December was a very quiet month. Most days I simply made incremental progress on game design, writing, and my university work, without hitting any big milestones. Truth be told, I was kind of taking it easy. So there’s not much specific to report about the month – I kept up with my obligations and a lot of second-tier projects just marked time.

So, without further ado, here’s the tentative plan for January 2026.

University Studies

At the moment I’m only a few days ahead on both of my courses, so I hope to do a little catching up. If I hit the following marks, I should be about two weeks ahead at the end of the month.

Objectives for January include:

• For my astronomy course: Finish the third graded assignment, complete the first half of the course exam, and read Topic 4.
• For my mathematics course: Finish the second graded assignment and read Units 7 and 8.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I was able to finish “The Spooky Season” in December, and start on what looks like a short-novel-length piece: “What’s Past is Prologue.” This is going to be a big work, rounding out the “season” of Star Trek: Lower Decks stories I’ve been writing since early last year. A lot of established Star Trek characters are going to appear, there’s going to be lots of intrigue, mystery, and starship battles, and Beckett Mariner is going to have her first no-kidding command with extremely high stakes.

The objective for January is to complete “What’s Past is Prologue” at least through Chapter 10.

Architect of Worlds & Conductor of Cultures

I was able to complete version 0.3 of the Cultural Evolution Game, and playtesters have had a crack at it. The assessment is that the mechanics work, but I’ve heard a couple of insights that are leading me to rethink the design almost from scratch. So version 0.4 is in the pipeline, and if my Muse’s rumblings are any indication, it’s going to look quite different.

The following list includes two top-priority items, the rest being “as time permits” (which may mean no progress).

The objectives for January are:

• Complete a major rewrite (version 0.4) of the Cultural Evolution Game
• Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Conductor of Cultures
• Begin researching and drafting a new edition of “Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller“
• Reconstruct a formal errata list for Architect of Worlds, so readers can see what’s been fixed in each minor-version release so far
• 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

Still continuing to collect notes and do game design for a version 0.60 of the “Human Destiny Sourcebook,” based upon FATE. Incremental progress means I’m a long distance from being able to share any of this, although I may try to produce a short character-design document in January.

I’m also playing with revising a very old setting – I originally came up with this one for my personal RPG campaign over thirty years ago – for which I may write up a top-level overview. More about that once I’ve fleshed it out a bit.

If either of those (short) documents gets finished this month, I’ll post them to my Kofi, free for subscribers.