I spent most of August on the first tranche of writing and cartography for Fourth Millennium, and ended up with about 10,000 words of new material (and a snazzy master map for the setting). That all went out to my patrons on 31 August, so that hit my marks for the month. Which means several of my “front burner” items for August have actually been completed.

September is going to be a bit different. I have an obligation to run two events at Travellercon 2024 in October, so I need to focus on preparing for those.

One is going to be an Architect of Worlds “world-building workshop.” Up to six Traveller players and I are going to take four hours to work out a complete, Traveller-compatible planetary system using the Architect rules. I’ll need to do some prep work to make sure that runs smoothly and keeps the participants engaged, considering I won’t have a full-on computer on hand. After the convention is over, I’ll be writing up that planetary system in detail and sharing that with the workshop participants.

The other event will be a GURPS Traveller: The Interstellar Wars scenario . . . which will be the first time I’ve run any RPG for strangers in over twenty years. Yeah, that’s going to call for plenty of prep time too.

So I suspect most of my creative time in September will be taken up getting ready for the convention. My patrons can expect there to be no charged release for the month of September, although at some point after the con I may share my results of the two events as patron rewards.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a project to rescue a lot of my old fiction and republish it in forms that I can sell on my Kofi shop, once that opens up. As of today I’ve finished polishing up one novelette, incidentally working out the workflow for future items. This will be an “as time permits” project throughout the next 2-3 months, most likely.

So here’s the formal list for September:

• Front Burner:
  • Travellercon: Finish designing the scenario for the adventure “Raid on Markidu.”
  • Travellercon: Complete setup work for the Architect of Worlds world-building workshop.
• Back Burner:
  • Fourth Millennium: Write a gazetteer of major regions in the setting, tied to the master map.
  • Architect of Worlds: Finish setting up the page(s) for the book on this site.
  • Architect of Worlds: Start making at least one post per month (errata, edge cases, new material) supporting the book.
  • Publishing: Continue polishing and reformatting legacy fiction for publication via Kofi, as time permits.

More news as the month unwinds, no doubt. I hope to get back to Fourth Millennium as my primary project after the convention, in mid-October.