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

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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

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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”

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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

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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

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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

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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.

The “Great Lands” Master Map

The “Great Lands” Master Map

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Okay, here’s another map for the “Great Lands” setting. This one is focused more closely on the Great Lands themselves – that is, proto-Europe. The map was produced using Wonderdraft, with a carefully selected excerpt of the world map applied as a tracing image.

You can see that Europe hasn’t been fully assembled yet – with Africa still moving northward and rotating slightly counter-clockwise, the Italian and Balkan peninsulas haven’t merged in with the main portion of the continent. You can also see that the Atlantic Ocean is a bit narrower in this epoch – that’s a piece of Greenland in the far northwest, and the Americas aren’t too far off the western edge of the map.

The “Sea Kingdom” is an ahistorical bit, a subcontinent springing up along the mid-Atlantic ridge. I need a Númenor-analogue, so there it is.

The most notable feature of this pseudo-Eocene world is the climate. The planet is a lot warmer and less arid than we’re accustomed to, and sea level is quite a bit higher. The Great Lands have a humid subtropical climate all the way up into parts of what will eventually be Scandinavia and Russia. Warm, wet summers, cool winters with occasional snow, and the natural biome is either dense deciduous forest or highland prairie. Only in the very far north do you start getting a humid continental climate, with cool summers and bitterly cold winters.

People living in the Great Lands are not going to look or dress like medieval Europeans – they’re going to be generally olive to dark brown in complexion, and they’ll tend to dress pretty lightly in the summertime. I suspect the Tremara (the pseudo-Indo-European people that my protagonists belong to) are going to rather resemble Indians (as in, people from the Indian subcontinent, not Native Americans).

This part of the world will be home to several hominid species at once, each analogous to one of the Standard Fantasy Races found in (e.g.) Dungeons & Dragons. “Common-folk” (humans) can be found just about everywhere on this map. “Elder-folk” (elves) mostly stick to the western Great Lands, and keep to themselves. “Smith-folk” (dwarves) set up holdfasts wherever there’s copper, tin, or iron ore to be found, especially in hilly or mountainous regions. “Sea-folk” (halflings) come from a set of tropical islands far to the east, although a fair number of them have traveled on Sea-Kingdom ships to settle in the Great Lands. “Nomad-folk” or skatoi (orcs) mostly hang out in the colder northern regions, although they like to go raiding into the Great Lands on land or by sea.

Developing lots of neat ideas for this new version of the setting. More to come!

New Maps for “Great Lands” Setting

New Maps for “Great Lands” Setting

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A few years ago, I did a bunch of worldbuilding for an Iron Age fantasy setting that I call “the Great Lands.” I even wrote a full-length novel set there, which got self-published and is currently still available in ebook format on Amazon: The Curse of Steel.

The novel got almost no engagement in its time, and the sequel I had started ran into a plot block, so I eventually set the whole project aside. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about reviving it – reworking the worldbuilding, pulling the novel down and doing a minor rewrite before republishing it on Royal Road or a similar outlet, and so on.

An early step in the worldbuilding part of the project was to build a new “historical atlas” to settle the back-story of the setting. Which meant, among other things, revising the old master world map. At which point I ran into a snag.

The problem is, I’m too picky when it comes to my worldbuilding. I have to be able to believe in the world, which means I have to pay attention to the earth-sciences part of it, even if none of that is ever going to be too obvious in the finished stories. I know the techniques for developing a constructed world, starting with the plate tectonics and working my way up through the landforms and climate. Yet I’ve never been satisfied with the results when I do that. The worlds I build end up looking too . . . too bland.

I’ve also experimented with random planetary generators – there are plenty of those available, if you know where to look – but none of those come up to my standards. They always end up being too coarse-grained in their details, or if they’re fine-grained they give us naturalistic-looking worlds that make no sense if you examine them more closely. Nobody seems up to the challenge of simulating plate tectonics for a randomly-generated Earthlike world with any degree of fidelity.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been tinkering with worlds, sometimes getting to the point of a world map to start with before throwing the whole thing out, sometimes not even getting that far. Until I had An Idea: if one wants to build a world that’s much like Earth, that clearly evolved under the same physical regime, but isn’t actually our Earth . . . one thing we can do is look at Earth of the distant past.

My original design for the Great Lands involved a Europe-like subcontinent where much of the action would take place. Easy enough. To the south of this, a “Sailor’s Sea” that would allow easy travel from west to east, and then another continent where exotic creatures and cultures might dwell. More continents off in the distance, which might or might not ever become significant to the story.

What I realized was that Earth was actually like that once . . . back in the Eocene Era, before the continent of Africa moved a bit further north and started colliding with Europe and Asia. In that time, what would eventually become the Mediterranean Sea still connected freely both with the (narrower) Atlantic Ocean to the west, and to the Tethys Ocean to the east, an ocean which would eventually become the Indian Ocean once India itself finished making its way north to collide with Asia.

Okay, suppose I work with Earth in the Eocene, about 50 million years before the present. Is it possible to build decent world maps of that era?

Turns out we can. Let me briefly describe my workflow, with pointers to where you can lay hands on similar data and tools if you’d like to fiddle with Earth’s deep past in similar fashion.

The primary resource here is the PALEOMAP Project, work done by the prominent geologist Christopher Scotese. The link will take you to a paper he produced in 2018, describing a set of DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) that he and his colleagues have laboriously assembled for the entire planet Earth in different past eras. This is a monumental data set, with over 110 different maps stretching over half a billion years into the past. There’s a link in the paper that will give you access to the entire data set.

The PALEOMAP models are in a specific file format (NetCDF) that’s in common use in the earth-sciences community, but which I needed specific tools to work with. There’s a NetCDF viewer called Panoply that’s very good for reading the individual files in the PALEOMAP corpus and visualizing the results, but by itself that wasn’t fine-grained enough. I needed to convert the NetCDF files into a different file format like GeoTIFF, so it could be processed by professional cartography software like QGIS.

Fortunately, I was able to locate MyGeodata, a online utility that’s designed to convert geolocation data from one format to another. I was able to convert the two PALEOMAP data files I was most interested in to GeoTIFF with no difficulty. It cost me a few dollars – the size of the datasets were above the site’s threshold for free use – but the results were superb.

I was able to load a GeoTIFF file for the Eocene period (50 million years before present) into QGIS, and work with that to develop a nicely colored elevation map of Earth in the appropriate era. Output from that went into Affinity Photo, and a couple of hours later I had the completed “master world map” at the head of this post.

You should be able to see the differences between Eocene Earth and our present day. The Atlantic Ocean is narrower, and none of the continents have quite reached their present-day positions. The Tethys Ocean is still there, full of islands and island chains that will make it a nice “Sailor’s Sea.” The sea level is noticeably higher than in the present – the Eocene was a rather warm period in Earth’s history, with very little permanent glaciation. Even Antarctica doesn’t have much in the way of ice caps yet. I suspect if I run with that, the “Great Lands” (proto-Europe) are going to be subtropical – but that’s okay.

I’ve added one feature that didn’t exist in our own Earth’s past – an island subcontinent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, straddling the mid-ocean ridge. Kind of like Iceland, if it had appeared a few million years earlier and was a different shape. That’s going to be the “Sea Kingdom” in the fantasy setting I’m building, the current highest point of human civilization and the source of world-spanning oceanic adventures.

Okay, so I have a starting point for rebuilding “the Great Lands,” and I ought to be able to proceed from there. Chalked up some neat experience with working with geolocation data and professional-caliber cartography tools, too. Fun!

Planning for April 2026

Planning for April 2026

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Huh. My apologies to my readers – it looks as if I completely failed to post a planning message for the month of March. I certainly made out a planning board, and I know I intended to make a post about it, but “I’ll do it tomorrow” must have gotten a little too entrenched. So let’s pick back up with the month of April.

In general, retired life is agreeing with me, I’m keeping up with my university coursework, and I’m getting at least a little creative work done most days. It’s just a matter of pushing long-term projects forward until I have something worth sharing . . .

Here’s the (not so tentative – I’ve got some definite commitments I need to meet) plan for April.

University Studies

Still very much on track, and as far as I can tell I haven’t scored lower than about a 94/100 on any assignment or exam so far this year. Coming down to the final stretch for both courses, with exams coming up in May.

The objectives for April are:

  • For my astronomy course: Read Topic 6, turn in the sixth graded assignment, and then read Topic 7.
  • For my mathematics course: Read Units 11, 12, and 13. Get started on the computer-marked and tutor marked assignments due in mid-May.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

“What’s Past is Prologue” reached Chapter 20 just before the end of March, and I’m definitely getting into the end-game of the plot. Probably aiming for 24-25 chapters in all. Very good chance I’ll be able to finish that novel in April, depending on how my time works out. It’s getting very good engagement, including from new readers, to the point it should soon pop into the top-five list of all the stories I’ve ever written on Archive of Our Own.

The objective for April is to complete “What’s Past is Prologue.”

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

Ken Burnside would really like to have a revised version of “Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller” ready to sell, and I suspect I can have a draft ready for him before the Mayday celebrations kick off, so that’s a major project right now. I’m not seeing any reason why that revised and expanded document, based on the final release version of Architect, can’t be available on the Ad Astra Games catalog within a few weeks. This is my top priority right now.

Still working on version 0.5 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures. I had originally intended to do just a little polishing of existing mechanics, but the more I worked, the more I saw ways to improve the whole structure. The simulation model is complete at this point, but I’m working on the section the reader can use to translate the game results into a more-or-less detailed history of their sophont species’ cultural development. Hoping to have that done sometime in early-to-mid April.

The formal errata list for Architect of Worlds is finished and has been posted here.

The objectives for April are:

  • Draft a new edition of “Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller“ and release to Ad Astra for publication
  • 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

The “Human Destiny” and “Tree of Worlds” universes are getting occasional attention, as time permits, although progress on both is very slow. Maybe more over the summer, when I don’t have university courses to take up time and energy?

I’ve also gone back to look at my “Great Lands” Iron Age fantasy setting, with the intention of reworking some of the worldbuilding and re-releasing the fiction (“Krava’s Legend”) that I’ve written in that universe. Incremental progress there too. There’s a good chance I’ll eventually be able to point to a World Anvil page for this setting . . .