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Planning for December 2025

Planning for December 2025

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November was another mixed bag, due to a bout of illness and the need to finish preparing for Philcon 2025. I’ve been doing okay on staying ahead of schedule with my university courses – and getting top-notch grades, too, which is a morale booster! A couple of important creative projects have been pushed to the back burner for a while, though. Now that Philcon is over, I’m hoping to get back to making good progress on those.

Philcon 2025 After-Action Report

Philcon was a blast, by the way. A few minor stumbles, but on the whole I think it was a good con.

One of the two RPG events I drew up didn’t happen, for lack of players. I think I’ve concluded that Friday evening is just not the right time to try running a tabletop game at Philcon. If I do any games at future cons I think I’m just going to draw up one for Saturday evening.

My seminar ran into some trouble when I was unable to project slides, but I had a backup plan for that. I was able to direct the audience to the slide deck on this site, and most of them were following along on their phones. Lots of good questions afterward, and I sold and signed every single copy of Architect of Worlds that I had with me. Could have sold more copies, most likely.

(A surprising number of people at Philcon knew who I was as soon as Architect was mentioned. I’m beginning to think that book has gotten more penetration in the niche “SF creatives” market than I expected.)

The panels I was on all went off well. I particularly enjoyed the one I did on Friday evening with Jim Cambias, Andy Campbell, and Michael Ryan (on science-fiction gaming) and the one on Sunday afternoon with Charles Gannon and Dennis Myers (on exoplanetary science). Both of those moderated by Jennifer Povey, who’s pretty skilled. Being a panel moderator is tough work, and I always appreciate when it’s well done.

I also picked up information for some of the spring and summer conventions located closer to home – I may see if I can get onto the programming dockets for one or more of those.

Anyway, what follows is the tentative plan for December.

University Studies

I’ve lost a little ground, but I’m still ahead of schedule on both courses, and my grades so far have been sterling. It helps that I seem to have done a lot better job wrapping my brain around differential equations than I did the last time I studied them, forty years ago.

Objectives for December include finishing Topic 3 and the third graded assignment for my astronomy course, and finishing units 4-6 and the next two graded assignments for my mathematics course.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I had hoped to finish “The Spooky Season” in November, but here it is December and I’m still writing the Halloween-themed story. Finishing that is going to be the objective for the coming month. Good news is that I still seem to be bringing in readers. Lower Decks may have been over for a year, but it seems that people still want more stories about the Warp Drive Five.

The objective for December is to complete “The Spooky Season” and start on the next story.

Architect of Worlds & Conductor of Cultures

The next minor version of the Cultural Evolution Game is mechanics-complete, and I’ve made good progress on some of the explanatory and supporting text. I’m fairly certain I’ll have a new partial draft ready for collaborators and playtesters to look at, hopefully by mid-December.

The objectives for December are:

  • Complete a minor rewrite (version 0.3) of the Cultural Evolution Game, including a substantial portion of the supplementary material, and submit that to playtesters for comment
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Conductor of Cultures
  • Begin researching and drafting a new edition of “Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller“
  • Reconstruct a formal errata list for Architect of Worlds, so readers can see what’s been fixed in each minor-version release so far
  • Continue to collect research for a potential second edition of the book, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

The Human Destiny Universe

I’ve been able to collect some notes and do some back-of-brain game design for a version 0.60 of the “Human Destiny Sourcebook.” In particular, I think I’ve settled on the underlying game system for it, and I’m kind of kicking myself for not considering this one before. Version 0.60 is going to be designed around the FATE system published by Evil Hat Productions.

The objective for December is to continue work on a version 0.60 of the “Human Destiny Sourcebook,” with the understanding that it may be some time before I have a complete draft to share.

Upcoming Conventions

As mentioned, I’m interested in some other SF conventions that take place a little closer to home. The ones I’m specifically looking at include Balticon, Capclave, and RavenCon.

The objective for December is to apply for programming seats at Balticon 2026, Capclave 2026, and RavenCon 2026, and begin planning for possible appearances at these three conventions.

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.

The Human Destiny Sourcebook

The Human Destiny Sourcebook

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Okay, step one is finished. I’ve brushed off some old skills from my “writing proposals for GURPS sourcebooks” days, and put together an outline for what will probably be my first self-published RPG sourcebook.

I don’t have a nicely evocative working title yet, so this is just The Human Destiny Sourcebook for now. If everything goes as planned, the final shape of this will be a sourcebook for the Cortex Prime game system, about 36,000 words or a 72-page PDF. Aside from being a “bible” for the Human Destiny universe, the book will also describe three different campaign settings:

  • Human citizens on conquered Earth, striving for meaningful lives and personal status in a post-scarcity society
  • Human colonists and terraformers elsewhere in the Sol system, facing difficult technical and ecological challenges
  • First human officers and crew aboard a starship, exploring the galaxy

Each campaign setting will involve a slightly different application of the Cortex Prime rules, and there will also be guidelines for moving characters from one campaign setting to another. (After all, the primary character in my Human Destiny stories, Aminata Ndoye, is probably going to pass through all three settings in the course of her career.)

If and when the folks at Fandom get their new Cortex Creator Studio set up, I’ll push to get this project published through that venue. In the meantime, this will be the project I work on for their “creator confab” workshop in December.

Plans for December

Plans for December

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been making slow progress on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands. I was a bit blocked for most of November, with a sequence of scenes just not coming clear, but I think I’ve pushed past that obstacle.

My original plan was to have 15-20 kilowords of the draft finished by the end of November, and release that for my patrons, but that doesn’t appear likely to happen.

Therefore, there will be no charged release on Patreon again this month. I may have a free short story to share on this blog and with my patrons by the end of November; we’ll see how the Thanksgiving holiday goes.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been considering the Cortex Prime game system as a potential vehicle for publishing game material related to my literary projects. That’s looking more likely by the day. In particular, I’ve learned that Fandom (the publisher) plans to set up a new version of the Cortex Creator Studio which supported earlier versions of the game. Once that’s in place, it should permit me to write and release game material under fairly congenial licensing terms.

Meanwhile, starting on 4 December Fandom will be holding a “Cortex Creator Confab,” a workshop of sorts, which will allow potential creators to get some exposure and feedback on early drafts of their work. That looks like a superb opportunity for me to get started.

Upon consideration, I’ve decided that the first setting I’m going to try to write up isn’t Krava’s world, it’s going to be the Human Destiny space-opera setting. The end result will hopefully be a complete, Cortex-driven RPG that allows players to take on the role of humans living as subjects of a benevolent (but demanding) alien interstellar empire. I’m envisioning rules that will permit the game to take place on Earth, among the colonized worlds of the Sol system, or out on the interstellar stage.

So, this is what the plan for the remainder of November and the whole month of December looks like:

  • Continue working on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands, with the goal of having a significant chunk of the draft ready for patrons sometime in December.
  • A crash project to write up a big chunk of the Human Destiny setting in the form of a draft RPG based on Cortex Prime, to be submitted for the December workshop. This material should make a good release for my patrons too, and I may post excerpts from it here in the blog as well.
  • I’ve started reading the next self-published book that’s likely to get a review here. Look for that sometime in December.
  • Finally, I have a couple of partial short stories that I may complete and publish as free releases over the next couple of months.

More than enough to keep me busy through the holidays, I should think.