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Status Report (27 April 2023)

Status Report (27 April 2023)

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Small course correction, with respect to Architect of Worlds.

A few minutes ago, I sent this month’s incremental update of the book design to my patrons. That’s a few days early and about 12 pages short of the goal I set for myself at the beginning of April.

The reason is that I just reached Step Twenty-Four in the main design sequence. That’s the step in which you determine the current geophysical parameters for a world under development – status of the world’s lithosphere, whether or not it has active plate tectonics, that sort of thing. The issue is that there are a couple really thorny bits of math in that step, probably the ugliest formulae anywhere in the previous draft. I’m also not entirely confident in the accuracy of the mini-model for that step. So I’d like to pause the layout long enough to do a bit of research, maybe develop a new mini-model, and simplify the procedure so it’s not as ugly and ill-polished.

While I’m at it, I also have similar concerns about some of the later steps, especially where we figure out how much greenhouse effect a world gets from its atmosphere based on its composition. I’m actually very happy with the way that procedure fits together overall – it models the evolution of an Earthlike world’s atmosphere very elegantly. However, the actual mini-model for greenhouse effect is again both ugly and not one I’m 100% confident in. So that might get some attention too.

So I’m going to set aside layout work on Architect for at least a few days, while I go off and do some of that redevelopment. In the meantime, I’m just one chapter away from the point in Twice-Crowned at which I was thinking another charged release of the interim draft for my patrons might be appropriate. So the last few days of April, I’m going to spend mostly on getting that chapter written and polishing up the last chunk of new material. Patrons should look for a charged release there, probably sometime on Sunday if all goes according to plan.

I also have another “bonus” book review I want to publish this month, but that will have to wait until I’m sure I can get this chunk of Twice-Crowned whipped into shape on time. if that doesn’t work out, at least I have a review ready to go early in May.

An Insight into the Galilean Moons

An Insight into the Galilean Moons

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Here’s a neat little bit of “new science” that I might be able to quickly build into Architect of Worlds while I continue editing and laying out the release draft.

The idea is that Jupiter, just after its formation, was probably much more luminous than it is today due to its heat of accretion. Its luminosity might have been as high as about 0.00001 times the current solar level. That doesn’t sound like much, but with the Galilean satellites (Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto) orbiting so close to the young, hot Jupiter, they would have undergone a period of extreme heating. It wouldn’t have lasted long – Jupiter would have cooled off and ceased to radiate so enthusiastically – but it seems to have been enough to drive off a lot of water ice and other volatiles.

Notice that Io, the closest to Jupiter, is almost free of water ice to this day. Which makes sense – in its first few million years, Io would have been getting over 30 times as much irradiation from Jupiter as it currently gets from the Sun. More than enough to melt and then boil water ices, and then drive the resulting water vapor into space. For Europa and Ganymede the effect wouldn’t have been as pronounced, which is why those moons still have plenty of ice today.

At present, the Architect of Worlds design sequence has a weird kludge in place to differentiate Io-like from Europa-like or Ganymede-like gas giant moons. It shouldn’t be too difficult to replace that with a rough estimate of a gas giant primary’s early luminosity, which (when taken with the moon’s orbital radius) will indicate how much irradiation the moon got early in its history. Particularly important for super-Jupiters, which we’ve already observed plenty of and for which the design sequence certainly allows.

I think I may also rearrange some text between Steps Sixteen (world density and surface gravity) and Seventeen (placing moons). Right now that’s the only place in the design sequence where you implicitly have to back up a step – after you place a moon in Seventeen, you may want to go back to Sixteen to determine its density and so on. Easy enough to move some of the pertinent text forward, so you can figure out a moon’s properties in the same step when you place it. That’ll also allow me to insert the new computation at a convenient place in the sequence.

A popular-science article on this result is here: Baby Jupiter glowed so brightly it might have desiccated its moon. The research paper involved, with references to other relevant work, is here: The effect of Jupiter’s early luminosity on the Galilean satellites.

Very Small “Habitable” Worlds?

Very Small “Habitable” Worlds?

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This article was brought to my attention a while back: “How small is the smallest habitable exoplanet?” (EarthSky, October 2019). The basic takeaway was kind of eye-catching.

Apparently some modeling work had been done to try to find the boundary between “planet-like” and “comet-like” water-rich objects. The distinction (in this specific context) is that “planet-like” objects can have atmosphere and liquid surface water, whereas “comet-like” objects can’t – they either retain water ice on their surface, or they lose their water entirely. The models pointed in the direction of surprisingly small objects falling into the “planet-like” domain – rocky planets or moons with as little as 2.7% of Earth’s mass could be “habitable” in this sense.

Naturally, that led me to raise an eyebrow, given that the Architect of Worlds design sequence is decidedly not going to give us worlds that small with liquid surface water. One of the reasons I wrote Architect in the first place was as a reaction against early planet-design sequences, in games like Traveller, which sometimes gave us those really implausible cases of worlds as small as Luna with Earthlike atmospheres and oceans. Had I been operating under a false assumption all along?

So I tracked down the actual paper: “Atmospheric Evolution on Low-gravity Waterworlds” (Astrophysical Journal, August 2019). If I’m reading this right, this is one of those cases where the Architect model probably doesn’t need to be adjusted to fit new science.

What the paper seems to be saying is that even some of these very low-mass worlds might be able to retain an atmosphere and liquid surface water. It looks primarily at the possibility of a runaway greenhouse, and at the mechanism of hydrodynamic escape for water. It doesn’t seem to address the possibility of simple thermal or Jeans escape, and it doesn’t take photodissociation into account at all. So it’s only looking at some of the mechanisms for atmospheric or water loss . . . and even so, these low-gravity worlds aren’t going to retain atmosphere or water indefinitely. What the authors have shown is that under ideal conditions, some of these small worlds may be able to retain liquid-water oceans for a while – up to a billion years or so. Which is interesting, but it doesn’t tell us anything about a long-term stable state, much less the possibility of the evolution of a local biosphere.

Architect generally assumes that the planetary systems you design with it are stable on several-billion-year timescales. Planets and systems of moons aren’t going to be crashing into each other, planetary surface conditions aren’t going to be in a state of rapid change. Which means the Architect model isn’t designed to look at edge cases like these, which are only likely to appear in very young star systems.

To astronomers, “habitable” means “there can be liquid water right now.” Which can include worlds that are not going to be at all comfortable for humans without environment suits and sealed habitats. It can also include worlds, as here, where the “habitable” state is more or less transient.

So in this case I’m not seeing the need to adjust my design sequences as they stand. It occurs to me that it might be worthwhile to provide some material on system or planetary states that aren’t long-term stable, so the reader can place some outliers. Planets that are likely to collide sometime in the next few thousand years, say, or tiny worlds like these with a surprising amount of free water on hand. For the moment, I think that’s going to be delayed until I write a second edition of the book.

Planning for April 2023

Planning for April 2023

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March was a surprisingly productive month. I blew right past my milestone for the layout and book design of Architect of Worlds. I believe I can predict now, with high confidence, that the bulk of the layout will be finished sometime in June. At that point I’ll still need to make one more editorial pass, create and arrange a bunch of filler art, probably clean up the cover and a few other illustrations, and create the credits page and the table of contents. I can’t imagine any of that will take more than a couple of months to finish. Very tentatively, let’s look to see Architect of Worlds released in its first edition late this summer.

I also managed to get a chapter or so written in Twice-Crowned. That looks like a good trend to maintain in the coming month. On the side, I’ve been tinkering with the alternate history for the Danassos setting. I had become dissatisfied with a few elements of the history about the time of the Twice-Crowned novel, so I’ve been going back in what little free time I have and working out some changes. That’s set me back from working with Notion so much – that will probably resume once I’m happy with the new structure.

Once again, this month’s planning message is going to look a lot like last month’s.

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Tentatively plan to finish through page 115 (out of approximately 180).
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.

I expect at least one free update for my patrons – the next partial interim draft of the Architect book design. I suspect there’s a good chance that I’ll also be able to issue a charged release in April: the next partial draft of Twice-Crowned, hopefully well past the mid-point of the planned story.

Status Report (22 March 2023)

Status Report (22 March 2023)

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I’ve apparently hit my stride with respect to doing layout for Architect of Worlds. I reached my tentative milestone for that earlier this week, passing page 70 out of 180 in the draft.

I intend to continue working on that for the rest of March, but not pushing the pace too hard – maybe a page or two at a time, possibly getting as far as page 80. Meanwhile, I’m going to take a creative break and see if I can complete some revisions and bang out a few more chapters of Twice-Crowned before the end of the month.

Here’s the plan, then, for my patrons and other readers. You’ll be seeing another incremental draft for the rough layout of Architect of Worlds regardless, as a free update. Hopefully that will get us to a point most of the way through the “Designing Planetary Systems” chapter. However, if I can get at least to the end of Chapter Eighteen in Twice-Crowned, I’ll push that out as a charged release. That will be roughly 12,500 words of new material that you folks won’t have seen before. If I don’t get that far, there won’t be a charged release for this month and we’ll see how things go in April.

The Structure of “Fourth Millennium”

The Structure of “Fourth Millennium”

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Things are moving right along on Architect of Worlds. I’m confident that I’ll be able to hit my objective of page 70 out of 180 by the end of this month, and probably a few pages beyond that. So while I’m working on Architect, I’m also giving some thought to what’s likely to be my next big RPG project: Fourth Millennium.

Fourth Millennium is envisioned as an alternate-historical fantasy, set in the Mediterranean world sometime in the middle of what we would think of as the first century BCE. The setting is the same one in which I’m writing the novel Twice-Crowned – I’ve already written a few short pieces in it too, and will likely write more as the muse moves me.

The underlying game system is probably going to be the Cypher System from Monte Cook Games, under their (very generous) creative license. Assuming I live and stay motivated long enough to produce the whole thing, it’s going to have three major components:

  • The core Cypher System-compatible rules for building characters and roleplaying in the setting, with rules for not only personal-combat-heavy adventures, but mass combat, social and political conflict, and so on. There will be a magic system based heavily around spirit-derived and divine magic, with a strong trace of neo-Platonist hermeticism as well.
  • A gazetteer of the Mediterranean world in the setting, somewhat familiar from our own history, but also full of divergences (a surviving Minoan-derived state, a Roman Republic that hasn’t been quite as fortunate but still has the potential to conquer widely, an emerging Hellenistic world-empire derived from the Alexandrian οἰκουμένη, and so on).
  • At least one One Ring– or Pendragon-inspired “grand campaign” that organizes adventures in annual cycles, letting characters start out as minor figures, work their way up to being movers and shakers, and change the course of the setting’s future history. So (e.g.) in a Roman Grand Campaign, characters might start out as clients supporting an ambitious Roman senator, but while assisting him they would build up their own wealth and clout, eventually setting out on the cursus honorum and standing for the offices of praetor and consul in their own right, all the while dealing with the perennial crises facing the Republic.

It’s that last item that has me cogitating heavily. I’m concerned that a single book that contains all three of these components is going to be huge, especially if I go all-in on building multiple interlocking Grand Campaigns based on different cultures. I could see building at least three of those: one set in the Roman Republic, one in the Hellenistic empire, one in the Minoan-derived culture that occupies an uneasy space between the two.

So suppose I instead build a single book that contains character-design and adventuring rules, the extra rules needed to support Grand Campaign play, and the gazetteer describing the setting. That book would be enough for players and GMs to build their own adventures and campaigns. Big, but not outrageously so. Then there would be one or more follow-on books that describe each Grand Campaign in detail.

The thing I’m wrestling with is, which campaign book to plan to work on first.

  • The Roman book would have the advantage of being the most well-documented in primary sources and extant fiction, and the most familiar to the audience. No trouble building a plausible political and social system here, with plenty of room for adventures. Of course, Roman society was very problematic by modern standards – strong misogyny, a very equivocal view of LGBT+ behavior and lives, rampant slave-holding. Good portion of the audience would probably be repelled by that, even if I were to work hard to provide alternatives.
  • The Hellenistic book would be most attractive to me, given that I’m a Hellenophile of long standing, but it would carry a lot of disadvantages. Primary-source documentation of the details of society and politics among the Hellenistic kingdoms isn’t as rich, since most our sources were (of course) Roman. I’d have a harder time developing social and grand-campaign mechanisms for this piece of the setting to the same level of detail. Maybe not quite as much values dissonance for the audience, but the difference would be pretty slim. Hellenistic societies tended to be just as nasty as the Roman by modern standards.
  • The Minoan-derived society would have its own set of trade-offs. In this case, I’d be making the details up almost out of whole cloth – we’re talking about a culture that just didn’t exist in the corresponding era of our real-world history. Which would probably mean that I’d have to work all the harder to get the audience on board, since this would be the most historical-fantasy piece of the setting. On the other hand, the post-Minoans would be a lot less problematic for the modern audience – very little misogyny or patriarchy, a much more liberal view of LGBT+ people, slavery present but not nearly as prevalent as in Rome or the Hellenistic world. Not to mention, this society’s location between the other two would add a certain degree of tension and potential conflict to the setting, possibly helping to engage the audience.

Mental note: this project is really going to need some effort spent on consent-and-safety tools.

So yeah, in the short run I’m not going to need to make any decisions, but by the time Architect is in release and I’m starting to produce rough-draft material for Fourth Millennium, I’m going to have to have a lot of this figured out.

I’d be interested in hearing from my readers and patrons on this one. If you have any interest in Fourth Millennium at all, which of the three grand-campaign sourcebooks do you think you’d find most interesting and useful? Feel free to drop me a comment or an email if you have any insight.

Some Insight on Oceanic Super-Earths

Some Insight on Oceanic Super-Earths

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I came across this article a few days ago, and it’s making me think I need to make a small adjustment to the Architect of Worlds planetary design sequence: “Astronomers identify a new class of habitable planet” (Astronomy.com, September 2021).

The case in question is one that we should all have been aware of for a while: super-Earths with very dense atmospheres dominated by hydrogen, with deep world-spanning liquid-water oceans. Architect would call these Class 2 (Dulcinea-type, after Mu Arae c) worlds with Massive prevalence of water.

The problem is that if these worlds are too warm, the current Architect design sequence quickly turns them into Class 1 (Venus-type) worlds: very hot due to a runaway greenhouse, but very dry because their primordial oceans have been boiled away and lost to photodissociation. But if I understand the physics correctly, this shouldn’t happen in these specific cases.

If a Dulcinea-type world has a rocky surface, it’s buried under many kilometers of ocean, and atmospheric heat isn’t going to bake carbon dioxide out of the rocks to cause a runaway greenhouse. Now, these worlds are likely to have a ton of water vapor in their atmospheres, and water vapor is itself a really effective greenhouse gas. But that doesn’t seem likely to boil the ocean itself away. With a really dense atmosphere, the boiling point of water soars and you can keep liquid-water oceans with surface temperatures well above 370 K. Meanwhile, these worlds aren’t going to lose their water due to photodissociation, because they’re massive enough to retain molecular hydrogen anyway. Any water vapor that gets into the upper atmosphere may break down due to high-energy sunlight, but the hydrogen won’t just fly off into space, it’ll stick around to recombine with oxygen again.

Fortunately I think adjusting for this will be an easy fix in the Architect draft, something I can do on the fly while I’m doing the rough layout. Basically, I’ll build an exception into the sequence for Dulcinea-types, forbidding them to make the usual transition to a runaway greenhouse somewhere just above a blackbody temperature of 300 K. I may need to add a provision in the procedure to compute surface temperature for these worlds – if they’re already hot, they’re going to have a fierce greenhouse due to water vapor in the atmosphere and yet will still keep their liquid-water envelope.

These strike me as odd worlds to call “habitable,” although in the scientific literature astronomers generally use that word to just mean “probably has liquid water.” You could theoretically land on one of these, but it wouldn’t be a remotely shirt-sleeve environment for humans.

Planning for March 2023

Planning for March 2023

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I didn’t get as much done in February as I had originally hoped, although those milestones were probably more than a little optimistic. I wrote a little bit of Twice-Crowned, and made it almost to page 40 in the layout and book design for Architect of Worlds.

The only really new element in February: I’m starting to use the documentation tool Notion to gather and collate notes for the Danassos setting. That’s really promising as a method for archiving world-building notes for a given setting – much better than my usual procedure involving a bunch of disorganized Word documents. For now, I’m using it to support work on Twice-Crowned and to prepare for work on the Fourth Millennium RPG book later this year. I also anticipate it may be a very useful tool for the Human Destiny setting – I can see using it to cleanly document Architect of Worlds designs for various star systems, for example.

So in any case, this month’s planning message is going to look a lot like last month’s, aside from some minor tweaks.

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Tentatively plan to finish through page 70 (out of approximately 180).
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Gather notes in Notion for an eventual Fourth Millennium book.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.

As usual, while I focus primarily on Architect, I don’t expect a charged release for my patrons this month unless I get really ambitious with the novel or some other piece of fiction. There will probably be at least one free update – the next partial interim draft of the Architect book design.

Status Report (20 February 2023)

Status Report (20 February 2023)

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Quick note today, to discuss progress on Architect of Worlds.

Slowly but surely, I’m improving my layout skills in Adobe InDesign. In particular, I’ve developed workflows for producing chapter title pages, managing several levels of header, cleaning up font variations, producing mathematical formulae as vector images and placing them in the draft, building tables with a consistent format, and so on. It’s getting to the point where I can pretty reliably lay out a page per hour, which means I ought to be able to make at least a little progress almost every day.

The biggest change I’ve made is that I’m no longer trying to produce filler art as I go. Pages that end up with a significant amount of white space are going to be left as is for now. Once I’ve got the whole book laid out, I’ll go back and select all the filler art that’s needed. Where I need images to help support the text, those are being selected or generated and inserted into the draft along the way – that’s actually one of the things that slows me down the most.

As of this afternoon, I’ve gotten all the way to the end of “The Science of Star Maps,” or about page 31 in the integrated draft. I think I’m going to be making slow but steady progress from this point onward. My proposed milestone for the month of February (about 60 pages completed in this month alone) seems awfully optimistic, though. I’ll probably be somewhere in the range of page 35-40 by the end of this month instead.

I’ll probably continue to provide partial drafts each month for patrons to review, as free updates. Honestly, the next few months may not see much in the way of charged releases, while I work on this as my primary project.

One note, for those of you who are reviewing the incremental drafts and providing potential errata and other feedback. Right now, I’m concentrating on getting the book laid out! Any comments or proposed tweaks to the text are being heard, much appreciated, and carefully stored away, but you’re not likely to see them reflected in the draft until I’ve got the book fully laid out in rough. Once that’s done, I’ll be doing a polishing pass, to include building the table of contents and credits page, polishing up the layout, adding filler art, and making any final corrections and tweaks to the text.

Patience. We’re definitely in the home stretch on this project!

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

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“Battle of Pydna 168 BCE,” by Peter Connolly

While I continue to make incremental progress on Architect of Worlds and Twice-Crowned, I also keep thinking about what’s likely to be my next big tabletop RPG project, beginning later this year. That’s a full-fledged historical-fantasy game, probably published under the Cypher System, with the working title of Fourth Millennium.

The premise is that this is the ancient Western world, centered around the Mediterranean basin, but it’s not exactly the world we see in our history books. There are fantastic elements: spirits that can be bargained with, gods who may or may not be kindly disposed toward mortals, magic that works more often than not, strange creatures that lurk in the wilderness beyond the borders of civilization. It’s also an alternate history, with several points of divergence: a survival of Minoan civilization, a Hellenic world that didn’t commit suicide in the fifth century BCE with quite so much short-sighted enthusiasm, an Alexandrian οἰκουμένη that managed to survive its founder’s death. The setting is divided between two incipient world-empires and a whole host of minor kingdoms and barbarian peoples, each with their own distinctive flavor.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the “canonical adventure” for the setting. My past experience with RPG design tells me that this is really important. Potential players and game-masters need to be clear as to what they can expect to do in a setting. Dungeons & Dragons centers around the dungeon crawl. Traveller centers around doing odd jobs to survive on the fringes of interstellar society. Transhuman Space, when we first developed it, was a lovely rich setting that didn’t have a clear answer for “what do the characters do?” and that handicapped it for a long time.

So what will player characters in Fourth Millennium be doing? I think that boils down to the motto for the setting – something that may end up being the core book’s subtitle:

The future is in your hands.

The idea is that player characters will be thoroughly involved in history as it unfolds in this alternative world. They’ll start out as agents for powerful people – an ambitious Roman senator, a powerful post-Minoan priestess-queen, a provincial governor in the Alexandrian empire, that sort of setup. At first they’ll be carrying out missions for their patron – accumulating rewards of wealth and treasure, sure, but also gathering social standing and authority. Eventually they’ll become more independent, becoming movers and shakers in their own right. They’ll feel as if they’re making a mark on the future of the world – although, to be sure, Fate and the gods will have their own say.

So yeah, fighting monsters, but more often human foes: cutpurses and assassins, pirates, brigands, barbarian raiders. Exploring the uncivilized wilderness, traveling in strange foreign lands. Solving mysteries, making scientific discoveries, writing books that everyone wants to read. Making brilliant speeches, intriguing to discredit or eliminate political rivals, persuading people to vote one way or another. Making a fortune in trade or loot, or just collecting the revenue from big land-holdings. Fighting in wars, even commanding armies. Winning elections, holding political office, governing whole provinces. Eventually reaching the top of the social pyramid in whatever republic, kingdom, or empire you call your own. The end-point of a successful long-term campaign might be to gather such fame and glory that people will still be talking about you at the end of the Fourth Millennium.

One major inspiration here might be games like Pendragon or Paladin – games that aren’t just richly imagined settings, but structured campaigns that encourage play across years and even generations.

I know, I know. Ambitious as all hell, especially for a one-person development shop. Well, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. And you never know, maybe the Muses are thinking kindly of me.