Just a quick post today, while I continue to work on the next few steps of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. I’m noticing some renewed interest in this project, which I suppose shouldn’t surprise me given that I’m finally getting back to work on it.
It looks as if people are coming to the blog and doing a tag-search for old Architect of Worlds posts. That’s fine, but you should be aware that the earlier steps as originally posted to the blog may not be the most current version of the system. Not to mention, the blog posts aren’t always formatted so as to be easy to read or use.
For the time being, I maintain PDFs of the current “official” version of the draft on the Architect of Worlds page in the sidebar. If you’re interested in what’s been developed so far, you might want to look there rather than try to page through the old blog posts.
So long as everyone respects my copyrights, you’re welcome to download copies for your personal use. That will probably change as the book gets closer to actual publication, but that won’t be for some time yet. Of course, if you work with the system and get some interesting results, I’d be pleased to hear about that.
Architect of Worlds – Step Seventeen: Determine Obliquity
The obliquity of an object is the angle between its rotational axis and its orbital axis, or equivalently the angle between its equatorial plane and its orbital plane. It’s often colloquially called the axial tilt of a moon or planet. Obliquity can have significant effects on the surface conditions of a world, affecting daily and seasonal variations in temperature.
Procedure
Begin by noting the situation the world being developed is in: is it a major satellite of a planet, a planet with its own major satellite, or a planet without any major satellite? Notice that these three cases exactly parallel those in Step Sixteen.
First Case: Major Satellites of Planets
Major satellites of planets, as placed in Step Fourteen, will tend to have little or no obliquity with respect to the planet’s orbital plane. To determine the obliquity of such a satellite at random, roll 3d6-8 (minimum 0) and take the result as the obliquity in degrees.
Note that the major satellites of gas giants, distant from their primary star, may be an exception to this general rule. For example, in our own planetary system, the planet Uranus is tilted at almost 90 degrees to its orbital plane. Its satellites all orbit close to the equatorial plane of Uranus, so their orbits are also at a large angle, and their obliquity is very high. Cases like this are very unlikely for the smaller planets close to a primary star – tidal interactions will tend to quickly “flatten” the orbital planes of any major satellites there.
Second Case: Planets with Major Satellites
A Leftover Oligarch, Terrestrial Planet, or Failed Core which has a major satellite is likely to have its obliquity stabilized by the presence of that satellite.
To select a value of the planet’s obliquity at random, roll 3d6. Add the same modifier that was computed during Step Sixteen for the Rotation Period Table, based on the degree of tidal deceleration applied by the major satellite. Refer to the Obliquity Table.
Obliquity Table
Modified Roll
Obliquity
4 or less
Extreme (see Extreme Obliquity Table)
5
48 degrees
6
46 degrees
7
44 degrees
8
42 degrees
9
40 degrees
10
38 degrees
11
36 degrees
12
34 degrees
13
32 degrees
14
30 degrees
15
28 degrees
16
26 degrees
17
24 degrees
18
22 degrees
19
20 degrees
20
18 degrees
21
16 degrees
22
14 degrees
23
12 degrees
24
10 degrees
25 or higher
Minimal (3d6-8 degrees, minimum 0)
Feel free to adjust a result from this procedure to any value between the next lower and next higher rows on the table.
If the result is Extreme, the obliquity is likely to be anywhere from about 50 degrees up to almost 90 degrees. To select a value at random, roll 1d6 on the Extreme Obliquity Table.
Extreme Obliquity Table
Roll (1d6)
Obliquity
1-2
50 degrees
3
60 degrees
4
70 degrees
5
80 degrees
6
98-3d6 degrees, maximum 90
Again, feel free to adjust a result from this procedure to any value between the next lower and next higher rows on the table.
Third Case: Planets Without Major Satellites
A Leftover Oligarch, Terrestrial Planet, or Failed Core which has no major satellite will be most affected by its primary star.
However, without the stabilizing presence of a major satellite, the planet’s obliquity is likely to change more drastically over time. Minor perturbations from other planets in the system may lead to chaotic “excursions” of a planet’s rotation axis. For example, although at present the obliquity of Mars is about 25 degrees (comparable to that of Earth), some models predict that Mars undergoes major excursions from about 0 degrees to as high as 60 degrees over millions of years.
To select a value for obliquity at random, begin by rolling 3d6 on the Unstable Obliquity Table.
Unstable Obliquity Table
Roll (3d6)
Modifier
7 or less
Roll 1d6 – High Instability
8-13
No modifier
14 or higher
Roll 5d6 – High Instability
Make a note of any result indicating High Instability for later steps in the design sequence. The planet is likely to be undergoing drastic climate changes on a timescale of millions of years.
Now make a roll on the Obliquity Table, but if High Instability was indicated, roll 1d6 or 5d6 on this table, rather than the usual 3d6. Finally, add the same modifier that was computed during Step Sixteen for the Rotation Period Table, based on the degree of tidal deceleration applied by the primary star. Refer to the Obliquity Table, and possibly the Extreme Obliquity Table, as required.
Examples
Both Arcadia IV and Arcadia V are planets without major satellites, so they both fall under the third case in this section, as they did in Step Sixteen.
For Arcadia IV, Alice begins by rolling a 4 on the Unstable Obliquity Table, indicating that she will need to roll 1d6 rather than 3d6 on the Obliquity Table. That roll will therefore be 1d6+1, and Alice gets a final result of 3. Arcadia IV apparently has extreme obliquity in the current era. Rather than roll at random, Alice selects a value for the planet’s obliquity of about 58 degrees.
Alice makes a note of the “high instability” of the planet’s obliquity. Its steep axial tilt may be a relatively recent occurrence, taking place over the last few million years. Arcadia IV, the Earth-like candidate in her planetary system, will have very pronounced seasonal variations, and may be undergoing an era of severe climate change. Any native life has probably been significantly affected, and human colonists would need to adapt!
Meanwhile, for Arcadia V, Alice rolls a 12 on the Unstable Obliquity Table, indicating that the planet’s rotational axis is currently relatively stable. She rolls an unmodified 3d6 on the Obliquity Table, getting a result of 15. She selects a value for this planet’s obliquity of about 28.5 degrees.
Architect of Worlds – Step Sixteen: Determine Rotation Period
A quick note before I drop the next section of the draft: I caught myself making several errors in the mathematics while developing this step. I think I’ve weeded all of those out, but if anyone is experimenting with this material as it appears, let me know if you come across any odd results.
Step Sixteen: Determine Rotation Period
The next three steps in the sequence all have to do with planetary rotation. Every object in the cosmos appears to rotate around at least one axis, and in fact some objects appear to “tumble” by rotating around more than one.
Planets and their major satellites usually have simple rotation, spinning in the same direction as their orbital motion, around a single axis that is more or less perpendicular to the plane of their orbital motion. There are, of course, a variety of exceptions to this general rule.
In this step, we will determine the rotation period of a given world. In this case, we will be dealing with what’s called the sidereal period of rotation – the time it takes for a world to rotate once with respect to the distant stars.
Worlds appear to form with wildly varying rotation periods, the legacy of the chaotic processes of planetary formation. However, many worlds will have been affected by tidal deceleration applied by the gravitational influence of nearby objects. Tidal deceleration may cause a world to be captured into a special status called a spin-orbital resonance, in which the world’s orbital period and its rotational period form a small-integer ratio.
Procedure
Begin by noting the situation the world being developed is in: is it a major satellite of a planet, a planet with its own major satellite, or a planet affected primarily by its primary star?
First Case: Major Satellites of Planets
Major satellites of planets, as placed in Step Fourteen, will almost invariably be in a spin-orbit resonance state. Most models of the formation of such satellites suggest that they are captured into such a state almost immediately after their formation.
Since a major satellite’s orbit normally has very small eccentricity, the spin-orbit resonance will be 1:1. The satellite’s rotation period will be exactly equal to its orbital period.
Second Case: Planets with Major Satellites
A Leftover Oligarch, Terrestrial Planet, or Failed Core which has a major satellite may be captured into a spin resonance with the satellite’s orbit. This is actually somewhat unlikely; for example, Earth is not likely to become tide-locked to its own moon within the lifetime of the sun. However, a satellite’s tidal effects on the primary planet will tend to slow its rotation rate.
To estimate the probability that a planet has become tide-locked to its satellite, and to estimate its rotation rate if this is not the case, begin by evaluating the following:
Here, A is the age of the star system in billions of years. MS and MPare the mass of the satellite and the planet, respectively, in Earth-masses. R is the radius of the satellite, and D is the radius of the satellite’s orbit, both in kilometers.
If T is equal to or greater than 2, the planet is almost certainly tide-locked to its satellite. Its rotation period will be exactly equal to the orbital period of the satellite.
Otherwise, to generate a rotation period for the planet at random, multiply T by 12, round the result to the nearest integer, add the result to a roll of 3d6, and refer to the Rotation Period Table.
Rotation Period Table
Modified Roll (3d6)
Rotation Rate
3
4 hours
4
5 hours
5
6 hours
6
8 hours
7
10 hours
8
12 hours
9
16 hours
10
20 hours
11
24 hours
12
32 hours
13
40 hours
14
48 hours
15
64 hours
16
80 hours
17
96 hours
18
128 hours
19
160 hours
20
192 hours
21
256 hours
22
320 hours
23
384 hours
24 or higher
Resonance Established
Feel free to adjust a result from this procedure to any value between the next lower and next higher rows on the table.
The planet will be tide-locked to its satellite on a result of 24 or higher, or in any case where the randomly generated rotation rate is actually longer than the satellite’s orbital period. In these cases, again, its rotation period will be exactly equal to the orbital period of the satellite.
Third Case: Planets Without Major Satellites
A Leftover Oligarch, Terrestrial Planet, or Failed Core which has no major satellite may be captured into a spin-orbit resonance with respect to its primary star. Even if this does not occur, solar tides will tend to slow the planet’s rotation rate.
To estimate the probability that such a planet has been captured into a spin-orbit resonance, and to estimate its rotation rate if this is not the case, begin by evaluating the following:
Here, A is the age of the star system in billions of years, MS is the mass of the primary star in solar masses, MPis the mass of the planet in Earth-masses, R is the radius of the planet in kilometers, and D is the planet’s orbital radius in AU.
Again, if T is equal to or greater than 2, the planet has almost certainly been captured in a spin-orbit resonance. Otherwise, to generate a rotation period for the planet at random, multiply T by 12, round the result to the nearest integer, add the result to a roll of 3d6, and refer to the Rotation Period Table. The planet will be in a spin-orbit resonance on a result of 24 or higher, or in any case where the randomly generated rotation rate is actually longer than the planet’s orbital period.
Planets captured into a spin-orbit resonance are not necessarily tide-locked to their primary star (or, in other words, the resonance is not necessarily 1:1). Tidal locking tends to match a planet’s rotation rate to its rate of revolution during its periastron passage. If the planet’s orbit is eccentric, this match may be approximated more closely by a different resonance. To determine the most likely resonance, refer to the Planetary Spin-Orbit Resonance Table:
Planetary Spin-Orbit Resonance Table
Planetary Orbit Eccentricity
Most Probable Resonance
Rotation Period
Less than 0.12
1:1
Equal to orbital period
Between 0.12 and 0.25
3:2
Exactly 2/3 of orbital period
Between 0.25 and 0.35
2:1
Exactly 1/2 of orbital period
Between 0.35 and 0.45
5:2
Exactly 2/5 of orbital period
Greater than 0.45
3:1
Exactly 1/3 of orbital period
On this table, the “most probable resonance” is the status that the planet is most likely to be captured into over a long period of time. It’s possible for a planet to be captured into a higher resonance (that is, a resonance from a lower line on the table) but this situation is unlikely to be stable over billions of years.
Examples
Both Arcadia IV and Arcadia V are planets without major satellites, so they both fall under the third case in this section. The most significant force modifying their rotation period will be tidal deceleration caused by the primary star.
The age of the Arcadia star system is about 5.6 billion years. Arcadia IV has mass of 1.08 Earth-masses and a radius of 6450 kilometers. Alice computes T for the planet and ends up with a value of about 0.083. Arcadia IV is probably not in a spin-orbit resonance, but tidal deceleration has had a noticeable effect on the planet’s rotation. Alice rolls 3d6+1 for a result of 11 and selects a value slightly lower than the one from that line of the Rotation Period Table. She decides that Arcadia IV rotates in about 22.5 hours.
Meanwhile, Arcadia V has mass of 0.65 Earth-masses and a radius of 5670 kilometers. Alice computes T again and finds a value of about 0.007. (Notice that the amount of tidal deceleration is very strongly dependent on the distance from the primary.) Alice rolls an unmodified 3d6 for a value of 12, this time selecting a value slightly higher than the one from the table. She decides that Arcadia V rotates in about 34.0 hours.
Citations
Gladman, Brett et al. (1996). “Synchronous Locking of Tidally Evolving Satellites.” Icarus, volume 122, pp. 166–192.
Makarov, Valeri V. (2011). “Conditions of Passage and Entrapment of Terrestrial Planets in Spin-orbit Resonances.” The Astrophysical Journal, volume 752 (1), article no. 73.
Peale, S. J. (1977). “Rotation Histories of the Natural Satellites.” Published in Planetary Satellites (J. A. Burns, ed.), pp. 87–112, University of Arizona Press.
Architect of Worlds – Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period
So, for the first time in over two years, here is some new draft material from the Architect of Worlds project. First, some of the introductory text from the new section of the draft, then the first step in the next piece of the world design sequence.
The plan, for now, is to post these draft sections here, and post links to these blog entries from my Patreon page. None of this material will be presented as a charged update for my patrons yet. In fact, there may be no charged release in September, since this project is probably going to be the bulk of my creative work for the next few weeks. At most, I may post a new piece of short fiction as a free update sometime this month.
Designing Planetary Surface Conditions
Now that a planetary system has been laid out – the number of planets, their arrangement, their overall type, their number and arrangement of moons, all the items covered in Steps Nine through Fourteen – it’s possible to design the surface conditions for at least some of those many worlds.
In this section, we will determine the surface conditions for small “terrestroid” worlds. In the terms we’ve been using so far, this can be a Leftover Oligarch, a Terrestrial Planet, a Failed Core, or one of the major satellites of any of these. A world is a place where characters in a story might live, or at least a place where they can land, get out of their spacecraft, and explore.
Some of the surface conditions that we can determine in this section include:
Orbital period and rotational period, and the lengths of the local day, month, and year.
Presence and strength of the local magnetic field.
Presence, density, surface pressure, and composition of an atmosphere.
Distribution of solid and liquid surface, and the composition of any oceans.
Average surface temperature, with estimated daily and seasonal variations.
Presence and complexity of native life.
In this section, we will no longer discuss how to “cook the books” to prepare for the appearance of an Earthlike world. If you’ve been following those recommendations in the earlier sections, at least one world in your designed star system should have a chance to resemble Earth. However, we will continue to work through the extended example for Arcadia, focusing on the fourth and fifth planets in that star system.
Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period
The orbital period of any object is strictly determined by the total mass of the system and the radius of the object’s orbit. This is one of the earliest results in modern astronomy, dating back to Kepler’s third law of planetary motion (1619).
Procedure
For both major satellites and planets, the orbital period can be determined by evaluating a simple equation.
First Case: Satellites of Planets
To determine the orbital period of a planet’s satellite, evaluate the following:
Here, T is the orbital period in hours, D is the radius of the satellite’s orbit in kilometers, and MPand MS are the masses of the planet and the satellite, in Earth-masses. If the satellite is a moonlet, assume its mass is negligible compared to its planet and use a value of zero for MS.
Second Case: Planets
To determine the orbital period of a planet, evaluate the following:
Here, T is the orbital period in hours, D is the radius of the planet’s orbit in AU, and M is the mass of the primary star in solar masses. Planets usually have negligible mass compared to their primary stars, at least at the degree of precision offered by this equation, and so don’t need to be included in the calculation.
Examples
The primary star in the Arcadia system has a mass of 0.82 solar masses, and the fourth and fifth planet orbit at 0.57 AU and 0.88 AU, respectively. The two planets’ orbital periods are about 4170 hours and 7990 hours. Converting to Earth-years by dividing by 8770, the two planets have orbital periods of 0.475 years and 0.911 years.
Alice has decided to generate more details for the one satellite of Arcadia V. This is a moonlet and so can be assumed to have negligible mass, while the planet itself has a mass of 0.65 Earth-masses. The moonlet’s orbital radius is about five times that of the planet, and Alice sets a value for this radius of 28400 kilometers. The moonlet’s orbital period is about 16.4 hours.
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.
My plans regarding The Curse of Steel have evolved with remarkable speed over the past few days.
My novel-writing process seems to boil down to the following:
A long period of chaotic brainstorming, tinkering, and world-building work, in which the overall concept of the story can change many times. This stage can take several years and is likely to produce a lot of abortive partial drafts. Most of the novels I’ve worked on have never gotten past this point.
Eventually, the concept stabilizes in my head enough that I can produce the first complete draft of a novel. This has happened exactly three times in my entire career as a writer.
The first draft tells a complete story, but it probably has all kinds of plot holes, undeveloped characters, and vagueness of setting in it. After all, I was making it up as I went along – I seem to be much more a “pantser” than a “planner.” So now I go back and write a second complete draft, one that rounds out the story and patches most of those holes.
About eight years ago, my first mature original novel reached that second-draft stage. That was The Master’s Oath, a tale of time travel, alternate histories, and Hermetic magic that will absolutely never be seen again outside my dead files. It wasn’t until I was finished with that one that I had a “What in God’s name was I thinking” moment and realized the thing was utterly unpublishable. Decently written, not a bad adventure story, but bound to mortally offend big chunks of my audience. Lesson learned.
Now, as of last week, The Curse of Steel has reached the second draft stage. Lo, the creator looked upon his work, and he was pleased.
Now what?
Well, to be honest, my workflow doesn’t exist yet past this point. The Curse of Steel is the first original novel I’ve ever written that I honestly believe is publishable.
I spent a couple of weeks putting together a cover image for the book. While I worked on that, I thought about what the next steps should be. Should I just publish the second draft as is, and hope for the best?
The more I thought about that, the less comfortable I was with the idea.
I know my prose style is reasonably clean. When I was a freelance writer, more than one editor remarked on that. As an editor, I’ve seen enough prose from other people to be able to compare.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a few people reading my drafts, and they’ve been encouraging about the story.
On the other hand, a novel is a very different beast from a non-fiction book, there are necessary skills I may not have developed in full, and none of my early readers are experienced editors. I don’t have a decent writer’s circle to help me hammer my drafts into submission. What if I’m missing something?
No, scratch that, I know I’m missing something. Maybe two or three novels from now, I’ll have a better idea of what to do at this point. Right now I’m still not sure.
The obvious solution would be to hire an editor.
Of course, a skilled and reliable editor costs money. Not to mention, there are a lot of people out there ready to take advantage of would-be authors, offering cheap book-preparation services for top dollar without any guarantee of results. Ever since deciding to pursue self-publishing, I’ve been very cautious about laying out cash for such services.
On the gripping hand, I can afford to spend some money on the experiment.
So over the past week or so, I’ve done some research and developed two lines of attack.
One line is to search for software that can help a novelist pick nits in his prose style. Sure, everything has a spelling-and-grammar checker these days, but strong prose writing needs more than that. I need to be able to ferret out filler words, excess adverbs, phrases that I repeat too often, that kind of thing. I could do that by eye, but the process would be slow and painful, and I would be likely to miss the weaknesses in my own style.
Autocrit is billed as a “self-editing platform,” and it certainly works as such. It’s essentially a web-based word processor, but it’s specifically designed to carry out a wide variety of specialized text searches and basic statistical analyses. It compares your text to a huge corpus from published novels, helping you find and carve out the flabby bits of your prose.
Using AutoCrit over the past three days, I’ve been able to rework The Curse of Steel with surprising speed and efficiency. Already I’ve cut a little over 2000 words of material, mostly filler words and repetitive phrases that didn’t add to the sense of each passage.
It’s been quite the eye-opener. Every writer needs something to rub his nose in the shortcomings of his prose style, or he isn’t likely to improve. Lacking an editor or a ruthless critique circle, something like this may be the next best thing.
AutoCrit isn’t ideal. It’s web-based, which I don’t care for. It chokes if you hand it more than 50,000 words of text at once, which means I have to edit my novel in chunks. It doesn’t handle special characters gracefully, so all my conlang words that have accents and umlauts in them get snarled up. Its import from Word, and its export back to Word, are both a little kludgy.
Still, I suspect I’ll have a third complete draft, with much tighter prose, by later this week.
The second line of attack is that I have, indeed, hired an editor. This involved a fair amount of searching through the Web, looking for editorial networks that are competent, reliable, and not outrageously expensive. The SFWA site was fairly helpful here – they don’t explicitly recommend editors, but they have an excellent checklist of things to consider in the process.
The editor I ended up with is being hired specifically to do a manuscript assessment, not a complete edit of the novel. This will set me back a few hundred dollars, and it may not end up being part of my usual workflow in the future. Still, the experiment should be worthwhile. I’m hoping he’ll be able to provide actionable feedback that I can use while producing a final complete draft – the last step in my development process before the book goes out the door.
At the moment, the plan looks like this:
Finish working through The Curse of Steel with AutoCrit (to be completed by about 21 or 22 August).
Wait for my editor to complete his review of the draft (probably about the end of September).
Produce the final release draft (to be completed by late October).
Publish the book!
So it looks as if The Curse of Steel will finally hit the virtual shelves by Halloween. There will be much rejoicing . . . and then I’ll get started on The Sunlit Lands, the second book in the series. One assumes that one won’t take nearly as long to reach fruition.
In other news, that four- or five-week gap in September, while I wait for my editor to finish his task? I think I may sit down and work on Architect of Worlds for a while. No promises . . . but I think my research, and the subconscious work in the back of my head, have reached the point where I may be able to develop a rough draft of the third chunk of the world design sequence. We’ll see how things go.
Today I came across a neat example of automated star-system generation, based on the design sequence I wrote for GURPS Space, Fourth Edition back in the day.
It looks like a robust code base, supporting a web-based interface. You can generate star systems at random, possibly forcing a few parameters (existence of a garden world, position in an open cluster, and so on). You can pick from several naming schemes for the resulting planets.
The output includes a neat animated map of the system, and hierarchically tabulated information for randomly generated stars, planets, and moons. All in all, it looks very slick, and it seems to reflect the original game rules pretty accurately.
I’ve mentioned my own more recent work on Architect of Worlds – it would be neat to see a similar automated version of that once it’s ready for release. In any case, this application looks very useful for folks who are running hard-SF games, whether using GURPS Space or something similar.
Well, this has been a year. Twelve months of doing my best to pass by the madness that seems to be sweeping the world, keep my family prospering, excel at my day job, and keep making progress on my creative projects. With some success, as it turned out.
Let’s be honest, this is the year a lot of things seemed to come together, as I built workflows I could use to set up and finish creative projects. I designed my first full constructed language, one which is actually usable for literary work. I drew up several maps. I hacked my brain in such a way that I could do world-building work in service to an actual story for a change.
I managed to write (at least in the first draft) my first mature, full-length, original, publishable novel: The Curse of Steel. That’s a pretty big deal.
So while 2019 wasn’t altogether sunshine and roses, I do feel as if I’m in a reasonably good place in my creative life. Still more work to be done, to be sure, but I’m more confident that I once was.
This blog seems to have reflected that. I’m still not sure who is reading this thing regularly – most of you don’t have a lot to say – but traffic keeps growing, slowly by steadily. The top ten (new) posts for this year were:
As usual, about 40% of the hits on the blog just start at the home page and go from there. There’s also a lot of perennial interest in some of my old Architect of Worlds posts from 2018, as well as that extended exercise in world-building I carried out based on the Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna games. That’s always in the back of my mind as I consider what to work on next.
As always, let’s hope that the coming year is prosperous and productive for all of us . . . and that the world manages to hang onto sanity in the coming months.
It’s not the end of the year yet – that being when I usually take stock and make plans for upcoming creative work – but a few things have happened recently that may turn out to be productive.
The Obvious Task: The Curse of Steel is finished in the first draft. I’ll be spending the next few months on a second-draft rewrite of the novel, with a planned milestone of having it ready for publication in the spring. After that, I’ll be getting started on the second novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands.
Preparing for Patreon: Now, as one element of preparing for publication, I’ve been thinking about re-opening my Patreon campaign, which has been shut down for several years. Hopefully, that can help me gather an audience for the novel(s), as well as raise a little money to help pay for professional cover art or editorial services. With the novel series underway, I certainly won’t have any problem producing material that patrons can enjoy for the foreseeable future.
World-Building Material for Patrons: However, while working on the novel series, I’ve been coming up with a lot of world-building material: maps, constructed language, cultural descriptions, character writeups, and so on. Most of that material hasn’t been posted here. I imagine some of my readers would be interested in it, either on its own or as support for tabletop gaming.
The stumbling block here is that when I frame my own world-building notes in terms of a tabletop game, the game system I normally use is GURPS. Steve Jackson Games is fairly strict about licensing the GURPS system for third-party publishers – there’s no Open Gaming License for it, for example. It’s possible to work with them to get a license, and several publishers have done so, but for someone like me who would just be publishing material for a small audience via Patreon, that’s not worthwhile.
Fortunately, a solution came to me a few days ago: publish game-ready material using a “generic” character description format of my own design, one which could easily be converted to GURPS – or to any number of other game systems, for that matter. That way I can publish the material for patrons and still avoid any danger of infringing on SJG’s online policy.
Just as a trial balloon, I’ve started pulling together the design I have in mind, and it’s surprisingly simple. I suspect I could publish a reference document, under a Creative Commons license, that’s no more than a dozen pages long. So that looks like it’s going to be part of the strategy.
Some New Simulations for Evaluation: Entirely unconnected to the above, I received a shipment from Sierra Madre Games earlier this week – two games that I ordered many months ago and that have finally been released.
Bios: Origins (Second Edition)is the final game in Phil Eklund’s Bios trilogy, which began with Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna. This game picks up where Megafauna left off – at the point where the primitive human species (or some other pre-sapient species on an alien world) first attains a spark of consciousness. It’s a Civ-like game, which traces the history of a world from the Paleolithic all the way to the dawn of the Space Age.
As with Phil’s other games, this has oodles of thematic interest, and I suspect it could be used rather handily as a world-building tool. You may recall that I did a series of “world-building by simulation” articles a while back, using Genesis and Megafauna to design an alien world and its dominant sentient species. Now I think I’m going to tinker a bit with Origins and see if I can turn it to similar purposes. There may be a fair number of blog posts about that over the next few months.
Meanwhile, Pax Transhumanity is a game by Phil Eklund’s son, Matt Eklund. It’s a thematic simulation of future history – the period over the next century or so, during which technology is likely to completely transform human society (again, still, as always). It fits in well with the Transhuman Space setting I helped design for Steve Jackson Games back in the day.
I’ve been waiting for Pax Transhumanity for a long time, hoping to use it to re-inspire me for another of my creative projects: the “Human Destiny” setting, in which humanity becomes part of a polyspecific interstellar community over the next couple of centuries.
The Human Destiny stories started off reasonably well – I actually published one of them via Amazon a while ago – but I ran into a brick wall with them. Largely because, in the current concept for the setting, human beings have very little agency! They’re the passive subjects of an alien empire, which came to manage Earth and human destiny because we proved unable to succeed on our own.
Okay, I will admit that I’m fairly pessimistic about human prospects. My evaluation of my species is that we’re just smart enough to get ourselves into a world of difficulty, but not smart enough to save ourselves from the consequences. That doesn’t make for very hopeful or interesting storytelling, though.
So for a long time, I’ve been trying to find ways to convince myself anew that humanity actually has a hopeful future, preferably without divine intervention or helpful aliens to save us from our own folly. I want to develop a fictional world in which we muddle through and eventually manage to solve the problems we cause for ourselves. Going back and re-reading Transhuman Space has helped a little, since that’s exactly the assumption we made for that setting. Tinkering with Pax Transhumanity might help too.
All of which means that I might be re-working the Human Destiny setting over the next few months. More material for this blog, the Patreon, and eventual publication, hopefully.
Architect of Worlds: I still need to get back to work on the Architect of Worlds project, of course – that’s been stalled for a lot longer than I originally planned. Even so, every once in awhile someone comes across it and gets good use out of it, even in its incomplete state. One of these days I’ll have to set everything else aside and just get the next big section written . . .
Hmm. This is reading a lot like a “prospects for the new year” post, isn’t it? Even if the above list is all I work on, that’s more than enough to keep me busy for months. I suppose that’s okay. When the muse calls, you answer, no matter what the calendar says!
Just a short note, to call your attention to an interesting result in recent astrophysics that’s quite relevant to the Architect of Worlds project.
It’s well known that we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets in the last couple of decades. Now the state of the art is approaching the point where we can get clues about the environment on those planets. For example, one recent result (here’s an article in Scientific American) is the first indication we have of the kind of atmosphere that exists around an Earth-sized rocky exoplanet. In this case, the planet is in its primary star’s habitable zone, and it’s more than large enough to retain a significant atmosphere against thermal or Jeans escape. Yet there doesn’t seem to be much if any atmosphere there.
I’ve long since worked out a model for Jeans escape; that much was in the world-design system I wrote for GURPS Space back in the day. (If you’ve used that system, you may recall a “minimum molecular weight retained” or MMWR calculation. That’s specifically relevant to Jeans escape.)
The problem is that thermal loss isn’t the only way a planet’s atmosphere can get stripped off. If the primary star is prone to flares and has an energetic stellar wind, that will do the trick too. This is specifically relevant to red dwarfs, like the star LHS 3844 which has the planet mentioned above. Red dwarf stars punch well over their weight in the stellar-wind and flare department, especially early in their lives. Thus, any rocky planet close enough to be in the liquid-water zone will probably get a serious sandblasting early on.
This is kind of a new area in astrophysics, and there are a lot of competing models out there. Some scientists are predicting that Earth-sized planets should be able to retain their atmospheres in at least some cases, others are much less sanguine. The LHS 3844 result certainly seems to support the pessimistic case.
For Architect of Worlds, I’ve been thinking in terms of assigning each planet a “volatiles budget” from its formation and early years, modified by things like the planet’s MMWR, whether it formed inside the snow line, whether there’s a dominant gas giant to fling comets in-system, and so on. A big random factor as well, since it looks as if this feature is strongly subject to chance. Then we would reduce that volatiles budget to reflect non-thermal processes of atmospheric escape, photodissasociation of water molecules, and so on. (Hmm. Maybe have a separate budget just for water, since that goes through some significantly different processes and might not be correlated with atmospheric volatiles.)
The devil’s in the details, of course, and for all my tinkering I have yet to come up with a model that satisfies me (or even fits all the cases we know about). This might actually be the biggest obstacle to getting the third section of the design sequence hammered out.
