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Second Draft of “The Curse of Steel” Under Way

Second Draft of “The Curse of Steel” Under Way

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Just a quick status report today. After a few months of world-building work, I’ve finally gotten started with the second draft of The Curse of Steel.

How quickly this goes depends on a lot of things. Although I’m still not going into the office, and probably won’t be doing that on a regular basis for some time yet, I have started doing some day-job work from home. Work on the novel is going to have to compete for time. Still, I hope to be able to finish this draft by the end of August, then prepare the novel for release in the September-October timeframe.

If things go according to plan, patron rewards for June, July, and August will consist of chunks of the revised draft, about a dozen chapters at a time. As always, if anyone’s interested in seeing that material as I release it, click on the Patreon link in the sidebar. All of my patrons, $1 level and up, will get to see sections of the draft. Patrons at the $2 level and up will get a free copy of the finished e-book when that’s done.

Last Call for the Historical Atlas

Last Call for the Historical Atlas

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I’m making very good progress in compiling the Historical Atlas of the Great Lands.

This document is going to describe some of the basic assumptions of the Great Lands setting, laying out its large-scale history with a series of maps and a timeline. The final draft looks like it’s going to be about forty pages and 12,500 words, with fifteen maps. The finished product will be part of my setting bible, and will probably become an integral part of any RPG sourcebook I publish for the Great Lands in the future.

If you’ve been following my posts here for the past six weeks, you’ve seen at least early drafts of most of this material – but the final version has another coat of polish, and some new content as well.

Best guess is that I’ll be releasing the Historical Atlas sometime on Tuesday, 26 May 2020. It will be available to all of my patrons, from the $1 level up. If you want a copy and you haven’t signed up yet, now’s a good time to head on over to my Patreon page.

Status Report (8 May 2020)

Status Report (8 May 2020)

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You may have noticed that I’ve paused in the production of the “historical atlas” for the Great Lands.

The reason is essentially linguistic. I was coming up with a lot of off-the-cuff names for languages and places, and the results were starting to annoy me. So finally, a few days ago, I bit the bullet. I started working through a piece of the constructed-language program that I’d been putting off: developing sound-change sets to generate several related languages.

I always intended to do this, eventually.

My first constructed language was Tremara, the language spoken by Krava’s people. The initial development of Tremara involved building a Proto-Indo-European-like ur-language, and then applying a consistent set of sound-change and orthographic laws to get the results I wanted. This way, I knew I could quickly develop more constructed languages, plausibly related to Tremara, if I needed them in the story. I always suspected I might need at least two such languages:

  • One for the pseudo-Hellenic people who dominate the “Sunlit Lands” in the south, where Krava will be traveling in the second and possibly third novels of the series.
  • One for the “northern barbarians” who play a background role in the first novel and are likely to appear more frequently later.

Now that I’m building this “historical atlas,” however, I find I already need at least a few names from those two languages (and possibly a few more). So time to bite the bullet, and build the rules that will generate vocabulary for them.

I’m not finished quite yet, but the results so far have been interesting. Here’s part of a table of comparative vocabulary that I’ve been building for testing purposes:

Original WordMeaning“Hellenic”“Northern”Tremara
h1dhemedhh2es­“child of the earth, human”hethemethas­demedazathemetha
h1reyyh3es“king”herezosreyyozaraio
h2erdhh3em“plow”arthonardomardom
h2ertay“tribesmen”artaiarthayartai
h2remas“hero, man”haremasremazarama
bheh2ay“cattle (plural)”phāibāybai
bhrewh2em“bread”phreanbrewambrevam
dh2enas“man”danastanazdana
deh3wwelkas“dark wolf”dōelkastōwwelxazduvelka
dheh2n“tree”thāndāndan
dreh3dheh2n“sacred tree”drōthāntrōdāndruthan
gwenas“woman”denaskunazbana
keh2rdh2enay“all men”kārdanaixārtanaykárdanai
kelth2er“smith”keltarxeltharkeltar
kelth2ermeh2ras“smith-folk”keltarmārasxeltharmārazkeltarmara
kh2epem“slave”kapenxaphemkapem
kh3elmh3es“priest”kolmosxolmozkolmo
keh3lh2em“burial mound, kurgan”kōlanxōlamkolam
keh3ras“horse”kōrasxōrazkora
kwekweres“wheel”tetereshweherezkukurë
kreh2was“raven”krāsxrāwazkrava
leh3kas“flame”lōkaslōxazloka
meh2ras“host, tribe, folk”mārasmārazmara
meh3rweh1ras“great warrior”mōrērasmōrwērazmurvira
merh2“sea”meramermara
merh2eh2ry“those of the sea”merārimerārymerari
merweh1ray“northern warriors”merēraimerwēraymervirai
neh2ghes“power, magic, sorcery”nākhesnāgeznaxë
neh2keh2les“lord’s hall, feasting hall”nākālesnāxāleznákalë
nesah2ry“those of Nesa”neārinezārynesari
newbhas“bride”nephasnewbaznevba
peh3tas“lord”pōtasphōthazpota
reh3keh3rh3es“chariot”rōkōrosrōxōrozrókoro
reykas“settlement, village”rezkasreyxazraika
senh2dhay“ancient ones, elves”henathaisenadaysanathai
steh2nh2er“standing stone”stānarstānarstanar
tekwas“horse”tepasthehazteku
trenmeh2ras“mighty folk”trenmārasthrenmāraztremara
weh1ras“warrior, man”ēraswērazvira

I think I have one or two more days’ work to do on this before I can go back to the map series. At that point, I’ll probably start by revising previous maps. I have some ideas about how to improve the graphic design there, as well as clean up the bits of constructed language. I still think I’m on track to produce the finished “atlas” this month, at which point it will be released to my patrons.

Then a little more world-building and mapping, and it will be time to get back to the second draft of The Curse of Steel . . .

Status Report (28 April 2020) – Patreon Campaign About to Go Live

Status Report (28 April 2020) – Patreon Campaign About to Go Live

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As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been using my period of forced vacation to engage in an extended world-building exercise. Using a series of maps, I’m building the large-scale back history of The Great Lands, the setting for The Curse of Steel (and what may be a series of novels after that).

This has been a remarkably useful exercise. I went in with only a general plan for how I wanted the process to go. A lot of the details have been filled in with improvisation, guided by plentiful references to real-world history. As a result, I’ve been surprised by some of the details as they’ve emerged, and the back-story I’m developing feels coherent and organic. There may be many more stories to be found in this framework once it’s done.

At the moment, I’m planning to produce a total of 15 maps, with attached background text, a little over half of which is already finished in rough draft. That should give me plenty of material to work with moving forward.

Once that’s done, I have a couple of days’ worth of more focused work to do, redrawing a local map and reworking a timeline, before I can start writing the second draft of The Curse of Steel. I expect to have all of this under way by mid- to late May.

One consequence of all this is that, finally, I think I’m prepared to start my Patreon campaign going once more.

In May, I plan to release a PDF titled The History of the Great Lands, including cleaned-up versions of all of the maps, a timeline, and a pile of additional text. That will serve as a first teaser for the Great Lands RPG sourcebook I’m putting together. In June, I should be able to release a PDF of the first few chapters of the second draft of The Curse of Steel.

Shameless plug: both of those items will only be available to my patrons, so if you’re interested in them, have a look at my Patreon page and see if you’d like to sign up.

While you’re here, have a look at the sidebar for this blog. I’ve dropped the Chapterbuzz link, added links to my Patreon and DeviantArt pages, and switched the Progress Bar widget over to indicate progress on the historical-atlas series.

Now, back to the maps . . .

Status Report: 28 March 2020

Status Report: 28 March 2020

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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!

EIDOLON: The Extended Character, Revisited

EIDOLON: The Extended Character, Revisited

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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!

EIDOLON: The Extended Character

EIDOLON: The Extended Character

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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.

Projects for 2020: The Curse of Steel

Projects for 2020: The Curse of Steel

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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.

Projects for 2020: EIDOLON

Projects for 2020: EIDOLON

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Rough draft of a logo for EIDOLON

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.

Status Report (28 December 2019)

Status Report (28 December 2019)

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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.