Sharrukin

Planning for February 2022

February 2, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Well, my day job is a little less demanding as January turns into February – my two big projects for calendar year 2021 are almost finished and I don’t have any big new projects for 2022. At least not yet. So I’m expecting to make good progress on a couple of creative projects this month. Here’s the main list:

Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
- Architect of Worlds: Rewrite sections of the Introduction and Design Sequence segment, based on new research, hopefully simplifying several steps of the sequence having to do with the placement of planets. I may also take this opportunity to update all the worked examples and make all the mathematical notation more consistent.
- Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
- Human Destiny: Finish writing an article for the Cepheus Journal about the game-book project.
Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
- Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
- Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
- Human Destiny: Produce a high-level map of terraformed Mars.
- Human Destiny: Research and produce a timeline for the terraforming of Mars.
- Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
- Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
- Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
- Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine)

The work on Architect of Worlds is probably the top priority this month. The end result there will probably be a version 0.8 draft of the Introduction and World Design Sequence. That new document will be a free update for my patrons.

I’m also considering releasing the new partial for free on this blog site, in an attempt to generate some new interest for the project. There have been a lot of changes and improvements since the version that’s currently available to the public. My patrons will continue to get any further updates to that document as free rewards, until there’s another major overhaul or the book as a whole is about ready for layout and release.

Meanwhile, I should be able to complete the novelette “Remnants” this month, and if that ends up being long enough, I’ll likely make it the charged release for February.

Review: The Wild Court, by E. G. Radcliff

January 31, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

The Wild Court by E. G. Radcliff

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Wild Court is the most recent installment in a high-fantasy series, strongly flavored by elements of Irish mythology.

Áed is the young king of a human realm, struggling with physical disability, the responsibilities of rule, and the growing possibility of a relationship with one of his royal counselors. On the evening of a liminal festival – a time when Áed’s mundane realm and the Otherworld come into contact – his kingdom is savagely attacked by the fae. He soon learns that a war in the faerie realm is spilling over into his own kingdom, threatening widespread death and devastation. He resolves to visit the Otherworld in person, hoping to uncover the causes of the faerie war and end it before it can do any more harm. Several other characters go with him on this quest; he meets both foes and surprising allies along the way.

The greatest strength of this story is its characters. Áed reminds me a little of Maia from The Goblin Emperor; he’s very earnest but also surprisingly clever in a pinch, and he overcomes steep obstacles to be an effective ruler. His supporting cast – his heir Ronan, his advisor Éamon, a fae girl named Erin, and many of the people he meets in the Otherworld – are all interesting and sympathetic. Even the villain of the piece (a truly horrifying figure) is very well-drawn.

E. G. Radcliff has a very clean prose style, with either very good self-editing skills or a sharp editor; I don’t recall being pulled out of the story even once by a copy- or line-editing problem. Her style is always at least workmanlike, and occasionally lyrical. She has a clear eye for the details of character and place, and a gift for making the reader feel part of the story. I found The Wild Court engaging and a very clean read.

One observation I made was that the plot is very straightforward, even a little predictable at times. The story sets up one or two mysteries, but none of these are at all difficult for the reader to unravel before the characters resolve them. That’s not a weakness of this story – not all fantasy tales need to be convoluted and mysterious, after all! The reader’s motivation is to watch a team of brave and clever characters as they deal with personal issues and relationship drama, even as they face down villains and try to end a war. On that basis, The Wild Court succeeds admirably.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Wild Court, and in my experience the story did a very good job of reaching its objectives – once I finished it, I immediately went to pick up the earlier books in the series. Very highly recommended if you enjoy honest high fantasy with a strong Celtic flavor.

Status Report (30 January 2022)

January 30, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Well, the honey and the biscuits are not quite coming out even.

I’m making decent progress on “Remnants,” a new Human Destiny novelette. However, that’s going more slowly than I had expected; I’m discovering that writing a murder mystery is a bit more challenging than my usual genre. I’ve also settled on an indie novel to review before the end of the month, and I’m plowing through that text at a rapid pace. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have enough free hours left before the end of the month to get both tasks finished.

Doing at least one book review a month has to take precedence, so as a result, there will be no charged release for my patrons for January 2022. I’ll most likely be able to finish “Remnants” in the first week or so of February, and that will probably be the next charged release. I haven’t settled on the next major project to get attention, but I suspect I may be looking hard at a major round of revisions to the Architect of Worlds design sequence, based on the new research I mentioned in this post from last week.

More news early in February.

New Models for Planetary Formation

January 24, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 5 comments

Rings in the protoplanetary disk around the young star HD163296 (Image courtesy of Andrea Isella/Rice University)

The science of planetary formation has been advancing in leaps and bounds for the last decade or two, driven by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets and fine-detail imaging of other planetary systems. This has been giving us a lot of insight into not only the history of our own Solar System, but also the general case of planetary formation elsewhere.

With my Architect of Worlds project, I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the current science while designing a world-building system for use in game design and literary work. The current state of the system is pretty good, I think, but it’s a bit complicated. I’ve built a model that tracks the formation of a system’s primary gas giant (if any), follows that planet as it migrates inward (and possibly outward), and uses the results of that evolution to determine the mass and placement of the rest of the planets. Lots of moving parts there, and a few of the steps are kind of unwieldy.

Now there’s some recent research suggesting that I might be able to simplify the model and still get good results. The pertinent paper is “Planetesimal rings as the cause of the Solar System’s planetary architecture,” by Andre Izidoro et al., released in December 2021. Here’s a layman’s article from Rice University: “Earth isn’t ‘super’ because the sun had rings before planets,” published on 4 January.

The idea is that it wasn’t specifically the migrations of Jupiter that brought about the architecture we see of the inner Solar System. Instead, the protoplanetary disk probably had several “pressure bumps,” places where infalling particles released gases due to the increasing temperature close to the embryonic Sun. These pressure bumps tended to accumulate dust particles, and created an environment where planetesimals could form and coalesce, without continuing to spiral into the Sun. The authors of the paper predict the presence of three such “pressure bumps,” which ended up giving rise to the rocky inner planets, the gas giants, and the Kuiper Belt objects respectively.

The idea makes a lot of sense, especially since we’ve started to get fine-detail images of young stars and their protoplanetary disks, and we sometimes see exactly the system of “rings” that the model would predict. Take the image that leads the Rice University article, which I’ve included above.

Scientifically, speaking, the neat thing about this new model is that it explains several things that previous models (which assumed a more uniform disk and relied on Jupiter-migrations to make things work out) had trouble with – especially the specific isotopic composition of inner-system as opposed to outer-system material. The new model also doesn’t have any trouble producing a small Mercury or Mars, or a planetoid belt (with mixed composition) between Mars and Jupiter.

From my perspective, it may mean that I can simplify the model on which Architect of Worlds is built, making the whole thing much easier for people to use. I’m going to be reading the literature on this, and thinking about the implications.

Status Report (23 January 2022)

January 23, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

A quick post to update things, as we’re moving into the last week of the month. My day job has been insanely busy so far this month, with two major projects coming to a conclusion more or less at the same time. Still, I’ve survived the critical few days and still gotten some creative work done. Fingers crossed that I’ll hit my major milestones by next Monday.

I’ve just finished putting together a new partial draft of the Human Destiny setting bible and game sourcebook. This is the first draft under the assumption that the eventual product will be published as a Cepheus Engine book – the main block of new material is a complete draft of the character design rules, including all the lifepath tables. A PDF of the draft just went out to all of my patrons as a free update.

I’ve also finished polishing up the existing partial draft of a Human Destiny novelette, with the working title of “Remnants.” This is actually the first Human Destiny story I ever started writing, seven or eight years back, and I’m hoping to finish it over the next few days. If I can get that whipped into shape before the end of the month, it will be a charged release for my patrons.

In other news, I have an opportunity to write an article for the Cepheus Journal, the foremost fanzine for the Cepheus Engine family of games. The article will probably be a summary of the Human Destiny setting, with some designer’s notes about ways in which the eventual game book will be distinctive. Cepheus Journal isn’t a paying market, but that’s okay – I’ll bring in more attention for that particular project that way.

Meanwhile, I still need to finish reading a novel or two for review by the end of the month. I’ve got a couple of promising candidates, but we’ll see how that goes.

Eight days to go, and I think I’m ahead of the usual monthly curve. Hopefully nothing unexpected will get in the way.

Human Destiny: The Careers List

January 11, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

Here’s another teaser for the Cepheus Engine hack I’m putting together, for the new version of the Human Destiny sourcebook. This is part of the character design rules – the draft list of available “careers” for characters to indulge in during the lifepath generation process.

Again, this list is kind of atypical for a Cepheus Engine game. A few of the careers here are somewhat analogous to the ones you’ll find in the classic space-opera RPG that the engine emulates. Others are not – again, Human Destiny stories are likely to be heavily social-interaction-oriented, in a context of post-scarcity economics and a strong interstellar state. That sets different parameters (and constraints) on the kind of “adventures” that are likely to happen.

Careers List

Activist – Individual who pursues a cause, agitating for social or political change.
Artist – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by producing and selling works of art or handicraft.
Athlete – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by taking part in one or more competitive sports.
Bureaucrat – Official in an organized bureaucracy, either under the Hegemony or in an éthnos, charged with following the details of administrative process.
Citizen – Individual who subsists almost entirely on the Citizen’s Allowance, and who spends most of their time on entertainment or socializing.
Colonist – Individual who has settled on a more-or-less Earthlike (or terraformed) world and works to support the human community there.
Counselor – Individual who provides psychological care or social services.
Dissident – Individual who has rejected Hegemony society, but still uses some technology and lives in a Free Zone.
Ecological Reclamation Service –Member of the Hegemony’s scientific corps, overseeing wilderness reserves to support and protect the natural ecology.
Entertainer – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by performing before an audience.
Feral – Individual who has escaped the Hegemony entirely, by rejecting all technology and living in the deep wilderness.
Guard Service – Member of the Hegemony’s paramilitary force, enforcing the Praxis on planetary surfaces, also (rarely) carrying out annexation against pre-stellar civilizations.
Influencer – Individual who advocates for ideas, products, or services, primarily on the global information grid.
Interstellar Service – Member of the Hegemony’s interstellar paramilitary force, carrying out missions involving peacekeeping, enforcement of the Praxis, and exploration of deep space.
Mediator – Individual who provides negotiation or conflict-resolution services.
Physician – Individual who provides medical care.
Rogue – Individual who frequently engages in deception and subterfuge, whether in violation of the Praxis or not.
Scholar – Individual who is engaged in and has expert knowledge of a science, or some similar formal body of organized knowledge. Also, anyone attending or teaching at an institution of higher learning.
Service Specialist – Individual who provides personal service to others, most often in the hospitality or leisure industries.
Spacer – Individual who works aboard a deep-space outpost or colony, usually on an asteroid or moon.
Technician – Individual who is skilled in designing, building, maintaining, or repairing complex technological systems.

Now that I’ve blocked this out, the rest of the character generation rules should follow without much trouble. We’ll see how much progress I’m able to make over the next week or two.

Planning for January 2022

January 8, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Things have been a little hectic here at the Palace lately. The period since Christmas has, ironically, been one of the busiest I’ve had at my day job in some time, with three major projects all coming to a head at the same time and demanding a lot of my attention. On top of that, throw the disruption of the worst surge since the pandemic started and our usual pattern of getting heavy snow in January, and it’s kind of been chaos. Not conducive to getting creative work done.

Still, I have a calm weekend at the moment, and it’s a good time to outline work for the rest of this month.

Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
- Human Destiny: Finish a draft of the character design rules and release the first partial draft of the Human Destiny setting bible as a Cepheus Prime sourcebook.
- Human Destiny: Finish a new novelette for eventual collection and publication.
- Human Destiny: Produce a high-level map of terraformed Mars.
- Human Destiny: Research and produce a timeline for the terraforming of Mars.
Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
- Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
- Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
- Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
- Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
- Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release. This work may involve updating all of the worked examples, and making mathematical notation more consistent.
- Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
- Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine)

I’m clearly focusing on the Human Destiny universe some more this month. I’ve actually worked out most of the Martian material, although it’s all scattered notes at the moment, and producing the map is proving a little more challenging than I thought. I’m making good progress on the Cepheus Engine hack for the sourcebook. Meanwhile, I’ve come across one of my older partial stories – possibly the first piece of fiction I ever wrote in the setting that eventually became Human Destiny – and it seems likely that I’ll be able to finish that fairly quickly. So that’s where the low-hanging fruit are at the moment.

For my patrons, the most likely releases this month will be the next partial rough draft of the sourcebook (free release) and the new story (charged release, if it’s long enough). As always, I’ll update as the month progresses and it’s clearer how things are going to go.

2021 in Review

January 1, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

In some ways, 2021 was a pretty good year at the Palace. The blog has been growing steadily every year since I resumed it in 2018, and 2021 was no exception. We got several thousand distinct views, which isn’t bad for a non-themed, meandering blog by a part-time creative. On the Patreon side of things, I’ve reached almost two dozen active patrons. I’m not sure yet, but I think income from my original work is approaching the level that I make on the long tail from my tabletop industry period years back. Not a bad milestone, even if it’s still orders of magnitude short of “quit the day job” money.

This was the first full year after I started cross-posting to social media. It was also the first full year since I started posting one or two reviews per month of self-published or indie fiction. Those no doubt helped.

As usual, the main factors holding me back are the part-time nature of my work, and the fact that I likely have too many distinct projects under way. Those items make it hard for me to hit major milestones. For example, it’s been over a year since my debut novel, The Curse of Steel, was released – yet the sequel, The Sunlit Lands, is still not nearly complete in first draft. I started a space-opera novel, Second Dawn, for Kindle Vella but that project has been stalled too. My main non-fiction project, Architect of Worlds, made significant progress but still isn’t close to being finished.

My creative style seems to work for me – I don’t get completely blocked very often, and I usually make progress on something every month. I worry that it demands patience from my readers, though.

Anyway. I usually take this opportunity to look back on the top-ten new posts from the previous year. This year looks kind of different on that score. My book reviews are clearly driving some traffic, and when I can connect my work to the popular RPG Traveller, that seems to bring a lot of clicks. Something to keep in mind.

Overall, I think my goals for the coming year are going to involve two meta-objectives: to make progress on all of my outstanding projects, and at the same time to finish one of the book-length items. The best candidates for the latter are Architect of Worlds and The Sunlit Lands. Still, we’ll have to see how things go.

Review: The Shivering Ground & Other Stories, by Sara Barkat

December 31, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

The Shivering Ground & Other Stories by Sara Barkat

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Shivering Ground & Other Stories is a collection of eleven short stories, combining science fiction with an almost Victorian sensibility and prose style.

A woman has her heart surgically removed to better survive the demands of her society. Ordinary people are caught up in irreversible climate change. A prison guard watches over the last prisoner from a war that ended long before. Two lovers living in alternate universes carry on a doomed affair through letters. These are some of the worlds explored in this unique collection.

The stories are independent, although they share some common features. Many of them seem to be set in steampunkish universes, with dreary industrial districts, airships in the skies, a sense that humanity struggles to thrive in the world it has built for itself. Several stories focus on the details of ordinary life in the shadow of massive disaster: war, ecological collapse, or the fall of civilization.

The prose style here is immaculate – I caught a couple of places where line formatting seemed to go awry, but copy- and line-editing were otherwise superb. Her style reminds me of some Victorian fiction: dense, with a broad vocabulary carefully deployed, often focused on fine descriptive detail. Sara Barkat is painting word-pictures, and she does it with considerable skill. Another reviewer likens the result to Emily Dickinson, and it’s not a bad comparison.

The reader will find most of these stories mysterious; each one contains a mystery, a puzzle that the reader may not be able to solve before the story closes. If you find yourself asking “what’s really going on here” right up to the last word, then the story is probably hitting its objective. Some of the pieces are barely stories at all, in the sense that they don’t seem to have much plot – they’re portraits, windows into universes that are not quite like our own.

I very much enjoyed The Shivering Ground, and I’m going to be looking for more from Sara Barkat. Very highly recommended if you enjoy evocative science-fiction stories in a distinctive style.

Human Destiny: the Skill List

December 27, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

I’ve been working on a Cepheus Engine kitbash for my Human Destiny setting bible and game.

One thing that became obvious fairly quickly is that the usual skill sets for Cepheus Engine, as derived from Traveller, may not work well in this setting. The typical premise in the older games is a band of misfit characters trying to make a living through some combination of troubleshooting, mercenary work, or tramp-freighter trade. Those are a lot less likely in Human Destiny stories, which are more likely to be heavily social-interaction-oriented in the context of post-scarcity economics and a fairly strong interstellar state. Think Star Trek or the Culture, rather than Firefly or The Expanse.

So here’s the tentative skill set for the new game. I anticipate task and conflict mechanics to work in a standard manner for Cepheus Engine, but this is distinct enough from the SRD that the game will certainly be presented as “An Alternate Cepheus Engine Universe.”

Incidentally, I spent a lot of time reviewing other science-fiction games in my library to remind myself how this was done elsewhere. It’s actually rather amusing how many games, published across four decades of time, have taken very similar approaches to this problem . . .

Tentative Skill List

Artistic Skills

Fine Arts (Specializes to Architecture, Body Art, Calligraphy, Drawing, Interior Decorating, Musical Composition, Photography, Poetry, Pottery, Sculpting, Video Production, Virtual Production, Woodworking, or Writing)
Handicrafts (Specializes to Basket Weaving, Brewing, Blacksmith, Bookbinding, Carpentry, Cooking, Gardening, Glassblowing, Jeweler, Leatherworking, Masonry, Needlework, Sewing, Winemaking, or Woodworking)
Performing Arts (Specializes to Acting, Dancing, Singing, or a specific musical instrument)

Athletic Skills

Athletics
Free Fall
Observation
Riding
Sports (Specializes to a specific sport)
Stealth
Unarmed Combat

Interpersonal Skills

Carousing
Debate
Deception
Diplomacy
Games (Specializes to Gambler, Virtual Gamer, or a specific game)
Instruction
Interrogation
Leadership
Negotiation
Personal Service
Persuasion
Public Speaking

Operations Skills

Battle Dress
Demolitions
System Operations (Specializes to Comms, Computers, Security, Sensors, or Telepresence)
Vacc Suit

Outdoor Skills

Animal Handling
Navigation
Survival
Tracking

Professional Skills

Admin
Broker
Forensics
Law
Medicine
Memetics
Politics
Profession (Specializes to a specific career)
Protocol
Strategy
Streetwise
Tactics

Scientific Skills

Research
Science (Specializes to Anthropology, Archaeology, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Ecology, Economics, Geology, History, Linguistics, Literature, Mathematics, Metallurgy, Meteorology, Paleontology, Philosophy, Physics, Physiology, Planetology, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Theology, or Xenology)

Starship Skills

Astrogation
Engineering (Specializes to Drive, Life Support, or Power Plant)
Gunnery (Specializes to Bay Weapon, Orbital Bombardment, Spinal Mount Weapon, or Turret Weapon)
Pilot

Technical Skills

Civil Engineering
Construction
Cybernetics
Electronics
Gravitics
Mechanics

Vehicle Skills

Air Vehicles (Specializes to Airship, Grav Aircraft, Rotor Aircraft, or Winged Aircraft)
Ground Vehicles (Specializes to Cycle, Hovercraft, Tracked Vehicle, or Wheeled Vehicle)
Water Vehicles (Specializes to Motor Ship, Sailing Ship, Small Craft, or Submarine)

Weapon Skills

Guns (Specializes to Archaic Guns, Energy Guns, Gravitic Guns, and Stun Guns)
Heavy Weapons
Melee Weapons (Specializes to Fencing Weapons, Impact Weapons, Knives, Staves, or Swords)
Missile Weapons (Specializes to Bows or Crossbows)

Current status of the project: I had vaguely hoped to have a new partial rough draft for my patrons by the end of December, with the character rules more or less finished, but designing this list took a lot longer than I expected.

I’ll have my formal “planning for January” blog post in a few days, but I suspect my main efforts for next month will involve finishing this game-design task so I can push a version 0.4 draft to my patrons, and possibly writing a new Human Destiny novelette. A murder mystery, oddly enough, although murders are vanishingly rare in the Human Destiny setting . . .

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