, but the core elements of the setting remain the same.

Hopefully it doesn’t overexplain things to bore returning fans.