Rather than maintain the master errata list for Architect of Worlds as a PDF file – which I then have to provide with a new URL every time there’s an update – I’ve created a page on this site which will always provide the current errata. Here’s a link:
Mongoose Publishing is in the process of producing a new Traveller-derived RPG, called Pioneer, set in the near future and centered around a New Space Age in which player characters (called “Pioneers”) are engaged in the development and colonization of space. Written by Sandy Antunes, it’s very much on the “hard science fiction” end of the spectrum.
For those of us who backed the project, a pre-release draft of the Pioneer core book was made available a few days ago, and I’ve been poring through that ever since.
First impressions: this looks like it’s going to be a very neat game, and I’m looking forward to making use of the finished product. I might be developing some Pioneer adventures for future convention visits!
On the other hand, it really needs a copy-editing pass before final release, and I suspect it’s going to be a tough game to referee unless you’re already comfortable with some space science. The core book tries to present both an engaging RPG and a primer on space science and engineering, and it may be falling between two stools in the process. On the other hand, the final release is apparently going to include two full campaign books, so that might help get potential referees over that hump. We’ll have to see how it turns out.
In the meantime, I spent some time today putting the Pioneer character generation sequence through its paces, and I ended up with a team of four ready-to-play Pioneers. These are loosely inspired by my own “Human Destiny” universe, although I don’t plan on taking these specific versions of the characters as canon.
Age 38 (born 1992) – current residence Baltimore, Maryland, USA
STR 8 (+0), DEX 9 (+1), END 9 (+1), INT 13 (+2), EDU 13 (+2), SOC 8 (+0)
Skills: Athletics-0, Charm-0, Computers-2, Engineer-0, Explosives-0, Heavy Machinery-0, Investigate-1, Language-1 (Spanish), Media-1, Medic-0, Navigation-1, Perception-1, Persuade-1, Science-4 (Life), Space Suit-1, Survival-1, Zero-G-1
Social Assets: Rival x2
Benefits: 540 Influence, Lab
Jack Carter graduated from the University of Tennessee in 2014, and earned his PhD in biology from Oxford University in 2018. He has earned widespread renown and multiple awards for excellence in the sciences, and is recognized as a world-class expert in life support technology and the adaptation of biological organisms to long-term space travel.
Dr. Carter currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and also does commercial research for several space-industry firms. He is a close personal friend of Nathan Walker and is a likely candidate for Walker’s growing space ventures.
Besides, with a name like that, he’s doomed to be selected for an eventual Mars expedition . . .
Age 34 (born 1996) – current residence Houston, Texas, USA
STR 5 (-1), DEX 9 (+1), END 6 (+0), INT 10 (+1), EDU 11 (+1), SOC 6 (+0)
Skills: Charm-0, Combat-2, Computers-2, Electronics-2, Heavy Machinery-0, Language-1 (Mandarin), Leadership-1, Navigation-1, Orbital Mechanics-1, Perception-0, Pilot-1, Profession-0, Remote Operation-1, Science-1 (Planetary), Space Suit-1, Survival-1, Zero-G-1
Social Assets: None
Benefits: 80 Influence, Secret Clearance, Advanced Tech
Melissa Chen attended the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs, where she earned recognition for both academic and leadership excellence. Despite facing systemic prejudice for being a woman, and a second-generation immigrant whose parents came from a rival nation, she had an outstanding military career which ended in a nomination for astronaut training. She recently retired from the service in order to pursue long-time ambitions in space.
Ms. Chen has been married to Robert Mitchell since 2020.
Age 42 (born 1988) – current residence Houston, Texas, USA
STR 7 (+0), DEX 9 (+1), END 8 (+0), INT 12 (+2), EDU 7 (+0), SOC 3 (-1)
Skills: Admin-1, Advocate-1, Athletics-1, Charm-2, Computers-1, Deception-0, Electronics-3, Engineer-2 (Electrical), Language-1 (Mandarin), Leadership-2, Mechanic-1, Pilot-1, Profession-1 (Roughneck), Streetwise-2
Social Assets: Ally, Contact x2
Benefits: 120 Influence, Plane
Robert Mitchell was born to a very poor family, and never had the opportunity to gain much formal education. However, he has spent his life working twice as hard as anyone around him, and educating himself with every available resource. The result has been a successful career as a networking specialist, working his way up from freelance contractor, to team leader, to head of engineering for medium-to-large firms. Much of his work has been adjacent to the growing space industry, where he has many contacts and potential allies now that he is consciously aiming for a role as a Pioneer.
Mr. Mitchell has, among other things, taught himself to be a skilled backpacker and small-aircraft pilot. His occasional vlogs about his expeditions into deep wilderness have made him a minor social-media celebrity.
Mr. Mitchell has been married to Melissa Chen since 2020.
Age 30 (born 2000) – current residence Palo Alto, California, USA
STR 6 (+0), DEX 8 (+0), END 6 (+0), INT 9 (+1), EDU 10 (+1), SOC 12 (+2)
Skills: Admin-1, Advocate-2, Charm-1, Computers-2, Deception-0, Electronics-1, Explosives-0, Jack-of-all-Trades-1, Language-1 (Russian), Media-2, Orbital Mechanics-1, Survival-1
Social Assets: Ally, Enemy
Benefits: 200 Influence, Board Position
Nathan Walker has two very important assets: he was born into a lot of money, and he has an immense talent for loudly claiming credit for successful ventures (while moving silently away from unsuccessful ones). Space is his latest hobby, and he has enormous ambitions for his new startup venture (Ares Enterprises). He hasn’t quite reached the position of being able to carry out his own launches and missions, but his money and his media presence have gotten his foot in the door with both national and commercial space ventures.
Mr. Walker and Dr. Carter are close friends. Mr. Walker is also acquainted with Ms. Chen, who led the rescue mission when one of his highly publicized adventures went badly in 2024.
Okay, here’s another map for the “Great Lands” setting. This one is focused more closely on the Great Lands themselves – that is, proto-Europe. The map was produced using Wonderdraft, with a carefully selected excerpt of the world map applied as a tracing image.
You can see that Europe hasn’t been fully assembled yet – with Africa still moving northward and rotating slightly counter-clockwise, the Italian and Balkan peninsulas haven’t merged in with the main portion of the continent. You can also see that the Atlantic Ocean is a bit narrower in this epoch – that’s a piece of Greenland in the far northwest, and the Americas aren’t too far off the western edge of the map.
The “Sea Kingdom” is an ahistorical bit, a subcontinent springing up along the mid-Atlantic ridge. I need a Númenor-analogue, so there it is.
The most notable feature of this pseudo-Eocene world is the climate. The planet is a lot warmer and less arid than we’re accustomed to, and sea level is quite a bit higher. The Great Lands have a humid subtropical climate all the way up into parts of what will eventually be Scandinavia and Russia. Warm, wet summers, cool winters with occasional snow, and the natural biome is either dense deciduous forest or highland prairie. Only in the very far north do you start getting a humid continental climate, with cool summers and bitterly cold winters.
People living in the Great Lands are not going to look or dress like medieval Europeans – they’re going to be generally olive to dark brown in complexion, and they’ll tend to dress pretty lightly in the summertime. I suspect the Tremara (the pseudo-Indo-European people that my protagonists belong to) are going to rather resemble Indians (as in, people from the Indian subcontinent, not Native Americans).
This part of the world will be home to several hominid species at once, each analogous to one of the Standard Fantasy Races found in (e.g.) Dungeons & Dragons. “Common-folk” (humans) can be found just about everywhere on this map. “Elder-folk” (elves) mostly stick to the western Great Lands, and keep to themselves. “Smith-folk” (dwarves) set up holdfasts wherever there’s copper, tin, or iron ore to be found, especially in hilly or mountainous regions. “Sea-folk” (halflings) come from a set of tropical islands far to the east, although a fair number of them have traveled on Sea-Kingdom ships to settle in the Great Lands. “Nomad-folk” or skatoi (orcs) mostly hang out in the colder northern regions, although they like to go raiding into the Great Lands on land or by sea.
Developing lots of neat ideas for this new version of the setting. More to come!
A few years ago, I did a bunch of worldbuilding for an Iron Age fantasy setting that I call “the Great Lands.” I even wrote a full-length novel set there, which got self-published and is currently still available in ebook format on Amazon: The Curse of Steel.
The novel got almost no engagement in its time, and the sequel I had started ran into a plot block, so I eventually set the whole project aside. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about reviving it – reworking the worldbuilding, pulling the novel down and doing a minor rewrite before republishing it on Royal Road or a similar outlet, and so on.
An early step in the worldbuilding part of the project was to build a new “historical atlas” to settle the back-story of the setting. Which meant, among other things, revising the old master world map. At which point I ran into a snag.
The problem is, I’m too picky when it comes to my worldbuilding. I have to be able to believe in the world, which means I have to pay attention to the earth-sciences part of it, even if none of that is ever going to be too obvious in the finished stories. I know the techniques for developing a constructed world, starting with the plate tectonics and working my way up through the landforms and climate. Yet I’ve never been satisfied with the results when I do that. The worlds I build end up looking too . . . too bland.
I’ve also experimented with random planetary generators – there are plenty of those available, if you know where to look – but none of those come up to my standards. They always end up being too coarse-grained in their details, or if they’re fine-grained they give us naturalistic-looking worlds that make no sense if you examine them more closely. Nobody seems up to the challenge of simulating plate tectonics for a randomly-generated Earthlike world with any degree of fidelity.
So for the past few weeks I’ve been tinkering with worlds, sometimes getting to the point of a world map to start with before throwing the whole thing out, sometimes not even getting that far. Until I had An Idea: if one wants to build a world that’s much like Earth, that clearly evolved under the same physical regime, but isn’t actually our Earth . . . one thing we can do is look at Earth of the distant past.
My original design for the Great Lands involved a Europe-like subcontinent where much of the action would take place. Easy enough. To the south of this, a “Sailor’s Sea” that would allow easy travel from west to east, and then another continent where exotic creatures and cultures might dwell. More continents off in the distance, which might or might not ever become significant to the story.
What I realized was that Earth was actually like that once . . . back in the Eocene Era, before the continent of Africa moved a bit further north and started colliding with Europe and Asia. In that time, what would eventually become the Mediterranean Sea still connected freely both with the (narrower) Atlantic Ocean to the west, and to the Tethys Ocean to the east, an ocean which would eventually become the Indian Ocean once India itself finished making its way north to collide with Asia.
Okay, suppose I work with Earth in the Eocene, about 50 million years before the present. Is it possible to build decent world maps of that era?
Turns out we can. Let me briefly describe my workflow, with pointers to where you can lay hands on similar data and tools if you’d like to fiddle with Earth’s deep past in similar fashion.
The primary resource here is the PALEOMAP Project, work done by the prominent geologist Christopher Scotese. The link will take you to a paper he produced in 2018, describing a set of DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) that he and his colleagues have laboriously assembled for the entire planet Earth in different past eras. This is a monumental data set, with over 110 different maps stretching over half a billion years into the past. There’s a link in the paper that will give you access to the entire data set.
The PALEOMAP models are in a specific file format (NetCDF) that’s in common use in the earth-sciences community, but which I needed specific tools to work with. There’s a NetCDF viewer called Panoply that’s very good for reading the individual files in the PALEOMAP corpus and visualizing the results, but by itself that wasn’t fine-grained enough. I needed to convert the NetCDF files into a different file format like GeoTIFF, so it could be processed by professional cartography software like QGIS.
Fortunately, I was able to locate MyGeodata, a online utility that’s designed to convert geolocation data from one format to another. I was able to convert the two PALEOMAP data files I was most interested in to GeoTIFF with no difficulty. It cost me a few dollars – the size of the datasets were above the site’s threshold for free use – but the results were superb.
I was able to load a GeoTIFF file for the Eocene period (50 million years before present) into QGIS, and work with that to develop a nicely colored elevation map of Earth in the appropriate era. Output from that went into Affinity Photo, and a couple of hours later I had the completed “master world map” at the head of this post.
You should be able to see the differences between Eocene Earth and our present day. The Atlantic Ocean is narrower, and none of the continents have quite reached their present-day positions. The Tethys Ocean is still there, full of islands and island chains that will make it a nice “Sailor’s Sea.” The sea level is noticeably higher than in the present – the Eocene was a rather warm period in Earth’s history, with very little permanent glaciation. Even Antarctica doesn’t have much in the way of ice caps yet. I suspect if I run with that, the “Great Lands” (proto-Europe) are going to be subtropical – but that’s okay.
I’ve added one feature that didn’t exist in our own Earth’s past – an island subcontinent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, straddling the mid-ocean ridge. Kind of like Iceland, if it had appeared a few million years earlier and was a different shape. That’s going to be the “Sea Kingdom” in the fantasy setting I’m building, the current highest point of human civilization and the source of world-spanning oceanic adventures.
Okay, so I have a starting point for rebuilding “the Great Lands,” and I ought to be able to proceed from there. Chalked up some neat experience with working with geolocation data and professional-caliber cartography tools, too. Fun!
Huh. My apologies to my readers – it looks as if I completely failed to post a planning message for the month of March. I certainly made out a planning board, and I know I intended to make a post about it, but “I’ll do it tomorrow” must have gotten a little too entrenched. So let’s pick back up with the month of April.
In general, retired life is agreeing with me, I’m keeping up with my university coursework, and I’m getting at least a little creative work done most days. It’s just a matter of pushing long-term projects forward until I have something worth sharing . . .
Here’s the (not so tentative – I’ve got some definite commitments I need to meet) plan for April.
Still very much on track, and as far as I can tell I haven’t scored lower than about a 94/100 on any assignment or exam so far this year. Coming down to the final stretch for both courses, with exams coming up in May.
The objectives for April are:
“What’s Past is Prologue” reached Chapter 20 just before the end of March, and I’m definitely getting into the end-game of the plot. Probably aiming for 24-25 chapters in all. Very good chance I’ll be able to finish that novel in April, depending on how my time works out. It’s getting very good engagement, including from new readers, to the point it should soon pop into the top-five list of all the stories I’ve ever written on Archive of Our Own.
The objective for April is to complete “What’s Past is Prologue.”
Ken Burnside would really like to have a revised version of “Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller” ready to sell, and I suspect I can have a draft ready for him before the Mayday celebrations kick off, so that’s a major project right now. I’m not seeing any reason why that revised and expanded document, based on the final release version of Architect, can’t be available on the Ad Astra Games catalog within a few weeks. This is my top priority right now.
Still working on version 0.5 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures. I had originally intended to do just a little polishing of existing mechanics, but the more I worked, the more I saw ways to improve the whole structure. The simulation model is complete at this point, but I’m working on the section the reader can use to translate the game results into a more-or-less detailed history of their sophont species’ cultural development. Hoping to have that done sometime in early-to-mid April.
The formal errata list for Architect of Worlds is finished and has been posted here.
The objectives for April are:
The “Human Destiny” and “Tree of Worlds” universes are getting occasional attention, as time permits, although progress on both is very slow. Maybe more over the summer, when I don’t have university courses to take up time and energy?
I’ve also gone back to look at my “Great Lands” Iron Age fantasy setting, with the intention of reworking some of the worldbuilding and re-releasing the fiction (“Krava’s Legend”) that I’ve written in that universe. Incremental progress there too. There’s a good chance I’ll eventually be able to point to a World Anvil page for this setting . . .