There have been some recent developments. In particular, I’ve finally come out the far side of a roughly six-week period of really busy time at the office. Next week I’m helping to teach one of my own courses, and then there’s not much on my calendar for the rest of the summer. While I will still have plenty of other projects to occupy my day-job time, I won’t be putting in so many long days, weekend hours, or business trips for a while.

Meanwhile, the creative juices seem to be flowing again at home, so I’m starting to get some world-building and writing work done again.

In particular, I’ve been experimenting with a new approach to world-building for the literary projects I have on the docket. My preferred tabletop game for many years has been GURPS, flagship RPG from Steve Jackson Games. That’s not likely to change, but recently I’ve turned to another “generic, universal” game to do basic world-building. That game is FATE, published by Evil Hat Productions, a sophisticated and highly polished version of the venerable FUDGE system.

GURPS is deeply simulation-driven, largely derived from the tabletop wargaming thread of the origins of roleplaying games. FATE, on the other hand, is deeply narrative-driven, encouraging its users to do only as much world-building as they need to generate cool characters and drive their stories forward. Definitely worth considering for someone like me, who tends to fling himself down the world-building rabbit-hole to the exclusion of actually writing and publishing stories.

Unfortunately, while I understand GURPS inside and out, FATE is a pretty different approach to the problem of world-building and story prep. I’ve had trouble in the past wrapping my head around how it works. In the last few weeks, though, I’ve made a concerted effort to force myself to go through FATE‘s world-building and character-creation processes, with one of my literary projects in mind (the gritty-fantasy setting I’m calling The Curse of Steel). The results are starting to feel fairly promising. More about that over the next few days, I think.

None of which is to say that you won’t be seeing anything more from me about GURPS in the future. Still, if this experiment pans out, I may end up doing a lot of literary prep work with FATE instead. I might then come back and write things up in GURPS terms, but only after I’ve made good progress with a story that’s on track for publication.

It has also not escaped my notice that it would be a lot easier for me to self-publish material for FATE than to do the same for GURPS. Self-publishing GURPS-based material for profit certainly isn’t impossible, and I do have a long (if rather stale) history as a published GURPS author if I wanted to make a proposal to Steve Jackson Games. On the other hand, the FATE system is available under an Open Gaming License or a Creative Commons license. To be explored if and when I have something that might be worth publishing.