[Dukat]

Hi guys,

according to the Glossary appendix, Deliver Ancient Artifact is the Vulcan homeworld ... but Observe Ritual is not?

Is that correct?

[winterflames]

Until release day for Movies Remastered, yes. After release day observe ritual will get an erratum to become a Homeworld. According to discussion elsewhere on the board.

[BCSWowbagger]

There's an interesting story here.

When Observe Ritual first came out, it self-identified in lore as the Vulcans' "home planet," which, of course, is just another way of saying "homeworld." Decipher ruled that, despite this text, it was not a homeworld, because only affiliations have homeworlds, and Vulcans are not an affiliation. This was a special rule that only really made a difference for Observe Ritual. (Symbiont Diagnosis

When the CC created the Vulcan affiliation in 2010 (by "teasing" it with an affiliation icon on Prevent Rebellion), whoops, Vulcans became an affiliation. Someone eventually pointed out that this was a problem, because, by the terms of the characteristics rule and the Decipher ruling, Observe Ritual should now be considered the Vulcan homeworld.

Rules almost went ahead and issued a ruling confirming that Observe Ritual was the Vulcan homeworld -- but it hesitated, because there was a 2EBC card called Deliver Ancient Artifact which was already in the game but was not a homeworld (there was no lore or anything on it saying it was a homeworld, so it wasn't). Rules did not want to create a situation where one version of a mission was a homeworld and the other version was not, so Rules instead issued a peculiar ruling that violated the general characteristics rule: saying "home planet" is not enough to count as a "homeworld." The lore must literally use the word "homeworld." This was a bit of a hack (generally speaking, close enough is close enough: a "bladed weapon" counts for the "blade weapon" characteristic), and it was intended to be a temporary hack in place until Vulcans were fully developed.

When LLAP finally came along, though, we neglected to deal with Observe Ritual. Deliver Ancient Artifact came out (and was turned into a homeworld!), but it had been five or six years by that point, and Rules was pretty distracted that year, and we seemingly just forgot to revisit Observe Ritual until Power was out and it was too late to do anything about it. As a result, we ended up with the exact situation we had tried to avoid in 2011: one version of the mission persona was a homeworld, but the other was not.

So when TMP: Remastered came along, we took advantage of the opportunity to fix it, and Rules requested this change (though not without some spirited discussions), and this change survived the playtesting gamut.

Thus, Observe Ritual will be the homeworld, just like Deliver Ancient Artifact, starting on June 24th, 2022. (Crap, I really need to write the article for that.)