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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.

Publication Eve

Publication Eve

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As of this evening, The Curse of Steel has been fully prepared as a KPF-format e-book and is about three steps short of being released.

I’m not going to try to publish it tonight. I want to review the whole e-book one final time to make sure there are no last-minute errors, and that may take me a little while. Especially since I have a pile of telework to get done for my office over the next couple of days.

Still. Everything has been loaded into the Kindle Create app, and it looks very nice indeed. This is starting to feel like a real event. The book will almost certainly be released by Wednesday of this week.

Status Report (1 October 2020)

Status Report (1 October 2020)

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I’m still working on the next step in the Architect of Worlds design sequence.

This one is proving a bit thornier than usual, because I’m trying to model a very complex system. This step is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to describe the geology of a world. I need something that can handle Earth’s complex plate-tectonics geology, and the stagnant-plate geologies of Venus and Mars, and the mega-vulcanism of Io, and putative super-Earths, and can also handle long stretches of geologic time, and and and. Tall order . . . although I think I’m converging on something that will work well enough. A few more days of work on that, most likely, and then the next block of draft text will appear here.

Meanwhile, as of today the editor I hired to review the draft of The Curse of Steel has finished his work, and his assessment was both useful and very positive. The big takeaway here is that he’s confirmed my belief that the current draft does not need any more major surgery. I estimate about two more weeks of work, to finish the glossary, go through the draft one last time to pick a few more nits out of the prose, assemble the e-book files, and publish.

The Curse of Steel will almost certainly be available on Kindle Direct by the middle of October. At the point of release, anyone who’s signed up as my patron at the $2 level or above will receive a free copy of the e-book, and anyone who’s signed up at the $5 level or above will be mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of the book.

After which, I plan to spend about three days in unashamed celebration, and then it will be time to get to work on the next book in the series: The Sunlit Lands.

Dependencies in a Model

Dependencies in a Model

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Still working on the next sections of Architect of Worlds.

What’s interesting is that we’re coming to a number of items that fall into a web of dependencies. Some items affect the most likely outcome of others, and it’s not a nicely linear process. Just to give you a sample, here’s some storyboarding I’ve been doing using the Miro application online:

Where this mostly comes into play is with the order that the steps need to come in the design sequence. Fortunately, I have yet to come across any dependency loops. As long as the sequence moves more or less left to right, everything should work properly . . .

Architect of Worlds: The Next Chunk

Architect of Worlds: The Next Chunk

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While I’m waiting for my consulting editor to have a look at The Curse of Steel, I’ve turned back to a project that I’ve been neglecting for too long: the world-building book Architect of Worlds. Several sections of that book already exist in a rough draft, which can be found at the Architect of Worlds link in the sidebar.

The bulk of the material I’ve already written is a design sequence, permitting the user to set up fictional star systems (or to fill in details for real-world systems). The idea is to let SF writers, game designers, tabletop game referees, and so on design locations for interstellar SF settings, using whatever combination of random chance and deliberate choice they prefer. The emphasis is on “hard SF” realism, as far as the state of exoplanetary astronomy will permit, and no dependencies on any specific tabletop rules system.

So far, the draft system permits one to place stars, planets, and moons, and get gross physical properties (mass, density, surface gravity) and dynamic parameters (orbital radius, eccentricity, and period) for each.

The next slice of the system will involve generating the surface conditions for such bodies, at least for the small “terrestroid” worlds that are likely to provide environments for SF adventure. At this point we’re talking about things like surface temperature (average and variations), atmospheric composition and pressure, the amount and state of water (or other volatiles) on the surface, what kind of native life might be prevalent, and so on.

I’ve been mulling this section over for a few years now, since the science involved is a lot more complicated and more difficult to reduce to a set of game-able abstractions.

When I designed a system like this for GURPS Space Fourth Edition, I made a deliberate design choice to reduce all the possibilities to a specific set of archetypes. That provided some backward compatibility with earlier versions of the GURPS system, and with the older Traveller systems that were an inspiration for both. For this book, though, I want to give the readers as much detail as I can, and let them decide what to use and what to set aside. That complicates the design.

So, a very rough overall outline of what’s going to be involved for a given “world” (that is, a terrestrial planet or moon with some likelihood of a solid surface):

  • The rotation rate of the world (including cases where the world is tide-locked or resonant with a primary). As a sidebar, this gives us quantities for the length of the natural day, month, and year.
  • The blackbody temperature and incidence of stellar wind for the world, based on the properties and distance of its primary star.
  • The strength of the world’s magnetic field, and the consequences for the size and strength of its magnetosphere (if any). If the world is a moon (for example, the satellite of a gas giant planet), then the primary’s magnetic field and magnetosphere may be relevant as well.
  • The world’s initial budget of volatiles – how much in the way of possible liquid or gaseous compounds was the world left with after its process of formation.
  • Atmospheric composition – what volatile compounds are likely to be gaseous at local temperatures, and can the planet hold onto them?
  • Atmospheric mass and pressure.
  • Hydrospheric composition – what volatile compounds are likely to be liquid or solid instead?
  • Hydrospheric mass and prevalence – how much of the world’s surface will be covered by what kinds of liquid or solid stuff?
  • Average surface temperature.
  • Estimated variations in surface temperature with the position on the surface, time of day, and so on.
  • Presence and complexity of native life – which may require a loop-back to adjust characteristics of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and surface temperature.

All that’s the minimum for what the next section of the book needs to cover. There are a lot of dependencies back and forth here, which is one reason why I’ve struggled for so long to build this piece. I’m beginning to think I see how to design something workable, though. At least enough to get started. More over the next few weeks.