Sharrukin's Palace

Things are moving right along on Architect of Worlds. I’m confident that I’ll be able to hit my objective of page 70 out of 180 by the end of this month, and probably a few pages beyond that. So while I’m working on Architect, I’m also giving some thought to what’s likely to be my next big RPG project: Fourth Millennium.

Fourth Millennium is envisioned as an alternate-historical fantasy, set in the Mediterranean world sometime in the middle of what we would think of as the first century BCE. The setting is the same one in which I’m writing the novel Twice-Crowned – I’ve already written a few short pieces in it too, and will likely write more as the muse moves me.

The underlying game system is probably going to be the Cypher System from Monte Cook Games, under their (very generous) creative license. Assuming I live and stay motivated long enough to produce the whole thing, it’s going to have three major components:

• The core Cypher System-compatible rules for building characters and roleplaying in the setting, with rules for not only personal-combat-heavy adventures, but mass combat, social and political conflict, and so on. There will be a magic system based heavily around spirit-derived and divine magic, with a strong trace of neo-Platonist hermeticism as well.
• A gazetteer of the Mediterranean world in the setting, somewhat familiar from our own history, but also full of divergences (a surviving Minoan-derived state, a Roman Republic that hasn’t been quite as fortunate but still has the potential to conquer widely, an emerging Hellenistic world-empire derived from the Alexandrian οἰκουμένη, and so on).
• At least one One Ring– or Pendragon-inspired “grand campaign” that organizes adventures in annual cycles, letting characters start out as minor figures, work their way up to being movers and shakers, and change the course of the setting’s future history. So (e.g.) in a Roman Grand Campaign, characters might start out as clients supporting an ambitious Roman senator, but while assisting him they would build up their own wealth and clout, eventually setting out on the cursus honorum and standing for the offices of praetor and consul in their own right, all the while dealing with the perennial crises facing the Republic.

It’s that last item that has me cogitating heavily. I’m concerned that a single book that contains all three of these components is going to be huge, especially if I go all-in on building multiple interlocking Grand Campaigns based on different cultures. I could see building at least three of those: one set in the Roman Republic, one in the Hellenistic empire, one in the Minoan-derived culture that occupies an uneasy space between the two.

So suppose I instead build a single book that contains character-design and adventuring rules, the extra rules needed to support Grand Campaign play, and the gazetteer describing the setting. That book would be enough for players and GMs to build their own adventures and campaigns. Big, but not outrageously so. Then there would be one or more follow-on books that describe each Grand Campaign in detail.

The thing I’m wrestling with is, which campaign book to plan to work on first.

• The Roman book would have the advantage of being the most well-documented in primary sources and extant fiction, and the most familiar to the audience. No trouble building a plausible political and social system here, with plenty of room for adventures. Of course, Roman society was very problematic by modern standards – strong misogyny, a very equivocal view of LGBT+ behavior and lives, rampant slave-holding. Good portion of the audience would probably be repelled by that, even if I were to work hard to provide alternatives.
• The Hellenistic book would be most attractive to me, given that I’m a Hellenophile of long standing, but it would carry a lot of disadvantages. Primary-source documentation of the details of society and politics among the Hellenistic kingdoms isn’t as rich, since most our sources were (of course) Roman. I’d have a harder time developing social and grand-campaign mechanisms for this piece of the setting to the same level of detail. Maybe not quite as much values dissonance for the audience, but the difference would be pretty slim. Hellenistic societies tended to be just as nasty as the Roman by modern standards.
• The Minoan-derived society would have its own set of trade-offs. In this case, I’d be making the details up almost out of whole cloth – we’re talking about a culture that just didn’t exist in the corresponding era of our real-world history. Which would probably mean that I’d have to work all the harder to get the audience on board, since this would be the most historical-fantasy piece of the setting. On the other hand, the post-Minoans would be a lot less problematic for the modern audience – very little misogyny or patriarchy, a much more liberal view of LGBT+ people, slavery present but not nearly as prevalent as in Rome or the Hellenistic world. Not to mention, this society’s location between the other two would add a certain degree of tension and potential conflict to the setting, possibly helping to engage the audience.

Mental note: this project is really going to need some effort spent on consent-and-safety tools.

So yeah, in the short run I’m not going to need to make any decisions, but by the time Architect is in release and I’m starting to produce rough-draft material for Fourth Millennium, I’m going to have to have a lot of this figured out.

I’d be interested in hearing from my readers and patrons on this one. If you have any interest in Fourth Millennium at all, which of the three grand-campaign sourcebooks do you think you’d find most interesting and useful? Feel free to drop me a comment or an email if you have any insight.