“Architect of Worlds” Page Now Active
Recently I’ve noticed a big uptick in traffic to posts under the architect of worlds tag. I suspect someone out in the wilds of the Internet has called people’s attention to the project.
I’m up to my eyebrows in other projects at the moment, but today I took a few moments to create an Architect of Worlds page, accessible under the Sharrukin’s Worlds section in the sidebar. If you’re interested in the project, the advantage of that page for you is that it will include links to current PDFs of the completed draft sections. No more having to weed through old blog posts!
Incidentally, I do hope that people who find the material useful will let me know that, and provide any feedback they can as to how well or poorly the system works for them.
5 thoughts on ““Architect of Worlds” Page Now Active”
Hello Sharrukin,
I love your work on GURPS Space and (not having anyone to play GURPS with) found the world and alien simulation to be really fun sub-games in themselves. I think it’s awesome that you’re making Architect of Worlds and plan to buy it when I can. My own attempts to update Space with new research and enormous extra detail have been frightfully amateur and slower than the pace of research – I’m sure you’re doing a vastly better job.
I have a question about Architect of Worlds. Obviously it won’t be a GURPS publication or intended solely for GURPS players. What I’m wondering is how easily it will be backwards-compatible with the economic, social, and alien-biology parts of Space.
Heh. I don’t know if anything I’m doing with Architect of Worlds is going to be vastly better, but if I can get it working to my own satisfaction that’ll be an improvement.
No, if and when I ever publish the thing on a for-profit basis, it almost certainly won’t be explicitly as a GURPS supplement – it should be game-system-agnostic. That being said, I probably won’t go into placing populations or societies at all – the design sequence will stop with the details of the physical setting. That should permit users to bolt on whatever system they like for placing specific sentient species and their societies. I could see using the rules from GURPS Space, or from some version of Traveller, for example.
Hi Sharrukin,
Actually I have a second comment/question. One thing I really like about GURPS Space is that I can start either with the star and generate planets, or start with either a rocky planet or gas giant and then design the rest of the system around that planet. That feature allowed me to design tables to randomly generate the biochemistry of a biosphere (whether the ecosystem uses carbon and water, or some other combination, or even something really bizarre like macro-nanitic life), whether it’s rocky or gaseous, and its GURPS size category and climate and a hydrodynamic coverage range; then generate the planet to support that biosphere; and THEN generate the system where the planet is. I’ve had a ton of fun randomly generating alien biospheres first, then the planet and system, and then the alien species itself.
This lets me decide, for example, what types of alien life are common, uncommon, and impossible in a particular sci-fi setting (published or my own) and then generate a string of aliens and their worlds specific to that setting.
My question is whether Architect of Worlds will also allow starting with generating the planet and then backtracking to fill in the star and other planets. I hope it will be possible to do that.
A third question is whether the system will allow the user to start with a real star and its known or suspected exoplanets, and generate the rest of the system at random (and then be annoyed when new discoveries find different planets instead, of course!)
Sure, both of those things should work in the finished product, if and when that ever appears.
Once the design sequence is finished, I plan to write a big chapter on things you can do with it other than simply run through from Step One. Working from a desired end-state backward to the star system design is one way to go about that, and in private I’ve already used it that way more than once.
And yes, you can be assured that starting with a real-world star and what’s known about it will very much be an option. I’ve done that any number of times using the current draft system and data from the HIPPARCOS project. Complete with annoyed muttering when astronomers catch up with me and discover a different set of exoplanets than the one I built. The last time I applied the draft Architect of Worlds system to the solar neighborhood, that literally happened while I was working – a real star system I had generated worlds for just a couple of days before was published with new exoplanets that didn’t fit.
Awesome, and thanks for your replies! Yes I mentioned being annoyed by new planet discoveries because I read the Reality Ensues article and found it amusing.
Cheers!