A Character Sheet

A Character Sheet

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Making good progress on the proposed Cortex Prime sourcebook for the Human Destiny universe. The character rules, in particular, are pretty much done in a rough draft. To test them out, I worked up a character sheet for my usual protagonist in those stories: Aminata Ndoye, the young woman from Senegal who is destined to be the first human starship captain.

What follows is pretty crude – Cortex Prime normally emphasizes the use of well-designed “character files” and this is just text – but it should get the idea across.

A bit of notation: anywhere I have a number in parentheses, that indicates a character trait that contributes one die of that size to the player’s dice pool. So, for example, “(6)” means that trait contributes a 6-sided die. Cortex Prime builds dice pools out of 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, and 12-sided dice, and the bigger the die the more likely it is to produce a good result.

Aminata Ndoye

Student at the École supérieure de l’astronautique in Toulouse, province of Midi de la France.

Stands 168 centimeters tall, masses about 60 kilograms, age 17 Earth years. Her skin tone is deep brown, her eyes are such a dark brown as to be almost black, and her hair is black and cut very short.

Aminata is invariably cool, collected, and rational. She has already demonstrated courage and decisiveness, even under pressure. It is rare for her to lose her temper or otherwise display uncontrolled emotion, and she deals with others with calm, unshakeable courtesy. Strangers often find it difficult to get to know her, as she is something of a workaholic and appears to have little sense of fun or humor.

Distinctions

(8) Devoted Sunni Muslim

Islam is just as important to me as science when I try to make sense of the world around me.

  • Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
  • Spend a PP to step up a Value when you reconnect with your core identity.

(8) Going to the Stars Someday

Nothing and no one will keep me tied down to the Earth.

  • Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
  • Spend a PP to reroll your dice when the test or contest is in direct pursuit of your core ambition.

(8) Life is an Equation to be Solved

It’s all about figuring out the unknown variables.

  • Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
  • Spend a PP to double your Skill die when you embrace your personal style.

Values

  • (8) Sympátheia
  • (10) Logismós
  • (6) Prónoia
  • (6) Prokopé
  • (6) Andreía
  • (4) Evexía

Relationships

  • (10) The Hegemony (Gold card)
  • (6) Valérie Chauvin
  • (6) Nguyen Thi Mai

Skills

  • (6) Influence
  • (8) Know
    • (6) Astronomy
  • (6) Move
  • (6) Notice
  • (6) Operate
  • (6) Play
  • (6) Survive

Resources

                None

Some commentary, for the Cortex-unaware among my readers:

Distinctions are core pieces of a character’s identity. It’s expected that just about any test or contest the character gets into will involve one of their Distinctions.

Values are kind of like “attributes,” but they measure the character’s commitment to certain ethical or philosophical principles. I’m taking a small risk here by defining six Values for characters and naming them in a language most players won’t know (Classical Greek). I’m hoping to convey the alien-ness of the values system that people in this universe are trying to live under.

In this case, Aminata’s higher Values indicate that she’s good at understanding other sentient beings, empathizing with them, and persuading them. She’s very good at rational thinking and taking an objective viewpoint. On the other hand, her main weakness is evexía, which means something like “hygiene,” “self-awareness,” or “self-care” – she’s a bit of a workaholic, and tends to throw herself into problems without taking proper care of her own needs.

Relationships are ties the character has to other people or institutions. In this case, Aminata has a very strong Relationship with the Hegemony, the alien empire humans live under in this universe. She has an unusual level of privilege under Hegemony law. She also has Relationships with two other students at the “space academy” where she is currently studying.

Skills should be fairly straightforward. Cortex Prime encourages creators to name Skills with simple action verbs, to help make it clear when one of them comes into play. I’ve drawn up a list of Skills that’s a little longer than the default one in the core book, but for a space-opera setting that should work well.

Here, Aminata is just starting out at said “space academy,” where she and her fellow students are going to spend several years going through a grueling schedule of academic study and physical training. It occurs to me that Cortex Prime would have no trouble supporting a series of game sessions based on that situation . . .

A Vignette

A Vignette

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Another piece of the Introduction for the Human Destiny sourcebook I’m writing. I intended to include a short fictional vignette, but rather than write a new piece I decided to just grab the first page or so of “Pilgrimage,” a novelette I’ve already published in that universe. Hey, it’s my copyrighted material, I can use it if I want to.

“Pilgrimage” is available at this link on Amazon.

Aminata Ndoye emerged from a taxi outside the front gate of her home, in the arondissement of Mermoz-Sacré-Cœur, on a quiet street not far from the sea. As the taxi chirped and drove itself away, she looked carefully up and down the street. Sure enough, she spotted the first of her admirers, in a little park across the street and about half a block away. Three men, standing in the shade of an acacia tree, doing their best not to be too obvious about watching her.

She turned a cold shoulder to the men, waved a hand at the gate to unlock it, and hurried inside.

“Hello, little bird.”

Aminata glanced up, surprised.

A man sat at ease in the shade of the front porch, a cup of coffee in his hand. He was big, not tall but powerfully built, still resembling the wrestler he had been in his youth. His face was long, narrow, and very dark, with close-cropped black hair and a neatly trimmed beard that had just started to show a little silver. He wore a kaftan in deep blue, and a white kufi cap. He rose when he saw Aminata, setting his coffee down on a side table.

“Father!” Aminata hurried forward to greet him. “We weren’t expecting you home for weeks. Is everything all right?”

“Fine, fine,” said Ibrahim Ndoye. He returned Aminata’s embrace and gave her a warm smile. “Everything is in place for the rainy season, and Dr. Guèye has the reserve well in hand. I decided to give myself a few days off, and Supervisor Veshati agreed, so here I am.”

“I’m glad.” Aminata sobered. “Something has happened. I only learned about it an hour ago. I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with it with only Mother’s help.”

“Oh?”

Aminata hesitated. “It’s not something that we should discuss outdoors, Father.”

Ibrahim cocked an eyebrow at his daughter. “Very mysterious. Let’s go inside, then.”

They stepped up and through the door of their house, into the cool peace of the front hallway, where Ibrahim took off his kufi and set it on a side table. Aminata found words had abandoned her. She simply opened her tablet, called up the pertinent message, and handed the device to her father. Ibrahim read it with grave attention, giving no sign of surprise except for a sudden leap of his eyebrows.

“Truly?” he murmured when he had finished, handing the tablet back to Aminata. “A gold card?”

She only nodded, overwhelmed for a moment.

Immediately after Aminata’s sixteenth birthday, her primary education finished, she had undergone a week-long battery of assessments. A genetic assay. A rather invasive medical examination. Trials of her strength, speed, and coordination. Tests of cognitive ability and academic achievement. Extensive psychological evaluations, some of them under stress.

Every human on Earth went through the same process, as he or she approached adulthood. The stakes were very high. Nine out of ten humans spent their entire lives subsisting on the austere comforts of the Citizen’s Allowance. Nine out of ten of the rest might find work, but only under the direct supervision of foreigners. Only one in a thousand would ever earn gold-card citizenship: the elite of conquered humanity.

The process had other implications as well, which Aminata took very personally.

“A gold card,” she said at last. “Our benevolent lords and masters have decreed that I may have as many as five children. Now I’ll have men following me everywhere. I think there are some outside even now, watching the house. Not to mention that I’ve already gotten dozens of messages from complete strangers.”

“Some of them will be men of good family,” Ibrahim pointed out. “Men with worthwhile jobs and real status. You’ll get the chance to pick and choose.”

“That’s not at the top of my priority list, Father.”

Ibrahim cocked a skeptical eyebrow at her. “You don’t want a family of your own? Children?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “Someday. After I’ve seen and done something that will be worth passing on to them.”

He nodded gravely, pleased. “That’s very sensible, little bird. Perhaps it’s one reason why the Hegemony assigned you gold-card status to begin with.”

“Who knows what the khedai value in humans?”

“We can make a few guesses, based on the content of the examinations. Sound genes and healthy bodies. Intelligence. Sanity. The ability to live and work with beings who look different, have different customs, even think differently.” Ibrahim smiled. “All of which you have. Your mother and I never doubted you would do well.”

“They’re breeding us to be good subjects for their empire,” said Aminata, a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Like cattle, who never get to leave the field and see anything of the real world.”

For the first time, Ibrahim gave his daughter a look of disapproval. “They aren’t bad rulers. We saw much worse before the Conquest.”

“At least then, our rulers were human.”

The Elevator Pitch

The Elevator Pitch

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Here’s a chunk of the growing draft for the Human Destiny Sourcebook. This is a piece of the Introduction, an “elevator pitch” for the book and the setting it will describe.

In the middle of the Twenty-First Century, the age-old question of “are we alone in the universe?” got a sudden and very emphatic answer.

Earth was in bad shape at the time. Global depression, ecological collapse, runaway climate change, and half a dozen regional wars – one of them nuclear – had thrown the world into chaos. Civilization seemed to be on the brink of total failure, and many wondered whether the human species itself would survive.

Then the khedai came.

The khedai were the overlords of a vast interstellar empire, the Hegemony: tens of thousands of worlds, trillions of sentient beings, all living in relative peace and prosperity. They first became aware of Earth just after the turn of the century. At once, they began planning to intervene before we humans could finish rendering our home world uninhabitable. They sent a fleet to Sol and began building the infrastructure they would need.

Thirty years later, just as a few humans were becoming aware that something strange was happening in the outer solar system, the Hegemony finally made its move. The invasion of Earth began in September of 2044, and it was over in less than six months. The khedai called it the Fifth Rimward Intervention, and they considered it a minor skirmish on the frontiers of their empire. Humans called it simply the Conquest.

The khedai were certainly imperialists, but they turned out to be surprisingly benevolent overlords. The resources of Earth and the solar system were not plundered. In fact, the Hegemony worked to rebuild shattered ecosystems, restoring much of Earth’s natural beauty and health. Humans were not enslaved. In fact, most humans found themselves enjoying a higher standard of living than ever before, without having to work for any of it. The Hegemony enforced a system of laws that most humans found reasonable, and they did so with majestic impartiality.

The khedai have always claimed that they came to Earth only to save humanity from its self-destructive nature. They claim to mean us no harm, and they express a wish to see us someday become mature citizens of the galaxy.

Even so, for two hundred years many humans have resented the Hegemony. They feel that the human species has been forced to give up its freedom and its ambitions in exchange for a false security – the life of animals on exhibit in a zoo. Dissent and passive resistance continue to the present day.

In recent years, however, there are signs that the Hegemony’s policy toward humans may be about to change. More humans have been elevated to positions of authority in the cities of Earth. More humans have been encouraged to move to the colonies on Luna, on Mars, and elsewhere in the solar system. More humans have been permitted to travel to other stars. A few humans have been selected to serve aboard Hegemony starships, as crewmen and even as officers.

It is the middle of the Twenty-Third Century on Conquered Earth, and you are one of those exceptional humans. You stand out in a crowd. You have dreams and aspirations that can’t be denied. Whether it’s a quest for a meaningful life on Earth, a career of hard work in the colonies, or a vision of exploring the stars, you have only to step up to the challenge.

The galaxy doesn’t belong to humans, but that doesn’t mean you can’t earn a place in it.

Short Story Now Available: “Fragment”

Short Story Now Available: “Fragment”

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I’ve posted a new short story, “Fragment,” to the Free Articles and Fiction section of this blog.

“Fragment” is an odd little story, dressed up as a short scholarly article in the discipline of Assyriology, possibly appearing in a peer-reviewed journal from some other line of history.

“Fragment” will also be released to my patrons, free of charge.

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.

Review: Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles by Jürgen Hubert

Review: Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles by Jürgen Hubert

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Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles: Commentaries on German Folklore by Jürgen Hubert

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

Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles is a collection of tales from German folklore, many of them derived from German-language collections that have never before been translated. It’s an entertaining and potentially very useful reference for a branch of European folklore unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience.

Full disclosure: The compiler and translator of these tales, Jürgen Hubert, is an acquaintance of long standing, although he and I have no professional relationship and I have received no compensation for this review.

Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles collects a little over 150 narratives, most of them fairly short. These tales have all been drawn from various 19th Century collections of German folklore that have come into the public domain. Dr. Hubert has translated these stories into English, in most cases for the first time, and he also offers some commentary on each.

The breadth of this project can be gathered from the book’s subject headings. There are tales here about the Devil and the Wild Hunt, maidens and crones, saints and sinners. Charlemagne makes several appearances, as does Frederick Barbarossa. There is a bewildering array of monsters, including several kinds of dragon, werewolves, dwarves, giants, “pressure spirits,” and the title-mentioned evil black poodles. Every story carries its own magic and presents its own mysteries. Sometimes the tales go far beyond any simple “fairy tale” and venture into almost Fortean weirdness. Often, the translator seems just as bemused as we are at the results!

Americans, even those of us of German descent, tend to forget how much linguistic and cultural diversity there is in the Old Country. In the early modern era from which these tales derive, there was no such thing as Germany. There was only a stretch of Central Europe, home to different German dialects, diverse religious practices, several non-German ethnic minorities, and little or no political unity. The tales in this collection demonstrate all of this rich diversity. Dr. Hubert helps put all of this in context by providing the geographic framework for each story: where it was told, what villages or towns were nearby, and what features of the landscape are prominent. One of the appendices even indexes the tales by geographic location.

The collection has considerable entertainment value, and it provides plenty of insight into European folklore. Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles might also serve as a valuable source for authors, game designers, or other creatives who wish to investigate the distinctive folklore and fantasy of German culture. Dr. Hubert has specifically supported such application by placing his translations under a Creative Commons license. The book is also extensively footnoted, with appendices on relevant customs and the German language to help the reader interpret the material.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sunken Castes, Evil Poodles, and found a great deal of inspiration in it for my own work. Highly recommended for anyone interested in folklore, faerie tales, or stories of high weirdness.

Architect of Worlds – Step Twenty-Four: Determine Hydrographic Coverage

Architect of Worlds – Step Twenty-Four: Determine Hydrographic Coverage

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In this step, we will determine how much of the world’s surface is covered by water, either as liquid-water seas and oceans, or as a layer of ice. We will express this hydrographic coverage in terms of a percentage. A world with 0% hydrographic coverage has no significant surface water or ice, while a world with 100% hydrographic coverage has no exposed dry land.

This is largely determined by the prevalence of water, from Step Twenty. However, in some cases the amount of dry land surface will also depend on the world’s geophysical parameters, from Step Twenty-One. Large land masses are unlikely to form unless a world has a strong lithosphere and is geologically active, creating variation in topographical relief faster than it can be worn down by weathering and erosion. Otherwise, the world’s surface is likely to be dominated by shallow oceans or ice sheets.

Procedure

Refer to the following table, and find the row corresponding to the world’s prevalence of water and current lithosphere. To determine the hydrographic coverage at random, roll dice as shown in the third column and apply the result.

Architect of Worlds: Some Minor Revisions

Architect of Worlds: Some Minor Revisions

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As I work on the next few steps in the Architect of Worlds design sequence, I’ve realized that I can save myself a lot of hassle by tweaking a couple of the steps I’ve recently posted.

So, for those of you who are following along and experimenting with the sequence as I post it, here are two minor changes you may want to consider implementing immediately. The next few steps are going to assume these modifications are in effect.

Under Step Twenty-One, add the following right after the “Status of Lithosphere” block:

Special Case: Molten Lithospheres and Prevalence of Water

If the world has a Molten Lithosphere, and its prevalence of water is not Massive, then it cannot currently support liquid-water oceans or ice sheets. Reduce the prevalence of water to Trace. This does not constitute a runaway greenhouse event. If the world’s surface cools in the future, water may appear.

The idea here is to avoid cases where the world’s surface is covered with molten lava and yet somehow has significant liquid (or even solid) water. Of course, if the world has so much water that its surface is going to be covered hundreds of kilometers deep, even a Molten Lithosphere isn’t going to be able to evaporate all of it.

Next modification: under Step Twenty-Three, beginning with the paragraph that starts “Make a list of the atmospheric components that meet both conditions . . .” and ending with the block titled “Third Case,” replace the text with the following:

Make a list of the atmospheric components that meet both conditions, and then refer to the following three cases. In each case, the world will also be assigned an atmospheric class of I through V, which will be relevant in later steps of the design sequence.

First Case

This case holds if one or more of molecular hydrogen, helium, or molecular nitrogen meet both conditions from the table.

In this case, roll 3d6 and modify the result as follows:

  • +6 if the world has Massive prevalence of water
  • +6 if the world has undergone a runaway greenhouse event
  • +6 if the world has a Molten Lithosphere
  • +4 if the world has a Soft Lithosphere
  • +2 if the world has an Early Plate Lithosphere
  • -2 if the world has an Ancient Plate Lithosphere
  • -4 if the world has a Solid Lithosphere
  • -2 if the world has a Moderate Magnetic Field
  • -4 if the world has a Weak Magnetic Field
  • -6 if the world has no Magnetic Field

If the modified dice roll is 0 or less, then the world will have a Trace atmosphere, with an atmospheric mass of zero. Otherwise, multiply the modified dice roll by:

  • 10 if the world has undergone a runaway greenhouse event (the world will have a Class I or Venus-type atmosphere)
  • 1 if the world has blackbody temperature less than 125 K and Massive prevalence of water (the world will have a Class II or Titan-type atmosphere)
  • 0.1 otherwise (the world will have a Class III or Earth-type atmosphere)

The final result is the world’s atmospheric mass. Feel free to adjust this result by up to half of the multiplier.

Second Case

This case holds if the first case does not, but carbon dioxide meets both conditions from the table.

In this case, the world will automatically have a Trace atmosphere, with an atmospheric mass of zero. This will be a Class IV or Mars-type atmosphere.

Third Case

This case holds if neither the first case nor the second case is in effect (that is, none of the volatiles listed on the table meet both conditions).

In this case, the world will automatically have no significant atmosphere, and an atmospheric mass of zero. This will be a Class V or Luna-type atmosphere.

Assigning these “atmospheric classes” at this point will make several of the steps, starting with Twenty-Five, much more concise.

That’s all for now. I may be able to post Step Twenty-Four tomorrow, and we’ll see how smoothly the next few steps after that fall together.

Launch Day

Launch Day

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My debut novel, The Curse of Steel, has been available on Amazon since early October. As of this morning, the novel has been launched on Reedsy Discovery – you can visit its launch page at:

https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/the-curse-of-steel-john-alleyn

Reedsy Discovery is a website where independent authors can promote their work, and readers can learn a little about new books before deciding which ones to invest in. Well worth a visit.

In fact, you can help me by visiting the launch page. There, you can read the first chapter of the story, check out its first formal review (five stars!), and upvote the novel. Enough upvotes, and the novel will get further promotion via Reedsy’s newsletter.

Meanwhile, the book is available for sale (Kindle e-book only for the moment, I’m afraid) at:

I’ll admit to being rather proud of my first novel-length venture into original fiction; I hope you’ll enjoy it as well.