gurps – Sharrukin's Palace

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.

Planning for March 2024

March 2, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Fairly short planning message this month – things are straightforward at the moment. Getting Architect of Worlds into people’s hands is taking a little longer than I expected, but we’re getting there.

Ken Burnside is still working on the final round of textual edits, but it sounds as if he’ll be done with that sometime around the GAMA Trade Show this week. He and I have discussed the number and nature of his editorial requests, and aside from the tweaks I’ve already made it sounds as if I’ll be able to rip through the whole list in just a few hours. So the current guess is that he’ll have the final release draft in hand by about 9-10 March, after which he’ll be able to do his first print run and start shipping hardcopies. The e-book version should be available about then too, including rewards for my patrons. Further delays aren’t impossible – Ken is a one-man shop too, and he has a lot more on his plate than I do – but we’re certainly getting closer to release day.

Meanwhile, I was able to release a substantially revised version of the Human Destiny setting bible to my patrons as a reward, the first charged release I’ve made since April or May of last year. That’s still going to be my primary creative project over the next few months. I feel as if I’ve underestimated the amount of setting-bible work I need to do before I start writing new fiction in that universe, but I’m at least getting closer to the point where I’ll be confident.

Here’s the formal plan for March:

Front Burner:
- Architect of Worlds: Finish editorial work on the release draft and turn that over to Ken Burnside for publication in the mid-March timeframe.
- Human Destiny: Continue rewriting and adding to the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
- Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
Back Burner:
- Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
- Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
- Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

I’m betting on a charged release for my patrons this month, most likely some combination of new Human Destiny setting-bible material and a new Aminata Ndoye story. That all depends on whether my other commitments leave me enough time, as usual.

“Architect of Worlds” Page Under Construction

February 7, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

With the imminent release of Architect of Worlds, I’m starting to rework the page for that project on this site.

First and foremost, the partial draft once offered from that page has been taken down. The release draft is significantly different, and at this point I want to encourage people to pick up the actual book once it’s available. I’m not going to take down any of the original blog posts in which I posted a very rough draft of the design sequence – if anyone wants to page through those, they’re welcome to it.

Meanwhile, moving forward I intend to use the project’s page to offer long-term support for the book: a place to ask questions, a (hopefully well-maintained) errata list, and a place to collect any blog posts I make about new science or more detailed world-design techniques. There’s some possibility I’ll be looking to produce a second edition of the book in five or six years, and the rebuilt page will be a good place to collect material for that project.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it already, here’s a link to the Ad Astra Games catalog page for the book. Pre-orders are under way!

Meanwhile, here’s a link to the first (glowing!) review the book has received, from Amazing Stories.

Planning for February 2024

February 2, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Getting back toward a more normal planning-and-execution style this month, now that Architect of Worlds is just about out the door. Couple of status items before the planning message, though.

Architect of Worlds

Ken Burnside and I are working on a final editorial pass through the book, finding and stepping on the last few textual bugs. Last I heard, Ken thought he would be done with his piece of that sometime next week, after which I suspect it won’t take more than one or two evenings for me to make the necessary tweaks to the text and layout. At which point I generate two PDFs (full-color and greyscale) and send those over to Ken, and my editorial involvement with the project is done.

Ken is working to ensure that hardcopies will be back from the printer before the GAMA Trade Show in early March. He may be able to ship the first batch of hardcopy editions to the folks who are pre-ordering the book before then, otherwise it will probably be mid-March before that happens. E-book copies will likely be available to the general market about the same time. I should be able to distribute e-books to my patrons and play-testers before that, but I don’t have a firm date yet. Patience a little while longer, please.

Human Destiny

With Architect of Worlds finished, I think my first new creative project is going to involve turning back to the Human Destiny setting.

My long-term plans for that setting have changed a bit. I have a couple of stories from that universe already published (“Pilgrimage” and “In the House of War”), but those have never sold very well for lack of advertising and word-of-mouth.

I think I may actually pull those stories back, do some setting redesign to match my more current thinking, and then start releasing fiction through a different avenue: the Royal Road website.

Royal Road tends to focus on so-called “progression” fiction – long-running serialized stories in which the protagonist gains in personal power and influence in the course of the narrative. It occurs to me that the story of my central character – Aminata Ndoye, the first human to become an officer in an alien interstellar service – would work pretty well as a (subtle) progression story. After all, she works her way upward in social status and rank throughout her career.

The nice thing about Royal Road is that it enables you to start building up an audience for your work, eventually working toward a paid-publication roll-out that’s likely to be more successful. We’ll see.

So the plan there is to rework the “setting bible” a bit, firm up the plan for a long-term narrative for Aminata’s story, rewrite the existing pieces to fit the new narrative, and start writing new fiction as well. Once I have a good chunk of Aminata’s early story down, I can start releasing that to Royal Road and attracting an audience for it. Patrons will, of course, get to see that new material as I get it laid out.

The new version of Human Destiny is also likely to tie into a tabletop RPG project, most likely using Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system. In particular, the setting bible is likely to be framed as a BRP book that might get self-published in the long run.

Other Projects

There are also a couple of other settings I’m thinking about spending some time with, notably the Great Lands setting (high fantasy, related to my first published novel, The Curse of Steel) and the Fourth Millennium setting (historical fantasy, related to my unfinished novel, Twice-Crowned). These are likely to be back-burner items through February while I work on finishing Architect of Worlds and getting some material laid down for Human Destiny.

So here’s the formal plan for February:

Front Burner:
- Architect of Worlds: Finish editorial work on the release draft and turn that over to Ken Burnside for publication in the February-March timeframe.
- Human Destiny: Outline and begin rewriting the setting bible, possibly in the form of a draft BRP sourcebook.
- Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
Back Burner:
- Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
- Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
- Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.

I would estimate a 75% chance of a charged release for my patrons this month, most likely some combination of Human Destiny setting-bible material and a new Aminata Ndoye story. As usual, that’s more likely as I produce more than about 10,000 words of substantively new material, and becomes a near certainty as I approach 20,000 words. We’ll see how the month goes.

Status Report (30 January 2024)

January 31, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Just a quick note to let patrons and readers know how things are going.

Things are moving very quickly with respect to getting Architect of Worlds out the door. We have a book cover (see above), and Ken Burnside and I are doing our final editorial-and-layout-adjustments pass. I expect I’ll be handing a final-release draft off to Ken in no more than a few days, after which the book may be on the market in e-book format very quickly. I should have patron rewards ready to distribute almost immediately after that. Hardcopy will take longer, but that may be available for pre-order on the Ad Astra Games site fairly soon too.

I don’t have a tranche of new original fiction to release to patrons before the end of January, so this will probably be the last month in which there’s no charged release on Patreon. I may have a free reward to push out by tomorrow – a bit of fan-fiction I wrote a while back, which I obviously won’t be charging for. It will still serve as something to remind my patrons that I do actually write fiction from time to time!

Decent chance I’ll actually have a book review out shortly as well. I tripped over a book that’s surprisingly enjoyable, even though it breaks about every rule I have for “this is worth reading.” As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be serving as a judge for the Indie Ink awards for the next few months, but this one might get a quick review before I have to settle in and get working on that.

Otherwise, day job and university courses are keeping me at a dead run, but I’m somehow managing to keep ahead of it all. More news as we move into February.

Planning for January 2024

January 6, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Once more, my creative situation hasn’t altered much since last month . . . but that is about to change dramatically.

At the moment, I am only a few days away from being ready to hand Architect of Worlds off to my publisher at Ad Astra Games. Last night I reached the end of the draft in this final editorial-art direction-layout pass. That doesn’t mean I’m finished just yet, but I can now do things like resolve the last “p. XX” references, build a Table of Contents, and so on. I’m guessing I may be ready to send the production PDF files over to Ken Burnside by the end of next week.

Now, the rest of my life is uncommonly busy at the moment.

My day job is as an instructional designer and instructor; I do research, write course materials, and occasionally teach. At the moment we’re about to begin a pilot offering for the biggest single course I’ve ever designed . . . and we plan to pilot two more courses after that, stretching through most of 2024, courses I haven’t even started on yet. Let’s just say I’m likely to be putting in a lot of hours on evenings and weekends over most of the coming year.

Meanwhile, I’m also working toward a second bachelor’s degree, and eventually my first graduate degree, with a plan to complete the course of study about the time I’m ready to retire from my day job. So far my coursework has been almost entirely review, but it does take up some time. For example, this weekend I’m working through some material I hadn’t had time to stay caught up on throughout the month of December.

So that’s the background noise that’s going to stay consistent, even while I put (the first edition of) Architect of Worlds on its final glide-path to release. Still, once those PDFs are out the door, a big slot will open up on my calendar for new forms of creative work. How completely I’ll be able to pivot in the month of January remains to be seen, but by the end of the month I hope to at least get started on some new creative work.

What’s that going to involve? At the moment, I think I’m going to get back to working on my more-or-less-hard-SF universe, under the working title of The Human Destiny. Which will involve some combination of:

Doing a zero-based review of the existing setting material, some of which I’ve decided to rethink from scratch. For example, elements of the history of the galaxy and the structure of interstellar civilizations, some of the specific aliens I designed back in the day, and so on.
Revisiting, revising, and possibly repackaging some of the fiction I’ve already written in that universe, in part to fit the revised setting assumptions.
Writing some new fiction, most likely centered around my character Aminata Ndoye, the first human to become an officer aboard an alien starship. I’m planning to start releasing some of that online as serialized fiction, through vehicles like the Royal Road website. Hopefully that will help build a bigger audience that I’ve had so far.
Starting to collect material for a tabletop RPG treatment of the setting, most likely structured around a licensed game system such as Monte Cook’s Cypher or (more likely at present) Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying.

I’m not going to try to build a formal task list, as I’ve done in previous “planning for the coming month” posts. Things are too much in a state of flux at the moment. It’s safe to say that January 2024 will involve two major themes: (1) finishing Architect of Worlds at last and putting it in the hands of my publisher; and (2) pivoting to resume work on the Human Destiny setting. Exactly where I stand on 31 January will inform the more structured planning messages for February 2024 and onward.

For my patrons: There may be a charged release at the end of this month, for the first time in quite a while. It depends on whether I can produce enough new or substantially revised Human Destiny material to justify that. You can probably count on charged releases resuming on a more-or-less regular monthly basis by February 2024.

2023 in Review

January 1, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

2023 was . . . kind of a rough year for me and my family. Things seemed to be moving along smoothly until mid-June, at which point a series of minor disasters struck.

Past as Prologue

First, my basement apartment and workspace flooded. We had to pack everything up and move it into storage, repair some of the plumbing, tear up and repair the house’s foundation, install a new drainage system and sump pump, put in new carpet and drywall, and finally move everything back in. Along the way we replaced the water heater. Then the house’s HVAC system went on the fritz, and we ended up replacing the furnace and air conditioning equipment. Then we discovered that we had an infestation of mice, which led to us having the insulation in the attic torn out and replaced – which also caused yet another outbreak of flooding, when the work crew broke open the sprinkler lines up there. Still more drywall repair and painting, although at least we saved the carpets that time, and the exterminators picked up the costs.

By my count, I spent somewhere between 40% and 50% of my annual salary on home repairs this year. Fortunately we had the financial reserves to call upon, but that still hurt. We’re probably not going to get back to our earlier savings state until sometime next year. Assuming I’m still employed by 2025.

Meanwhile, about the time we were wrestling with all of that, I decided to start on a second university degree. As of right now, I’m aiming for a new BSc in Natural Sciences from the Open University in the UK, with a plan to earn a graduate degree in astronomy or space science by the time I retire. All of which entails a fairly healthy commitment of time. Back in August and September that didn’t seem unreasonable . . .

. . . but then, in the September-October timeframe, the biggest course-development project of my entire public-service career came down firmly upon my shoulders, a commitment that’s suddenly pushing everything else aside and probably will throughout 2024.

Well. My time-management and stress-management skills, such as they are, are being sorely tested at the moment. There hasn’t been much relief throughout the second half of 2023, and I don’t anticipate getting to relax much until very late in the new year.

Still, I’ve survived the slings and arrows so far. I’ve even managed to get some good creative work done. I had hoped to have Architect of Worlds completely finished by now, but I can’t complain about that project’s status. As of this moment, the book is finished in final draft, and I’m putting the finishing touches on art selection and layout. I fully expect to have a complete production draft ready within a week or so. Which is a good thing, because Architect now has a publisher. It’s close to a certainty that the book will be on sale through Ad Astra Games and DriveThruRPG no later than March 2024.

I also got another dozen or so book reviews done, and I seem to be attracting a small reputation as a reviewer. I’m apparently going to be serving as a judge for an indie-press writer’s award in the coming year, which should be interesting.

Meanwhile, traffic to this blog remains steady, and I have about twice as many patrons as I did this time last year. Thanks to all of you for your support!

New Ventures

Once Architect is out the door, that means I’ll be free for the first time in over a year to think about other creative projects. I think 2024 is going to be the year I pivot back to writing fiction, with an eye to self-publishing as much of it as possible.

Previous ventures in that direction haven’t been terribly successful – I’ve got a novel and a couple of smaller pieces out there, but they’ve sold very poorly. After quite a bit of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that my approach was just flat-out incorrect.

To be a successful indie author, you need to take on a lot of roles – editor, art director, communications director, marketing guru. If you don’t have the time, energy, or skill for any of those tasks, you have to hire someone else to do them for you. I’ve been very reluctant to do that in the past, because it sometimes seems as if the entire self-publishing industry is one enormous vanity press. If anyone out there was making money on the basis of my self-published work, it certainly wasn’t me. My editor made money, Amazon and Meta made money, Adobe and Tafi made money, I made not a dime. The only money coming my way was from Patreon.

Okay, time to embrace the reality. I’m going to get back to writing fiction, but I’m going to apply some new techniques for building an audience. I’m also going to bite the bullet and set up a reasonable budget for editing, art, and promotion for each new novel or collection I decide to self-publish. Still going to avoid the worst vanity presses out there, but that doesn’t mean I can’t benefit from professional help. Which may mean that I never get much past “writing as an expensive hobby,” but at least I’ll be able to get my work in front of more people. Who knows, the lightning may strike.

Most likely candidates for new fiction include work set in a re-imagined Human Destiny setting, and the novel Twice-Crowned and its adjacent Fourth Millennium setting. Both of which may also give rise to my next tabletop gaming projects as well. Human Destiny is a decent candidate for that – Ken Burnside, the fellow who will be publishing Architect of Worlds, has already expressed some interest.

The Year’s Blog Traffic

The top ten posts for 2023 turned out to be:

The high-traffic posts seemed to be a mix of Architect of Worlds material, general world-building notes, discussion of possible future tabletop-game projects, and status reports about the year’s setbacks. Not unexpected.

So those are my objectives for the coming year: get Architect of Worlds out the door at last, pivot back to writing fiction on a regular basis, and experiment with new ways to get my work in front of interested eyeballs. All while keeping my day job happy, studying for my university courses, and hopefully finding a little time to unwind here and there.

Not expecting any boredom, that’s for sure. With any luck my health, the state of my finances, and the political climate in the country I have to live in will all stay favorable.

“Architect of Worlds” Has a Publisher

December 16, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

I’ve been putting off this announcement for a while, but as of a couple of days ago I have a signed contract, so this is a done deal and I can finally talk about it.

Architect of Worlds has a publisher: Ad Astra Games, a small press that’s primarily known for games like Squadron Strike and Attack Vector: Tactical, highly realistic yet playable simulations of space warfare. Ad Astra also publishes a few non-fiction pieces that are great resources for anyone trying to develop fictional futures.

Ad Astra is a one-man show, with Ken Burnside as the proprietor. Ken is a long-standing acquaintance who has been watching the development of Architect of Worlds for quite some time. He seems to think that Architect would be a good fit for the rest of his product line and his usual audience, and I tend to agree. It helps that Ken has advertising, promotion, and distribution contacts that I simply can’t match – I suspect Architect will see at least a full order of magnitude better sales as a result of this deal.

The terms Ken offered me are pretty generous, so I’m quite pleased with this development, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

In the meantime, as promised, my patrons at the Intermediate Support level and above – along with a few “patrons emeritus” who have contributed to the “playtesting” of Architect over the years – can expect to receive their copies of the released e-book once it’s ready. Look for that sometime in the February-March timeframe. My deadline to get finished drafts over to Ken is 1 February, but to be honest I can’t see that taking any longer than very early January at the rate I’m moving. We should be able to have both e-book and printed copies ready for the spring convention season.

Planning for December 2023

December 4, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Not much change from last month.

My final editing-and-layout-and-filler-art pass on Architect of Worlds is about half finished. As of this evening, I’ve made it through page 89 out of 188, so just short of halfway through the book. That brings me to the beginning of the “Designing World Surface Conditions” section. As I remarked a few days ago, I may be making some small adjustments to the rules in this section, but for the moment I don’t see that slowing down my progress all that much. Time commitments for my studies and my day job notwithstanding, I still think I can have the whole book ready by the end of calendar year 2023, or at least not too far into January 2024.

Matters with the potential publisher for Architect of Worlds are still hanging fire. We’ve reached an informal agreement, but until I’ve signed a contract I can’t say the deal is complete, and so I still can’t comment further on that. Hopefully we can get that out of the way shortly.

We’re still looking at a formal release date for the book sometime in March 2024.

The current list of outstanding tasks, unmodified from last month:

Editorial Work:

Make final alterations to the design sequence or other rules for this edition, based on recent patron and reader feedback.
Perform a final editorial pass through the complete text, correcting typos, style inconsistencies, errors in tables or mathematical formulae, and “page XX” references.
Generate and lay out the copyright & acknowledgements page.
Generate and lay out the Table of Contents.

Art Direction:

Create separate “print on demand” (almost entirely greyscale) and “e-book” (full color) layers in the InDesign layout, supporting the production of two release PDFs.
Correct all cases where space for filler art was allocated by changing the size of the page’s main text frame, as opposed to placing an explicit object frame.
Create greyscale versions of (some) existing full-color images and place those in the layout on the appropriate layer.
Generate additional filler art throughout the book, placing both full-color and greyscale versions on the appropriate layers.
Create (or receive from publisher) new front and back cover images, and integrate these into the release PDFs.

I didn’t have much time to write fiction in November, and given how much of my time is spoken for, that’s probably not going to change in December. What little free time I have, I need to work on book reviews – I’ve only just finished one for October (a month late), and I need to be thinking about November and December so as to get caught up. Otherwise, right now my plan is to get Architect out the door, and only then think about what I want to do with other game-development projects and fiction. Stay tuned.

Planning for November 2023

November 1, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

A little different format this time. Now that the initial layout for Architect of Worlds is complete, I’m in the final push to finish the book for actual release. There are still a number of tasks that need to be done before we get to that point, though. That’s the list that’s going to take center stage for November – and probably for December as well.

The objective is to have Architect of Worlds ready for release by the end of the calendar year. At this moment, it’s looking as if the actual release will not be via self-publication, as I had originally considered. Instead, as I’ve mentioned, there’s a good chance I’ll be working an established small-press publisher to release the book through their own imprint. We haven’t agreed to a deal just yet, and until that happens I’m not going to say who it is. Watch this space for further news – it probably won’t be long before I know what’s going to happen.

Either way, I suspect I/we will be setting the release date at no later than March 2024. I had originally hoped for earlier, but given all the life disasters I’ve been dealing with since July, I’m actually pleased the book won’t be further delayed. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, prayers to whatever deity or luck-granting spirit you subscribe to . . .

So here’s the current list of outstanding tasks:

Editorial Work:

Make final alterations to the design sequence or other rules for this edition, based on recent patron and reader feedback.
Perform a final editorial pass through the complete text, correcting typos, style inconsistencies, errors in tables or mathematical formulae, and “page XX” references.
Generate and lay out the copyright & acknowledgements page.
Generate and lay out the Table of Contents.

Art Direction:

Create separate “print on demand” (almost entirely greyscale) and “e-book” (full color) layers in the InDesign layout, supporting the production of two release PDFs.
Correct all cases where space for filler art was allocated by changing the size of the page’s main text frame, as opposed to placing an explicit object frame.
Create greyscale versions of (some) existing full-color images and place those in the layout on the appropriate layer.
Generate additional filler art throughout the book, placing both full-color and greyscale versions on the appropriate layers.
Create (or receive from publisher) new front and back cover images, and integrate these into the release PDFs.

I’m probably going to work on all of these concurrently, aside from those last-minute changes to the text at the top of the list (that’s the only item that might significantly change the layout). So a clean progress bar is probably not going to work – I’ll just leave the occasional Status Report post here to let everyone know how it’s going.

It should be clear that the window is just about closed for any recommendations for altered “rules” mechanics. If you have anything you’d like to suggest, I suspect that has to be in my hands before, say, 10 November. After that, the major structure of the text is going to be set in stone for this edition. Speak up, or it will have to wait for after-publication articles, or the second edition in a few years.

In the meantime, to the extent I have any unclaimed time (or I need another task for variety) I think I’m going to get back to writing some fiction. Most likely this will be more chapters of Twice-Crowned. If I make enough progress with that between now and the end of the calendar year, I’ll publish a new partial draft as a charged release for my patrons. No predictions – a lot depends on how Architect and some other tasks are doing in the meantime.

We’re on the home stretch!