Just a quick post to report on how things are going here.
We’re all in lockdown, with my son the only one who’s still leaving the house for work each day. He works at a small factory that supports the food-delivery industry; as you can imagine, they’re doing an absolutely booming business right now. He’s earning lots of overtime, and he and I joke that he’s the only one in the family that’s really “essential” at the moment. At least my job is secure for when things start getting back to normal, and I’m still getting paid in full for the duration. We have plenty of savings in any case, so as long as money remains good in the first place, we should be able to weather the storm.
The psychological toll seems more acute. I have plenty to do, and my son has his work and his online friends. On the other hand, my wife misses her classes and social contacts, and I think my daughter is going slowly mad, stuck in the house without her usual busy school schedule.
For my part, I’ve been having the usual upper-respiratory issues that always hit me, when the dogwood and maple trees do their thing every spring. I’ve been watching my symptoms like a hawk, and taking my temperature regularly, but so far I haven’t seen any reason to push the panic button. All that means is that I’m in a constant state of low-level apprehension rather than mortal terror, but if that’s the worst I have to live with over the next few months, I count myself blessed. A lot of people are having it far worse.
As for the creative work which is the normal reason for this blog, I’ve been nicely productive ever since I came home. I’ve been working on a more extended system for designing Iron Age villages, an expansion of the “extended character” work I’ve posted about recently. That, in turn, is helping me to visualize the social setting of The Curse of Steel much more completely. If and when I start the second-draft rewrite – which may now be a matter of days – I think I’ll have a much better picture to draw upon.
Meanwhile, I’m also working on the first draft for the EIDOLON “core book,” the basic character-description rule set that I’ll be self-publishing as a basis for releasing world-building material for the game market. I’m also working on the Tremara “culture book” that’s likely to be the first major release for the EIDOLON system. There’s still plenty of work to do on both items, but there’s real progress.
I think April may be the first month that my Patreon campaign gets started again; I’ll have enough new material that patrons might find interesting or useful. If you’re interested in signing up as my patron, please have a visit to my creator page and drop a pledge. Thanks!
My employer has sent me home for what may be the next couple of months, since I’m in a “high-risk” category for COVID-19 (over 50 and with a chronic health condition that might complicate if I come down with the disease). So here’s a great opportunity to work on EIDOLON and some of the world-building for The Curse of Steel. I may be posting a lot more frequently for a while . . .
For today, here are some notes I’ve put together over the past few days. Here I’m starting to puzzle out how the EIDOLON “extended character” will work in practice. I’m working with the home society for The Curse of Steel here – the Tremara or “Mighty Folk,” a tribal Iron Age culture somewhat reminiscent of pre-Roman Celts. These notes aren’t polished rules material, but if you refer to last week’s post you may get some insight into what I’m working on here.
In Tremara society, the smallest monetary unit is the copper
penny (cp). A copper penny is roughly the value of a pound of barley.
As a practical matter, most Tremara tribes don’t coin copper
pennies. Most transactions at that level are handled through barter or exchange
of favors. The most common coin in circulation is the silver penny (sp),
which is worth 12 cp. Very wealthy Tremara sometimes use gold coins for big
transactions; these are either obtained in foreign trade or minted by the richest
tribes. The gold piece (gp) is worth 20 sp or 240 cp.
Tremara agriculture is based largely upon barley. A bushel
of barley weighs about 48 pounds, and so is worth about 4 sp.
Assume an average person requires 600 pounds of barley per year. This constitutes a subsistence diet, without much variety or luxury, but enough to support a healthy life. This comes to 600 cp per year or 50 cp per month. Assume another 10 cp per month for other expenses (clothing, tools, maintenance of housing, and so on). Hence the bare minimum for subsistence living will be 60 cp (5 sp) per month, or 720 cp (60 sp) per year.
Proposed rule for Social Standing in EIDOLON:
In any EIDOLON setting, the benchmark figure for Social Standing is a cost-of-living equal to the bare minimum for subsistence living in that setting. Social Standing for any individual equals log-2 of (his personal cost-of-living expenses, divided by the benchmark figure), rounded to the nearest integer.
Social Standing can be modified by conditions of legal or social privilege, although these modifiers will not normally amount to more than plus or minus 1.
Farming in the Iron Age
Tremara Agriculture
Tremara characters can own several Assets related to agriculture:
Crop Land (measured in acres) – cleared flat
land of good quality that can be used to raise barley. Only half of the Crop
Land is planted each year, the other half being left fallow.
Pasture (measured in acres) – cleared land
that doesn’t have to be flat or of the best quality, which is set aside for grazing.
Can also include land left forested for pigs to forage.
Horses
Cattle
Small Animals – some combination of sheep,
goats, and pigs.
These Assets are operated by three classes of Workers:
Farmers – a character serving as a Farmer
must have the Professional Skill Farmer at +2 or better.
Herdsmen – a character serving as a
Herdsman must have the Professional Skill Herdsman at +2 or better. Each
Herdsman is assumed to work with a pair of dogs trained for animal handling.
Farm Laborers – a character serving as a
Farm Laborer needs no specific Professional Skill, but must have Strength,
Dexterity, Vitality, and Intelligence at +0 or better. A Farm Laborer provides
unskilled labor, which is often seasonal in nature (grain harvest, shearing,
milking, herding pigs, and so on). Farm Laborers may be slaves.
Agricultural Assets must be supported as follows, or else
they can produce no profits:
One Farmer for every 24 acres of Crop Land
(round up)
One Farm Laborer for every 12 acres of Crop Land
(round up)
One Cattle for every 6 acres of Crop Land (round
up)
One Herdsman for every 80 Horses or Cattle, or for
every 120 Small Animals (combine fractions and then round up)
Farm animals must be supported by Pasture: 0.5 acres of
Pasture for every Small Animal, and 4 acres of Pasture for every Horse or
Cattle. Any animals not supported by Pasture are lost.
Each year, Agricultural Assets will produce profits:
Per acre of Crop Land: 210 cp (350 pounds of
barley, of which 140 pounds must be set aside for next year’s planting)
Per Horse: 150 cp (loan or sale of animals, possibly
stud fees)
Per Cattle: 100 cp (milk, leather, meat)
Per Small Animal: 20 cp (milk, wool, leather,
meat)
Each year, the farm workers must be paid:
Per Farmer: 2,700 cp
Per Herdsman: 1,800 cp
Per Farm Laborer: 900 cp
Example: A Prosperous Farmer
An independent Tremara land-holder maintains his own small
farming settlement:
48 acres of Crop Land
60 acres of Pasture
12 Cattle
24 Small Animals
The land-holder himself is a Farmer. His wife and eldest son serve as Farm Laborers, without needing to be paid (they are supported by his profits). He has also hired a second Farmer and a Herdsman as farm-hands, and he owns two slaves who serve as additional Farm Laborers. All his labor requirements are met. He has enough Cattle to support his Crop Land.
The land-holder’s farm produces 11,760 cp per year (10,080 cp in profit from the barley harvest, 1,200 cp from the Cattle, and 480 cp from the Small Animals). He must pay his labor 6,300 cp per year (2,700 cp for the Farmer, 1,800 cp for the Herdsman, and 1,800 cp for the two Farm Laborers). He makes a clear profit of 5,460 cp per year. Divided among himself and his four dependents (including his elderly mother and a daughter too young to work), this comes to 1,092 cp per year per person. His Social Standing rounds up to +1.
Example: A Chariot-Lord
A Tremara chariot-lord owns three small farming villages,
scattered across several miles of countryside. These amount to the following
Assets:
1,000 acres of Crop Land
1,400 acres of Pasture
40 Horses
260 Cattle
400 Small Animals
None of the chariot-lord’s personal Company (his household)
are working as Farmers, Herdsmen, or Farm Laborers. He needs 42 Farmers, 84
Farm Laborers, and 8 Herdsmen to maintain his lands. He has more than enough
Cattle to support his Crop Land.
The chariot-lord’s lands produce 250,000 cp per year (210,000 cp in the barley harvest, 6,000 cp from his Horses, 26,000 cp from his Cattle, and 8,000 cp from his Small Animals). He must pay 203,400 cp per year for labor (113,400 cp for his Farmers, 75,600 cp for his Farm Laborers, and 14,400 cp for his Herdsmen). His annual profits are 46,600 cp. Divided among himself and three dependents (wife and two children), this comes to 11,650 cp per year per person. This chariot-lord’s Social Standing rounds off to +4.
Some final comments:
So far, I’ve been working mostly on the left-hand side of the diagram in last week’s post: the income and profits generated by a character’s Assets and Workers. I haven’t done too much yet on the right-hand side: the hirelings and support staff that can make a wealthy character’s life better. I’ll need to develop both sides before I can lay out what a wealthy Tremara chariot-lord’s household really looks like! More on that as my enforced vacation continues.
As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been working on a way to not just model individual characters in the EIDOLON ruleset, but to model their social connections. The idea is to have a simple set of rules that I can use to describe the intricate web of relationships that any character will have, as a member of a complex society.
I think I may be getting close to what I want. Consider the following diagram:
A model for the extended character in EIDOLON
You’ll notice a certain confusion of vocabulary here; I’m not sure yet what words would be best to describe the various components of this model. Here’s the idea, though.
At the top, we have the extended character itself. Perhaps this is a single individual, perhaps it includes that person and some of her partners and dependents. Or perhaps it’s a group of unrelated characters who have agreed to throw in their fortunes together: an adventuring party, the officers of a mercenary band, the crew of a privately held starship, und so weiter. In any case, all the Members (or Household, or Company, or whatever term makes sense in the setting) will share their finances equally, sharing the same social standing score once the model is complete.
On the left, we have various forms of Income. Some of this may be External Income – simple pay for the professional occupations of the Members, say. On the other hand, the Members may also own certain Assets, pieces of wealth-producing property. Most likely these Assets will require some kind of labor to actually produce their own Income. A medieval lord will need peasants to farm his land, an ancient tycoon needs slaves to operate his mines, a starship captain needs crewmen to run his ship. These workers, employees, or vassals will be paid for their labor, but by working on the Assets they produce Income for the owners, in the form of profit.
Income is on the left, outgo on the right. The Members will probably spend some of their resources on simple consumption – food, clothing, housing, luxury goods, entertainment, all at whatever level they can afford. They may also have people hired to provide them with personal service: a wealthy woman’s impeccable butler, a warlord’s kept courtesan, a personal clerk or physician, whatever might be available and appropriate in the setting. These hirelings or henchmen are also paid, but they produce no Income or Profit, they simply work to improve the quality of life for the Members.
The Members have to make sure the books balance – they can’t spend more on luxuries and personal service than they bring in! Any given setting book written under EIDOLON would lay out various structures like this, with rules for various Assets and how they would have to be worked, and lists of available workers and henchmen.
Here’s one simple result of this system: the Social Standing score of all the Members depends solely on the amount spent on Consumption and Staff. I’m taking an almost Veblenist approach here, claiming that status in almost any society is strongly correlated to the level of conspicuous consumption. Not a bad assumption, I think, for most RPG worlds and fictional universes.
There’s one more neat feature of this model: it’s possible to nest it. The character(s) who make up one set of Members may be getting paid for their services by someone higher up. Likewise, each of the workers or henchmen that one character pays may be keeping her own Household at a lower level.
For example, I’ve started to work out the details here using features of Tremara society, the setting of The Curse of Steel. A given Tremara chariot-warrior will own many hundreds of acres of cleared land, with peasants to manage his herds of cattle and horses and raise an annual crop of barley. If we wanted to zoom in on those peasants, then each peasant household could be described at finer detail using this same model. Meanwhile, the spearmen, bards, and other specialists who live in the lord’s hall and provide service for him could also have families, dependents, or property of their own.
This is a model I think I can use extensively in worldbuilding work, in a variety of settings; it should make an interesting innovation for the EIDOLON ruleset. Progress!
I’ve gotten kind of stuck, and it’s affecting three separate projects at once. I suppose it’s another example of the world-building rabbit hole that I tend to fall into. Although in this case, if I may mix a metaphor, I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Before I dig deep into the second-draft rewrite of The Curse of Steel, I want to revise my earlier, rather sketchy, world-building work about Krava’s home society. That should help me ground the story better in the details of her situation: a noble warrior’s only child, who suddenly inherits his lands and possessions at the same moment that she becomes a leading figure in her tribe. There are a lot of moments in the story where Krava deals with money, with groups of warriors, with chains of command and fealty . . . and it would be good to have a better image of how her tribal society (the Tremara, or “Mighty Folk”) organize such things.
The more I think about that, the more time I’ve spent turning some of my previous bits of world-building and game design over in my head, most notably the analysis I did of ancient Greek society in GURPS terms. Earlier this month, I spent a week or so on a similar analysis of Tremara economics and social structure – how many peasant families are needed to support one chariot-driving warrior, and so on.
That did help me get a more realistic picture of population sizes and social stratification in Tremara culture, so that helped. But then, my mind tripped and fell down the rabbit hole. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about something for the EIDOLON project. (As a reminder, EIDOLON is the not-quite-a-full-RPG I’m designing, a universal character description system that should be easily convertible to any other published RPG rule-set, so I can publish world-building material in a game-agnostic manner.)
The idea is that an individual character isn’t just a collection of aptitudes and skills. She’s going to have a place in society, a role, a specific status in the social hierarchy. Most RPGs tend to gloss over this factor. Characters tend to be socially unpinned, wandering adventurers without ties to the community around them, even in settings that ostensibly involve dense social structures.
GURPS at least attempts to account for social standing, with a set of character traits like Wealth, Social Status, Rank, Social Regard, Social Stigma, and so on. It still tends to treat characters in isolation, each one’s place in society always independent of every other’s. For example, a GURPS character has a Cost of Living that’s tied to his Social Status, but that’s highly abstracted. A socially prominent character probably has many other characters working to support his rank and status, but GURPS just elides all that into a monthly expenditure.
So it occurred to me: why not have rules in EIDOLON to support the description of characters (or groups of characters) who have extensive social capital? Instead of just having a bare-bones “wealth” trait, or a simple ranking of social status, why not lay out exactly what that means?
So, for example, take a prominent noble warrior in Krava’s world, such as her father Derga at the beginning of The Curse of Steel. Considered as an adventurer, Derga has a lot of gear and equipment that go with him when he travels: fine clothes, some armor, weapons, a chariot and a team of ponies to draw it, all of the finest quality. Considered as a lord, however, Derga has a lot of things that wouldn’t go on a typical RPG’s character sheet: agricultural land, herds of cattle and horses, a fine mead-hall to live in. He also has the people that are loyal to him and are needed to support his assets and lifestyle: subordinate chariot warriors, spearmen, craftsmen to maintain all his goods, someone to manage his household while he’s away, all the peasant families who work his land, and so on. Meanwhile, Krava herself is Derga’s dependent – she gains benefit from all of his holdings and wealth, even if she doesn’t control them yet.
So I’m working on a set of rules and techniques that EIDOLON can use to describe a situation like that. Since EIDOLON is intended to be a “universal” system, of course, I’m hoping the framework will be extensible to cover a variety of situations: adventuring or mercenary companies, commercial starship crew, modern small businesses, and so on. Any situation in which characters have enough social status and wealth to have assets, property, and hirelings to help maintain it all.
I think I’m getting close to a first-draft design for all this. Once that’s done, I can do a lot of the detailed world-building for Krava’s setting, which in turn will give me material for the first EIDOLON “setting book,” and will also let me get started on the second draft for The Curse of Steel.
It’s annoying when my different projects get tangled up, as if I had discovered unexpected dependencies in an elaborate Gantt chart. Should be productive in the long run, though.
One of the things I’ve been working on is a minor reworking of the Tremara language that appears in The Curse of Steel. Mostly I’m just choosing a few word-roots differently for aesthetic reasons, and tweaking the word-formation rules so that I’m not applying the Pūnct’uatìon Sh’akër quite so liberally.
I’m also working through some translations from English, since that’s a good way to develop more vocabulary and try out the syntax and grammar. Here’s an example, which was much more complex than I expected it to be, although I’m pleased with the result. As a small challenge for you, see if you can identify the original text.
Kadir ganari tíveta, anara tar dranet. Náraië tar steret, velo tar athemeta plemet, iu kesë tíveta aseneti.Bravam lókosar ganari genana dun, tan sendi ganari verdun, iu kesi sendenti argeni verdónemo.Geni pereta vergan va, tan geni revsova areg. Kun náraië tar asenet, tan kun poten, tan kun naren, athemë plemeti va. Asenet.
It’s working, I think. A little more of this, and then I need to generate a few dozen new personal names. The character names in the draft are a little repetitive.
Storyboarding the back story for The Curse of Steel
Meanwhile, the most important project I have underway is the novel I finished in the rough draft last year: The Curse of Steel.
Here’s a short synopsis that I put together for Books & Buzz back in November:
The Curse of Steel is the story of a young woman from an Iron Age “barbarian” culture, not quite identical to any culture from our own history, but most like the Celtic or Germanic tribal kingdoms of the pre-Roman period.
At the beginning of the story, Krava is an ordinary warrior of her tribe, serving as her father’s charioteer and bodyguard while he travels to visit friends. Suddenly her father is killed in an unexpected battle, leaving her alone and far from home. Soon afterward, she comes into possession of an ancient and powerful weapon, and she also learns that she is descended from the gods of her people.
Krava quickly grows into the role of a classical hero: a skilled and resourceful warrior who proves her worth in violent action, motivated by a craving for fame and esteem, and often arrogant or foolhardy. Think of Achilles, or Cuchulainn from Irish mythology. Krava’s own culture admires such behavior, and for a while she enjoys her new status, but in the end the results are a disaster for herself and everyone around her. At the end of this first story, she has matured a little; she departs on a quest to repair the harm she has done, and find a more sustainable way of life for herself and her people.
The rough draft – what I sometimes call the “plot draft,” in which I mark out the broad outlines of character, setting, and plot – is finished. The story is readable now, but it’s not very tight. Over the next few months, I intend to do an almost complete rewrite in the second draft, to fine-tune the story and bring the themes and dramatic beats into clear focus.
If all goes according to plan, The Curse of Steel will be self-published sometime this summer, after which I’ll get started on the second novel in the series. The working title for that one is The Sunlit Lands.
My patrons will see sections of the revised draft as I work on it, and those at the second or third level of patronage will get a free e-book copy of the finished novel once it’s published.
As I spin up to self-publish more material in the new year, there are two major tracks on which I’ll be spending time and effort. One is to publish fiction. The other is to publish game-ready world-building material.
Pursuing that second goal, the first step is to design a partial roleplaying-game system that fits my preferences, isn’t under anyone else’s intellectual property, and should be relatively easy to convert to any RPG rules system a reader might prefer. That process is well underway, and the working title for the system is EIDOLON.
From the draft Introduction for the core EIDOLON book:
The word eidolon comes from an ancient Greek word (εἴδωλον) which had several meanings. An eidolon was a phantom or apparition, the likeness of a dead man that appeared to the living. More generally, it could be a figure, image, or shape, a representation of a real thing.
EIDOLON – the set of rules and guidelines in this book – is a system for quickly and consistently describing fictional characters.
Using the systems in this book, you should be able to describe a fictional character in enough detail to use it in your own creative work, or in a live-action or tabletop roleplaying game (RPG). You should be able to easily understand characters described by others using the same rules. You should also be able to convert from EIDOLON to your favorite commercial game systems, and back again as needed.
One thing EIDOLON is not – at least not yet – is a complete RPG. Every tabletop RPG provides a system for describing characters so that they can be used in the game . . . but they also include systems for designing those characters, for resolving situations in which characters must overcome obstacles, and for gaming out various forms of conflict. Although this book does include a very basic challenge-resolution mechanic, none of those other components are here. You will not be able to use EIDOLON for live-action or tabletop roleplaying without doing some additional work!
On the other hand, we plan to publish future source material for roleplaying games, based on the EIDOLON rules. These “setting books” should therefore be easy to convert and use in other, more complete RPG systems.
I’m envisioning this core book as being about 20-25 pages, to be published as a PDF on a “pay what you want” basis. At least for now, I intend to hold the copyright to the core book in my own name. As this effort matures I’ll probably release the system under some form of open-gaming license, so others can easily use it to publish their own work. Once the core book is finished, I’ll be ready to start publishing world-building material under the EIDOLON system.
My patrons will see partial drafts of the core book as I work on it, and even those at the lowest level of patronage will get a free copy of the finished product.
I don’t usually post just to link to articles, but this one was particularly intriguing: Alone in a Crowded Milky Way.
Executive summary: the author and his colleagues did some modeling of the expansion of interstellar civilizations through a segment of the galaxy. They made some fairly conservative assumptions – STL travel only, how many planets would be worth colonizing, how long a given planetary civilization would be likely to survive. The result was that space-faring cultures tended to form “archipelagos” in interstellar space, leaving vast regions unvisited for many millions of years at a time. The limiting factor was imposed by stellar cartography – the arrangement of interesting planets among a population of stars that move over time.
This strikes me as a similar approach to Geoffrey Landis’ percolation theory, and yields similar results. In either case, we get a galaxy that could be full of interstellar-capable civilizations, and yet one in which many habitable worlds (like ours) might appear unvisited at any given time. It’s a sophisticated solution to the Fermi Paradox, and one which avoids nightmare scenarios.
One insight the authors of this article mention, which I hadn’t considered, is that even if Earth had been visited – or even colonized – at some point in the distant past, we might have no way of knowing that. My own models for putative galactic civilization might stand to be relaxed a little. That might go on the list for some deeper research, if and when I get back to working on space-opera projects.
Well, this has been a year. Twelve months of doing my best to pass by the madness that seems to be sweeping the world, keep my family prospering, excel at my day job, and keep making progress on my creative projects. With some success, as it turned out.
Let’s be honest, this is the year a lot of things seemed to come together, as I built workflows I could use to set up and finish creative projects. I designed my first full constructed language, one which is actually usable for literary work. I drew up several maps. I hacked my brain in such a way that I could do world-building work in service to an actual story for a change.
I managed to write (at least in the first draft) my first mature, full-length, original, publishable novel: The Curse of Steel. That’s a pretty big deal.
So while 2019 wasn’t altogether sunshine and roses, I do feel as if I’m in a reasonably good place in my creative life. Still more work to be done, to be sure, but I’m more confident that I once was.
This blog seems to have reflected that. I’m still not sure who is reading this thing regularly – most of you don’t have a lot to say – but traffic keeps growing, slowly by steadily. The top ten (new) posts for this year were:
As usual, about 40% of the hits on the blog just start at the home page and go from there. There’s also a lot of perennial interest in some of my old Architect of Worlds posts from 2018, as well as that extended exercise in world-building I carried out based on the Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna games. That’s always in the back of my mind as I consider what to work on next.
As always, let’s hope that the coming year is prosperous and productive for all of us . . . and that the world manages to hang onto sanity in the coming months.
I’ve been busy with several projects over the past couple of weeks.
The foremost item, of course, is spinning up the second-draft rewrite of the Curse of Steel.
This has been a bit harder than I thought it would be at first. The more I examine and re-read the first draft, the more I realize that it needs extensive surgery. Turns out that I’ve written a rather complex story, with references to back-story, a bunch of subplots, an antagonist who isn’t the primary villain, a primary villain whose actions are largely invisible to the viewpoint character, setup for the later novels, and so on. There are lots of loose bits of plot-thread that I need to either tie off or properly anchor into the narrative. I’m having some trouble teasing all of this out and keeping track of it.
So I’ve been taking a lot of notes, and reviewing the details of three-act structure, and trying very hard to ignore Hero’s Journey hand-waving, and generally flailing about. I’m sure things will settle down before long, but at the moment the process is kind of painful.
One thing I’ve started to experiment with is using a bit of software to help lay out the story structure and start bringing order to the chaos. I’ve invested in a product called Causality, which is mostly designed for story-boarding screenplays but can also be configured to assist with novel-writing. It’s an interesting approach – one builds a narrative from the individual dramatic beats up, grouping those into scenes and chapters, tracking what characters are involved, and so on. Here’s a sample of what I’ve done so far with The Curse of Steel:
Storyboarding for what’s currently Chapter One.
I’m just getting started with the software, learning its functions, but it does promise to help me make sense of the novel I’ve already written, enough that I can tighten it up and make it publishable.
Meanwhile, on another track, I’ve started pulling my world-building notes together, with the goal of making those available via my Patreon and eventually self-publishing them in PDF form.
One piece of that project involves designing a general character- and setting-description format, so I can publish game-ready material for sale without stepping on anyone else’s intellectual property. That’s actually moving along fairly well. I’ve laid out how to describe a character’s untrained aptitudes and trained skills. and I’ve started on sections laying out how to describe things like social status, membership and rank in an organization, personality traits, and so on. All of this is looking like it will end up as a 20-25 page document. The working title for this not-quite-a-complete-roleplaying-game thing is Eidolon.
Once Eidolon is in working order, that should open the door for me to start publishing world-building material for people to use. Actually opening up my Patreon campaign for contributions will hinge on how close Eidolon is to a complete rough draft, and how close I am to being ready to bang out chapters of the revised novel. Probably not in January 2020, but maybe by February.
