Planning for October 2026

Planning for October 2026

Comments 0 Comment

September was a mixed bag when it came to knocking items off my to-do lists. As often happens, some of that can be attributed to the items themselves being too ambitious. Really need to break my long-term objectives down to more realiztic bite-sized pieces. Especially since the university year is starting up and I’m going to be insanely busy between now and year’s end.

Here’s the general plan for the coming month!

University Studies

My two courses have been open for a few weeks now, and I’ve actually done some early prep work for them. Things get formally under way next week and through the end of October. These courses look a bit more challenging than what I’ve seen so far.

As a side note, I can now confirm that the astrophysics course, at least, is likely to give me several items to refine the Architect of Worlds models for that putative second edition. Not redesign those models – it’s gratifying to see that my research is still holding up in general – but there’s been some new work in models of planetary formation that I’ll be able to use to sharpen them up.

The objectives for October are:

  • SXPS288 – Complete the Introduction to Python material, as well as all the work for the “Skills” weeks 1 and 2, and the “Astronomy” weeks 1 and 2.
  • S384 – Complete the Introduction module, as well as all the work associated with the Exoplanets text chapters 1-3, and the first week of work for the observational project.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

Very productive in September, even though I didn’t quite manage to complete the current “Lower Decks” story – I posted Chapter 5 on the last day of the month, but the story is going to need at least one more chapter before I can bring it to a conclusion.

On the other hand, I managed to perform a light edit on just under a quarter of a million words of old fan-fiction, moving all of it away from FanFiction.Net and onto Archive of Our Own. My FFN account still exists, but it’s now just a stub pointing to the current home for all my work. I also updated my CV on this site so that all my fan-fiction work now has links pointing to the pertinent AO3 pages. That was a big project, taking close to two weeks to complete, which is one reason why other items on my to-do list didn’t reach the finish line.

In October I have more modest goals, especially since a lot of other tasks have moved onto my plate.

The objective for October are:

  • Finish and post “Sixpence in Her Shoe”
  • Write at least one chapter of the ongoing work “From the Ashes”
  • Start the next “Star Trek: Lower Decks” story in the series

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

I made incremental progress on version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game in September, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. Rather than aim for competing a draft for my entire portion of Composer of Cultures in October, I’m going to lay down a much more attainable partial goal. Bite-sized objectives, remember?

The objectives for October are:

  • Finish the Catalog of Capabilities for version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of Architect of Worlds, and make very occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I didn’t carry my run of the simulation game Stellar Horizons to a conclusion, because I realized I was having a hard time believing in the premises. In particular, the game assumes that the human species will maintain seven robust national space programs through the rest of the 21st Century . . . and that seems extremely unlikely, given the era of international chaos and climate-change-driven disaster we’re almost certainly moving into.

So I took down Stellar Horizons temporarily, and brought out a different game as a palate cleanser. This was Daybreak, a cooperative game with a “save the world from climate change” theme. From the same design team that produced the very popular board-game Pandemic, if that’s at all familiar.

Daybreak is a very challenging game, and playing it is quite sobering – if the future it models is accurate, we all have some difficult years ahead of us. On the other hand, it’s an inherently optimistic game too. It assumes that given enough global cooperation and new technology, we can get ahead of climate change, and build a better and more humane world.

I spent a few days in September running through several games of Daybreak (it’s also a fairly light-weight and fast-moving game) and eventually took notes from a playthrough to generate elements of the “Human Destiny” future history. I then wrote a new Stellar Horizons scenario to translate the results of that Daybreak run into conditions for future interplanetary exploration. So far the results have been very promising.

The objective for October is to continue working with Stellar Horizons to build a new timeline for the “Human Destiny” future history.

Philcon 2026 Preparation

The last item is kind of hanging fire. I’m committed to attending Philcon 2026 in November, and I expect my programming schedule will be finished any day now, but for the moment I’m still not sure what that’s going to look like. I’m not going to be running any tabletop games this year, which reduces my preparation effort considerably. I think I’ll be delivering a one-hour world-building seminar, so I’ll need to put that together. For the moment I don’t have any specific Philcon-related objectives, but I fully expect I’ll be adding some of those as “time permits” items once my schedule is ready.

Updates to my CV

Updates to my CV

Comments 0 Comment

Just a quick announcement: I’ve overhauled the About Me page on this site, including some much-needed updates to my curriculum vitae as listed there.

As of this morning, the CV should be complete, including everything I’ve ever written for publication: traditionally published books and stories, fan-fiction, and self-published work. Including links to where items can be found, where that’s possible.

There are more adjustments to be made over the next few weeks – in particular, I may be in the process of rethinking what little self-published original fiction I have – but for now the page should be complete. Have a look.

Planning for September 2026

Planning for September 2026

Comments 0 Comment

Hmm. Looks like I did it again – by the time I reminded myself about posting a planning message for August, it was already almost the end of the month. Retirement does not seem to have improved my tendency toward procrastination.

A lot has, in fact, been going on! So here’s a summary of events over the summer, and plans for the coming month.

University Studies

Summer vacation is about over, and I’m going to be starting to do some pre-review of the coming year’s course materials. In the 2026-2027 year, I’ll be taking two courses.

One is a straightforward astrophysics course, Astrophysics of stars and exoplanets, which looks as if it’s going to be digging a lot further into the quantitative aspects of modern astronomy. I’m looking forward to learning some new bits and pieces that might make their way into the putative second edition of Architect of Worlds.

The other is an experimental-physics course, Remote experiments in physics and space. You’d think it would be tough to do a lab course when you’re remote-learning across the Atlantic, but the university seems to have figured that out. I’ll be working with other students to plan and carry out some physics experiments and astronomical observations using remote access to the university’s instruments.

The courses formally open in about a week, although actual instruction doesn’t start until October. I plan to spend some time in September reading ahead and generally getting ready. At the end of this year I should be 75% finished with my BSc degree, still on track to start my post-graduate work by about 2029.

No formal objectives here for September. Those will start in October once my courses are actually under way.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

Since my last planning message, I’ve finished two stories, “The Country of Silence” and “Clear as Mudd.” The next story, “Sixpence in Her Shoe,” is under way and I plan to get that finished in September.

At this point, my return to fan-fiction writing has been going on for about a year and a half, involving 15 stories and over a third of a million words. Still not the biggest chunk of my fan-fiction corpus – my Mass Effect stories (written between 2014-2016) come to around a million words – but it’s been more robust than I expected when I started. Probably going to keep going for at least another few months before the planned series is complete.

A side project: the site where I started posting fan-fiction back in the day has become a sad example of the “dead internet” theory. It’s very poorly maintained, a lot of its functions no longer work well or at all, and it’s apparently awash in scam bots. So I’m in the process of moving all of my work off that site for good. Fortunately, I kept all my earlier work in my own files. Hence I can pull those stories up, possibly give them another coat of polish, and repost them to Archive Of Our Own (AO3) without much trouble. So as time permits, I’m doing that, including a few stories that I wrote and never did post to the old site. I’m also going to be updating my CV page on this site to make sure it points to the new master copies of everything. Once all that’s done, I’ll be deleting all my stories from the old site and deactivating my account there. Unfortunate, but probably necessary.

The objectives for September are:

  • Finish and post “Sixpence in Her Shoe”
  • Finish copying all my old stories over to AO3
  • Update the CV page on this site to reflect the current status of my fan-fiction
  • Deactivate my original fan-fiction site account

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

August and September were mostly devoted to an overhaul of the draft Cultural Evolution game for Composer of Cultures. The result was enough different from the incomplete version 0.5 draft that I’m labeling it version 0.6.

The game mechanics themselves are complete, and in fact Ken Burnside has done some red-pencil on them. Currently I’m in the process of writing all the supplementary material for the new draft (basically, all the material that would let the user interpret the results of the “game” and build an historical timeline for their fictional alien culture). No firm timeline as to when that will be finished, although I’m hoping to be able to release a complete draft to playtesters sometime this fall.

The objectives for September are:

  • Finish version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of Architect of Worlds, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I’ve been creatively blocked with my “Human Destiny” space-opera universe for quite a while. To review the bidding: in its original concept, this is a universe in which benevolent aliens arrive (about 18 years from today) and conquer Earth in order to save us from our own folly, after which humans slowly become citizens of the galaxy.

Much of my trouble with that concept has been two-fold. First, it really was hard to write stories about human characters with agency when the Overwhelmingly Benevolent Aliens were in charge of literally everything. Second, I was just having trouble believing in the premise. Okay, it’s not like there’s any shortage of human folly around, but the back story is otherwise already falling apart. As an example, one of the stories I’ve actually written for this setting had a character loosely modeled on Elon Musk as the protagonist, set on Mars in the early 2040s. These days I have zero appetite for taking any inspiration from Elon Musk, nor do I believe we’re going to be putting any humans on Mars that soon.

So the solution I’ve meandered toward is to rethink the setting, so as to preserve a lot more human agency and simultaneously divorce it from those last vestiges of America-centrism. One aspect of this is to assume humans will explore and colonize the rest of the Solar System over the next century or so, although it will be a slow process and it will be driven primarily by powers like China, India, and the European Union rather than (e.g.) Russia or the United States.

To this end, I’ve been tinkering with a tabletop game, Stellar Horizons by Andrew Rader (who is a well-known space scientist). Probably the best “explore the Solar System” game I’ve come across for messing with plausible future histories. It’s been working pretty well! There’s a sequel too, which covers the exploration of the interstellar neighborhood over the next few centuries. I’m hoping the end result will be a medium-to-long-term timeline that will get my Muse moving more effectively.

The objective for September is to finish working with Stellar Horizons and build a first revised timeline for the “Human Destiny” universe.

Photograph of a completed boardgame, "Mega Empires," portraying the alternate-historical evolution of civilizations in Europe and the Near East through the early Iron Age.
Planning for July 2026

Planning for July 2026

Comments 0 Comment

June was a month of ups and downs. I did accomplish quite a bit last month, although I struggled a bit at the very end of my academic year, and not all of the planned projects got completed. So, on to July . . .

University Studies

I stumbled right at the finish line for my courses in 2025-2026. The final exam for my mathematics course was 100% of the grade for the course overall, and I simply ran out of time on it, so the highest possible score I could have earned was a 90%. Annoying, given that I didn’t score lower than a 95% on any assignment throughout the course – if any of those assignments counted toward my final grade, I would be pretty confident of the result, but they didn’t. So this may be the first course I fail to pass “with distinction.” Which isn’t a disaster – it’s not like I’ve failed the course entirely, and missing a “with distinction” on one course won’t prevent me from starting on my graduate work when that comes around. Still, it’s annoying that I may have that blot on my transcript.

At any rate, I’m done for the next two months, until I start looking at my courses for the 2026-2027 academic year in early September.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I actually didn’t get much done on my current story, “The Country of Silence,” in June. At present I’m three chapters in, out of what will probably be five or six chapters. At least the exercise gave me the opportunity to (attempt to) read William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and then actually read James Stoddard’s epitome of the novel. I should be able to finish my story in early July, and then get started on the next story in the series.

The objective for July is to finish and post “The Country of Silence.”

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

I spent a big chunk of June researching improvements to the Architect of Worlds design sequence, mostly having to do with flare stars, atmospheric retention, and atmospheric greenhouse effect. At the moment I’ve got about 5,000 words of notional “second edition” material, which has already been applied to one of the worlds in the Ten Worlds setting of Ad Astra Games. In July I’m going to pivot back to working on the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures.

The objectives for July are:

  • Finish version 0.5 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of the book, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

Portion of the game map at the end of an 18player game of "Mega Empires," displaying the situation among the civilizations around the Indian Ocean.

Many hours in June were spent on an alternate-history-generating experiment for my Great Lands Iron Age fantasy setting. Specifically, I used the tabletop game Mega Empires to build a potential back story for the setting. This was a big project, requiring me to set up the game and play 18 (!) positions against one another, taking notes the whole time.

(In case you’re not familiar with tabletop games lore, Mega Empires is the current edition of the classic Avalon Hill game Civilization, with decades of polishing and a much-expanded map. In fact, the publisher is currently working on even further expansions of the game as far as China and Japan, which could theoretically permit up to 30 (!!) players to participate at once. That would be far too much for my available space, so I’m content with the alternate history I was able to sketch out with the existing pieces of the mega-game.)

I’m actually quite pleased with how this project turned out, giving me material for the Great Lands back story that I’ll probably spend weeks or months analyzing and fleshing out.

As before, the next step remains construction of a revised “historical atlas” for the setting, which I can make available both on my Kofi page and on World Anvil.

Now that I’m finished with the “Great Lands” setting, I have another tabletop experiment I want to roll out, in support of my space-operatic Human Destiny universe. More about that in the coming months.

Planning for June 2026

Planning for June 2026

Comments 0 Comment

May 2026 was a fairly productive month, although I didn’t get as much done on creative tasks as I had hoped. June is going to mark something of a transition point, as I’m finishing up the 2025-2026 academic year and getting ready for summer break.

Here’s the plan for June.

University Studies

I finished my astronomy course’s final exam back in May, and I’m reasonably confident that I passed that course with distinction. For the past few weeks I’ve been intensively “revising” for my mathematics course, especially since the final exam is 100% of the grade and I have reason to believe it will be challenging. That final takes place on 9 June, after which summer break starts and I won’t have too much to do for a few months.

The objective for June is to take the final exam for my mathematics course and score no less than 90% overall.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I finished “Home Front” in May, and I’ve started on the next story in the series, with the working title of “The Country of Silence.” This is going to be the first of a number of stories that involve my personal take on the history of artificial intelligence and synthetic life in the Star Trek universe.

The objective for June is to complete and post “The Country of Silence.”

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

A new item that’s come up involves corrections to some of the world design for Ad Astra’s Ten Worlds setting. In particular, as I observed here, I’m working on some incremental improvements to elements of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, which we can apply to the Ten Worlds and eventually integrate into a second edition of Architect.

Meanwhile, once I’m done with my finals, finishing the new draft of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures will rise to first or second place on the priority list.

The objectives for June are:

  • Produce new models for EUV-driven atmospheric escape and planetary greenhouse effect, and apply those to revisions to the Ten Worlds setting
  • Finish version 0.5 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of the book, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I’m still focusing on my “Great Lands” Iron Age fantasy setting. I decided I wasn’t happy with the geography I was building, and chose to discard that in favor of making the setting an explicit alternate Earth – the physical geography is going to be very close to what actually existed in ancient times, even if the history and cultural geography are very different.

The next step remains construction of a revised “historical atlas” for the setting, which I can make available both on my Kofi page and on World Anvil. This remains relatively low on the priority list, but I’m making progress with it and may have some interim reports in the month of June.

Toward a Second Edition of “Architect of Worlds”

Toward a Second Edition of “Architect of Worlds”

Comments 0 Comment

Since Architect of Worlds was published in 2024, the book has held up pretty well. We’ve gone through seven minor-version releases, each of which has corrected minor errors or made patches to the design sequence. “Minor” as measured by the fact that we haven’t had to repaginate anything – I think the biggest tranche of new text so far was four short sentences long. Here’s a link to the current errata list.

Science marches on, of course, and in any case many of the models described in Architect of Worlds are deliberately simplified to some degree for ease of use. While interacting with readers, and especially while working with Ad Astra Games on other projects, I’ve found myself making notes about ways to improve and add to those models.

For example, I’m currently supporting a long-term world-building project for Ad Astra Games – updates to their Ten Worlds science-fiction setting – that is already motivating new research. The “Ten Worlds” of that setting are often only Earthlike by courtesy; they tend to have odd features that make them poor copies of long-lost Earth. Which, of course, means they often manifest special cases that fall outside the usual design parameters of the Architect of Worlds sequence. I’m currently doing research to help put solid scientific justification behind the Ten Worlds planetary designs, where possible, and that’s providing fertile ground for possible improvements to the Architect models.

Eventually (and by that I would estimate 2-3 years from now) I’m going to have enough new, refined, improved models that a significantly new design sequence is likely to be called for. That will lead to a Second Edition of the book. I’ll likely make note of some of those potential changes in this space, just to keep readers up to date on what they might expect in that Second Edition.

So far, I’ve identified three good candidates for new modeling:

Tweaks to the design of planetary systems (Steps Nine through Twelve): The Architect design sequence as written doesn’t quite cover all the exoplanetary systems we know about today, not in fine-grained detail.

For example, the putative exoplanets for Tau Ceti (assuming those actually exist) are remarkably massive and the current design sequence has a hard time matching them.

Meanwhile, the well-understood TRAPPIST-1 planetary system doesn’t quite fit – given the masses of the known terrestrial planets in that system, Architect implies there should be at least a few gas giants as well, and we haven’t detected those. Further research seems to be indicated, to find ways to modify the existing sequence to better accommodate the special cases we’ve seen.

New features for the atmospheric-retention model, to better handle hydrodynamic escape due to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation (Steps Twenty-Two and Twenty-Six): There’s a provision in the current edition (added very late in the design process) that attempts to model the way EUV radiation drives off portions of a terrestrial world’s primordial atmosphere. It’s not a terribly elegant provision, and it’s probably too harsh on some of the special cases.

Meanwhile, it occurs to me that modeling hydrodynamic atmospheric depletion could also be extended to the case of ongoing atmosphere loss for worlds circling flare stars, which can continue to generate EUV bursts for billions of years. So this is a good candidate for a more fleshed-out model. Probably involving a more nuanced approach to computing a world’s M-number.

For example, we might compute a “young primary star” M-number that measures its early EUV output and mostly just affects whether the world retains primordial hydrogen and helium. Then a “sustained M-number” that mostly models simple thermal escape, but which also takes into account the continued EUV output of a flare-star primary.

More sophisticated modeling of atmospheric greenhouse effect (Step Thirty): The existing model for final atmospheric composition and greenhouse effect is actually fairly sophisticated as-is, but even so it does simplify a few factors away.

For example, we normally don’t think of the diatomic molecular gases in Earth’s atmosphere (the nitrogen and oxygen) as being significant for the greenhouse effect, and the current edition of Architect ignores them entirely. However, for worlds with denser atmospheres (such as “super-Earths”), collisions between air molecules become significant in causing greater absorption of far-infrared radiation and therefore promoting greenhouse effect. This makes another good candidate for improvements to the existing model – probably the biggest challenge I’ve come across so far, because real-world mathematical modeling of atmospheric greenhouse effect tends to be very complex.

There – that should give you some idea as to the kind of subjects I’m working on for that eventual new edition of the book. Watch this space for more updates, which I suspect will be very occasional at first, but will become more frequent as the new edition comes closer to being a reality.

Planning for May 2026

Planning for May 2026

Comments 0 Comment

April was a productive month. I didn’t get everything I planned done, but I made decent incremental progress on just about every front, and hit a couple of major milestones. About all I can ask for.

Here’s the plan for May.

University Studies

Just about finished with studying and assignments for both my courses for the 2025-2026 year. Late May and early June are going to be final-exam season.

Meanwhile, I’ve registered for two more courses for the coming year. One’s an astrophysics course, the other is an experimental-physics course in which I’ll be working with other students and getting time on some remote scientific instruments. In particular, I’ll be getting some time on the Open University’s telescopes in the Canary Islands and doing some actual astronomical observation, which will be cool.

The objectives for May are:

  • For my astronomy course: Finish reading Topic 7 and prepare for the final exam on 29 May.
  • For my mathematics course: Finish the tutor-marked and computer-marked assignments due on 5 May and 12 May, then prepare for the final exam on 9 June.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I was able to finish “What’s Past is Prologue” in April, which rounded out the “sixth season” of Star Trek: Lower Decks in my personal continuity. Once that was finished, I spent a few days planning and mapping out the “seventh season,” which I’ll be writing as time permits over the next year or so. I’ve started writing the first story in that sequence, with the working title of “Home Front.”

The objective for May is to complete and post “Home Front.”

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

One big milestone for April was the new version of “Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller,” which has been released by Ad Astra Games and is apparently already selling reasonably well.

I’m still working on version 0.5 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures, making good progress on both rules mechanics and supporting material. Rather than release yet another partial draft, I’m working toward having a first complete draft for my half of the book, and there’s a decent chance I’ll be able to get that done in May. I know, I keep saying that, but I do keep getting closer every month . . .

The objectives for May are:

  • Finish version 0.5 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect research for a potential second edition of the book, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I’m currently focusing on my “Great Lands” Iron Age fantasy setting, and I’ve posted a few draft maps here and to World Anvil. I’ve also applied the draft “Cultural Evolution Game” from Composer of Cultures to help me work out an historical back story for the setting. Next step is going to be to build a revised “historical atlas” for the setting, and make that available both on my Kofi page and on World Anvil. This is fairly low on the priority list, but I do hope to make some decent progress on it in May.

A "family tree" of famous cyberneticists in the "Star Trek" fictional universe.
A Mentorship Chain

A Mentorship Chain

Comments 1 comment

There’s a bit of worldbuilding that often comes up when you’re working in a rich setting. Sometimes you’ll want to trace master-student or mentor-protégé chains, so you can see schools of thought and who’s likely to have had the most influence on whose philosophy.

If I wanted to work in the Star Wars universe, for example, I might want to trace links between Jedi masters and their padawans. In fact, there’s a very famous chain in the canon universe, stretching five “generations” (Yoda -> Dooku -> Qui-Gon Jinn -> Obi-Wan Kenobi -> Anakin Skywalker -> Ahsoka). If I was writing wuxia fiction, I might want to trace lines of succession for the leadership of various martial-arts schools. And so on.

Today, since I’m planning the next “season” for my Star Trek: Lower Decks fan-fiction writing, I had occasion to do some research and map out just such a mentorship chain. In this case, for “important cyberneticists.” The result is the attached “family tree,” which combines both alpha canon and some plot-relevant decisions of my own. Took about 90 minutes of work to produce, including sketching out the chart in Affinity Photo.

I won’t explain every item on this tree – Star Trek fans may recognize some or all of the names, and possibly there will be some raised eyebrows at some of the links I’ve established for my own continuity. Still, this can serve as a small example of the worldbuilding technique.

Four Pioneers

Four Pioneers

Comments 0 Comment

Mongoose Publishing is in the process of producing a new Traveller-derived RPG, called Pioneer, set in the near future and centered around a New Space Age in which player characters (called “Pioneers”) are engaged in the development and colonization of space. Written by Sandy Antunes, it’s very much on the “hard science fiction” end of the spectrum.

For those of us who backed the project, a pre-release draft of the Pioneer core book was made available a few days ago, and I’ve been poring through that ever since.

First impressions: this looks like it’s going to be a very neat game, and I’m looking forward to making use of the finished product. I might be developing some Pioneer adventures for future convention visits!

On the other hand, it really needs a copy-editing pass before final release, and I suspect it’s going to be a tough game to referee unless you’re already comfortable with some space science. The core book tries to present both an engaging RPG and a primer on space science and engineering, and it may be falling between two stools in the process. On the other hand, the final release is apparently going to include two full campaign books, so that might help get potential referees over that hump. We’ll have to see how it turns out.

In the meantime, I spent some time today putting the Pioneer character generation sequence through its paces, and I ended up with a team of four ready-to-play Pioneers. These are loosely inspired by my own “Human Destiny” universe, although I don’t plan on taking these specific versions of the characters as canon.

Dr. John “Jack” Carter

Age 38 (born 1992) – current residence Baltimore, Maryland, USA
STR 8 (+0), DEX 9 (+1), END 9 (+1), INT 13 (+2), EDU 13 (+2), SOC 8 (+0)
Skills: Athletics-0, Charm-0, Computers-2, Engineer-0, Explosives-0, Heavy Machinery-0, Investigate-1, Language-1 (Spanish), Media-1, Medic-0, Navigation-1, Perception-1, Persuade-1, Science-4 (Life), Space Suit-1, Survival-1, Zero-G-1
Social Assets: Rival x2
Benefits: 540 Influence, Lab

Jack Carter graduated from the University of Tennessee in 2014, and earned his PhD in biology from Oxford University in 2018. He has earned widespread renown and multiple awards for excellence in the sciences, and is recognized as a world-class expert in life support technology and the adaptation of biological organisms to long-term space travel.

Dr. Carter currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and also does commercial research for several space-industry firms. He is a close personal friend of Nathan Walker and is a likely candidate for Walker’s growing space ventures.

Besides, with a name like that, he’s doomed to be selected for an eventual Mars expedition . . .

Major Melissa Chen, USAF (retired)

Age 34 (born 1996) – current residence Houston, Texas, USA
STR 5 (-1), DEX 9 (+1), END 6 (+0), INT 10 (+1), EDU 11 (+1), SOC 6 (+0)
Skills: Charm-0, Combat-2, Computers-2, Electronics-2, Heavy Machinery-0, Language-1 (Mandarin), Leadership-1, Navigation-1, Orbital Mechanics-1, Perception-0, Pilot-1, Profession-0, Remote Operation-1, Science-1 (Planetary), Space Suit-1, Survival-1, Zero-G-1
Social Assets: None
Benefits: 80 Influence, Secret Clearance, Advanced Tech

Melissa Chen attended the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs, where she earned recognition for both academic and leadership excellence. Despite facing systemic prejudice for being a woman, and a second-generation immigrant whose parents came from a rival nation, she had an outstanding military career which ended in a nomination for astronaut training. She recently retired from the service in order to pursue long-time ambitions in space.

Ms. Chen has been married to Robert Mitchell since 2020.

Robert Mitchell

Age 42 (born 1988) – current residence Houston, Texas, USA
STR 7 (+0), DEX 9 (+1), END 8 (+0), INT 12 (+2), EDU 7 (+0), SOC 3 (-1)
Skills: Admin-1, Advocate-1, Athletics-1, Charm-2, Computers-1, Deception-0, Electronics-3, Engineer-2 (Electrical), Language-1 (Mandarin), Leadership-2, Mechanic-1, Pilot-1, Profession-1 (Roughneck), Streetwise-2
Social Assets: Ally, Contact x2
Benefits: 120 Influence, Plane

Robert Mitchell was born to a very poor family, and never had the opportunity to gain much formal education. However, he has spent his life working twice as hard as anyone around him, and educating himself with every available resource. The result has been a successful career as a networking specialist, working his way up from freelance contractor, to team leader, to head of engineering for medium-to-large firms. Much of his work has been adjacent to the growing space industry, where he has many contacts and potential allies now that he is consciously aiming for a role as a Pioneer.

Mr. Mitchell has, among other things, taught himself to be a skilled backpacker and small-aircraft pilot. His occasional vlogs about his expeditions into deep wilderness have made him a minor social-media celebrity.

Mr. Mitchell has been married to Melissa Chen since 2020.

Nathan Walker

Age 30 (born 2000) – current residence Palo Alto, California, USA
STR 6 (+0), DEX 8 (+0), END 6 (+0), INT 9 (+1), EDU 10 (+1), SOC 12 (+2)
Skills: Admin-1, Advocate-2, Charm-1, Computers-2, Deception-0, Electronics-1, Explosives-0, Jack-of-all-Trades-1, Language-1 (Russian), Media-2, Orbital Mechanics-1, Survival-1
Social Assets: Ally, Enemy
Benefits: 200 Influence, Board Position

Nathan Walker has two very important assets: he was born into a lot of money, and he has an immense talent for loudly claiming credit for successful ventures (while moving silently away from unsuccessful ones). Space is his latest hobby, and he has enormous ambitions for his new startup venture (Ares Enterprises). He hasn’t quite reached the position of being able to carry out his own launches and missions, but his money and his media presence have gotten his foot in the door with both national and commercial space ventures.

Mr. Walker and Dr. Carter are close friends. Mr. Walker is also acquainted with Ms. Chen, who led the rescue mission when one of his highly publicized adventures went badly in 2024.