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Status Report (27 March 2021)

Status Report (27 March 2021)

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I swear, sometimes my muse has the attention span of a squirrel.

My plan for March was to release a new minor update to the Architect of Worlds partial draft, and then write several more chapters of The Sunlit Lands so I could send out a good-sized chunk of that as a charged release for my patrons.

Architect of Worlds did get bumped up to Version 0.4 as of last week – a bunch of tweaks, some of them substantive, many of them driven by the flood of good feedback I’ve received from Brett Evill since the beginning of the year. With that out of the way, I was all set to buckle down and concentrate on The Sunlit Lands. I expected to be finished through Chapter Six or Seven and about 20,000 words by the end of March.

Meanwhile, I posted a couple of weeks ago about an old Traveller project, the Game of Empire rules that I originally developed about twenty years ago. At some time in the near future, I intend to revisit that project and produce a new version of those rules, possibly working toward publishing them as a paid product on DriveThruRPG. I hadn’t intended to work on that just yet, though – Krava’s story was calling me!

Yet early this week, I got the first hint of an idea for a Traveller setting that could act as a test-bed for Game of Empire. It’s a “Milieu Zero” concept of sorts, a single world striving to establish a new interstellar empire after a Long Night. Every day, while I worked on projects for my day job and made progress with Krava’s story, the Traveller idea kept growing in the back of my head, grabbing hold and not letting go.

Today I sat down to try to jot down some notes and get it out of my system, so I could get back to work on Krava . . . and new material just poured out onto the page. Over 3,000 words of it since I got up this morning. Not to mention that I’ve already come up with at least two or three ideas for short fiction, attached to this setting.

Well. I know not to argue when my muse is at work. Even if I wish she were more consistent.

Apparently, by the end of March, I’m going to have something new and worth sharing, it just isn’t going to be enough of The Sunlit Lands to meet my objective. Nor will this block of new Traveller material be useful as a charged release, since I’d like to share it widely and attract some attention to the potential project.

So here’s the (revised) plan for the last few days of March:

  • There will be no charged release for my patrons this month. (Again.)
  • I should have about 5-6000 words of new Traveller material that will be posted here, shared with my patrons, and possibly shared via social media as well. This will be a free release.
  • I still need to finish and publish a book review for the month of March. I’ve already selected and read the book, I just need to bang out the review.

We’ll see if April goes any differently. At least I seem to have gotten out of the creative slough I was mired in for most of February and the first week or so of March. There’s a good chance I’ll be able to produce a worthwhile amount of material next month.

Looking Backward: Game of Empire

Looking Backward: Game of Empire

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One of the more interesting phases of my creative career was my involvement with the Traveller tabletop roleplaying game. Between 1999 and 2005, I wrote, co-authored, or edited at least seven books for the GURPS Traveller product line. In fact, for much of that time, I was effectively the backup Line Editor, assisting Loren K. Wiseman in that capacity, and even taking over entirely for a few months at one point. It was a neat experience; I kind of miss it even today.

In 2000, I was writing the Solomani Rim sector book for GURPS Traveller. I was also helping Loren to produce an online edition of Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (JTAS), the venerable Traveller fan magazine. One thing I did in that period was to help Loren wrangle Traveller News Service (TNS) entries, little scraps of “current events” from the Third Imperium setting that were meant to maintain the game’s meta-plot and suggest interesting adventures.

There was a side project I undertook, relevant to all of that activity: a set of rules with the working title of Game of Empire. This was a set of Traveller meta-rules, designed to allow “movers and shakers” roleplaying across a region of space. Instead of playing ordinary Imperial citizens, players could take on the role of very senior nobles, megacorporate executives, planetary political leaders, rebel-faction commanders, and so on. The actions and decisions they carried out would affect whole worlds. There was some resemblance to other Traveller products such as Pocket Empires or Dynasties, although the scale and emphasis were a bit different.

As part of the project, I wrote up a scenario, titled The Alderamin Scramble. The premise was that an Imperial duke’s title had fallen vacant in the Solomani Rim sector, and a number of notables were in a position to compete for an appointment to that seat. There were a lot of other events in the scenario – at least two local wars, a visit from Empress Iolanthe to the Rim, and so on.

I recruited 20 players from the JTAS message boards, and we spent several months “playtesting” the ruleset and the Alderamin Scramble scenario. It was a lot of fun – and along the way, we generated dozens of potential TNS items. I think most of the TNS entries from the in-game years 1119 through 1122 came out of that one game.

I often thought about building Game of Empire into something that could be published. I did write a second edition of the ruleset, based on our experience with the playtest, and thought about running more games with that. Unfortunately, with one thing and another, further development never happened before GURPS Traveller started dying on the vine a few years later.

In fact, I somehow misplaced my copy of the game’s files at some point. Fortunately, in 2017, I happened to be talking with Keith Alan Johnson when he mentioned he had a complete copy of both versions of the rules, the Alderamin Scramble scenario, and a bunch of his notes from the playtest. He was generous enough to bundle the whole package up and send it to me.

At the time, I still didn’t have any place to publish the game, but that may be changing. There’s an “open source” version of Traveller in existence now (a game called Cepheus Engine) and several independent publishers have released material through that venue. I’m already exploring ways to release other game material, as for example through DriveThruRPG. So a few days ago I got the notion of reviving this old project.

Yesterday I made a post on the Traveller Facebook group, describing the project and its history, and asking whether the audience would be interested. The response was a pretty resounding yes – so this certainly looks like something that would be worth moving to the front burner. I already have a lot on my plate for the rest of this month, but I may be spending odd moments looking at the old material and letting my subconscious mull over ways to improve and add to it.