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Thinking about “Fourth Millennium”

Thinking about “Fourth Millennium”

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I’ve been doing a lot of back-of-my-head design work for the Fourth Millennium universe this weekend.

To recap: Fourth Millennium is an alternate-historical fantasy setting, somewhat resembling the situation in and around the Mediterranean basin in middle antiquity. There are a lot of divergences from our history: a Minoan successor state in Sicily that’s a counterweight to both Rome and Carthage, an Alexandrian empire that lasts for several generations before finally breaking apart, a Carthaginian empire that lasts much longer than the real one did, and so on. There are some subtle fantastic elements too, such as working ritual magic, the intervention of gods, and philosophical schools that open the door to special powers of body and mind.

I’ve written several pieces of fiction in this universe, and will probably write more. It’s an ideal setting for me to apply all the time I’ve spent studying the world of antiquity.

It’s also going to become a tabletop RPG setting at some point, and that’s what I’ve been spending a lot of time on over the last couple weeks.

At this point I think the canonical setup for a Fourth Millennium campaign will be a group of young but well-connected characters, firmly embedded in the social and political environment of a given civilized state. In a Hellenistic state, for example, the characters might be born to wealthy or noble families, starting out with obligations to king, home city, family, philosophical school, and so on. Characters will adventure to earn dóxa (glory) and arkhḗ (authority, social power), with the ultimate objective of “everlasting fame,” the kind of historical legacy that people will still be talking about centuries or millennia later. Adventures may involve:

  • Political intrigue
  • Fighting against brigands, pirates, barbarians, or other civilized states
  • Recovering treasures
  • Exploring strange lands
  • Gaining standing in a philosophical school through debates and writing learned treastises
  • Producing great works of art or architecture
  • Making scientific discoveries or inventing wonderful devices

Becoming a very important figure won’t be out of the question – a prominent strategos, a city or provincial governor, even a king or ruling queen. All of this will hopefully get game-mechanical support.

The models I’m looking toward here are in the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) arena, especially Pendragon and Runequest. I’ve already been doing some design work with BRP, and the system seems adaptable to a game such as I have in mind, so it’s a decent fit.

One neat feature did occur to me today. I suspect the “core book” for Fourth Millennium will focus on the Hellenistic kingdoms, from Sicily in the far west to the receding frontier of Alexander’s empire in the far east. Lots of focus on Hellenistic society, its structure, its customs, and so on. But if the core book does at all well, I could very easily write “splatbooks” describing other parts of the setting – the Roman Republic, the Carthginian Empire, the Parthian kingdom, Egypt (outside Alexandria and the Hellenistic core), and so on. Similar mechanics for each, but differences in character design and social structure. It would be easy, after a while, to mix cultural backgrounds and have a truly globe-trotting campaign.

I suspect I’ll be starting to outline the Fourth Millennium core book this month, and maybe even writing a few sections of the rules or setting background. We’ll see how much I have in hand by the end of July.

Incidentally, if you’re reading this post and you’re interested in seeing more about Fourth Millennium, you might consider signing up for my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/Sharrukin. Patrons get regular updates on all my creative projects, including interim drafts of books in progress. For the past couple of years, my patrons have mostly been seeing work on Architect of Worlds, but if you’re more interested in TTRPG development now might be a good time to sign up.

(Image credit: Angus McBride, cover image for Osprey Publishing, The Thracians: 700 BC-46 AD. I really wish Mr. McBride was still with us, and that I could afford to commission him for art for this project . . .)

Planning for June 2024

Planning for June 2024

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May was a pretty big month. The final round of edits for Architect of Worlds is done, and the book is well and truly on the market. PDF sales are under way, and I’ve been hearing about sightings of the hardcopy book in the wild, although I haven’t personally seen it yet. I pulled together a submission package for the “Human Destiny” setting for the Chaosium design challenge. I also finished my university courses for the year, and although I haven’t seen my final grades yet, I’m reasonably confident I passed both courses “with distinction.”

That closes out one of the more demanding years I’ve ever had in my life. Starting last June I’ve had a flooded basement (which pushed me out of my usual living quarters and office space), some pretty extensive home repairs, an infestation of mice, yet another flooding incident (this time on the upper floors of the house), a nasty outbreak of office politics, and the biggest course-development project on the shortest time-scale I’ve ever had to work on. Amid all of this, it’s been a bit of a challenge to take on an aggressive course of university study and keep pushing my creative projects forward.

So, now that I’ve reached the summer of 2024 with my sanity more or less intact, I think I’m going to pivot to something different for the next few months. I’ve barely touched my Fourth Millennium or “Danassos” universe in over a year, and that’s going to make for a nice change of pace.

What will that involve? Well, I’m almost certainly going to get back to working on Twice-Crowned, my half-finished novel set in Danassos and Athens in the time of the Second Peloponnesian War. I also have a couple pieces of short fiction in the back of my mind, and I might try to get those into readable form. Finally, I think I’ll work on the Fourth Millennium back story timeline a bit, and start collecting notes for what may one day be a setting bible and tabletop RPG supplement for the universe.

None of which is to say that I’m not going to work on plausible interstellar world-building or the “Human Destiny” future history any more. Just that I feel the need to take a break from those for at least 2-3 months and see if I can make progress on some other projects.

So, here’s the planning roster for June:

  • Front Burner:
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.
    • Fourth Millennium: Write at least one short story set somewhere in the timeline.
  • Back Burner:
    • Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
    • Human Destiny: Continue rewriting and adding to the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
    • Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.

As far as items for my patrons go: I’m going to work hard to have at least 10,000-20,000 words of new material down by the end of June, in which case there will be a charged release for my patrons. Most likely this will consist of some new fiction, and possibly the first stab at a Fourth Millennium setting bible. Look for a Status Report or two in the course of June.

Planning for May 2024

Planning for May 2024

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As of this evening, I’ve completed the final edits for Architect of Worlds and sent the release-draft PDFs over to Ken Burnside. Assuming all goes well, that’s the project finished. Ken tells me he ought to be able to make the complete PDFs available for purchase (and for me to share with patrons and playtesters) very soon. I imagine the process of printing and shipping physical copies won’t be too far behind.

My next big project is going to be to put together a Human Destiny package for the Chaosium design challenge, due at the end of this month. I suspect that’s not going to involve just adding to the existing partial draft of the sourcebook. Instead, I’m probably going to take the material I already have, maybe add some additional content, and assemble a package specifically for the contest.

Meanwhile, I have the finals for my university courses coming up at the end of the month too.

All of which is to say that there probably will not be a substantial new release for my patrons this month, although I may have a small item or two for them that won’t amount to a charged release. Once I get into June, however, a lot of my prior commitments are going to be off my plate over the summer. I’m hoping to get a bunch of useful and interesting creative work done in the June-September timeframe.

Here’s the current lineup, notable as the first time in years that Architect of Worlds hasn’t appeared as a front-line item:

  • Front Burner:
    • Human Destiny: Continue rewriting and adding to the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
    • Human Destiny: Complete and send a contest entry for the Chaosium design challenge.
  • Back Burner:
    • Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
    • Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

I’ll keep everyone posted with a Status Update or two as the month progresses.

Planning for April 2024

Planning for April 2024

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The planning messages remain fairly short and simple, as my status isn’t changing much from one month to the next.

I know, it’s April and Architect of Worlds still isn’t out the door. Ken Burnside has been having a difficult few weeks, and the final textual edits on the book are still on his plate. At this point I’m not going to make any more estimates as to when the book will be finished – hopefully sooner rather than later, but it’s not in my control.

For the moment, I’m focusing on the Human Destiny setting bible and RPG sourcebook, with an eye toward being able to send an interim draft off to Chaosium at the end of May for their “design challenge” contest. I was able to push out a medium-sized update to my patrons on 31 March, and I’m hoping April will be a productive month for that project.

In particular, I’m going to be concentrating on those parts of the book that are directly tied to game mechanics. The Chaosium blog has mentioned that one of the things they’ll be looking for in a successful entry is clever and original ways to apply the Basic Roleplaying rules to support a game’s themes. That’s something I think Human Destiny can do very well, once it’s closer to completion – in fact, I have several game systems in mind that are not quite like anything that’s been done with BRP before. So that’s where my focus is going to be, leading up to the deadline for the contest.

Which is not to say I won’t be continuing to add to the setting background, of course. The sourcebook has a lot of outline sections that are still incomplete, and I’ve found it’s best to work where my muse wants to work on any given day.

So here’s the formal plan for April, very similar to the plan for March:

  • Front Burner:
    • Architect of Worlds: Implement final-release changes to the text and turn the release draft over to Ken Burnside for publication once his editorial work is finished.
    • Human Destiny: Continue rewriting and adding to the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
    • Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
  • Back Burner:
    • Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

There may or may not be a charged release for my patrons this month, most likely some combination of new Human Destiny setting-bible material and a new Aminata Ndoye story. As always, that depends on whether my other commitments leave me enough time and energy to get creative work done.

An Unexpected Opportunity

An Unexpected Opportunity

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This was announced yesterday: a contest for indie designers who are working with the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) engine.

Normally I dislike creative contests. My experience with literary contests in particular has been invariably bad. I’ve lost control over some of my work in exchange for promises of publication or other opportunities that never materialized. I no longer pay any attention to literary contests, and I don’t advise anyone else to enter them either.

Game design contests are usually more well-founded, and my experience with those hasn’t been so negative. I participated in (e.g.) the design contest that eventually gave rise to the Eberron setting for D&D, and that went well even if I didn’t make the short-list. Of course, my usual problem is that I almost never have the right project under way when a contest is announced, so – given how many irons I usually have in the fire at any given time – I rarely have a good shot at producing a viable entry in time.

This one looks like an exception. Chaosium has already placed their BRP engine under the ORC license, making it available for indie designers under very friendly terms. Now they have just announced a design challenge for BRP, with a planned short-list of 10 entries and pretty substantial cash prizes.

Oh, look, and here I have an (admittedly early and incomplete) draft for a BRP-based game. To which I had already planned on devoting most of my creative time over the next few months.

I think I know what I’ll be doing between now and the end of May.

Planning for March 2024

Planning for March 2024

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Fairly short planning message this month – things are straightforward at the moment. Getting Architect of Worlds into people’s hands is taking a little longer than I expected, but we’re getting there.

Ken Burnside is still working on the final round of textual edits, but it sounds as if he’ll be done with that sometime around the GAMA Trade Show this week. He and I have discussed the number and nature of his editorial requests, and aside from the tweaks I’ve already made it sounds as if I’ll be able to rip through the whole list in just a few hours. So the current guess is that he’ll have the final release draft in hand by about 9-10 March, after which he’ll be able to do his first print run and start shipping hardcopies. The e-book version should be available about then too, including rewards for my patrons. Further delays aren’t impossible – Ken is a one-man shop too, and he has a lot more on his plate than I do – but we’re certainly getting closer to release day.

Meanwhile, I was able to release a substantially revised version of the Human Destiny setting bible to my patrons as a reward, the first charged release I’ve made since April or May of last year. That’s still going to be my primary creative project over the next few months. I feel as if I’ve underestimated the amount of setting-bible work I need to do before I start writing new fiction in that universe, but I’m at least getting closer to the point where I’ll be confident.

Here’s the formal plan for March:

  • Front Burner:
    • Architect of Worlds: Finish editorial work on the release draft and turn that over to Ken Burnside for publication in the mid-March timeframe.
    • Human Destiny: Continue rewriting and adding to the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
    • Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
  • Back Burner:
    • Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

I’m betting on a charged release for my patrons this month, most likely some combination of new Human Destiny setting-bible material and a new Aminata Ndoye story. That all depends on whether my other commitments leave me enough time, as usual.

Planning for February 2024

Planning for February 2024

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Getting back toward a more normal planning-and-execution style this month, now that Architect of Worlds is just about out the door. Couple of status items before the planning message, though.

Architect of Worlds

Ken Burnside and I are working on a final editorial pass through the book, finding and stepping on the last few textual bugs. Last I heard, Ken thought he would be done with his piece of that sometime next week, after which I suspect it won’t take more than one or two evenings for me to make the necessary tweaks to the text and layout. At which point I generate two PDFs (full-color and greyscale) and send those over to Ken, and my editorial involvement with the project is done.

Ken is working to ensure that hardcopies will be back from the printer before the GAMA Trade Show in early March. He may be able to ship the first batch of hardcopy editions to the folks who are pre-ordering the book before then, otherwise it will probably be mid-March before that happens. E-book copies will likely be available to the general market about the same time. I should be able to distribute e-books to my patrons and play-testers before that, but I don’t have a firm date yet. Patience a little while longer, please.

Human Destiny

With Architect of Worlds finished, I think my first new creative project is going to involve turning back to the Human Destiny setting.

My long-term plans for that setting have changed a bit. I have a couple of stories from that universe already published (“Pilgrimage” and “In the House of War”), but those have never sold very well for lack of advertising and word-of-mouth.

I think I may actually pull those stories back, do some setting redesign to match my more current thinking, and then start releasing fiction through a different avenue: the Royal Road website.

Royal Road tends to focus on so-called “progression” fiction – long-running serialized stories in which the protagonist gains in personal power and influence in the course of the narrative. It occurs to me that the story of my central character – Aminata Ndoye, the first human to become an officer in an alien interstellar service – would work pretty well as a (subtle) progression story. After all, she works her way upward in social status and rank throughout her career.

The nice thing about Royal Road is that it enables you to start building up an audience for your work, eventually working toward a paid-publication roll-out that’s likely to be more successful. We’ll see.

So the plan there is to rework the “setting bible” a bit, firm up the plan for a long-term narrative for Aminata’s story, rewrite the existing pieces to fit the new narrative, and start writing new fiction as well. Once I have a good chunk of Aminata’s early story down, I can start releasing that to Royal Road and attracting an audience for it. Patrons will, of course, get to see that new material as I get it laid out.

The new version of Human Destiny is also likely to tie into a tabletop RPG project, most likely using Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system. In particular, the setting bible is likely to be framed as a BRP book that might get self-published in the long run.

Other Projects

There are also a couple of other settings I’m thinking about spending some time with, notably the Great Lands setting (high fantasy, related to my first published novel, The Curse of Steel) and the Fourth Millennium setting (historical fantasy, related to my unfinished novel, Twice-Crowned). These are likely to be back-burner items through February while I work on finishing Architect of Worlds and getting some material laid down for Human Destiny.

So here’s the formal plan for February:

  • Front Burner:
    • Architect of Worlds: Finish editorial work on the release draft and turn that over to Ken Burnside for publication in the February-March timeframe.
    • Human Destiny: Outline and begin rewriting the setting bible, possibly in the form of a draft BRP sourcebook.
    • Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
  • Back Burner:
    • Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

I would estimate a 75% chance of a charged release for my patrons this month, most likely some combination of Human Destiny setting-bible material and a new Aminata Ndoye story. As usual, that’s more likely as I produce more than about 10,000 words of substantively new material, and becomes a near certainty as I approach 20,000 words. We’ll see how the month goes.

Planning for January 2024

Planning for January 2024

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Once more, my creative situation hasn’t altered much since last month . . . but that is about to change dramatically.

At the moment, I am only a few days away from being ready to hand Architect of Worlds off to my publisher at Ad Astra Games. Last night I reached the end of the draft in this final editorial-art direction-layout pass. That doesn’t mean I’m finished just yet, but I can now do things like resolve the last “p. XX” references, build a Table of Contents, and so on. I’m guessing I may be ready to send the production PDF files over to Ken Burnside by the end of next week.

Now, the rest of my life is uncommonly busy at the moment.

My day job is as an instructional designer and instructor; I do research, write course materials, and occasionally teach. At the moment we’re about to begin a pilot offering for the biggest single course I’ve ever designed . . . and we plan to pilot two more courses after that, stretching through most of 2024, courses I haven’t even started on yet. Let’s just say I’m likely to be putting in a lot of hours on evenings and weekends over most of the coming year.

Meanwhile, I’m also working toward a second bachelor’s degree, and eventually my first graduate degree, with a plan to complete the course of study about the time I’m ready to retire from my day job. So far my coursework has been almost entirely review, but it does take up some time. For example, this weekend I’m working through some material I hadn’t had time to stay caught up on throughout the month of December.

So that’s the background noise that’s going to stay consistent, even while I put (the first edition of) Architect of Worlds on its final glide-path to release. Still, once those PDFs are out the door, a big slot will open up on my calendar for new forms of creative work. How completely I’ll be able to pivot in the month of January remains to be seen, but by the end of the month I hope to at least get started on some new creative work.

What’s that going to involve? At the moment, I think I’m going to get back to working on my more-or-less-hard-SF universe, under the working title of The Human Destiny. Which will involve some combination of:

  • Doing a zero-based review of the existing setting material, some of which I’ve decided to rethink from scratch. For example, elements of the history of the galaxy and the structure of interstellar civilizations, some of the specific aliens I designed back in the day, and so on.
  • Revisiting, revising, and possibly repackaging some of the fiction I’ve already written in that universe, in part to fit the revised setting assumptions.
  • Writing some new fiction, most likely centered around my character Aminata Ndoye, the first human to become an officer aboard an alien starship. I’m planning to start releasing some of that online as serialized fiction, through vehicles like the Royal Road website. Hopefully that will help build a bigger audience that I’ve had so far.
  • Starting to collect material for a tabletop RPG treatment of the setting, most likely structured around a licensed game system such as Monte Cook’s Cypher or (more likely at present) Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying.

I’m not going to try to build a formal task list, as I’ve done in previous “planning for the coming month” posts. Things are too much in a state of flux at the moment. It’s safe to say that January 2024 will involve two major themes: (1) finishing Architect of Worlds at last and putting it in the hands of my publisher; and (2) pivoting to resume work on the Human Destiny setting. Exactly where I stand on 31 January will inform the more structured planning messages for February 2024 and onward.

For my patrons: There may be a charged release at the end of this month, for the first time in quite a while. It depends on whether I can produce enough new or substantially revised Human Destiny material to justify that. You can probably count on charged releases resuming on a more-or-less regular monthly basis by February 2024.

A Choice of Game Mechanics

A Choice of Game Mechanics

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As of today, the initial layout of Architect of Worlds is finished – all of the final-draft text has been dropped into InDesign and laid out on the pages. In fact, given that there are a couple more days before the end of October, I’ve gone ahead and dropped the “Fine-Tuning World Climate” material into the book as well. I’m going to try to get that laid out before I produce an end-of-month PDF for my patrons.

This is a really big milestone. My planning message for November will detail the work that remains to be done, but the bulk of the final editorial work is finished. From here to the release version is a short distance, relatively speaking.

So today, I’m taking a break from Architect to consider some of the projects I might take up afterward. In particular, the possibility of producing one or more RPG sourcebooks tied to my personal literary settings. These include:

  • The Human Destiny: Interstellar science fiction, positioned somewhere between moderately hard SF and conservative space opera, essentially a pastiche of Star Trek in a universe where human beings are decidedly not the dominant culture.
  • Fourth Millennium: Alternate-historical fantasy set in and around the ancient Mediterranean, a world in which Hellenistic civilization is dominant and (at least some of) the gods are real and active in human affairs.
  • The Great Lands: Iron-Age fantasy reminiscent of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, in which heroic demigods struggle for glory and the survival of their people.

Of the three, I suspect The Human Destiny and Fourth Millennium are most likely to come to fruition. I do want to do more with The Great Lands, but that setting has been getting a lot less interest from the potential audience, so I’m a bit less motivated to push it forward.

One question that keeps coming up is how these settings might best be translated into tabletop RPG material – in particular, what game system might be the best choice for me to work with and publish under?

My first choice, of course, would be GURPS. I’ve got plenty of experience writing for various editions of GURPS – no fewer than 17 full-length books for which I was sole author, co-author, contributor, or editor would argue for that. To this day I’m fond of the system, and I’m quite convinced that any of my personal settings would translate well into it. Not least because I suspect a lot of GURPS idioms have embedded themselves into my personal world-building style.

The problem is that GURPS doesn’t have any form of open license. It’s certainly possible to write and sell third-party GURPS material. Douglas Cole of Gaming Ballistic, for example, has managed a small but successful product line tied to Dungeon Fantasy. As someone with a long track record of both freelance and on-the-payroll work for SJG, I could probably do the same. The barrier to entry would be steep, though, and probably not something at which a one-man development shop working around the constraints of a day job could succeed.

A few years back, I briefly considered writing my own RPG system. You can probably find a few references to the Eidolon system in old posts here. I eventually set that idea aside, because frankly the market is already absolutely glutted with RPG game systems. Anything I publish along these lines is going to be very marginal to begin with; tying it to an idiosyncratic game system would reduce the audience size from “few” to “none.”

I considered the new Cortex Prime system, and even wrote up a bunch of Human Destiny material for it. I still like that system, but the promised creator-friendly licensing scheme never materialized, so I had to set that aside too.

I thought about publishing Human Destiny under the OGL, possibly by way of Cepheus Engine, but the blowup over the OGL at the beginning of this calendar year kind of scotched that notion. I have absolutely no interest in building a dependency into any of my work that Wizards of the Coast could yank out from under me at any time. There was some talk of placing Cepheus Engine on a different licensing basis, possibly with cooperation from Mongoose Publishing, but I’m not sure how that shook out. I’m still kind of leery. Besides, I’m not entirely convinced that the Traveller-like mechanics of Cepheus Engine would quite fit the Human Destiny setting.

More recently I’ve been looking at Monte Cook’s Cypher, and Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (BRP), both of which are available under very creator-friendly licensing terms.

Cypher is perhaps a little more streamlined than I like in a tabletop system, but it seems to have a bigger and growing audience. Monte Cook Games has been pushing it hard this year, especially after the OGL debacle. Cypher is available under its own open license, and the System Reference Document (SRD) is pretty extensive.

On the other hand, Basic Role Playing is an established and very solid system, more GURPS-like than most of the others. It’s been applied to a variety of settings over the years, and I think some of its mechanics would fit my settings very nicely. It’s not clear how much of an audience it has outside the very popular Pendragon, Runequest and Call of Cthulhu games. BRP used to be under a fairly restrictive open license – the SRD included almost nothing but the core task-resolution mechanic – but the most recent release of the engine includes more mechanics, and is apparently going to be placed under the much broader ORC license.

None of this is urgent yet; it’s going to be a while yet before Architect is finally out the door and I can turn to the next big project. Still, that seems to be the current state of play. I need a tabletop game system that will be a good fit for the settings I want to write, which has at least some established audience, and which exists under a licensing scheme for which I won’t have to be a full-time developer and marketer to succeed. It’s encouraging that the intersection of those three sets doesn’t appear to be quite empty . . .