Trivia / Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

• Shrug of God:
  • All over the place. As noted in the main page, just as novels like Fable of the Swan are not 'official', Jenna encourages players to come up with their own interpretations of the setting and its characters, so they don't feel restricted by canon. As such, many setting details or character's motivations are open-ended. Some examples of this include:
  • The setting's starting point is the death of Jade Irinka, which drowned the universe and created the Outside due to some metaphysical weirdness. Since the Outside can be seen as all that is unknown or uncertain, it's a breeding ground for Wild Mass Guessings.
  • The nature of the Outside itself is in debate: It could be a metaphorical chaos which swallowed up the world as a psychological phenomenon, or it could be literal chaos which drowned it. Finally, it's entirely possible that there never was any 'real world' outside of Town, and that such things only appear to arise from the Outside when people try to make sense of it.
  • Did the Headmaster actually kill Jade Irinka? That's the default, but whether it's true or not is open.
  • The exact reason for Jade's death is just as unclear. It is suggested in the Glass-Maker's Dragon that it might have been a metaphysical gambit one of them won - that Jade might have allowed herself to die as a Thanatos Gambit to change the Lands Beyond Creation, to make nonexistence a different place, or that the Headmaster killed her to drown the world into the Outside. It is also suggested that she and the Headmaster could have conspired together to pull it off, for reasons not fully clear.
• Troubled Production: Jenna has seen a *lot* of grief putting the corebook together, owing to (among other things) her publisher Eos not being capable of getting its act together.
• What Could Have Been: Chuubo's was originally announced in 2010 as a single campaign book for Nobilis, which would have contained a setting, fifteen characters, and a simplified Nobilis rules system. In this iteration, Principal Entropy was Nobilis's Lord Entropy, Chuubo could make a wish every day, and there were wish-eating fairies.
  • About a year later, CMWGE had a main book, a rules corebook, the Fortitude setting book, and a book on adventures with the rats of Fortitude all in various stages of being written. At this point, the initial set of characters would have been the Wishing Boy, the Best Friend, the Idol, the Magical Detective, the Class President, the Child of the Sun, the Ideologue, the Empty Child, the Rival (aka Nightmares' Angel), the Practical Teacher, Ogre-Sensei, Principal Entropy II, and the Wish-Granting Engine.
  • For a period up until early 2013, the plan was for each setting book to be its own RPG, with its own version of the core ruleset. This got nixed when playtester feedback said it'd be confusing; parts of the Fortitude rulebook and setting book were combined into the final CMWGE rulebook, while the rest of both books became the Fortitude setting book.