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Another Interesting Result

Another Interesting Result

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Artist’s conception of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system (NASA/JPL-CalTech)

Sometimes a bit of research comes across my desk that leads to big changes in one of my creative projects. Today we have a case in point.

At the beginning of December, Ken Burnside was kind enough to bring this article from phys.org to my attention: The solar system follows the galactic standard – but it is a rare breed.

The article was from the Niels Bohr Institute, summarizing some research done there by Nanna Bach-Møller and Uffe G. Jørgensen. The upshot is that, based on our extensive sample of detected exoplanets, we can conclude that there’s a fairly strong correlation between the number of planets in a planetary system and the average eccentricity of the orbits of those planets. “Just a few planets” seems to correlate to highly elliptical orbits, while “more planets” means closer-to-circular orbits.

It makes sense. We know a lot more about the process of planetary formation than we did even twenty years ago. That process appears to be pretty chaotic. Planets sometimes interact a lot while they’re forming, with unpredictable results. Sometimes that interaction leads to some of the young planets getting “pumped” into highly eccentric orbits, but that also leads to more of them being “ejected” from the planetary system entirely. So it makes sense that planetary systems that end up with fewer planets might also see those planets line up into more eccentric orbits.

The article claims that our own planetary system is unusual in that we ended up with more planets than the average. As a corollary, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the planets we still see have settled into a well-behaved stack of nearly circular orbits.

Okay. The article was interesting enough. The problem was that the actual research paper behind it was sitting behind a paywall. I put off reading that until after I had finished the rough draft of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. Maybe then I would track down a copy, and it might suggest a way to improve the step in which I assign orbital eccentricities. Not a big deal.

Well, I finished the rough draft just before Christmas, and yesterday I found a way to get a copy of the paper for a reasonable fee. I sat down to read it, and . . .

Whoa. This is a lot bigger than I thought.

Here’s a link to the abstract for the paper in question: Orbital eccentricity–multiplicity correlation for planetary systems and comparison to the Solar system. From there you can get to the whole paper, assuming that you have an Oxford Academic account or can work through DeepDyve.

Bach-Møller and Jørgensen have done something a little more remarkable than I expected. They haven’t just derived a strong correlation between planetary multiplicity and eccentricity of orbits. They’ve demonstrated that we can derive a clear power law for how many total planets a given system has, including the ones we can’t detect yet, just based on the observed eccentricity of the ones we can detect.

Applying this result to my models in Architect of Worlds, I find that I can do a lot more than just superficial improvement to one step of the system design process. I can actually rework several of the steps in the sequence, making them simpler and easier to use, and also making them line up a lot better with the current state of exoplanetary science.

The executive summary is that instead of laying down planets until you run into any of several limiting conditions, you randomly generate the total number of planets first, and then place that many. Much simpler, and it fixes the problem that the current version seems to generate too many planets.

This isn’t a small improvement. We’re talking about eliminating several of the most cumbersome computations and procedures, while also forcing the outcome to match observed results much more closely. I can’t really let that sit in the idle stack, especially since I have a couple of other projects that are dependent on having a complete draft here.

One complication is that one of those other projects was something I was planning to put together for my patrons, as a charged release, before the end of December. Although I think I see how to make all the necessary changes to the Architect of Worlds draft, that’s going to take a day or two of work, and I have a pile of other things to get finished over the next few weeks as well.

So here’s a revision to my creative plan for the next couple of weeks:

  • The top priority right now is to revise the partial Architect of Worlds draft to fit these new results. This should be complete no later than 28 December. At that point, I will release a revised version of all of the completed sections of the draft, for my patrons only (with one or two exceptions for non-patrons who have been helping out with extensive comments on the draft). That will constitute my charged release on Patreon for December 2020.
  • The PDFs that are already on the Architect of Worlds page will remain there. Those won’t constitute the most up-to-date version, but they are certainly “playable” for anyone who wants to experiment with them. I won’t be updating those PDFs for at least three months. During that time, I’ll continue to polish and tweak the system with input from my patrons, and possibly work on some additional material. I’ll reassess the situation in early April. By then I may be within striking distance of starting to prepare a publication-ready draft of the entire book. If not, then I’ll create and post new PDFs at that point.
  • By the end of December, I need to write a new book review, and also finish and release another piece of short fiction. Those will be posted here and released to my patrons for free. I also need to get started on a new piece of short fiction (more about that later).
  • Once all of the above is finished – probably over the New Year’s holiday – I’ll take stock. That’s a traditional time for such things anyway.

A Major Milestone

A Major Milestone

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As of today, the rough draft of the design sequence for Architect of Worlds is finished. Merry Christmas to me!

I’ve posted a PDF for the third chunk of the design sequence, “Designing Planetary Surface Conditions,” to the Architect of Worlds page on this site. That chunk includes everything from Step 15 (Orbital Period) through Step 27 (Components of Atmosphere) in one document, with a few minor tweaks and corrections from the version that was first posted to this blog.

Together with the earlier sections already available there, this makes up about 37,000 words of carefully researched and somewhat technical world-building tools, available to the public for free for now.

There’s a lot more work to be done before this is a completed book, ready for publication. I intend to write plenty more material:

  • How to work with real-world star maps
  • How to read and use real-world astronomical data from star catalogs and lists of known exoplanets
  • Tips for planning interstellar settings, and placing interstellar societies on the map
  • Sidebars for a bunch of special cases (planets that circle pairs of stars, planets of stars that aren’t on the main sequence anymore, planets of brown dwarfs, more exotic things to place on your star maps, odd circumstances that might pop up on planetary surfaces, and so on)
  • General world-building advice, including ways to use and make sense of the results of the design sequence

Not to mention going through the whole sequence at least one more time, to double-check all my research, footnote everything, and see if I can make the system easier to use in a few places. Probably with some intensive testing on real-world data to support one or two other projects.

Still. There’s at least a good chance that the first full edition of Architect of Worlds will be available for sale sometime in 2021. Probably later rather than sooner, but we’ll see how it goes.

Status Report (11 December 2020)

Status Report (11 December 2020)

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This is turning out to be a pretty busy month. Here’s the tentative plan for the rest of December:

  • By 14 December, finish a partial draft of the Human Destiny sourcebook for Cortex Prime, and post that so it can be reviewed as part of the Cortex Creators workshop. (Here’s a link to the current draft in Google Docs. Feel free to have a look.)
  • By the end of December, have a much-closer-to-finished partial draft of the sourcebook available for my patrons. That version will probably not be a finished first draft, but it should come to 15-20 kilowords, and it should be playable. This will be my charged release for this month on Patreon.
  • Also by the end of December, finish another piece of short fiction for free release here and to my patrons. I have a couple of candidate stories in mind.
  • Probably post one or two more steps in the Architect of Worlds design sequence.
  • Plan one or two pieces of short fiction for an upcoming anthology. More about this later, once I’m more sure that it’s going to come to fruition.
  • Start working to polish up a Human Destiny novella for publication via Amazon.
  • Work on The Sunlit Lands with what plentiful free time remains.

There’s just not enough of me to go around at the moment, given all the projects I have underway. Although that’s not a bad problem to have.

The Human Destiny Sourcebook

The Human Destiny Sourcebook

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Okay, step one is finished. I’ve brushed off some old skills from my “writing proposals for GURPS sourcebooks” days, and put together an outline for what will probably be my first self-published RPG sourcebook.

I don’t have a nicely evocative working title yet, so this is just The Human Destiny Sourcebook for now. If everything goes as planned, the final shape of this will be a sourcebook for the Cortex Prime game system, about 36,000 words or a 72-page PDF. Aside from being a “bible” for the Human Destiny universe, the book will also describe three different campaign settings:

  • Human citizens on conquered Earth, striving for meaningful lives and personal status in a post-scarcity society
  • Human colonists and terraformers elsewhere in the Sol system, facing difficult technical and ecological challenges
  • First human officers and crew aboard a starship, exploring the galaxy

Each campaign setting will involve a slightly different application of the Cortex Prime rules, and there will also be guidelines for moving characters from one campaign setting to another. (After all, the primary character in my Human Destiny stories, Aminata Ndoye, is probably going to pass through all three settings in the course of her career.)

If and when the folks at Fandom get their new Cortex Creator Studio set up, I’ll push to get this project published through that venue. In the meantime, this will be the project I work on for their “creator confab” workshop in December.

Plans for December

Plans for December

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been making slow progress on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands. I was a bit blocked for most of November, with a sequence of scenes just not coming clear, but I think I’ve pushed past that obstacle.

My original plan was to have 15-20 kilowords of the draft finished by the end of November, and release that for my patrons, but that doesn’t appear likely to happen.

Therefore, there will be no charged release on Patreon again this month. I may have a free short story to share on this blog and with my patrons by the end of November; we’ll see how the Thanksgiving holiday goes.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been considering the Cortex Prime game system as a potential vehicle for publishing game material related to my literary projects. That’s looking more likely by the day. In particular, I’ve learned that Fandom (the publisher) plans to set up a new version of the Cortex Creator Studio which supported earlier versions of the game. Once that’s in place, it should permit me to write and release game material under fairly congenial licensing terms.

Meanwhile, starting on 4 December Fandom will be holding a “Cortex Creator Confab,” a workshop of sorts, which will allow potential creators to get some exposure and feedback on early drafts of their work. That looks like a superb opportunity for me to get started.

Upon consideration, I’ve decided that the first setting I’m going to try to write up isn’t Krava’s world, it’s going to be the Human Destiny space-opera setting. The end result will hopefully be a complete, Cortex-driven RPG that allows players to take on the role of humans living as subjects of a benevolent (but demanding) alien interstellar empire. I’m envisioning rules that will permit the game to take place on Earth, among the colonized worlds of the Sol system, or out on the interstellar stage.

So, this is what the plan for the remainder of November and the whole month of December looks like:

  • Continue working on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands, with the goal of having a significant chunk of the draft ready for patrons sometime in December.
  • A crash project to write up a big chunk of the Human Destiny setting in the form of a draft RPG based on Cortex Prime, to be submitted for the December workshop. This material should make a good release for my patrons too, and I may post excerpts from it here in the blog as well.
  • I’ve started reading the next self-published book that’s likely to get a review here. Look for that sometime in December.
  • Finally, I have a couple of partial short stories that I may complete and publish as free releases over the next couple of months.

More than enough to keep me busy through the holidays, I should think.

Decisions, Decisions

Decisions, Decisions

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A planned part of my creative strategy is not just to write stories and novels, but also to integrate the world-building elements of those projects into tabletop game material that I can also sell. Basically offering myself a license to my own IP, and self-publishing game material via DriveThruRPG or a similar outlet.

That suggests framing that creative material within a genre-agnostic game system. After all, my two primary creative projects involve heroic alternate-world fantasy (The Curse of Steel and its sequels) and relatively hard-SF space opera (the Human Destiny setting). Any game system that could cover both is not going to be strongly bound to any existing setting or genre.

So the question arises: do I build such a system of my own, or do I find an existing one that works for me and has friendly licensing terms?

I have been gathering design notes for a personally owned game system, under the working title of EIDOLON. There would certainly be no licensing issues there. On the other hand, time spent designing a completely new tabletop game is time I’m not writing. Also, a completely new game system would start with zero market presence. Why should anyone buy such a product, when they would almost certainly have to convert the material to their favorite system before using it?

GURPS is certainly a possibility. I’ve been a GURPS player (and writer, and editor) for many years. Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since I did any work for Steve Jackson Games, so I’m no longer in close contact. In any case, the GURPS licensing terms are pretty strict. Far from impossible to work with – I’m certainly aware of other creators who have published their own GURPS material for sale – but maybe more trouble than it’s worth for what I’m planning to do.

I’ve considered using FATE Core, which certainly fits the criteria (setting- and genre-agnostic, and very congenial licensing terms). Unfortunately, that system is a little too rules-light for my taste. I’ve never quite been able to wrap my brain around how it works in play, so writing material for it feels like a bit more of a challenge than I’m after. I may just need a little more crunch in my game rules.

I’ve glanced at a few other systems over the past couple of years – notably the Genesys system from Fantasy Flight Games – but nothing has quite hit the sweet spot I’m looking for.

Now I see that there’s a new edition of the Cortex system out – the Cortex Prime core rules. These were Kickstarted back in 2017 and have just been released to the public.

Cortex Prime doesn’t look like a playable game right out of the box, so much as it is a toolkit for constructing playable games. Well, that’s true for systems like GURPS or FATE as well, so that’s certainly not a drawback. Reading through the core book, I’m getting a good feeling for the system’s crunchiness and flexibility. Previous editions of Cortex have carried fairly generous licensing terms, and the current publisher seems interested in following suit.

Hmm. I may have to contact them and see if this would be a good fit for what I want to do. If it does work out, then EIDOLON may go on the back burner. Or off the stove entirely.

Architect of Worlds: State of the Project

Architect of Worlds: State of the Project

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I haven’t posted any new Architect of Worlds material for a few days, but the project is still moving forward. The main issue is that I’m being required to ramp up my day-job telework to full-time status, so I need to make some adjustments to my time management. That’s being worked out, so I should be able to make progress on several of my creative projects over the next couple of weeks.

To review the bidding: since early September, I’ve written and posted the first drafts for Steps Fifteen through Twenty-Three of the design sequence. At this point, the reader should be able to get some of the broad outlines of a generated world’s surface conditions: blackbody temperature, the prevalence of water, geology, and some information about the composition and density of the atmosphere.

What’s left? Well, we still need the world’s actual surface temperatures, the prevalence of dry land if the world has oceans, the final composition of the atmosphere, and the presence and complexity of native life.

There are some complex interdependencies between those items, not to mention a bunch of special cases. In particular, I want to build in the possibility of a robust carbon cycle for a more-or-less-Earthlike world. The hypothesis is that the climate of Earth, or any similar planet with large oceans and life, will tend to self-correct over long periods. Carbon dioxide, in particular, will move into or out of the atmosphere in such a way as to keep the world in the proper temperature range for plentiful liquid water. That suggests a feedback loop that may require some special logic in the world-design sequence.

So I’ve been doing some storyboarding (kind of like what’s going on in this post from September) and roughing out the proper sequence of steps. I think I may end up with six or seven more major steps in the sequence. Seven would make a nice round thirty steps for the complete sequence, but if I end up with a weird prime number or something I suppose I’ll have to live with that.

In any case, I hope to break through the logic here and start posting the last chunk of the design sequence later this month. The third major piece of the sequence may be ready for PDF and posting to the Architect of Worlds page before Christmas.

That doesn’t mean Architect of Worlds, the book, will be ready. There’s a lot more I want to write before I’m ready to think about a publishable draft. How to plan an interstellar setting, how to work with real-world astronomical data, how to build star maps, that kind of thing. Still, I could see a first edition of the book finally making its appearance – most likely on DriveThruRPG.com – sometime next year.

Growing the TBR Pile

Growing the TBR Pile

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Last month, I got started on my new project of reviewing self-published science fiction and fantasy. I will admit to having ulterior motives there – I have work of my own that needs attention – but it’s also worth doing for its own sake.

I got started with the first three volumes of Gordon Doherty’s Empires of Bronze series, which I certainly enjoyed. Then the question arose: how to find more books for the TBR (To Be Reviewed) pile? I’m not widely known as a reviewer yet, since I’ve just started to put myself forward as such. I could always browse Amazon’s virtual shelves at random, but that’s no fun.

So I ended up doing the obvious thing: I posted a query to Reddit.

I now have a list of twenty self-published fantasy novels to choose from, already recommended by at least one reader. That should keep me going for the remainder of the calendar year, long enough to build up a back catalog of six to eight reviews that I can point to as proof that I’m serious about this. Hopefully, by then I’ll be getting the occasional request directly from other authors, and that will keep the ball rolling.

(If you have a self-published novel you’d like me to review, have a look at the Review Policy link in the menu bar, and drop me a line.)

In the meantime, I have a bunch of new novels to browse through and read, which is the fun part of this venture. Look for some more reviews to appear in this space over the next couple of weeks.

A Bit of Insight

A Bit of Insight

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I think I may have finally gotten myself unblocked with respect to one of my long-term creative projects. The project in question is the Human Destiny setting.

The premise is that sometime in the middle of the 21st century, an interstellar civilization arrives in the Sol system and (without much effort) conquers humanity. It’s a strangely benign sort of conquest, though. The aliens don’t have any interest in us as slaves, nor are they motivated by a desire to take the solar system’s natural resources for their own benefit. Their goals seem mostly to involve . . . nannying us. Their laws are fairly strict, backed up by almost-universal surveillance, but enforcement seems to be non-violent, completely incorruptible, and even-handed. Meanwhile, all of us are provided a standard of living better than ever before, without anyone being required to work for any of it.

Naturally, a lot of humans resent all this mightily, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. The longer-term question is why all this has happened. What motivates the aliens?

I’ve written and published a couple of stories in this setting: “Pilgrimage” and “Guanahani.” I have two or three more stories in my development pile too. I’m fairly sure there’s a robust series, maybe even a few novels, in there. Yet, even after years of cogitation, I’ve never been able to get the idea to launch.

The main problem is that the setting does away with a lot of human agency just by its premise. Great, the aliens have come along and solved a lot of our problems, including many of the ones driven by human conflict and misbehavior. There are certainly stories left to be told, but a lot of the writer’s tools for plot and character development are set aside already.

It’s probably telling that almost all the stories I’ve written in this setting so far involve breakdowns of the alien surveillance apparatus. It’s kind of like Star Trek‘s transporters – they’re so useful for short-circuiting plots that a writer often has to justify taking them off-line before a story can happen.

There’s also the aliens’ motivation. They’re here because they want us to survive and evolve into the kind of species that actually can play a role on the galactic stage. That means human psychology needs to change. We need to learn to live with each other and tolerate the Other, we need to get better at understanding and preserving the big systems that keep us alive, we need to start thinking on much larger scales in both space and time.

So how do I write stories about that, in which the aliens demonstrate their motivations through conflict and plot rather than by simply telling the reader what’s up?

I was idly thinking about this the other day – a lot of my creative work happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else entirely. Then my mind made a connection with what I was doing with my hands and my forebrain at the time.

I was idly playing a game on my iPad, you see.

Terraforming Mars has been out for several years as a tabletop game, and now has a pretty good adaptation as a mobile app as well. It’s one of those wonderfully thematic board games that does such a superb job of making a complex subject playable and interesting to the layman.

Terraforming Mars assumes an era of exploration and colonization throughout the solar system, starting either late in this century or sometime in the next. The centerpiece of that era is a generations-long project to, as it says on the tin, terraform Mars – transform that planet into an at least marginally habitable world, where human beings can live freely with little or no life-support equipment.

Well. Suddenly I could see a lot of possible context for the Human Destiny setting, Suppose the aliens, aside from simply providing a decent quality of life for most humans, also opened the door for this kind of expansion into the solar system? If humans could settle on Mars, cooperate with each other in a project that might not pay off for many human lifetimes, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for some of us to demonstrate the citizen-of-the-galaxy mindset the aliens are looking for?

Right away, my brain started working on ways to get my character Aminata Ndoye – the protagonist of “Pilgrimage” and a few of the not-yet-published stories – involved in Martian terraforming and solar-system expansion. That in turn gave me a whole raft of new ideas about the Human Destiny setting as a whole.

All of which is to say that I might be turning back to that project, finally. My creative plate is rather full at the moment, between working on my Krava stories, and Architect of Worlds, and wanting to flesh out the EIDOLON game system a bit more. Still, as 2020 winds down I think I might be able to revisit the Human Destiny setting, rework the core documentation for that, and start making some of that information available. Readers of this blog, and my patrons over on Patreon, can expect to see some results from that over the next couple of months.

Status Report (17 October 2020)

Status Report (17 October 2020)

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A quick note to assure everyone that I’m still alive. I’ve been working on a lot of things this week, with the result that none of them have been pushed through to completion. Hopefully this weekend will help change that.

  • About finished with the next bit of Architect of Worlds, which will start establishing a designed world’s atmosphere and climate.
  • Still working on reviews of the second and third books in Gordon Doherty’s Empires of Bronze series, which will bring me to my goal for this first month of reviewing other people’s self-published books.
  • Picking out another piece of short fiction, to post here and send as a free reward for my patrons.
  • Also working on promotion for The Curse of Steel, and pushing forward with the first draft of The Sunlit Lands, both of which are important but aren’t likely to be visible here. Watch that progress bar, though!

Look for some results from that list over the next few days, I think.