architect of worlds – Page 7 – Sharrukin's Palace

The OGL and the Palace

January 8, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

There’s been a serious mess evolving in the indie-creator space over the fate of Wizards of the Coast’s Open Gaming License (OGL). It appears, due to leaked language from the upcoming new version of the license, that not only is it going to be more restrictive in the future, there’s a good chance that older versions of it are going to be revoked or de-authorized in some fashion. This has a lot of independent publishers and creators in a bind. The OGL is over twenty years old at this point, and a lot of publishers, a lot of livelihoods, have been founded upon it.

I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had anything published specifically under the OGL, and my plans moving forward are only minimally affected by any changes to that license. So I’m not going to offer any opinion about the potential change, other than to hope that my fellow indie creators can weather the storm. This post is just a note about where I think my own work may be affected by what’s about to happen.

First off, Architect of Worlds will be completely unaffected. That book is game-system-independent to begin with, and doesn’t rely on anything but my personal research and game-design work. I don’t expect any change in when that book gets released – later this year, exactly when depending on how long it takes me to to edit and lay out the final version.

One of my long-term projects probably will be affected by what Wizards is doing, if only indirectly. The Human Destiny space-opera setting was tentatively going to be my next big tabletop project after Architect was released. My plan was to release it as a Cepheus Engine product . . . but the problem is that Cepheus Engine relies on the previous version of the OGL and derives from the Mongoose Press edition of Traveller. If that version of the OGL goes away, the status of Cepheus Engine becomes uncertain even if Mongoose takes no hostile action against it.

As I understand it, the major Cepheus Engine publishers (Samardan Press, Independence Games, and so on) are already aware of the potential issue and are rapidly developing contingency plans. By the time I’m ready to start working on something other than Architect, the dust may very well have settled and there will be a way-forward for Human Destiny as a Cepheus Engine product as planned. I’m not going to fret about it, since there’s nothing I can do except wait patiently for the outcome.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking hard about releasing another tabletop setting – based on my Danassos setting, with the working title of Fourth Millennium – as a Cypher System product under the open license offered by Monte Cook Games. If worse comes to worst, that may move to the front of my queue, or I may consider moving Human Destiny to that venue as well.

For now, though, I’m just watching developments and putting off making any decisions until I see how things shake out. It’s important to remember that no one has actually seen the new version of the OGL yet. This may be a tempest in a teapot . . . although given a lifetime’s experience with how corporate entities deal with stakeholders who don’t actually own shares of stock, I’m not sanguine.

Planning for January 2023

January 4, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

December went about as expected – I spent a lot of time learning Adobe InDesign and starting to plan the book design and layout for Architect of Worlds, and didn’t produce much of anything new.

At this point I think I’ve learned enough that I can at least start putting together the final design for the book. The immediate objective is going to be a “toy” version of the book, no more than 18-20 pages of excerpts from the complete draft. That won’t contain anything resembling a usable subset of the draft, but it will show off all the bits of design and layout I need to assemble: blocks of text, section headers at different levels, chapter title pages, a title page and acknowledgements page for the book as a whole, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae, filler art, and so on. The idea is to have something to show off for patrons and interested readers, while building a framework on which I can hang the whole book. That’s going to be the big project in January. Whether I’ll finish this month remains to be seen – this is a very new endeavor for me.

Meanwhile, in my spare time I’ve been playing around with my Danassos setting, the alternate-historical fantasy world in which my novel-in-progress Twice-Crowned takes place. I spent odd moments in November and December using some of my tabletop games to generate an alternate history for the setting, up through about 50 BCE. In the process, one of the Muses seems to have inspired me – I think I see how to build that setting into a very playable tabletop RPG, as well as a backdrop for more stories.

The working title for that setting book is probably going to be something like The Fourth Millennium, because the current end-date for the timeline is right around the year 3000 by the setting’s dominant reckoning. It’s got a lot of interesting features: a Mediterranean world divided between Hellenistic and Latin empires, plenty of internal conflict in each empire and the possibility of a big war between them, barbarian peoples around the fringes looking to take bites, new gods and religious movements, magic, new technologies of clockwork and steam, the possibility of monsters lurking in the shadows. It’s a world in which we could adventure at the height of the imperial era without being beholden to the actual course of ancient history. Best guess is this would make a good Cypher System game, published under Monte Cook Games’ new open license.

That’s not going to be a top priority any time soon – I’m focusing on Architect over the next few months – but it might occupy some spare cycles. Not to mention I want to make more progress on Twice-Crowned and maybe write a couple other stories in that setting.

Here’s this month’s priorities:

Top Priority:
- Architect of Worlds: Finish studying book layout techniques.
- Architect of Worlds: Begin setting up a “toy” design for the book.
Second Priority:
- Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
- Danassos: Write a short story drawn from the setting timeline.
- Danassos: Produce a new interim draft of the setting timeline, and otherwise gather notes 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 before, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in odd moments while I focus primarily on Architect. It remains unlikely that any of this will amount to a charged release for my patrons this month, but there may be a couple of smaller freebies. We’ll see how the month goes.

2022 in Review

January 2, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

For all the chaos out in the world at large, 2022 was a decent year for me as a part-time creative and blogger. Traffic to this blog continues steady, although there wasn’t quite as much as during the previous year. I still have a couple dozen patrons who are supporting my work.

I also managed several major accomplishments this year. In particular, I finished writing the first full draft of Architect of Worlds in 2022 – not bad for a project I’ve been working on for over six years at this point. There’s a near-certain chance I’ll have that book ready for release sometime in 2023.

Meanwhile, I did some work on the Human Destiny setting, putting together early partial drafts of the core book and the Atlas of the Human Protectorate. These seem likely to be tabletop RPG releases at some point, most likely under the Cepheus Engine system. Once Architect of Worlds is released, this is likely to be a good candidate for more attention.

I also revived an old novel project, Twice-Crowned, and got perhaps 40% of the first draft of that written. That’s another good candidate for more progress in the coming year, especially since its alternate-historical fantasy setting has been growing on me at a rapid pace. I may start writing that up as another tabletop RPG setting in the coming year, most likely as a Cypher System RPG under Monte Cook Games’ creator program.

Meanwhile, I got a round dozen book reviews done. I seem to be a success at that – I’ve been able to push out a review every month like clockwork for a couple of years now, and those reviews seem to be bringing at least a little attention to my other work too.

One thing I didn’t do much of this year is short fiction. I did push a couple of short items to this site as free stories, but those were mostly old writing being given a new venue. I’ve got several concepts for new short fiction that I want to work on soon, if I can get Architect moving toward release.

The top ten posts for 2022 turn out to be:

Interesting that most of the high-traffic posts all had to do with Architect, although I’m not overly surprised at that. A couple of my book reviews, a couple of status reports, and a side project (the Space: 2049 setting that I’m playing with). Fairly typical.

My objectives for the coming year should be pretty straightforward. I want to get Architect ready for release, and that currently involves teaching myself Adobe InDesign and some basic book-design principles. I want to make progress with at least one novel-length project, and maybe write a few pieces of shorter fiction. And once some of that is well in hand, I may start looking at publishing one of my settings as a tabletop RPG book. Plenty to keep me busy, that’s for sure.

Cover Mockup for “Architect of Worlds”

December 26, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

This isn’t the first mockup I’ve produced for the cover, but it’s the first one I’m happy with. It includes the design elements I most wanted – spiral galaxy, starfield, alien landscape with other worlds visible in the sky. The elements come from different sources, but I think I’ve managed to blend them together reasonably smoothly, and the composite image seems to work. This may or may not be the final cover, but it will certainly do for now.

The font is called Nasalization, and it’s based on a 1970s-era NASA logo. I think it’s clean and readable, and has the right aesthetics. I believe I’ll be using the same font for chapter and section headers inside the book.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to poke at Adobe InDesign, looking at a variety of worked examples too, and I think I’m getting a grip on how the project needs to go. By early January I’ll probably start to put together a toy layout that will include all the features that I’ll need to put in the final book – text passages, chapter and section headers, sidebars, mathematical equations, citations to scientific papers, tables, diagrams, filler art, the whole nine yards. Once I have that put together, I’ll be able to show it off and then take what I’ve learned and apply it to the bigger problem of building the complete book.

Progress!

Planning for December 2022

December 4, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

November saw a big milestone: the first complete rough draft of Architect of Worlds, shared with my patrons and a few selected readers on the last day of the month.

That accomplishment doesn’t mean the content of Architect has been finalized, by any means. While I don’t expect any more big changes to the “rules” mechanisms, I’m almost certainly going to polish the prose, clean up the mathematical formulae, and produce a number of graphs and diagrams to help support the text.

The big task, though, is going to be to start laying the book out for publication. Layout is a completely new skill set for me, so I expect to spend a fair amount of time mastering the basic skills before there’s substantial progress on the book. That’s where most of my creative time in December of 2022 is likely to go.

So, here’s this month’s priorities, arranged the same way as in November:

Top Priority:
- Architect of Worlds: Study and master book layout techniques.
Second Priority:
- Danassos: Continue work on the new rough draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
- Danassos: Write a short story drawn from the setting 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.

As you can see, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in between studying Adobe InDesign or examining other small-press products for layout pointers. At this point I find it kind of unlikely that any of this will amount to a charged release for my patrons this month, but there may be a couple of smaller freebies as pseudo-holiday-gifts.

Incidentally, I’ve already mentioned this elsewhere, but for my patrons and anyone else who’s interested: last month is the last time I plan to charge my patrons for any Architect of Worlds content. Any further changes to the draft are going to be incremental, in service to getting the book ready for release sometime in (hopefully the first half of) 2023. My patrons at the $2 and above can expect to get a free copy of the book if and when it’s ready.

What’s in store for Architect after it gets released? Well, I’ll almost certainly continue to keep an eye on the science as it develops, and I may write the occasional blog post here on the subject. Good chance there will be a second edition of the book in a few years, too. That endeavor isn’t going to be a “once and done” project, I suspect.

Planning for November 2022

November 2, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

October turned out to be somewhat productive – I finally broke through that logjam that was holding up forward progress on Architect of Worlds, and I finished another few chapters of Twice-Crowned.

I think I’m going to concentrate on Architect this month, trying to flesh out the text where it’s incomplete (extended examples, modeling notes, and the few sections that are still just stubs instead of completed prose). The goal, as always, is to get to a more-or-less complete nd integrated draft so I can start a final editorial pass and get started with layout of the finished book.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably try to write a few more chapters of Twice-Crowned this month, or maybe write one of the short stories that’s been hovering in the back of my brain. I might also tinker with some more items for the Atlas of the Human Protectorate – that hasn’t gotten any new material in a while.

The planning schedule for this month is pretty much the same as last month. I’m going to trim out some of the low-priority and “back burner” items – which isn’t to say that I’m abandoning those, but I suspect I’ll be focused enough on my top priorities that I won’t be spending any cycles on the rest for now. Once I get one of my top items – the book-length projects – finished, I’ll re-evaluate what might rise back toward the top of the queue.

Top Priority:
- Architect of Worlds: Continue work on preparing a complete draft of the book for eventual layout and publication.
Second Priority:
- Danassos: Continue work on the new rough draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
- Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.

Status Report (22 October 2022)

October 23, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Between a very busy time at my day job, and a bout of illness over the last week, I’m feeling under the gun to get anything creative finished this month. I think I have a couple of milestones that are feasible to reach in the next nine days, but a lot depends on whether I can carve out enough time.

The first milestone is to finish rewriting a big section of Architect of Worlds, reworking the process of placing planets in a star system under development. We’re talking about what is now Steps Nine through Twelve, although I’m breaking up a few of those and the final result will be Steps Nine through Fifteen instead. That’s making decent progress. I’m currently working Step Fourteen (determining the mass of planets) and once that’s finished the last step is almost a cut-and-paste from the previous draft. I think that’s going to come out to be about 7,000 words of reworked material – no examples, no modeling notes, just the bare sequence – but I think that will be one part of the release this month for my patrons and beta readers.

The other item is probably going to be a few new chapters of Twice-Crowned, set after Alexandra arrives in Athens as a penniless exile for the first time. I actually wrote this next section a couple of years ago, so it’s just going to need a once-over and a coat of polish. That should come to about 13,000 words. I think that will be easy enough to get ready by month’s end.

So, in all, we’re talking about 20,000 words of extensively reworked or completely new material. Kind of a patchwork for my patrons for this month, but enough to justify making the combination a charged reward.

I’m also plowing through a new indie novel for review, and with luck that will be done by the end of the month too.

Now, if I can just get all that done and juggle a rather terrifying number of projects for the office, all at once . . .

Rethinking the Placement of Planets

October 8, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 7 comments

The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, from a distance

The core of the Architect of Worlds design sequence is the series of steps in which the user places planets in orbit around a given star. Right now, that’s Steps Nine through Twelve:

Step Nine: Structure of Protoplanetary Disk
Step Ten: Outer Planetary System
Step Eleven: Inner Planetary System
Step Twelve: Eccentricity of Planetary Orbits

This is the section of the design sequence that’s been rewritten the most times, largely driven by the discovery of new exoplanets or new planetary systems in formation over the past few years. It works . . . but it doesn’t work well. Frankly, it’s a mess, it requires a lot of complicated and fiddly special cases, and I’m told it’s a bear to try to automate.

I’ve been thinking about doing yet another rewrite, as part of the process of producing a fully integrated draft of the book for the first time.

Now, as often happens, this gets into a peculiarity of my design process. There are times when I go for days or even weeks without writing a single word on a given project, because I’m chewing on some thorny problem. In a novel, it might be a bit of plot or character development that isn’t coming clear. In a game design, it’s a mechanic or subsystem that doesn’t want to work the way I would like. In either case, I do a convincing imitation of a writer who’s creatively blocked – but that’s not really the case. What’s really happening is that my brain is mulling over the problem with every spare cycle. Eventually, usually at the subconscious level, some inspiration comes along and I see a way forward.

I’m not quite at that point with this piece of Architect, but I think I’m getting close.

The way the system works now, you start by sketching out the mass and structure of the protoplanetary disk. Then you place planets roughly in the order in which they form – gas giants due to disk instability first, then gas giants due to rapid accretion, then rocky terrestrial worlds in the inner system. The results of each step can affect the parameters of the next, of course. That means lots of special cases where you have to put constraints on a mechanic, or where you have to fiddle with the outcome to make it fit.

This gets particularly annoying when the mechanics for planetary migration (i.e., movement inward or outward across the disk during formation) interact with the final placement of planetary orbits. Easy to get a case where you’re placing planets later in the process and you get an arrangement that interferes with planets you placed earlier on. Annoying.

So it occurred to me, possibly some night recently while I was drifting off to sleep, that I could just turn the whole process on its head. Instead of placing the young planets and then using a bunch of rules to shift them around due to disk migration and other factors, why not just do something like the following:

Determine with a few random numbers and table lookups how many planets survive the formation process in each of the three categories (disk-instability gas giants, rapid-accretion gas giants, rocky terrestrials). Assume these three categories of planets always fall in that order, outer orbits to inner.
Determine the orbital radii of the innermost planet and the outermost planet.
Space all the other planetary orbits more or less evenly in between, using a procedure that won’t generate impossible cases that have to be fixed.
Then, and only then, generate the masses of each planet.

One of the neat features of a system like this is that it can take into account things like disk migration and a Grand Tack for the system’s largest gas giant, without having to explicitly recapitulate all that evolution. If there aren’t any rocky terrestrials, that must mean that your innermost rapid-accretion gas giant migrated inward and stayed close to its primary, a “hot Jupiter.” If there are several rocky terrestrials, then that gas giant either didn’t migrate in very far, or it got pulled back outward by a Grand Tack. Done – no need to work through a several-step process, full of exceptions and special cases, to capture all the possibilities.

Hopefully this will be quite a bit easier to use. Ought to be a lot easier to automate, too. I can already hear K. Nakamura cheering, off in the distance.

I’m not quite ready to start rewriting this section of the sequence – I still need to work through some of the implications in my head first – but I might start taking a crack at it within a few days. If it works out, that will be a big step toward having a complete version 1.0 draft of the whole book that I’d be willing to share with my beta readers and patrons. Stay tuned.

Planning for October 2022

October 2, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

September was mostly about getting more incremental work done on Architect of Worlds, although I also spent a few hours updating some of the research and background for my Danassos setting. My patrons got some of that as a free update, and there wasn’t any charged release for September.

The biggest holdup for Architect is that I’m struggling with some of the intermediate steps in the design sequence – the ones where a planetary system is laid out. Every day I think I get a little closer to a workable overhaul of those guidelines, but it’s a slow process.

As before, if I can get that stumbling block dealt with, and I can get the Architect draft as a whole into some kind of semi-polished condition, then I may release that in some form in October. I may also spend a few hours this month writing a few new chapters for Twice-Crowned.

The planning schedule for this month, pretty much the same as last month:

Top Priority:
- Architect of Worlds: Continue work on preparing a complete draft of the book for eventual layout and publication.
Second Priority:
- Danassos: Continue work on the new rough draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
- Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
- Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
- Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story, set during her first year at the Interstellar Service academy.
Back Burner:
- Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
- Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
- Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
- Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
- Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).

Status Report (25 September 2022)

September 26, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 7 comments

Work on Architect of Worlds proceeds at a deliberate pace – I’ve made a bunch of incremental changes to the draft, and left myself notes for sections that need additional content. Every day I work on that feels like it gets me a few more meters toward a set of goal-posts that keep receding into the distance.

The biggest holdup there is that I’m trying to redesign Steps Nine through Eleven of the design sequence. That is, starting with the structure of the protoplanetary disk, then figuring out how the planets form, how they migrate across the disk, and how they end up being arranged in a stable final situation. That’s a part of the design sequence that has gotten tweaked and adjusted many times, responding to observed exoplanetary systems in the real world and changes in the best available theory. Honestly, the current state of that piece of the sequence is an enormous kludge and I can’t help thinking that there’s a better way to do it, more streamlined and yet at least as good at reflecting all the diversity we’re seeing in exoplanets.

The upshot of all this is that the integrated draft is not going to be ready to share with the audience in September. There will therefore be no paid release for my patrons this month, and we’ll see how October goes.

I did share a freebie with my patrons earlier this evening – an update to my alternate-history timeline for the Danassos setting, incorporating the results of a bunch of tabletop simulations I’ve been running over the last few months. That’s probably reached a stopping point for the foreseeable future, so hopefully more time and brain-cycles for me to work on Architect over the next few weeks.

Sharrukin's Palace

Building fantastic worlds of the mind

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