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Author: Sharrukin

Planning for March 2023

Planning for March 2023

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I didn’t get as much done in February as I had originally hoped, although those milestones were probably more than a little optimistic. I wrote a little bit of Twice-Crowned, and made it almost to page 40 in the layout and book design for Architect of Worlds.

The only really new element in February: I’m starting to use the documentation tool Notion to gather and collate notes for the Danassos setting. That’s really promising as a method for archiving world-building notes for a given setting – much better than my usual procedure involving a bunch of disorganized Word documents. For now, I’m using it to support work on Twice-Crowned and to prepare for work on the Fourth Millennium RPG book later this year. I also anticipate it may be a very useful tool for the Human Destiny setting – I can see using it to cleanly document Architect of Worlds designs for various star systems, for example.

So in any case, this month’s planning message is going to look a lot like last month’s, aside from some minor tweaks.

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Tentatively plan to finish through page 70 (out of approximately 180).
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Gather notes in Notion for an eventual Fourth Millennium book.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.

As usual, while I focus primarily on Architect, I don’t expect a charged release for my patrons this month unless I get really ambitious with the novel or some other piece of fiction. There will probably be at least one free update – the next partial interim draft of the Architect book design.

Review: Grimm Diagnosis, by Matt Golec

Review: Grimm Diagnosis, by Matt Golec

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Grimm Diagnosis by Matt Golec

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

Grimm Diagnosis is the flawed but entertaining story of a present-day doctor, caught up in a land of fables and folktales.

Robert Lang is an American physician, who at the beginning of the story has somehow found himself in another world and is doing his best to adapt.

It’s a strange place! It looks like a medieval German village, with the appropriate level of technology (and personal hygiene). On the other hand, many of the inhabitants are odd to the point of eccentricity, there’s a plethora of princes and princesses about, and everyone seems to speak idiomatic 21st century American English. Strangest of all, Dr. Lang can match many of the villagers with characters out of German (and other) folk tales. His office assistant is a young man named Hans with a sister named Greta, he has dealings with a ruthless guild-mistress called the Godmother of the Fair . . . and the girlfriend he has acquired since arriving seems to be a grown-up Red Riding Hood.

Dr. Lang struggles to make a place for himself, offering what little medical care he can without modern reference books or tools. At first, his biggest worries seem to be competition from the local guild of barber-surgeons, and a spell that has every eligible girl in town competing for his attention. Then the world he came from begins to intrude further, first as simple stray objects, then in the form of people. Soon it becomes obvious that the contact between worlds is expanding, and the results may be disastrous.

Mr. Golec’s prose is fairly clean, although I thought the story could have used some editorial attention. I caught a few grammatical stumbles and other minor problems that a careful copy-editing pass might have fixed. This wasn’t enough to pull me out of the story, but it was noticeable.

The biggest problem I had with Grimm Diagnosis was an oddity of its story structure. Dr. Lang, our viewpoint character, is an oddly passive protagonist. He doesn’t solve the mystery of what’s happening around him. Indeed, he seems barely to notice some aspects of it until other characters call them to his attention. His decisions and actions seem to have little effect on the conflicts of the story. Even his relationship troubles with his girlfriend seem to be resolved more on her initiative than his.

Dr. Lang is certainly a sympathetic character. He has plenty of moral integrity, and his devotion to the well-being of his patients and his adopted community is admirable. Still, he’s not a very active character. Some of this is likely due to the fact that most of the story is framed as a comedy; a comedic protagonist can often be more the victim than the instigator of the plot. Still, I occasionally found myself wishing for him to do something about his situation, rather than letting everyone else in the story do all the hard work of advancing the narrative.

Despite its flaws, I enjoyed Grimm Diagnosis, and found it a light and entertaining read. Highly recommended if you enjoy light-hearted portal fantasy.

Status Report (20 February 2023)

Status Report (20 February 2023)

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Quick note today, to discuss progress on Architect of Worlds.

Slowly but surely, I’m improving my layout skills in Adobe InDesign. In particular, I’ve developed workflows for producing chapter title pages, managing several levels of header, cleaning up font variations, producing mathematical formulae as vector images and placing them in the draft, building tables with a consistent format, and so on. It’s getting to the point where I can pretty reliably lay out a page per hour, which means I ought to be able to make at least a little progress almost every day.

The biggest change I’ve made is that I’m no longer trying to produce filler art as I go. Pages that end up with a significant amount of white space are going to be left as is for now. Once I’ve got the whole book laid out, I’ll go back and select all the filler art that’s needed. Where I need images to help support the text, those are being selected or generated and inserted into the draft along the way – that’s actually one of the things that slows me down the most.

As of this afternoon, I’ve gotten all the way to the end of “The Science of Star Maps,” or about page 31 in the integrated draft. I think I’m going to be making slow but steady progress from this point onward. My proposed milestone for the month of February (about 60 pages completed in this month alone) seems awfully optimistic, though. I’ll probably be somewhere in the range of page 35-40 by the end of this month instead.

I’ll probably continue to provide partial drafts each month for patrons to review, as free updates. Honestly, the next few months may not see much in the way of charged releases, while I work on this as my primary project.

One note, for those of you who are reviewing the incremental drafts and providing potential errata and other feedback. Right now, I’m concentrating on getting the book laid out! Any comments or proposed tweaks to the text are being heard, much appreciated, and carefully stored away, but you’re not likely to see them reflected in the draft until I’ve got the book fully laid out in rough. Once that’s done, I’ll be doing a polishing pass, to include building the table of contents and credits page, polishing up the layout, adding filler art, and making any final corrections and tweaks to the text.

Patience. We’re definitely in the home stretch on this project!

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

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“Battle of Pydna 168 BCE,” by Peter Connolly

While I continue to make incremental progress on Architect of Worlds and Twice-Crowned, I also keep thinking about what’s likely to be my next big tabletop RPG project, beginning later this year. That’s a full-fledged historical-fantasy game, probably published under the Cypher System, with the working title of Fourth Millennium.

The premise is that this is the ancient Western world, centered around the Mediterranean basin, but it’s not exactly the world we see in our history books. There are fantastic elements: spirits that can be bargained with, gods who may or may not be kindly disposed toward mortals, magic that works more often than not, strange creatures that lurk in the wilderness beyond the borders of civilization. It’s also an alternate history, with several points of divergence: a survival of Minoan civilization, a Hellenic world that didn’t commit suicide in the fifth century BCE with quite so much short-sighted enthusiasm, an Alexandrian οἰκουμένη that managed to survive its founder’s death. The setting is divided between two incipient world-empires and a whole host of minor kingdoms and barbarian peoples, each with their own distinctive flavor.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the “canonical adventure” for the setting. My past experience with RPG design tells me that this is really important. Potential players and game-masters need to be clear as to what they can expect to do in a setting. Dungeons & Dragons centers around the dungeon crawl. Traveller centers around doing odd jobs to survive on the fringes of interstellar society. Transhuman Space, when we first developed it, was a lovely rich setting that didn’t have a clear answer for “what do the characters do?” and that handicapped it for a long time.

So what will player characters in Fourth Millennium be doing? I think that boils down to the motto for the setting – something that may end up being the core book’s subtitle:

The future is in your hands.

The idea is that player characters will be thoroughly involved in history as it unfolds in this alternative world. They’ll start out as agents for powerful people – an ambitious Roman senator, a powerful post-Minoan priestess-queen, a provincial governor in the Alexandrian empire, that sort of setup. At first they’ll be carrying out missions for their patron – accumulating rewards of wealth and treasure, sure, but also gathering social standing and authority. Eventually they’ll become more independent, becoming movers and shakers in their own right. They’ll feel as if they’re making a mark on the future of the world – although, to be sure, Fate and the gods will have their own say.

So yeah, fighting monsters, but more often human foes: cutpurses and assassins, pirates, brigands, barbarian raiders. Exploring the uncivilized wilderness, traveling in strange foreign lands. Solving mysteries, making scientific discoveries, writing books that everyone wants to read. Making brilliant speeches, intriguing to discredit or eliminate political rivals, persuading people to vote one way or another. Making a fortune in trade or loot, or just collecting the revenue from big land-holdings. Fighting in wars, even commanding armies. Winning elections, holding political office, governing whole provinces. Eventually reaching the top of the social pyramid in whatever republic, kingdom, or empire you call your own. The end-point of a successful long-term campaign might be to gather such fame and glory that people will still be talking about you at the end of the Fourth Millennium.

One major inspiration here might be games like Pendragon or Paladin – games that aren’t just richly imagined settings, but structured campaigns that encourage play across years and even generations.

I know, I know. Ambitious as all hell, especially for a one-person development shop. Well, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. And you never know, maybe the Muses are thinking kindly of me.

Updates to the Progress Bar(s)

Updates to the Progress Bar(s)

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Just a quick note this evening, to point out that I’ve added a new progress-bar widget to the sidebar on this site. The “In Progress” section should now indicate progress both for layout for Architect of Worlds and for the first draft of Twice-Crowned. Those are the two major creative projects right now, and the ones for which I suspect readers and patrons are most interested in seeing the state of play.

The widgets are a little ugly at the moment, for which I apologize. At some point I think I’ll try to streamline that section and try for a neater appearance. For now, at least, the data are up where I can easily update them after each day’s work and my followers can keep track of how things are going.

Planning for February 2023

Planning for February 2023

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January was a good month for working on Architect of Worlds. I started out planning to build a “toy” version of the book, mostly to learn Adobe InDesign techniques and have something to show off for patrons, but plans change. At the moment I’m going all-in on building the book itself, and so far I’ve finished initial layout and design for about the first 22 pages. That’s going to be the primary project for the next few months, I think.

I didn’t get a lot of other creative work done last month, and I do want to make some forward progress on something while I continue to work on Architect. In particular, I’d like to get some fiction written; it’s been a few months since I’ve produced any new stories. Best candidate right now is to write a few more chapters of Twice-Crowned.

All of which makes this month’s priorities pretty straightforward:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Tentatively plan to finish through page 60 (out of approximately 180).
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Gather notes for an eventual Fourth Millennium book.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.

As has been consistent for the last few months, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in odd moments while I focus primarily on Architect. There might be a charged release for my patrons this month, if I end up producing enough new items to justify that, but we’ll see how things go.

Review: Augment Nation, by Scott Overton

Review: Augment Nation, by Scott Overton

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Augment Nation by Scott Overton

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

Augment Nation is a science-fiction novel of the old school, portraying the collision of all-too-human characters with plausible new technology, along the way serving as a chilling cautionary tale.

Our story begins about a decade from now. David Leiter is a fourteen-year-old boy, critically injured in an automobile accident. He suffers serious brain injury, and develops a condition called visual agnosia, an inability to process or recognize visual stimuli. He can still see, but he has lost the ability to interpret what he sees, identifying objects or recognizing faces. Luckily, he is selected to receive a radically experimental treatment – a computerized implant to augment his brain’s natural functions.

At first the implant only operates to mitigate David’s agnosia, but over time he learns to use it for other purposes: logging into wireless networks, browsing the Internet, mastering computational skills, and so on. Unfortunately, these new abilities also come with a heaping dose of alienation. His peers notice his social awkwardness, missteps with young women earn him a poor reputation, and authority figures punish him for suspected unfair advantages.

Only once David graduates from high school – taking some revenge against the worst of his tormentors on the way out – is he able to start building a worthwhile life of his own. He moves to university, taking the new name of Damon and setting aside his miserable adolescence, and life begins to improve dramatically for him. His implants are upgraded with new hardware and software, providing him with still more new abilities. His skills turn out to be a boon in academia and employment, he becomes less socially inept, he even finds ways to build healthy relationships with women. For a few years, he moves from success to success.

Yet slowly, Damon realizes that the gift of his computer implants has not come without a price. Someone is watching his progress, even after he has taken steps to avoid being monitored. Technology that was tested on him is being deployed to more and more people . . . and it becomes plain that shadowy corporate and government interests do not have any individual’s best interests at heart.

Mr. Overton’s prose style is very clean; I noticed one or two formatting issues in my e-book copy, but nothing to pull me out of the story. He exercises very good viewpoint discipline. The story does need quite a lot of exposition, but none of it is clumsy or obtrusive, almost entirely arising through Damon’s understanding of the world. This is a very well-crafted novel as far as the mechanics are concerned.

David (Damon) has a compelling story with some very credible challenges. Augment Nation isn’t just an exploration of plausible future technology, it’s a story about individuals caught up in the machinations of unscrupulous power. There are those in the story who would gladly use the new technology to lie and manipulate the public, and Damon’s confrontations with them are downright frightening. In the end, the story isn’t just recounting a personal odyssey, it’s describing a potential failure mode for civilization itself. Once I finished this novel, I found myself much more skeptical about the prospect of brain-machine interface technology than I was before I began.

One minor advisory for the reader. Augment Nation is about, among other things, a teenage boy discovering the potentials of new technology. As we might expect, some of the applications he finds have to do with sex, with all the awkwardness any young man might experience! The story is often frank, although never explicit. I found none of this material offensive, although some of Damon’s experiences were mildly uncomfortable to read about; your mileage may vary.

I thoroughly enjoyed Augment Nation, and it left me wanting to read more of Mr. Overton’s work. Very highly recommended if you enjoy believable near-future science fiction with some rather disturbing implications.

Status Report (22 January 2023)

Status Report (22 January 2023)

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A few items to report incremental progress on today.

Layout for Architect of Worlds has started in earnest. I’m learning Adobe InDesign as I go, but I’ve already taught myself a number of techniques that will prove useful. At the moment I’ve got about 20 pages of layout roughed out, all of the “Introduction” and getting into the “Science of Star Maps” section. I had thought to build a “toy” layout using excerpts from throughout the draft, but instead I’m just forging ahead and building the final layout in full. At the end of each day’s work I export the current state of the book to a PDF and give it a once-over to catch any obvious problems. Once I have 40-50 pages finished, I’ll probably take that to a printer and make sure it looks okay on paper as well. In the meantime, I think I’ll share the interim layouts with my patrons each month so everyone can see progress.

I’ve been applying Architect to a side project – developing a planetary system for the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG. Call it a bit of playtesting for the main book, and a worked example for how it might be applied to a given game universe. Might post some of those results here over the next couple of weeks.

One thing this side project has accomplished – it’s forced me to work through the new Step Thirty-Two (Fine-Tune Climate) of the design sequence, and I find that material needs more work. It’s clumsy, it seems to provide unintuitive results, and at least one of my readers has been having trouble with it as written. So that’s high on my list of components to test and rewrite as I work on the layout. Step Twenty-Four, Geophysical Parameters, is also likely to get some polish – if only because the math in that step is very ugly at present.

Meanwhile, in odd moments I’ve been collecting notes for the eventual Fourth Millennium project, and I’m about to start reading a novel or two for the end-of-month review.

Biggest obstacle in the past week has been that my whole household has come down with some nasty seasonal crud – not the plague, apparently, just a bad cold. I’ve been severely lacking in energy and focus for the past few days. Still, I seem to be on track to have a few things to share by the end of the month. No charged releases for my patrons, but maybe a freebie or two.

Fourth Millennium

Fourth Millennium

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Alexandros III of Makedon, called “The Great,” first Great King of the Argead dynasty (2702-2735 EK) (Image by Arienne King, original found here)

By the reckoning of years used in the Danassan Hegemony, the date is 3000 Ἔτος Κόσμου, the three thousandth year since the creation of the world. A new millennium is at hand, an age of prosperous cities and growing empires, new gods and ancient mysteries, science and darkest magic. It seems likely to be an age of conflict as well. Ambitious generals and kings struggle for power, and barbarian peoples look with envy on the wealth and sophistication of civilized lands. What history will reveal next, not even the gods can know for sure.

Fourth Millennium has been conceived as a game setting, derived from some of my own fiction: short stories set in the Greek “Heroic Age” as well as the novel-in-progress Twice-Crowned and its eventual sequels. It’s grown past its literary beginnings, though, taking on shape as a rich alternate-historical fantasy world.

Fourth Millennium echoes the Mediterranean world of our own history, in the first century before the Common Era . . . but fate has taken its own turns here. An offshoot of Minoan civilization survived, creating a neo-Hellenic culture in which women hold religious and political power. The Peloponnesian War may have taken place, but its outcome was less viciously harmful to the Hellenic civilization at its peak. Alexander the Great may have died young, but his son survived and came out on top of the civil wars that followed his death. The Roman Republic is on the rise, but it faces tough competition in the East, in the form of an Hellenistic world that is stronger and more unified.

Adventurers can come from a variety of origins: Greeks of several varieties, Romans and other Latins, Celts, Germans, Berbers, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Judeans, Persians, and many more. They may be warriors and soldiers, oracles and seers, legates and senators, or philosophers and scientists. There will be a variety of possible campaign structures: military stories, politics and intrigue, high-stakes commercial ventures, mysteries, exploration, possibly all of these at once.

The concept in my head is for a Cypher System game, published under the Monte Cook Games open license. I can already see the broad outlines of the game, and a lot of details that will fit the setting. I’m still debating whether to write one book or two here – there may be so much setting detail, so much to suggest a variety of structures for campaigns and adventures, that it won’t all fit in one volume.

Best guess is that I’ll be pulling together notes for Fourth Millennium while I work on getting Architect of Worlds out the door in the first half of this year. I might post a few fragments and notes here, or push them to my patrons as small freebies. Once Architect is finished, assuming my muse is still engaged by then, serious work on this project is likely to get under way.

Have to say, the more I think about this project the more excited I am for it. The ancient Mediterranean world has been a personal fascination for over half my life; it will be nice to get back to it as a game designer. Not to mention I’ve learned a lot since I wrote GURPS Greece, coming up on thirty years ago . . .

The OGL and the Palace

The OGL and the Palace

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There’s been a serious mess evolving in the indie-creator space over the fate of Wizards of the Coast’s Open Gaming License (OGL). It appears, due to leaked language from the upcoming new version of the license, that not only is it going to be more restrictive in the future, there’s a good chance that older versions of it are going to be revoked or de-authorized in some fashion. This has a lot of independent publishers and creators in a bind. The OGL is over twenty years old at this point, and a lot of publishers, a lot of livelihoods, have been founded upon it.

I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had anything published specifically under the OGL, and my plans moving forward are only minimally affected by any changes to that license. So I’m not going to offer any opinion about the potential change, other than to hope that my fellow indie creators can weather the storm. This post is just a note about where I think my own work may be affected by what’s about to happen.

First off, Architect of Worlds will be completely unaffected. That book is game-system-independent to begin with, and doesn’t rely on anything but my personal research and game-design work. I don’t expect any change in when that book gets released – later this year, exactly when depending on how long it takes me to to edit and lay out the final version.

One of my long-term projects probably will be affected by what Wizards is doing, if only indirectly. The Human Destiny space-opera setting was tentatively going to be my next big tabletop project after Architect was released. My plan was to release it as a Cepheus Engine product . . . but the problem is that Cepheus Engine relies on the previous version of the OGL and derives from the Mongoose Press edition of Traveller. If that version of the OGL goes away, the status of Cepheus Engine becomes uncertain even if Mongoose takes no hostile action against it.

As I understand it, the major Cepheus Engine publishers (Samardan Press, Independence Games, and so on) are already aware of the potential issue and are rapidly developing contingency plans. By the time I’m ready to start working on something other than Architect, the dust may very well have settled and there will be a way-forward for Human Destiny as a Cepheus Engine product as planned. I’m not going to fret about it, since there’s nothing I can do except wait patiently for the outcome.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking hard about releasing another tabletop setting – based on my Danassos setting, with the working title of Fourth Millennium – as a Cypher System product under the open license offered by Monte Cook Games. If worse comes to worst, that may move to the front of my queue, or I may consider moving Human Destiny to that venue as well.

For now, though, I’m just watching developments and putting off making any decisions until I see how things shake out. It’s important to remember that no one has actually seen the new version of the OGL yet. This may be a tempest in a teapot . . . although given a lifetime’s experience with how corporate entities deal with stakeholders who don’t actually own shares of stock, I’m not sanguine.