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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.

Decisions, Decisions

Decisions, Decisions

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A planned part of my creative strategy is not just to write stories and novels, but also to integrate the world-building elements of those projects into tabletop game material that I can also sell. Basically offering myself a license to my own IP, and self-publishing game material via DriveThruRPG or a similar outlet.

That suggests framing that creative material within a genre-agnostic game system. After all, my two primary creative projects involve heroic alternate-world fantasy (The Curse of Steel and its sequels) and relatively hard-SF space opera (the Human Destiny setting). Any game system that could cover both is not going to be strongly bound to any existing setting or genre.

So the question arises: do I build such a system of my own, or do I find an existing one that works for me and has friendly licensing terms?

I have been gathering design notes for a personally owned game system, under the working title of EIDOLON. There would certainly be no licensing issues there. On the other hand, time spent designing a completely new tabletop game is time I’m not writing. Also, a completely new game system would start with zero market presence. Why should anyone buy such a product, when they would almost certainly have to convert the material to their favorite system before using it?

GURPS is certainly a possibility. I’ve been a GURPS player (and writer, and editor) for many years. Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since I did any work for Steve Jackson Games, so I’m no longer in close contact. In any case, the GURPS licensing terms are pretty strict. Far from impossible to work with – I’m certainly aware of other creators who have published their own GURPS material for sale – but maybe more trouble than it’s worth for what I’m planning to do.

I’ve considered using FATE Core, which certainly fits the criteria (setting- and genre-agnostic, and very congenial licensing terms). Unfortunately, that system is a little too rules-light for my taste. I’ve never quite been able to wrap my brain around how it works in play, so writing material for it feels like a bit more of a challenge than I’m after. I may just need a little more crunch in my game rules.

I’ve glanced at a few other systems over the past couple of years – notably the Genesys system from Fantasy Flight Games – but nothing has quite hit the sweet spot I’m looking for.

Now I see that there’s a new edition of the Cortex system out – the Cortex Prime core rules. These were Kickstarted back in 2017 and have just been released to the public.

Cortex Prime doesn’t look like a playable game right out of the box, so much as it is a toolkit for constructing playable games. Well, that’s true for systems like GURPS or FATE as well, so that’s certainly not a drawback. Reading through the core book, I’m getting a good feeling for the system’s crunchiness and flexibility. Previous editions of Cortex have carried fairly generous licensing terms, and the current publisher seems interested in following suit.

Hmm. I may have to contact them and see if this would be a good fit for what I want to do. If it does work out, then EIDOLON may go on the back burner. Or off the stove entirely.

A Bit of Insight

A Bit of Insight

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I think I may have finally gotten myself unblocked with respect to one of my long-term creative projects. The project in question is the Human Destiny setting.

The premise is that sometime in the middle of the 21st century, an interstellar civilization arrives in the Sol system and (without much effort) conquers humanity. It’s a strangely benign sort of conquest, though. The aliens don’t have any interest in us as slaves, nor are they motivated by a desire to take the solar system’s natural resources for their own benefit. Their goals seem mostly to involve . . . nannying us. Their laws are fairly strict, backed up by almost-universal surveillance, but enforcement seems to be non-violent, completely incorruptible, and even-handed. Meanwhile, all of us are provided a standard of living better than ever before, without anyone being required to work for any of it.

Naturally, a lot of humans resent all this mightily, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. The longer-term question is why all this has happened. What motivates the aliens?

I’ve written and published a couple of stories in this setting: “Pilgrimage” and “Guanahani.” I have two or three more stories in my development pile too. I’m fairly sure there’s a robust series, maybe even a few novels, in there. Yet, even after years of cogitation, I’ve never been able to get the idea to launch.

The main problem is that the setting does away with a lot of human agency just by its premise. Great, the aliens have come along and solved a lot of our problems, including many of the ones driven by human conflict and misbehavior. There are certainly stories left to be told, but a lot of the writer’s tools for plot and character development are set aside already.

It’s probably telling that almost all the stories I’ve written in this setting so far involve breakdowns of the alien surveillance apparatus. It’s kind of like Star Trek‘s transporters – they’re so useful for short-circuiting plots that a writer often has to justify taking them off-line before a story can happen.

There’s also the aliens’ motivation. They’re here because they want us to survive and evolve into the kind of species that actually can play a role on the galactic stage. That means human psychology needs to change. We need to learn to live with each other and tolerate the Other, we need to get better at understanding and preserving the big systems that keep us alive, we need to start thinking on much larger scales in both space and time.

So how do I write stories about that, in which the aliens demonstrate their motivations through conflict and plot rather than by simply telling the reader what’s up?

I was idly thinking about this the other day – a lot of my creative work happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else entirely. Then my mind made a connection with what I was doing with my hands and my forebrain at the time.

I was idly playing a game on my iPad, you see.

Terraforming Mars has been out for several years as a tabletop game, and now has a pretty good adaptation as a mobile app as well. It’s one of those wonderfully thematic board games that does such a superb job of making a complex subject playable and interesting to the layman.

Terraforming Mars assumes an era of exploration and colonization throughout the solar system, starting either late in this century or sometime in the next. The centerpiece of that era is a generations-long project to, as it says on the tin, terraform Mars – transform that planet into an at least marginally habitable world, where human beings can live freely with little or no life-support equipment.

Well. Suddenly I could see a lot of possible context for the Human Destiny setting, Suppose the aliens, aside from simply providing a decent quality of life for most humans, also opened the door for this kind of expansion into the solar system? If humans could settle on Mars, cooperate with each other in a project that might not pay off for many human lifetimes, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for some of us to demonstrate the citizen-of-the-galaxy mindset the aliens are looking for?

Right away, my brain started working on ways to get my character Aminata Ndoye – the protagonist of “Pilgrimage” and a few of the not-yet-published stories – involved in Martian terraforming and solar-system expansion. That in turn gave me a whole raft of new ideas about the Human Destiny setting as a whole.

All of which is to say that I might be turning back to that project, finally. My creative plate is rather full at the moment, between working on my Krava stories, and Architect of Worlds, and wanting to flesh out the EIDOLON game system a bit more. Still, as 2020 winds down I think I might be able to revisit the Human Destiny setting, rework the core documentation for that, and start making some of that information available. Readers of this blog, and my patrons over on Patreon, can expect to see some results from that over the next couple of months.

Revised Map of the Great Lands

Revised Map of the Great Lands

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Lately I’ve been working on back-history and geography for The Curse of Steel, and for the EIDOLON-based world-pack I’m writing for parallel publication. This has caused me to experience greater and greater frustration with the world map I built last fall . . . so yesterday I bit the bullet and got to work revising that.

Fortunately, the Wonderdraft tool makes this kind of work very easy. As of this evening, here’s the result – a full Version 2.0 of the Great Lands map:

Here’s a link to the DeviantArt page for the work, in case you’d like to look at or download a more high-resulution image.

This is a big step forward! Next I’m going to be using this map as the basis for a kind of “historical atlas,” a series of schematic images that will help me nail down the historical timeline. Some of those may end up going in the world-pack too, but we’ll see how well they turn out. If this does nothing more than help me visualize how Krava’s world evolved, mission accomplished.

Status Report: 28 March 2020

Status Report: 28 March 2020

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Just a quick post to report on how things are going here.

We’re all in lockdown, with my son the only one who’s still leaving the house for work each day. He works at a small factory that supports the food-delivery industry; as you can imagine, they’re doing an absolutely booming business right now. He’s earning lots of overtime, and he and I joke that he’s the only one in the family that’s really “essential” at the moment. At least my job is secure for when things start getting back to normal, and I’m still getting paid in full for the duration. We have plenty of savings in any case, so as long as money remains good in the first place, we should be able to weather the storm.

The psychological toll seems more acute. I have plenty to do, and my son has his work and his online friends. On the other hand, my wife misses her classes and social contacts, and I think my daughter is going slowly mad, stuck in the house without her usual busy school schedule.

For my part, I’ve been having the usual upper-respiratory issues that always hit me, when the dogwood and maple trees do their thing every spring. I’ve been watching my symptoms like a hawk, and taking my temperature regularly, but so far I haven’t seen any reason to push the panic button. All that means is that I’m in a constant state of low-level apprehension rather than mortal terror, but if that’s the worst I have to live with over the next few months, I count myself blessed. A lot of people are having it far worse.

As for the creative work which is the normal reason for this blog, I’ve been nicely productive ever since I came home. I’ve been working on a more extended system for designing Iron Age villages, an expansion of the “extended character” work I’ve posted about recently. That, in turn, is helping me to visualize the social setting of The Curse of Steel much more completely. If and when I start the second-draft rewrite – which may now be a matter of days – I think I’ll have a much better picture to draw upon.

Meanwhile, I’m also working on the first draft for the EIDOLON “core book,” the basic character-description rule set that I’ll be self-publishing as a basis for releasing world-building material for the game market. I’m also working on the Tremara “culture book” that’s likely to be the first major release for the EIDOLON system. There’s still plenty of work to do on both items, but there’s real progress.

I think April may be the first month that my Patreon campaign gets started again; I’ll have enough new material that patrons might find interesting or useful. If you’re interested in signing up as my patron, please have a visit to my creator page and drop a pledge. Thanks!

EIDOLON: Examples of the Extended Character (I)

EIDOLON: Examples of the Extended Character (I)

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My employer has sent me home for what may be the next couple of months, since I’m in a “high-risk” category for COVID-19 (over 50 and with a chronic health condition that might complicate if I come down with the disease). So here’s a great opportunity to work on EIDOLON and some of the world-building for The Curse of Steel. I may be posting a lot more frequently for a while . . .

For today, here are some notes I’ve put together over the past few days. Here I’m starting to puzzle out how the EIDOLON “extended character” will work in practice. I’m working with the home society for The Curse of Steel here – the Tremara or “Mighty Folk,” a tribal Iron Age culture somewhat reminiscent of pre-Roman Celts. These notes aren’t polished rules material, but if you refer to last week’s post you may get some insight into what I’m working on here.

In Tremara society, the smallest monetary unit is the copper penny (cp). A copper penny is roughly the value of a pound of barley.

As a practical matter, most Tremara tribes don’t coin copper pennies. Most transactions at that level are handled through barter or exchange of favors. The most common coin in circulation is the silver penny (sp), which is worth 12 cp. Very wealthy Tremara sometimes use gold coins for big transactions; these are either obtained in foreign trade or minted by the richest tribes. The gold piece (gp) is worth 20 sp or 240 cp.

Tremara agriculture is based largely upon barley. A bushel of barley weighs about 48 pounds, and so is worth about 4 sp.

Assume an average person requires 600 pounds of barley per year. This constitutes a subsistence diet, without much variety or luxury, but enough to support a healthy life. This comes to 600 cp per year or 50 cp per month. Assume another 10 cp per month for other expenses (clothing, tools, maintenance of housing, and so on). Hence the bare minimum for subsistence living will be 60 cp (5 sp) per month, or 720 cp (60 sp) per year.

Proposed rule for Social Standing in EIDOLON:

In any EIDOLON setting, the benchmark figure for Social Standing is a cost-of-living equal to the bare minimum for subsistence living in that setting. Social Standing for any individual equals log-2 of (his personal cost-of-living expenses, divided by the benchmark figure), rounded to the nearest integer.

Social Standing can be modified by conditions of legal or social privilege, although these modifiers will not normally amount to more than plus or minus 1.

Farming in the Iron Age

Tremara Agriculture

Tremara characters can own several Assets related to agriculture:

  • Crop Land (measured in acres) – cleared flat land of good quality that can be used to raise barley. Only half of the Crop Land is planted each year, the other half being left fallow.
  • Pasture (measured in acres) – cleared land that doesn’t have to be flat or of the best quality, which is set aside for grazing. Can also include land left forested for pigs to forage.
  • Horses
  • Cattle
  • Small Animals – some combination of sheep, goats, and pigs.

These Assets are operated by three classes of Workers:

  • Farmers – a character serving as a Farmer must have the Professional Skill Farmer at +2 or better.
  • Herdsmen – a character serving as a Herdsman must have the Professional Skill Herdsman at +2 or better. Each Herdsman is assumed to work with a pair of dogs trained for animal handling.
  • Farm Laborers – a character serving as a Farm Laborer needs no specific Professional Skill, but must have Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Intelligence at +0 or better. A Farm Laborer provides unskilled labor, which is often seasonal in nature (grain harvest, shearing, milking, herding pigs, and so on). Farm Laborers may be slaves.

Agricultural Assets must be supported as follows, or else they can produce no profits:

  • One Farmer for every 24 acres of Crop Land (round up)
  • One Farm Laborer for every 12 acres of Crop Land (round up)
  • One Cattle for every 6 acres of Crop Land (round up)
  • One Herdsman for every 80 Horses or Cattle, or for every 120 Small Animals (combine fractions and then round up)

Farm animals must be supported by Pasture: 0.5 acres of Pasture for every Small Animal, and 4 acres of Pasture for every Horse or Cattle. Any animals not supported by Pasture are lost.

Each year, Agricultural Assets will produce profits:

  • Per acre of Crop Land: 210 cp (350 pounds of barley, of which 140 pounds must be set aside for next year’s planting)
  • Per Horse: 150 cp (loan or sale of animals, possibly stud fees)
  • Per Cattle: 100 cp (milk, leather, meat)
  • Per Small Animal: 20 cp (milk, wool, leather, meat)

Each year, the farm workers must be paid:

  • Per Farmer: 2,700 cp
  • Per Herdsman: 1,800 cp
  • Per Farm Laborer: 900 cp

Example: A Prosperous Farmer

An independent Tremara land-holder maintains his own small farming settlement:

  • 48 acres of Crop Land
  • 60 acres of Pasture
  • 12 Cattle
  • 24 Small Animals

The land-holder himself is a Farmer. His wife and eldest son serve as Farm Laborers, without needing to be paid (they are supported by his profits). He has also hired a second Farmer and a Herdsman as farm-hands, and he owns two slaves who serve as additional Farm Laborers. All his labor requirements are met. He has enough Cattle to support his Crop Land.

The land-holder’s farm produces 11,760 cp per year (10,080 cp in profit from the barley harvest, 1,200 cp from the Cattle, and 480 cp from the Small Animals). He must pay his labor 6,300 cp per year (2,700 cp for the Farmer, 1,800 cp for the Herdsman, and 1,800 cp for the two Farm Laborers). He makes a clear profit of 5,460 cp per year. Divided among himself and his four dependents (including his elderly mother and a daughter too young to work), this comes to 1,092 cp per year per person. His Social Standing rounds up to +1.

Example: A Chariot-Lord

A Tremara chariot-lord owns three small farming villages, scattered across several miles of countryside. These amount to the following Assets:

  • 1,000 acres of Crop Land
  • 1,400 acres of Pasture
  • 40 Horses
  • 260 Cattle
  • 400 Small Animals

None of the chariot-lord’s personal Company (his household) are working as Farmers, Herdsmen, or Farm Laborers. He needs 42 Farmers, 84 Farm Laborers, and 8 Herdsmen to maintain his lands. He has more than enough Cattle to support his Crop Land.

The chariot-lord’s lands produce 250,000 cp per year (210,000 cp in the barley harvest, 6,000 cp from his Horses, 26,000 cp from his Cattle, and 8,000 cp from his Small Animals). He must pay 203,400 cp per year for labor (113,400 cp for his Farmers, 75,600 cp for his Farm Laborers, and 14,400 cp for his Herdsmen). His annual profits are 46,600 cp. Divided among himself and three dependents (wife and two children), this comes to 11,650 cp per year per person. This chariot-lord’s Social Standing rounds off to +4.

Some final comments:

So far, I’ve been working mostly on the left-hand side of the diagram in last week’s post: the income and profits generated by a character’s Assets and Workers. I haven’t done too much yet on the right-hand side: the hirelings and support staff that can make a wealthy character’s life better. I’ll need to develop both sides before I can lay out what a wealthy Tremara chariot-lord’s household really looks like! More on that as my enforced vacation continues.

EIDOLON: The Extended Character, Revisited

EIDOLON: The Extended Character, Revisited

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As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been working on a way to not just model individual characters in the EIDOLON ruleset, but to model their social connections. The idea is to have a simple set of rules that I can use to describe the intricate web of relationships that any character will have, as a member of a complex society.

I think I may be getting close to what I want. Consider the following diagram:

A model for the extended character in EIDOLON

You’ll notice a certain confusion of vocabulary here; I’m not sure yet what words would be best to describe the various components of this model. Here’s the idea, though.

At the top, we have the extended character itself. Perhaps this is a single individual, perhaps it includes that person and some of her partners and dependents. Or perhaps it’s a group of unrelated characters who have agreed to throw in their fortunes together: an adventuring party, the officers of a mercenary band, the crew of a privately held starship, und so weiter. In any case, all the Members (or Household, or Company, or whatever term makes sense in the setting) will share their finances equally, sharing the same social standing score once the model is complete.

On the left, we have various forms of Income. Some of this may be External Income – simple pay for the professional occupations of the Members, say. On the other hand, the Members may also own certain Assets, pieces of wealth-producing property. Most likely these Assets will require some kind of labor to actually produce their own Income. A medieval lord will need peasants to farm his land, an ancient tycoon needs slaves to operate his mines, a starship captain needs crewmen to run his ship. These workers, employees, or vassals will be paid for their labor, but by working on the Assets they produce Income for the owners, in the form of profit.

Income is on the left, outgo on the right. The Members will probably spend some of their resources on simple consumption – food, clothing, housing, luxury goods, entertainment, all at whatever level they can afford. They may also have people hired to provide them with personal service: a wealthy woman’s impeccable butler, a warlord’s kept courtesan, a personal clerk or physician, whatever might be available and appropriate in the setting. These hirelings or henchmen are also paid, but they produce no Income or Profit, they simply work to improve the quality of life for the Members.

The Members have to make sure the books balance – they can’t spend more on luxuries and personal service than they bring in! Any given setting book written under EIDOLON would lay out various structures like this, with rules for various Assets and how they would have to be worked, and lists of available workers and henchmen.

Here’s one simple result of this system: the Social Standing score of all the Members depends solely on the amount spent on Consumption and Staff. I’m taking an almost Veblenist approach here, claiming that status in almost any society is strongly correlated to the level of conspicuous consumption. Not a bad assumption, I think, for most RPG worlds and fictional universes.

There’s one more neat feature of this model: it’s possible to nest it. The character(s) who make up one set of Members may be getting paid for their services by someone higher up. Likewise, each of the workers or henchmen that one character pays may be keeping her own Household at a lower level.

For example, I’ve started to work out the details here using features of Tremara society, the setting of The Curse of Steel. A given Tremara chariot-warrior will own many hundreds of acres of cleared land, with peasants to manage his herds of cattle and horses and raise an annual crop of barley. If we wanted to zoom in on those peasants, then each peasant household could be described at finer detail using this same model. Meanwhile, the spearmen, bards, and other specialists who live in the lord’s hall and provide service for him could also have families, dependents, or property of their own.

This is a model I think I can use extensively in worldbuilding work, in a variety of settings; it should make an interesting innovation for the EIDOLON ruleset. Progress!

EIDOLON: The Extended Character

EIDOLON: The Extended Character

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I’ve gotten kind of stuck, and it’s affecting three separate projects at once. I suppose it’s another example of the world-building rabbit hole that I tend to fall into. Although in this case, if I may mix a metaphor, I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Before I dig deep into the second-draft rewrite of The Curse of Steel, I want to revise my earlier, rather sketchy, world-building work about Krava’s home society. That should help me ground the story better in the details of her situation: a noble warrior’s only child, who suddenly inherits his lands and possessions at the same moment that she becomes a leading figure in her tribe. There are a lot of moments in the story where Krava deals with money, with groups of warriors, with chains of command and fealty . . . and it would be good to have a better image of how her tribal society (the Tremara, or “Mighty Folk”) organize such things.

The more I think about that, the more time I’ve spent turning some of my previous bits of world-building and game design over in my head, most notably the analysis I did of ancient Greek society in GURPS terms. Earlier this month, I spent a week or so on a similar analysis of Tremara economics and social structure – how many peasant families are needed to support one chariot-driving warrior, and so on.

That did help me get a more realistic picture of population sizes and social stratification in Tremara culture, so that helped. But then, my mind tripped and fell down the rabbit hole. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about something for the EIDOLON project. (As a reminder, EIDOLON is the not-quite-a-full-RPG I’m designing, a universal character description system that should be easily convertible to any other published RPG rule-set, so I can publish world-building material in a game-agnostic manner.)

The idea is that an individual character isn’t just a collection of aptitudes and skills. She’s going to have a place in society, a role, a specific status in the social hierarchy. Most RPGs tend to gloss over this factor. Characters tend to be socially unpinned, wandering adventurers without ties to the community around them, even in settings that ostensibly involve dense social structures.

GURPS at least attempts to account for social standing, with a set of character traits like Wealth, Social Status, Rank, Social Regard, Social Stigma, and so on. It still tends to treat characters in isolation, each one’s place in society always independent of every other’s. For example, a GURPS character has a Cost of Living that’s tied to his Social Status, but that’s highly abstracted. A socially prominent character probably has many other characters working to support his rank and status, but GURPS just elides all that into a monthly expenditure.

So it occurred to me: why not have rules in EIDOLON to support the description of characters (or groups of characters) who have extensive social capital? Instead of just having a bare-bones “wealth” trait, or a simple ranking of social status, why not lay out exactly what that means?

So, for example, take a prominent noble warrior in Krava’s world, such as her father Derga at the beginning of The Curse of Steel. Considered as an adventurer, Derga has a lot of gear and equipment that go with him when he travels: fine clothes, some armor, weapons, a chariot and a team of ponies to draw it, all of the finest quality. Considered as a lord, however, Derga has a lot of things that wouldn’t go on a typical RPG’s character sheet: agricultural land, herds of cattle and horses, a fine mead-hall to live in. He also has the people that are loyal to him and are needed to support his assets and lifestyle: subordinate chariot warriors, spearmen, craftsmen to maintain all his goods, someone to manage his household while he’s away, all the peasant families who work his land, and so on. Meanwhile, Krava herself is Derga’s dependent – she gains benefit from all of his holdings and wealth, even if she doesn’t control them yet.

So I’m working on a set of rules and techniques that EIDOLON can use to describe a situation like that. Since EIDOLON is intended to be a “universal” system, of course, I’m hoping the framework will be extensible to cover a variety of situations: adventuring or mercenary companies, commercial starship crew, modern small businesses, and so on. Any situation in which characters have enough social status and wealth to have assets, property, and hirelings to help maintain it all.

I think I’m getting close to a first-draft design for all this. Once that’s done, I can do a lot of the detailed world-building for Krava’s setting, which in turn will give me material for the first EIDOLON “setting book,” and will also let me get started on the second draft for The Curse of Steel.

It’s annoying when my different projects get tangled up, as if I had discovered unexpected dependencies in an elaborate Gantt chart. Should be productive in the long run, though.

Projects for 2020: EIDOLON

Projects for 2020: EIDOLON

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Rough draft of a logo for EIDOLON

As I spin up to self-publish more material in the new year, there are two major tracks on which I’ll be spending time and effort. One is to publish fiction. The other is to publish game-ready world-building material.

Pursuing that second goal, the first step is to design a partial roleplaying-game system that fits my preferences, isn’t under anyone else’s intellectual property, and should be relatively easy to convert to any RPG rules system a reader might prefer. That process is well underway, and the working title for the system is EIDOLON.

From the draft Introduction for the core EIDOLON book:

The word eidolon comes from an ancient Greek word (εἴδωλον) which had several meanings. An eidolon was a phantom or apparition, the likeness of a dead man that appeared to the living. More generally, it could be a figure, image, or shape, a representation of a real thing.

EIDOLON – the set of rules and guidelines in this book – is a system for quickly and consistently describing fictional characters.

Using the systems in this book, you should be able to describe a fictional character in enough detail to use it in your own creative work, or in a live-action or tabletop roleplaying game (RPG). You should be able to easily understand characters described by others using the same rules. You should also be able to convert from EIDOLON to your favorite commercial game systems, and back again as needed.

One thing EIDOLON is not – at least not yet – is a complete RPG. Every tabletop RPG provides a system for describing characters so that they can be used in the game . . . but they also include systems for designing those characters, for resolving situations in which characters must overcome obstacles, and for gaming out various forms of conflict. Although this book does include a very basic challenge-resolution mechanic, none of those other components are here. You will not be able to use EIDOLON for live-action or tabletop roleplaying without doing some additional work!

On the other hand, we plan to publish future source material for roleplaying games, based on the EIDOLON rules. These “setting books” should therefore be easy to convert and use in other, more complete RPG systems.

I’m envisioning this core book as being about 20-25 pages, to be published as a PDF on a “pay what you want” basis. At least for now, I intend to hold the copyright to the core book in my own name. As this effort matures I’ll probably release the system under some form of open-gaming license, so others can easily use it to publish their own work. Once the core book is finished, I’ll be ready to start publishing world-building material under the EIDOLON system.

My patrons will see partial drafts of the core book as I work on it, and even those at the lowest level of patronage will get a free copy of the finished product.

Status Report (28 December 2019)

Status Report (28 December 2019)

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I’ve been busy with several projects over the past couple of weeks.

The foremost item, of course, is spinning up the second-draft rewrite of the Curse of Steel.

This has been a bit harder than I thought it would be at first. The more I examine and re-read the first draft, the more I realize that it needs extensive surgery. Turns out that I’ve written a rather complex story, with references to back-story, a bunch of subplots, an antagonist who isn’t the primary villain, a primary villain whose actions are largely invisible to the viewpoint character, setup for the later novels, and so on. There are lots of loose bits of plot-thread that I need to either tie off or properly anchor into the narrative. I’m having some trouble teasing all of this out and keeping track of it.

So I’ve been taking a lot of notes, and reviewing the details of three-act structure, and trying very hard to ignore Hero’s Journey hand-waving, and generally flailing about. I’m sure things will settle down before long, but at the moment the process is kind of painful.

One thing I’ve started to experiment with is using a bit of software to help lay out the story structure and start bringing order to the chaos. I’ve invested in a product called Causality, which is mostly designed for story-boarding screenplays but can also be configured to assist with novel-writing. It’s an interesting approach – one builds a narrative from the individual dramatic beats up, grouping those into scenes and chapters, tracking what characters are involved, and so on. Here’s a sample of what I’ve done so far with The Curse of Steel:

Storyboarding for what’s currently Chapter One.

I’m just getting started with the software, learning its functions, but it does promise to help me make sense of the novel I’ve already written, enough that I can tighten it up and make it publishable.

Meanwhile, on another track, I’ve started pulling my world-building notes together, with the goal of making those available via my Patreon and eventually self-publishing them in PDF form.

One piece of that project involves designing a general character- and setting-description format, so I can publish game-ready material for sale without stepping on anyone else’s intellectual property. That’s actually moving along fairly well. I’ve laid out how to describe a character’s untrained aptitudes and trained skills. and I’ve started on sections laying out how to describe things like social status, membership and rank in an organization, personality traits, and so on. All of this is looking like it will end up as a 20-25 page document. The working title for this not-quite-a-complete-roleplaying-game thing is Eidolon.

Once Eidolon is in working order, that should open the door for me to start publishing world-building material for people to use. Actually opening up my Patreon campaign for contributions will hinge on how close Eidolon is to a complete rough draft, and how close I am to being ready to bang out chapters of the revised novel. Probably not in January 2020, but maybe by February.