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The “Great Lands” Master Map

The “Great Lands” Master Map

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Okay, here’s another map for the “Great Lands” setting. This one is focused more closely on the Great Lands themselves – that is, proto-Europe. The map was produced using Wonderdraft, with a carefully selected excerpt of the world map applied as a tracing image.

You can see that Europe hasn’t been fully assembled yet – with Africa still moving northward and rotating slightly counter-clockwise, the Italian and Balkan peninsulas haven’t merged in with the main portion of the continent. You can also see that the Atlantic Ocean is a bit narrower in this epoch – that’s a piece of Greenland in the far northwest, and the Americas aren’t too far off the western edge of the map.

The “Sea Kingdom” is an ahistorical bit, a subcontinent springing up along the mid-Atlantic ridge. I need a Númenor-analogue, so there it is.

The most notable feature of this pseudo-Eocene world is the climate. The planet is a lot warmer and less arid than we’re accustomed to, and sea level is quite a bit higher. The Great Lands have a humid subtropical climate all the way up into parts of what will eventually be Scandinavia and Russia. Warm, wet summers, cool winters with occasional snow, and the natural biome is either dense deciduous forest or highland prairie. Only in the very far north do you start getting a humid continental climate, with cool summers and bitterly cold winters.

People living in the Great Lands are not going to look or dress like medieval Europeans – they’re going to be generally olive to dark brown in complexion, and they’ll tend to dress pretty lightly in the summertime. I suspect the Tremara (the pseudo-Indo-European people that my protagonists belong to) are going to rather resemble Indians (as in, people from the Indian subcontinent, not Native Americans).

This part of the world will be home to several hominid species at once, each analogous to one of the Standard Fantasy Races found in (e.g.) Dungeons & Dragons. “Common-folk” (humans) can be found just about everywhere on this map. “Elder-folk” (elves) mostly stick to the western Great Lands, and keep to themselves. “Smith-folk” (dwarves) set up holdfasts wherever there’s copper, tin, or iron ore to be found, especially in hilly or mountainous regions. “Sea-folk” (halflings) come from a set of tropical islands far to the east, although a fair number of them have traveled on Sea-Kingdom ships to settle in the Great Lands. “Nomad-folk” or skatoi (orcs) mostly hang out in the colder northern regions, although they like to go raiding into the Great Lands on land or by sea.

Developing lots of neat ideas for this new version of the setting. More to come!

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.

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.

Rethinking the Human Destiny Setting Bible

Rethinking the Human Destiny Setting Bible

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One of my ongoing projects is to create a combination “setting bible” and tabletop RPG sourcebook for the Human Destiny setting. The idea is to codify the setting for myself, and also to make a little money while cross-marketing it to gamers.

The problem all along has been to find the right vehicle – that is, the right game system – for the RPG side of the project. There’s a continuum of potential options here.

At one end of the spectrum, I could design my own game system from scratch. I’ve done a little work in this direction, producing the fragmentary EIDOLON game system. The advantage there is that I would have creative freedom, and could avoid infringing on anyone else’s intellectual property. The drawback is that yet another original game system, one that doesn’t have any external support, acts as a barrier to potential players.

At the other end of the spectrum, I could license an existing and well-known game system and produce an independently published sourcebook for that. GURPS would be an obvious choice, given my publication history, but I’ve also considered a few other systems. For most of the past year, I’ve leaned toward Cortex Prime as a good choice, on the assumption that Fandom’s eventual licensing schemes would be congenial. In general, the advantage of working with an existing game system is that the finished product would be familiar to many potential players, and would have significant ancillary support.

The drawback of using an existing system – and this is a big one – is that most of the best choices have fairly restrictive licensing schemes. I’m a one-man creative operation with a fairly low tolerance for risk. I’m just not interested in a plan that would require me to hire a development staff and try to crowd-fund with a budget of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s why I’ve never seriously considered trying to get a GURPS license, for example. I know people have made a good go of that, but it’s not within my reach.

Recently the folks at Fandom announced their upcoming non-commercial and commercial licenses for Cortex Prime. I can’t speak to how other Cortex fans have reacted to that announcement. From my own perspective only, it looks as if what I would want to do with the system falls between two stools. Non-commercial license means no money at all. Commercial license looks as if it would informally require the development-staff-and-crowdfunding avenue.

Back to the drawing board. Fortunately, there’s another “sweet spot” on that continuum I mentioned earlier. That involves working with a system that’s covered under the Open Game License (OGL).

The OGL is a legal framework which was first established by Wizards of the Coast back in 2000, originally covering the “3.5 edition” of Dungeons & Dragons. Since then, a lot of indie publishers have produced material for a variety of game systems under the OGL.

Working under the OGL, you can use any game mechanics that a publisher has placed under the “Open Content” category, adding your own tweaks to the mechanics and your own new rules systems, and publish the result. There are some legal requirements – you have to include a copy of the OGL in your book, and you can’t expressly claim that your product is associated with the original game. Those aren’t onerous requirements, and they don’t push a project into the staff-and-crowdfunding zone. Plenty of one-man or small-team projects have succeeded under the OGL.

Meanwhile, under the OGL you can also designate your own intellectual property – information about a setting, most often – as “Product Identity” which is still protected by copyright. Which is exactly what I would want to do for game material based on any of my created settings or published fiction.

Right now I’m specifically looking at the fact that the popular SF game Traveller has at least one edition published under the OGL. There’s also a Traveller emulation under its own OGL structure, published as the Cepheus Engine RPG. There’s a whole cottage industry of indie publishers producing material under the Cepheus Engine banner, and some of that material is moving out into a variety of genres. There are Cepheus Engine-based games for hard-SF, swords & sorcery, Old West, and other settings.

The Human Destiny setting isn’t all that Traveller-like in some respects, but I suspect it wouldn’t be all that difficult to produce a Cepheus Engine hack that would do a good job of it. I might even be able to bring in some mechanics from EIDOLON – the two systems aren’t radically different and might hybridize well.

So that’s the current plan for the Human Destiny sourcebook: to rework it as a Cepheus Engine hack and start moving toward independent publication under the OGL. First step in the plan is to start working on the character design rules. I hope to have at least a partial draft of those available as a free release for my patrons by the end of December.