game design – Sharrukin's Palace

Thinking about “Fourth Millennium”

July 7, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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 . . .)

Four Spaceships

March 24, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

Purely for amusement’s sake, here are the GURPS Spaceships writeups for four spacecraft in the Human Destiny setting. I’ve been finding it useful to draw up these ships using the GURPS rules, because they’re a pretty clean (and appropriately generic) system for spaceship design. Naturally, I’ll be adapting these to more system-agnostic terms as I write them up for the Human Destiny sourcebook. You’ll notice I’m already converting certain measurements to the metric system . . .

Human Protectorate Heavy Utility Lander (TL10)

Built on a 1,000-ton (SM+8) 60-meter streamlined hull, this large vehicle was a workhorse of the development of the outer Solar System.

Front Section

[1]: Advanced Metallic Laminate Armor (dDR 10)
[2]: Passenger Seating (60 seats)
[3-6]: Cargo Hold (200 tons)
[core]: Control Room (C8, C/S 7, 4 control stations)

Center Section

[1]: Advanced Metallic Laminate Armor (dDR 10)
[2-6, core]: Cargo Hold (300 tons)

Rear Section

[1]: Advanced Metallic Laminate Armor (dDR 10)
[2-3]: Cargo Hold (100 tons)
[4-5]: Fuel Tank (100 tons hydrogen fuel, 30 mps delta-V)
[6]: Fusion Torch (0.5 G acceleration)

Features

Exposed Radiators

Crew Requirements

Pilot (Lieutenant)
Co-pilot (Sublieutenant)
Communications Operator (Enlisted)
Sensors Operator (Enlisted)

Details

dST/HP 70. HT 12. Hnd/SR -2/5. Move 0.5G/30 mps. Air Speed 2,800 kph. Air Hnd/SR -2/5. SM+8. Loaded mass 1,000 tons. dDR 10. Occupancy 4+60SV. Load 606.4 tons. Cost $28.9 million.

Khedai Hegemony Utility Spaceplane (TL12)

Built on a 1,000-ton (SM+8) 75-meter streamlined hull, this large spaceplane can be found all across the Hegemony. It can ferry passengers and cargo to and from the surface of inhabited worlds, make short journeys in interplanetary space, or serve as auxiliary craft for a starship.

Front Section

[1]: Exotic Laminate Armor (dDR 30)
[2]: Passenger Seating (60 seats)
[3-6]: Cargo Hold (200 tons)
[core]: Control Room (C10, C/S 9, 4 control stations)

Center Section

[1]: Exotic Laminate Armor (dDR 30)
[2-6]: Cargo Hold (250 tons)

Rear Section

[1]: Exotic Laminate Armor (dDR 30)
[2-4]: Cargo Hold (150 tons)
[5]: Engine Room (1 control station, 1 workspace)
[6!]: Reactionless Engine (1 G acceleration)
[core]: Fusion Reactor (de-rated, 1 PP, 3,000 years endurance)

Features

Exposed Radiators
Wings

Crew Requirements

Pilot (Lieutenant)
Co-pilot (Sublieutenant)
Communications Operator (Enlisted)
Sensors Operator (Enlisted)
Technicians x2 (Enlisted)

Details

dST/HP 70. HT 13. Hnd/SR -1/5. Move 1G/c. Air Speed 4,000 kph. Air Hnd/SR +3/6. SM+8. Loaded mass 1,000 tons. dDR 30. Occupancy 6+60SV. Load 606.6 tons. Cost $73.6 million.

Human Protectorate Heavy Utility Vehicle (TL10)

Built on a 100,000-ton (SM+12) 200-meter unstreamlined hull, this ship has a deep and rich history in the development of the Sol system. One of these vehicles, named Enterprise, was the first (and for a long time the only) Hegemony spaceship ever placed under human control.

Under human command, Enterprise spent decades journeying tirelessly through interplanetary space. The ship was used to set up asteroid-mining bases, to place industrial colonies on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, even to venture out to the Kuiper Belt and harvest comets for the terraforming of Mars. Along the way, the ship gave thousands of humans experience in deep-space operations using Hegemony technology. This cultural experience stood them in good stead when the Hegemony unexpectedly opened the way to the stars in the early 23^rd Century.

Front Section

[1]: Advanced Metallic Laminate Armor (dDR 70)
[2]: Comm/Sensor Array – Science (C/S 13, 10 workspaces)
[3]: Habitat (600 CE, 10 workspaces)
[4]: Hangar Bay (3,000 tons capacity, 500 tons/minute launch, 10 workspaces)
[5-6]: Cargo Hold (10,000 tons)
[core]: Control Room (C10, C/S 11, 20 control stations, 10 workspaces)

Center Section

[1]: Advanced Metallic Laminate Armor (dDR 70)
[2]: Cargo Hold (5,000 tons)
[3!]: Factory – Robofac ($10 million/hour capacity, 10 workspaces)
[4!]: Mining (500 tons/hour capacity, 10 workspaces)
[5!]: Refinery (1,500 tons/hour capacity, 10 workspaces)
[6, core]: Fusion Reactor (4 PP, 200 years endurance, 20 workspaces)

Rear Section

[1]: Advanced Metallic Laminate Armor (dDR 70)
[2-4]: Fuel Tank (15,000 tons hydrogen fuel, 180 mps delta-V)
[5-6]: Fusion Rocket (0.01 G acceleration, 20 workspaces)

Features

Exposed Radiators
Spin Gravity (0.5 G)
Total Life Support
Auxiliary Craft: Human Protectorate Heavy Utility Lander x3

Crew Requirements

Bridge Section: 12 officers, 8 enlisted (Captain x1, Commander x1, Subcommander x2, Lieutenant x3, Junior Officers x5, Enlisted x8)
Technical Section: 11 officers, 99 enlisted (Subcommander x1, Lieutenant x3, Junior Officers x7, Enlisted x99)
Flight Crew: 6 officers, 6 enlisted (Lieutenant x3, Junior Officers x3, Enlisted x6)
Administrative Section: 4 officers, 8 enlisted (Subcommander x1, Lieutenant x1, Junior Officers x2, Enlisted x8)
Science Section: 26 officers, 54 enlisted (Subcommander x1, Lieutenant x3, Junior Officers x22, Enlisted x54)
Medical Section: 2 officers, 2 enlisted (Subcommander x1, Lieutenant x1, Enlisted x2)
Services Section: 3 officers, 29 enlisted (Subcommander x1, Lieutenant x1, Junior Officers x1, Enlisted x29)
Passengers: 26 (2 luxury passengers, 24 passengers)
TOTAL: 296 (64 officers, 206 enlisted, 26 passengers) (Captain x1, Commander x1, Subcommander x7, Lieutenant x15, Junior Officers x40, Enlisted x206)

Habitat Allocation

Luxury Cabins x2 (8 CE)
Cabins x145 (290 CE)
Passenger Luxury Cabins x2 (8 CE)
Passenger Cabins x23 (46 CE)
Briefing Room x10 (10 CE)
Establishment x10 (20 CE)
Large Astronomy Lab (20 CE)
Large Chemistry Lab (20 CE)
Large Geology Lab (20 CE)
Large Physics Lab (20 CE)
Office x6 (6 CE)
Sickbay x40 (40 CE)
Steerage Cargo x92 (92 CE)
TOTAL 600 CE

Details

dST/HP 300. HT 14. Hnd/SR -4/5. Move 0.01G/180 mps. SM+12. Loaded mass 100,000 tons. dDR 70. Occupancy 344ASV. Load 18,494.4 tons. Cost $16.34 billion.

Khedai Hegemony Long-Range Exploration Starship (TL12)

This starship, built on a 30,000-ton (SM+11) 150-meter unstreamlined hull, is a mainstay of the Hegemony’s mission to explore and monitor interstellar space. Thousands of ships in this class are constantly on the move throughout the wilderness spaces supervised by the Khedai Hegemony. In particular, ships like this began to fan out from Sol soon after the Conquest.

Early in the 23^rd Century, the Hegemony began to recruit human crew for these exploration missions, permitting them to contribute to surveys within ten parsecs or so of Sol. Later, Aminata Ndoye (one of the first humans to earn officer’s rank in the Interstellar Service) worked aboard several ships of this class. Indeed, she was the first human to command one of them, the Challenger, during its history-making expedition toward the stars of Orion.

Front Section

[1]: Exotic Laminate Armor (dDR 150)
[2]: Comm/Sensor Array – Science (C/S 14, 3 workspaces)
[3]: Open Space (0.5 acres, 3 workspaces)
[4-5]: Habitat (400 CE, 6 workspaces)
[6]: Defensive ECM (-2 to hit, 3 workspaces)
[core]: Control Room (C11, C/S 12, 15 control stations, 3 workspaces)

Center Section

[1]: Exotic Laminate Armor (dDR 150)
[2-3]: Hangar Bay (2,000 tons capacity, 200 tons/minute launch, 6 workspaces)
[4-5]: Cargo Hold (3,000 tons)
[6!]: Factory – Nanofactory ($30 million/hour capacity, 3 workspaces)
[core]: Total Conversion Reactor (5 PP, infinite endurance, 3 workspaces)

Rear Section

[1]: Exotic Laminate Armor (dDR 150)
[2]: Defensive ECM (-2 to hit, 3 workspaces)
[3-4!!]: Reactionless Drive (2 G acceleration, 6 workspaces)
[5-6!!!!]: Super Stardrive (FTL-4, 12 workspaces)

Features

Exposed Radiators
Spin Gravity (0.3 G)
Stealth Hull (-12 to detect)
Total Life Support
Auxiliary Craft: Khedai Hegemony Utility Spaceplane x2

Crew Requirements

Bridge Section: 9 officers, 6 enlisted (Commander x1, Subcommander x1, Lieutenant x2, Junior Officers x5, Enlisted x6)
Technical Section: 5 officers, 40 enlisted (Lieutenant x1, Junior Officers x4, Enlisted x40)
Flight Crew: 4 officers, 8 enlisted (Lieutenant x2, Junior Officers x2, Enlisted x8)
Administrative Section: 3 officers, 5 enlisted (Lieutenant x1, Junior Officers x2, Enlisted x5)
Science Section: 24 officers, 48 enlisted (Subcommander x1, Lieutenant x3, Junior Officers x20, Enlisted x48)
Medical Section: 1 officer, 1 enlisted (Lieutenant x1, Enlisted x1)
Services Section: 1 officer, 11 enlisted (Lieutenant x1, Enlisted x11)
TOTAL: 166 (47 officers, 119 enlisted) (Commander x1, Subcommander x2, Lieutenant x11, Junior Officers x33, Enlisted x119)

Habitat Allocation

Luxury Cabins x2 (8 CE)
Cabins x90 (180 CE)
Briefing Room x6 (6 CE)
Establishment x6 (12 CE)
Astronomy Lab x6 (12 CE)
Biology Lab x6 (12 CE)
Chemistry Lab x6 (12 CE)
Geology Lab x6 (12 CE)
Metallurgy Lab x6 (12 CE)
Physics Lab x6 (12 CE)
Office x4 (4 CE)
Sickbay x20 (20 CE)
Steerage Cargo x98 (98 CE)
TOTAL 400 CE

Details

dST/HP 200. HT 14. Hnd/SR -2/5. Move 2G/c. SM+11. Loaded mass 30,000 tons. dDR 150. Occupancy 184ASV. Load 5,508.4 tons. Cost $14.0 billion.

An Unexpected Opportunity

March 6, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

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.

Echoes

July 1, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

While I continue rooting through my basement, boxing up the last scraps of small items I don’t want to discard, I’m coming across some interesting items.

Back in the 1995-2005 timeframe, I kept many handwritten notes in small notebooks. At the time a lot of my creative thinking happened at the office, or in other places where I didn’t have access to my computer or the Internet, so handwritten notes were very useful. Apparently I still have all of those notebooks, salted away on low shelves or in boxes that haven’t been opened in many years; very few of these got water-damaged in the recent disaster. So, for example, just today I found:

An extensive set of notes titled “Life after Steve Jackson Games,” in which I started planning an independent creative career. Most of that plan doesn’t seem to have survived contact with reality, but a few of its features do seem to have been implemented.
Huge piles of notes from when I was helping to develop setting material for GURPS Traveller, including the Interstellar Wars setting. More piles of notes that eventually went into Transhuman Space.
My own version of the Aldebaran Sector for Traveller, along with a contract (never completed) to write a GURPS Traveller sourcebook titled Grand Frontiers.
Notes and hardcopy of the rules for the Game of Empire system I developed for realm-level play in Traveller. This is the game that I refereed for a bunch of GURPS Traveller fans about 2000, developing a ton of background information (including months’ worth of Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society news items) for the Solomani Rim.
Notes for a new generic RPG system. Apparently I was already thinking in terms of developing my own rules mechanics so as to publish game material without running into licensing issues. Probably never going to be developed now, but still interesting.
Notes for a realm-management game set in Bronze Age Greece. I think this did get deployed in a GURPS campaign I was running back in the day, although one of my players reacted so badly to the system in its first session that the campaign disbanded almost immediately afterward.
Extensive notes for at least three genre settings. One these eventually gave rise to my first complete original novel (the unpublishable one). Another looks very much like an early version of my Human Destiny space opera setting. A third was a fantasy setting I had forgotten about entirely and might now think about revisiting.
Extensive musings on philosophy and theology. I’m almost afraid to re-read these in detail. I’m a cheerful solitary regarding such matters, so it doesn’t concern me that my ideas aren’t in lockstep with any extant school of thought. Still, I suspect the me of 2023 might find the me of circa 2000 kind of hard to take.

Quite the treasure trove. Hard to say whether any of it will ever see the light of day again – it’s not as if I don’t have enough creative work to do already – but it’s still interesting reading. All of it’s going in boxes to be preserved.

The Structure of “Fourth Millennium”

March 18, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Things are moving right along on Architect of Worlds. I’m confident that I’ll be able to hit my objective of page 70 out of 180 by the end of this month, and probably a few pages beyond that. So while I’m working on Architect, I’m also giving some thought to what’s likely to be my next big RPG project: Fourth Millennium.

Fourth Millennium is envisioned as an alternate-historical fantasy, set in the Mediterranean world sometime in the middle of what we would think of as the first century BCE. The setting is the same one in which I’m writing the novel Twice-Crowned – I’ve already written a few short pieces in it too, and will likely write more as the muse moves me.

The underlying game system is probably going to be the Cypher System from Monte Cook Games, under their (very generous) creative license. Assuming I live and stay motivated long enough to produce the whole thing, it’s going to have three major components:

The core Cypher System-compatible rules for building characters and roleplaying in the setting, with rules for not only personal-combat-heavy adventures, but mass combat, social and political conflict, and so on. There will be a magic system based heavily around spirit-derived and divine magic, with a strong trace of neo-Platonist hermeticism as well.
A gazetteer of the Mediterranean world in the setting, somewhat familiar from our own history, but also full of divergences (a surviving Minoan-derived state, a Roman Republic that hasn’t been quite as fortunate but still has the potential to conquer widely, an emerging Hellenistic world-empire derived from the Alexandrian οἰκουμένη, and so on).
At least one One Ring– or Pendragon-inspired “grand campaign” that organizes adventures in annual cycles, letting characters start out as minor figures, work their way up to being movers and shakers, and change the course of the setting’s future history. So (e.g.) in a Roman Grand Campaign, characters might start out as clients supporting an ambitious Roman senator, but while assisting him they would build up their own wealth and clout, eventually setting out on the cursus honorum and standing for the offices of praetor and consul in their own right, all the while dealing with the perennial crises facing the Republic.

It’s that last item that has me cogitating heavily. I’m concerned that a single book that contains all three of these components is going to be huge, especially if I go all-in on building multiple interlocking Grand Campaigns based on different cultures. I could see building at least three of those: one set in the Roman Republic, one in the Hellenistic empire, one in the Minoan-derived culture that occupies an uneasy space between the two.

So suppose I instead build a single book that contains character-design and adventuring rules, the extra rules needed to support Grand Campaign play, and the gazetteer describing the setting. That book would be enough for players and GMs to build their own adventures and campaigns. Big, but not outrageously so. Then there would be one or more follow-on books that describe each Grand Campaign in detail.

The thing I’m wrestling with is, which campaign book to plan to work on first.

The Roman book would have the advantage of being the most well-documented in primary sources and extant fiction, and the most familiar to the audience. No trouble building a plausible political and social system here, with plenty of room for adventures. Of course, Roman society was very problematic by modern standards – strong misogyny, a very equivocal view of LGBT+ behavior and lives, rampant slave-holding. Good portion of the audience would probably be repelled by that, even if I were to work hard to provide alternatives.
The Hellenistic book would be most attractive to me, given that I’m a Hellenophile of long standing, but it would carry a lot of disadvantages. Primary-source documentation of the details of society and politics among the Hellenistic kingdoms isn’t as rich, since most our sources were (of course) Roman. I’d have a harder time developing social and grand-campaign mechanisms for this piece of the setting to the same level of detail. Maybe not quite as much values dissonance for the audience, but the difference would be pretty slim. Hellenistic societies tended to be just as nasty as the Roman by modern standards.
The Minoan-derived society would have its own set of trade-offs. In this case, I’d be making the details up almost out of whole cloth – we’re talking about a culture that just didn’t exist in the corresponding era of our real-world history. Which would probably mean that I’d have to work all the harder to get the audience on board, since this would be the most historical-fantasy piece of the setting. On the other hand, the post-Minoans would be a lot less problematic for the modern audience – very little misogyny or patriarchy, a much more liberal view of LGBT+ people, slavery present but not nearly as prevalent as in Rome or the Hellenistic world. Not to mention, this society’s location between the other two would add a certain degree of tension and potential conflict to the setting, possibly helping to engage the audience.

Mental note: this project is really going to need some effort spent on consent-and-safety tools.

So yeah, in the short run I’m not going to need to make any decisions, but by the time Architect is in release and I’m starting to produce rough-draft material for Fourth Millennium, I’m going to have to have a lot of this figured out.

I’d be interested in hearing from my readers and patrons on this one. If you have any interest in Fourth Millennium at all, which of the three grand-campaign sourcebooks do you think you’d find most interesting and useful? Feel free to drop me a comment or an email if you have any insight.