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Month: January 2020

Projects for 2020: The Curse of Steel

Projects for 2020: The Curse of Steel

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Storyboarding the back story for The Curse of Steel

Meanwhile, the most important project I have underway is the novel I finished in the rough draft last year: The Curse of Steel.

Here’s a short synopsis that I put together for Books & Buzz back in November:

The Curse of Steel is the story of a young woman from an Iron Age “barbarian” culture, not quite identical to any culture from our own history, but most like the Celtic or Germanic tribal kingdoms of the pre-Roman period.

At the beginning of the story, Krava is an ordinary warrior of her tribe, serving as her father’s charioteer and bodyguard while he travels to visit friends. Suddenly her father is killed in an unexpected battle, leaving her alone and far from home. Soon afterward, she comes into possession of an ancient and powerful weapon, and she also learns that she is descended from the gods of her people.

Krava quickly grows into the role of a classical hero: a skilled and resourceful warrior who proves her worth in violent action, motivated by a craving for fame and esteem, and often arrogant or foolhardy. Think of Achilles, or Cuchulainn from Irish mythology. Krava’s own culture admires such behavior, and for a while she enjoys her new status, but in the end the results are a disaster for herself and everyone around her. At the end of this first story, she has matured a little; she departs on a quest to repair the harm she has done, and find a more sustainable way of life for herself and her people.

The rough draft – what I sometimes call the “plot draft,” in which I mark out the broad outlines of character, setting, and plot – is finished. The story is readable now, but it’s not very tight. Over the next few months, I intend to do an almost complete rewrite in the second draft, to fine-tune the story and bring the themes and dramatic beats into clear focus.

If all goes according to plan, The Curse of Steel will be self-published sometime this summer, after which I’ll get started on the second novel in the series. The working title for that one is The Sunlit Lands.

My patrons will see sections of the revised draft as I work on it, and those at the second or third level of patronage will get a free e-book copy of the finished novel once it’s published.

Projects for 2020: EIDOLON

Projects for 2020: EIDOLON

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Rough draft of a logo for EIDOLON

As I spin up to self-publish more material in the new year, there are two major tracks on which I’ll be spending time and effort. One is to publish fiction. The other is to publish game-ready world-building material.

Pursuing that second goal, the first step is to design a partial roleplaying-game system that fits my preferences, isn’t under anyone else’s intellectual property, and should be relatively easy to convert to any RPG rules system a reader might prefer. That process is well underway, and the working title for the system is EIDOLON.

From the draft Introduction for the core EIDOLON book:

The word eidolon comes from an ancient Greek word (εἴδωλον) which had several meanings. An eidolon was a phantom or apparition, the likeness of a dead man that appeared to the living. More generally, it could be a figure, image, or shape, a representation of a real thing.

EIDOLON – the set of rules and guidelines in this book – is a system for quickly and consistently describing fictional characters.

Using the systems in this book, you should be able to describe a fictional character in enough detail to use it in your own creative work, or in a live-action or tabletop roleplaying game (RPG). You should be able to easily understand characters described by others using the same rules. You should also be able to convert from EIDOLON to your favorite commercial game systems, and back again as needed.

One thing EIDOLON is not – at least not yet – is a complete RPG. Every tabletop RPG provides a system for describing characters so that they can be used in the game . . . but they also include systems for designing those characters, for resolving situations in which characters must overcome obstacles, and for gaming out various forms of conflict. Although this book does include a very basic challenge-resolution mechanic, none of those other components are here. You will not be able to use EIDOLON for live-action or tabletop roleplaying without doing some additional work!

On the other hand, we plan to publish future source material for roleplaying games, based on the EIDOLON rules. These “setting books” should therefore be easy to convert and use in other, more complete RPG systems.

I’m envisioning this core book as being about 20-25 pages, to be published as a PDF on a “pay what you want” basis. At least for now, I intend to hold the copyright to the core book in my own name. As this effort matures I’ll probably release the system under some form of open-gaming license, so others can easily use it to publish their own work. Once the core book is finished, I’ll be ready to start publishing world-building material under the EIDOLON system.

My patrons will see partial drafts of the core book as I work on it, and even those at the lowest level of patronage will get a free copy of the finished product.

Alone in a Crowded Milky Way

Alone in a Crowded Milky Way

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Enrico Fermi

I don’t usually post just to link to articles, but this one was particularly intriguing: Alone in a Crowded Milky Way.

Executive summary: the author and his colleagues did some modeling of the expansion of interstellar civilizations through a segment of the galaxy. They made some fairly conservative assumptions – STL travel only, how many planets would be worth colonizing, how long a given planetary civilization would be likely to survive. The result was that space-faring cultures tended to form “archipelagos” in interstellar space, leaving vast regions unvisited for many millions of years at a time. The limiting factor was imposed by stellar cartography – the arrangement of interesting planets among a population of stars that move over time.

This strikes me as a similar approach to Geoffrey Landis’ percolation theory, and yields similar results. In either case, we get a galaxy that could be full of interstellar-capable civilizations, and yet one in which many habitable worlds (like ours) might appear unvisited at any given time. It’s a sophisticated solution to the Fermi Paradox, and one which avoids nightmare scenarios.

One insight the authors of this article mention, which I hadn’t considered, is that even if Earth had been visited – or even colonized – at some point in the distant past, we might have no way of knowing that. My own models for putative galactic civilization might stand to be relaxed a little. That might go on the list for some deeper research, if and when I get back to working on space-opera projects.