Architect of Worlds – Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period

September 8, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

So, for the first time in over two years, here is some new draft material from the Architect of Worlds project. First, some of the introductory text from the new section of the draft, then the first step in the next piece of the world design sequence.

The plan, for now, is to post these draft sections here, and post links to these blog entries from my Patreon page. None of this material will be presented as a charged update for my patrons yet. In fact, there may be no charged release in September, since this project is probably going to be the bulk of my creative work for the next few weeks. At most, I may post a new piece of short fiction as a free update sometime this month.

Designing Planetary Surface Conditions

Now that a planetary system has been laid out – the number of planets, their arrangement, their overall type, their number and arrangement of moons, all the items covered in Steps Nine through Fourteen – it’s possible to design the surface conditions for at least some of those many worlds.

In this section, we will determine the surface conditions for small “terrestroid” worlds. In the terms we’ve been using so far, this can be a Leftover Oligarch, a Terrestrial Planet, a Failed Core, or one of the major satellites of any of these. A world is a place where characters in a story might live, or at least a place where they can land, get out of their spacecraft, and explore.

Some of the surface conditions that we can determine in this section include:

Orbital period and rotational period, and the lengths of the local day, month, and year.
Presence and strength of the local magnetic field.
Presence, density, surface pressure, and composition of an atmosphere.
Distribution of solid and liquid surface, and the composition of any oceans.
Average surface temperature, with estimated daily and seasonal variations.
Presence and complexity of native life.

In this section, we will no longer discuss how to “cook the books” to prepare for the appearance of an Earthlike world. If you’ve been following those recommendations in the earlier sections, at least one world in your designed star system should have a chance to resemble Earth. However, we will continue to work through the extended example for Arcadia, focusing on the fourth and fifth planets in that star system.

Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period

The orbital period of any object is strictly determined by the total mass of the system and the radius of the object’s orbit. This is one of the earliest results in modern astronomy, dating back to Kepler’s third law of planetary motion (1619).

Procedure

For both major satellites and planets, the orbital period can be determined by evaluating a simple equation.

First Case: Satellites of Planets

To determine the orbital period of a planet’s satellite, evaluate the following:

$T\ =(2.77\ \times{10}^{-6})\ \times\sqrt{\frac{D^3}{M_P+M_S}}$

Here, T is the orbital period in hours, D is the radius of the satellite’s orbit in kilometers, and M_P and M_S are the masses of the planet and the satellite, in Earth-masses. If the satellite is a moonlet, assume its mass is negligible compared to its planet and use a value of zero for M_S.

Second Case: Planets

To determine the orbital period of a planet, evaluate the following:

$T\ =8770\ \times\sqrt{\frac{D^3}{M}}$

Here, T is the orbital period in hours, D is the radius of the planet’s orbit in AU, and M is the mass of the primary star in solar masses. Planets usually have negligible mass compared to their primary stars, at least at the degree of precision offered by this equation, and so don’t need to be included in the calculation.

Examples

The primary star in the Arcadia system has a mass of 0.82 solar masses, and the fourth and fifth planet orbit at 0.57 AU and 0.88 AU, respectively. The two planets’ orbital periods are about 4170 hours and 7990 hours. Converting to Earth-years by dividing by 8770, the two planets have orbital periods of 0.475 years and 0.911 years.

Alice has decided to generate more details for the one satellite of Arcadia V. This is a moonlet and so can be assumed to have negligible mass, while the planet itself has a mass of 0.65 Earth-masses. The moonlet’s orbital radius is about five times that of the planet, and Alice sets a value for this radius of 28400 kilometers. The moonlet’s orbital period is about 16.4 hours.

Architect of Worlds: The Next Chunk

August 24, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

While I’m waiting for my consulting editor to have a look at The Curse of Steel, I’ve turned back to a project that I’ve been neglecting for too long: the world-building book Architect of Worlds. Several sections of that book already exist in a rough draft, which can be found at the Architect of Worlds link in the sidebar.

The bulk of the material I’ve already written is a design sequence, permitting the user to set up fictional star systems (or to fill in details for real-world systems). The idea is to let SF writers, game designers, tabletop game referees, and so on design locations for interstellar SF settings, using whatever combination of random chance and deliberate choice they prefer. The emphasis is on “hard SF” realism, as far as the state of exoplanetary astronomy will permit, and no dependencies on any specific tabletop rules system.

So far, the draft system permits one to place stars, planets, and moons, and get gross physical properties (mass, density, surface gravity) and dynamic parameters (orbital radius, eccentricity, and period) for each.

The next slice of the system will involve generating the surface conditions for such bodies, at least for the small “terrestroid” worlds that are likely to provide environments for SF adventure. At this point we’re talking about things like surface temperature (average and variations), atmospheric composition and pressure, the amount and state of water (or other volatiles) on the surface, what kind of native life might be prevalent, and so on.

I’ve been mulling this section over for a few years now, since the science involved is a lot more complicated and more difficult to reduce to a set of game-able abstractions.

When I designed a system like this for GURPS Space Fourth Edition, I made a deliberate design choice to reduce all the possibilities to a specific set of archetypes. That provided some backward compatibility with earlier versions of the GURPS system, and with the older Traveller systems that were an inspiration for both. For this book, though, I want to give the readers as much detail as I can, and let them decide what to use and what to set aside. That complicates the design.

So, a very rough overall outline of what’s going to be involved for a given “world” (that is, a terrestrial planet or moon with some likelihood of a solid surface):

The rotation rate of the world (including cases where the world is tide-locked or resonant with a primary). As a sidebar, this gives us quantities for the length of the natural day, month, and year.
The blackbody temperature and incidence of stellar wind for the world, based on the properties and distance of its primary star.
The strength of the world’s magnetic field, and the consequences for the size and strength of its magnetosphere (if any). If the world is a moon (for example, the satellite of a gas giant planet), then the primary’s magnetic field and magnetosphere may be relevant as well.
The world’s initial budget of volatiles – how much in the way of possible liquid or gaseous compounds was the world left with after its process of formation.
Atmospheric composition – what volatile compounds are likely to be gaseous at local temperatures, and can the planet hold onto them?
Atmospheric mass and pressure.
Hydrospheric composition – what volatile compounds are likely to be liquid or solid instead?
Hydrospheric mass and prevalence – how much of the world’s surface will be covered by what kinds of liquid or solid stuff?
Average surface temperature.
Estimated variations in surface temperature with the position on the surface, time of day, and so on.
Presence and complexity of native life – which may require a loop-back to adjust characteristics of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and surface temperature.

All that’s the minimum for what the next section of the book needs to cover. There are a lot of dependencies back and forth here, which is one reason why I’ve struggled for so long to build this piece. I’m beginning to think I see how to design something workable, though. At least enough to get started. More over the next few weeks.

Star System Generation: A Neat Automated Tool

July 28, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Today I came across a neat example of automated star-system generation, based on the design sequence I wrote for GURPS Space, Fourth Edition back in the day.

It looks like a robust code base, supporting a web-based interface. You can generate star systems at random, possibly forcing a few parameters (existence of a garden world, position in an open cluster, and so on). You can pick from several naming schemes for the resulting planets.

The output includes a neat animated map of the system, and hierarchically tabulated information for randomly generated stars, planets, and moons. All in all, it looks very slick, and it seems to reflect the original game rules pretty accurately.

The source code for the project can be found at Jan Sandberg’s GitHub repository. The redditor Myrion_Phoenix hosts an instance of the application on his website as well.

I’ve mentioned my own more recent work on Architect of Worlds – it would be neat to see a similar automated version of that once it’s ready for release. In any case, this application looks very useful for folks who are running hard-SF games, whether using GURPS Space or something similar.

EIDOLON: The Extended Character

February 25, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

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.

New Creative Directions

December 5, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

It’s not the end of the year yet – that being when I usually take stock and make plans for upcoming creative work – but a few things have happened recently that may turn out to be productive.

The Obvious Task: The Curse of Steel is finished in the first draft. I’ll be spending the next few months on a second-draft rewrite of the novel, with a planned milestone of having it ready for publication in the spring. After that, I’ll be getting started on the second novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands.

Preparing for Patreon: Now, as one element of preparing for publication, I’ve been thinking about re-opening my Patreon campaign, which has been shut down for several years. Hopefully, that can help me gather an audience for the novel(s), as well as raise a little money to help pay for professional cover art or editorial services. With the novel series underway, I certainly won’t have any problem producing material that patrons can enjoy for the foreseeable future.

World-Building Material for Patrons: However, while working on the novel series, I’ve been coming up with a lot of world-building material: maps, constructed language, cultural descriptions, character writeups, and so on. Most of that material hasn’t been posted here. I imagine some of my readers would be interested in it, either on its own or as support for tabletop gaming.

The stumbling block here is that when I frame my own world-building notes in terms of a tabletop game, the game system I normally use is GURPS. Steve Jackson Games is fairly strict about licensing the GURPS system for third-party publishers – there’s no Open Gaming License for it, for example. It’s possible to work with them to get a license, and several publishers have done so, but for someone like me who would just be publishing material for a small audience via Patreon, that’s not worthwhile.

Fortunately, a solution came to me a few days ago: publish game-ready material using a “generic” character description format of my own design, one which could easily be converted to GURPS – or to any number of other game systems, for that matter. That way I can publish the material for patrons and still avoid any danger of infringing on SJG’s online policy.

Just as a trial balloon, I’ve started pulling together the design I have in mind, and it’s surprisingly simple. I suspect I could publish a reference document, under a Creative Commons license, that’s no more than a dozen pages long. So that looks like it’s going to be part of the strategy.

Some New Simulations for Evaluation: Entirely unconnected to the above, I received a shipment from Sierra Madre Games earlier this week – two games that I ordered many months ago and that have finally been released.

Bios: Origins (Second Edition) is the final game in Phil Eklund’s Bios trilogy, which began with Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna. This game picks up where Megafauna left off – at the point where the primitive human species (or some other pre-sapient species on an alien world) first attains a spark of consciousness. It’s a Civ-like game, which traces the history of a world from the Paleolithic all the way to the dawn of the Space Age.

As with Phil’s other games, this has oodles of thematic interest, and I suspect it could be used rather handily as a world-building tool. You may recall that I did a series of “world-building by simulation” articles a while back, using Genesis and Megafauna to design an alien world and its dominant sentient species. Now I think I’m going to tinker a bit with Origins and see if I can turn it to similar purposes. There may be a fair number of blog posts about that over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Pax Transhumanity is a game by Phil Eklund’s son, Matt Eklund. It’s a thematic simulation of future history – the period over the next century or so, during which technology is likely to completely transform human society (again, still, as always). It fits in well with the Transhuman Space setting I helped design for Steve Jackson Games back in the day.

I’ve been waiting for Pax Transhumanity for a long time, hoping to use it to re-inspire me for another of my creative projects: the “Human Destiny” setting, in which humanity becomes part of a polyspecific interstellar community over the next couple of centuries.

The Human Destiny stories started off reasonably well – I actually published one of them via Amazon a while ago – but I ran into a brick wall with them. Largely because, in the current concept for the setting, human beings have very little agency! They’re the passive subjects of an alien empire, which came to manage Earth and human destiny because we proved unable to succeed on our own.

Okay, I will admit that I’m fairly pessimistic about human prospects. My evaluation of my species is that we’re just smart enough to get ourselves into a world of difficulty, but not smart enough to save ourselves from the consequences. That doesn’t make for very hopeful or interesting storytelling, though.

So for a long time, I’ve been trying to find ways to convince myself anew that humanity actually has a hopeful future, preferably without divine intervention or helpful aliens to save us from our own folly. I want to develop a fictional world in which we muddle through and eventually manage to solve the problems we cause for ourselves. Going back and re-reading Transhuman Space has helped a little, since that’s exactly the assumption we made for that setting. Tinkering with Pax Transhumanity might help too.

All of which means that I might be re-working the Human Destiny setting over the next few months. More material for this blog, the Patreon, and eventual publication, hopefully.

Architect of Worlds: I still need to get back to work on the Architect of Worlds project, of course – that’s been stalled for a lot longer than I originally planned. Even so, every once in awhile someone comes across it and gets good use out of it, even in its incomplete state. One of these days I’ll have to set everything else aside and just get the next big section written . . .

Hmm. This is reading a lot like a “prospects for the new year” post, isn’t it? Even if the above list is all I work on, that’s more than enough to keep me busy for months. I suppose that’s okay. When the muse calls, you answer, no matter what the calendar says!

Two Demigods

November 1, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I’m taking a bit of a break from working on The Curse of Steel directly. One of the things I’ve done is to tinker a bit with representing some of my characters in GURPS terms. A bit of a challenge, since these are clearly superhuman characters (they’re the descendants of gods, in a setting where that basically makes you a superhero). As a sample, here are what are shaping up to be my two lead characters, at least so far:

Kráva the Swift (400 points)

Age 20; Human; 6′ even; 160 lbs.; Strong, athletic warrior-woman, usually wearing fine-quality clothes decorated with raven feathers.

ST 22 [120]; DX 14 [80]; IQ 12 [40]; HT 14 [40].

Damage 2d/4d; BL 97 lbs.; HP 18 [-8]; Will 14 [10]; Per 12 [0]; FP 14 [0].

Basic Speed 7 [0]; Basic Move 7 [0]; Block 9 (DX); Dodge 11; Parry 11 (DX).

Social Background

TL: 2 [0]. CF: Tremára (Native) [0]. Languages: Tremára (Native) [0].

Advantages

Ally (Raven sent by Sky Father) (25% of starting points) (12 or less) [2]; Ally (Raven sent by Sky Father) (25% of starting points) (12 or less) [2]; Ally (Tarankláva) (150% of starting points) (15 or less) [30]; Appearance (Attractive) [4]; Blessed (Heroic Feats of ST) [10]; Charisma 2 [10]; Combat Reflexes [15]; Enhanced Move (Ground) (1/2) [10]; Fearlessness 2 [4]; Patron (Sky Father) (6 or less; Highly Accessible; Minimal Intervention) [15]; Status (+2) [5]; Super Jump 1 [10]; Wealth (Wealthy) [20].

Disadvantages

Bad Temper (12 or less) [-10]; Code of Honor (Tremára) [-5]; Enemy (Servants of the Dark God) (medium-sized group, some formidable or super-human) (9 or less) [-30]; Vow (Hold and defend the Thunder Blade unless its rightful owner should appear) (Minor) [-5].

Quirks: Chauvinistic; Headstrong; Proud; Vow (Shield-woman’s oath) [-4].

Skills

Animal Handling (Equines)-11 (IQ-1) [1]; Area Knowledge (Ravatheni Lands)-12 (IQ+0) [1]; Bow-15 (DX+1) [4]; Broadsword-14 (DX+0) [2]; Climbing-13 (DX-1) [1]; Current Affairs/TL2 (Ravatheni Lands)-12 (IQ+0) [1]; Hiking-13 (HT-1) [1]; Intimidation-13 (Will-1) [1]; Knife-14 (DX+0) [1]; Leadership-14 (IQ+2) [2]; Navigation/TL2 (Land)-12 (IQ+0) [2]; Politics-11 (IQ-1) [1]; Public Speaking (Oratory)-14 (IQ+2) [1]; Riding (Equines)-15 (DX+1) [4]; Running-13 (HT-1) [1]; Savoir-Faire (Tremára)-12 (IQ+0) [1]; Shield (Shield)-15 (DX+1) [2]; Spear-13 (DX-1) [1]; Stealth-13 (DX-1) [1]; Survival (Plains)-12 (Per+0) [2]; Swimming-14 (HT+0) [1]; Teamster (Equines)-14 (IQ+2) [4]; Throwing-13 (DX-1) [1]; Tracking-12 (Per+0) [2]; Wrestling-13 (DX-1) [1].

Kráva is very much a physical hero – very strong and fast, with a bit of Extended Move (Ground) and Super Jump to make her very mobile. She’s by no means stupid, but her talents mostly involve punching (or cutting) her way through problems.

A couple of notes about her Allies: I’ve drawn up her raven familiars as characters, and they both come in well under 0-point characters, so they’re fairly cheap.

I’ve also drawn up Tarankláva, her sword, as a character. As a practical matter, it works as a fine-quality broadsword with a bonus to skill rolls, but it also has certain powers of its own, which it uses to feed her information. The “curse of steel” has to do with the fact that it doesn’t feed her all the information it could in theory gather for her. On the sword’s character sheet, that’s set down as Reprogrammable and Slave Mentality, with a Divine Curse that prevents the sword from telling its bearer everything it sees.

Lóka the Clever (400 points)

Age 25; Human; 5′ 7″; 150 lbs.; Well-built man in a white vaita‘s robe.

ST 11 [10]; DX 13 [60]; IQ 15 [100]; HT 12 [20].

Damage 1d-1/1d+1; BL 24 lbs.; HP 11 [0]; Will 15 [0]; Per 15 [0]; FP 12 [0].

Basic Speed 6.25 [0]; Basic Move 6 [0]; Block 7 (DX); Dodge 9; Parry 9 (DX).

Social Background

TL: 2 [0]. CF: Tremára (Native) [0]. Languages: Lake Country (Native) [6]; Sea Kingdom (Native) [6]; Tremára (Native) [0]; Vaita Script (None/Native) [3].

Advantages

Appearance (Attractive) [4]; Blessed [10]; Cultural Adaptability [10]; Detect (Divine presence and children of the gods) (Rare) [5]; Eidetic Memory [5]; Magery 2 [25]; Modular Abilities (Cosmic Power) (Per point of abilities (+6); Trait Limited: One specific trait (Languages Only)) [30]; Musical Ability 2 [10]; Patron (Kórsata) (6 or less; Highly Accessible; Minimal Intervention) [15]; Social Regard (Respected) 1 [5]; Vaita Rank 1 [5]; Voice [10].

Disadvantages

Secret (Child of a god) (Utter Rejection) [-10]; Sense of Duty (Friends and companions) (Small Group) [-5]; Social Stigma (Second-Class Citizen) [-5]; Vow (Never admit his divine ancestry or the name of his divine parent) (Minor) [-5]; Xenophilia (12 or less) [-10].

Quirks: Congenial; Despises slave-owners and slavers; Likes to show off his cleverness; Proud [-4].

Skills

Current Affairs/TL2 (Ravatheni Lands)-15 (IQ+0) [1]; Diplomacy-15 (IQ+0) [1]; Esoteric Medicine-14 (Per-1) [2]; Fast-Talk-16 (IQ+1) [1]; History (Tremára Lands)-15 (IQ+0) [4]; Knife-13 (DX+0) [1]; Law (Tremára)-15 (IQ+0) [4]; Literature-15 (IQ+0) [4]; Musical Influence-15 (IQ+0) [2]; Musical Instrument (Harp)-16 (IQ+1) [2]; Occultism-15 (IQ+0) [2]; Performance-18 (IQ+3) [4]; Poetry-16 (IQ+1) [4]; Politics-16 (IQ+1) [1]; Public Speaking-18 (IQ+3) [3]; Religious Ritual (Tremára)-14 (IQ-1) [2]; Riding (Equines)-12 (DX-1) [1]; Savoir-Faire (Tremára)-15 (IQ+0) [1]; Singing-18 (HT+6) [4]; Staff-12 (DX-1) [1]; Swimming-12 (HT+0) [1]; Teaching-14 (IQ-1) [1]; Theology (Tremára)-14 (IQ-1) [2]; Writing-14 (IQ-1) [1].

Spells

Analyze Magic-15 [1]; Apportation-15 [1]; Counterspell-15 [1]; Create Fire-15 [1]; Cure Disease-15 [1]; Detect Magic-15 [1]; Detect Poison-15 [1]; Dispel Magic-15 [1]; Divination (Oneiromancy)-15 [1]; Enchant-15 [2]; Extinguish Fire-15 [1]; Find Weakness-15 [1]; Great Voice-15 [1]; History-15 [1]; Identify Spell-15 [1]; Ignite Fire-15 [1]; Know Illusion-15 [1]; Lend Energy-15 [1]; Lend Vitality-15 [1]; Light-15 [1]; Loyal Sword-15 [1]; Major Healing-15 [2]; Minor Healing-16 [2]; Rejoin-15 [1]; Relieve Sickness-16 [2]; Repair-15 [1]; Restore-15 [1]; Seek Air-15 [1]; Seek Earth-15 [1]; Seek Fire-15 [1]; Seek Magic-15 [1]; Seek Water-15 [1]; Seeker-15 [1]; Sense Danger-15 [1]; Sense Emotion-15 [1]; Sense Foes-15 [1]; Sense Life-15 [1]; Shape Fire-15 [1]; Simple Illusion-15 [1]; Sound-15 [1]; Thunderclap-15 [1]; Trace-15 [1]; Truthsayer-15 [1]; Voices-15 [1]; Ward-15 [1]; Weaken-15 [1].

When I was developing this story, and considering how to represent magic, I messed around with a bunch of different models. In the end, I decided to go with bog-standard GURPS, at least for now. Some characters will have superhuman powers that are innate to them, represented by very high Attribute scores and Advantages. Other characters will be able to use “charms” or “spells” that are learned, powered by personal resources – hence, standard GURPS magic. So far, that seems to be matching the story I want to tell pretty well.

One note about Lóka: in the story, it’s a plot point that he seems to be able to understand, speak, read, and write any language he encounters. That’s kind of difficult to represent in GURPS, but the Modular Abilities trait used here seems to be the best way to proceed. As it stands, Lóka knows two or three languages by natural means. He can also “miraculously” use other languages that he’s never encountered before, although it takes him a few seconds to switch to the new script or tongue (he has to “get the trick of it”). At the moment he could get native-level fluency and literacy in one language at a time, or speak two strange languages like a native and act as a translator (without being able to read either of them), and so on. Useful!

More characters to come, I think, and I may make a post or two about world-building assumptions. This setting wouldn’t make a bad GURPS world-book, actually.

Status Report (29 August 2019)

August 29, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Since last Friday evening, I’ve been able to put down something like 5,600 words on The Curse of Steel.

This is a pretty good rate of work for me. My personal best was probably the time I produced the last seven chapters of a Mass Effect fan-fiction novel in a single three-day weekend – over 24,000 words in those three days. Usually, I’m lucky to get more than a thousand words down in a day, and that’s assuming it’s a weekend day when I don’t have to worry about the office.

But then, this is why I do a lot of world-building.

As a writer, I seem to be able to produce very short pieces off the top of my head, doing all the scene-setting and character development in the back of my mind and just pouring the vignette down on the page. Most of the vignettes I wrote as flavor text for various GURPS books were done this way.

As soon as I get into the longer forms, though – pretty much anything above the level of the short story – I always get bogged down in setting detail and have a hard time proceeding. Unless I spend the time and effort to build those details in advance: constructed language and culture to help me get into characters’ heads, maps to help me see how places and people are related to each other, astrophysics for SF stories, and so on.

One reason fan-fiction always seems easier for me is that most of the work of setting up the story has already been done. Any original details I want to add, I can just graft them onto the existing structure and keep moving. I can concentrate on just writing story, and the words just flow. As witness that amazing, enormously satisfying weekend of something like 8,000 words per day.

I spent months wrestling with backdrop for The Curse of Steel, never writing more than the one chapter that started the story (which, by no coincidence, worked pretty well as a short story on its own). I tried several times to move forward, but every attempt failed until I had the setting worked out to my satisfaction.

Now the investment pays off. There’s a good chance – knock on wood and hope I don’t jinx it – that I’ll be able to put down about half the novel, a total of 80,000 words or so, without a pause. If the current rate of progress keeps up, that sounds like it should be doable by the end of the calendar year.

Feels good. I will admit to kicking myself sometimes, for being the writer of stories who never seems to actually write a story. If I’m starting to find ways to hack my creative mind and get actual stories written, that can’t hurt.

An Interesting Result

August 21, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

Just a short note, to call your attention to an interesting result in recent astrophysics that’s quite relevant to the Architect of Worlds project.

It’s well known that we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets in the last couple of decades. Now the state of the art is approaching the point where we can get clues about the environment on those planets. For example, one recent result (here’s an article in Scientific American) is the first indication we have of the kind of atmosphere that exists around an Earth-sized rocky exoplanet. In this case, the planet is in its primary star’s habitable zone, and it’s more than large enough to retain a significant atmosphere against thermal or Jeans escape. Yet there doesn’t seem to be much if any atmosphere there.

I’ve long since worked out a model for Jeans escape; that much was in the world-design system I wrote for GURPS Space back in the day. (If you’ve used that system, you may recall a “minimum molecular weight retained” or MMWR calculation. That’s specifically relevant to Jeans escape.)

The problem is that thermal loss isn’t the only way a planet’s atmosphere can get stripped off. If the primary star is prone to flares and has an energetic stellar wind, that will do the trick too. This is specifically relevant to red dwarfs, like the star LHS 3844 which has the planet mentioned above. Red dwarf stars punch well over their weight in the stellar-wind and flare department, especially early in their lives. Thus, any rocky planet close enough to be in the liquid-water zone will probably get a serious sandblasting early on.

This is kind of a new area in astrophysics, and there are a lot of competing models out there. Some scientists are predicting that Earth-sized planets should be able to retain their atmospheres in at least some cases, others are much less sanguine. The LHS 3844 result certainly seems to support the pessimistic case.

For Architect of Worlds, I’ve been thinking in terms of assigning each planet a “volatiles budget” from its formation and early years, modified by things like the planet’s MMWR, whether it formed inside the snow line, whether there’s a dominant gas giant to fling comets in-system, and so on. A big random factor as well, since it looks as if this feature is strongly subject to chance. Then we would reduce that volatiles budget to reflect non-thermal processes of atmospheric escape, photodissasociation of water molecules, and so on. (Hmm. Maybe have a separate budget just for water, since that goes through some significantly different processes and might not be correlated with atmospheric volatiles.)

The devil’s in the details, of course, and for all my tinkering I have yet to come up with a model that satisfies me (or even fits all the cases we know about). This might actually be the biggest obstacle to getting the third section of the design sequence hammered out.

Status Report (11 May 2019)

May 11, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

There have been some recent developments. In particular, I’ve finally come out the far side of a roughly six-week period of really busy time at the office. Next week I’m helping to teach one of my own courses, and then there’s not much on my calendar for the rest of the summer. While I will still have plenty of other projects to occupy my day-job time, I won’t be putting in so many long days, weekend hours, or business trips for a while.

Meanwhile, the creative juices seem to be flowing again at home, so I’m starting to get some world-building and writing work done again.

In particular, I’ve been experimenting with a new approach to world-building for the literary projects I have on the docket. My preferred tabletop game for many years has been GURPS, flagship RPG from Steve Jackson Games. That’s not likely to change, but recently I’ve turned to another “generic, universal” game to do basic world-building. That game is FATE, published by Evil Hat Productions, a sophisticated and highly polished version of the venerable FUDGE system.

GURPS is deeply simulation-driven, largely derived from the tabletop wargaming thread of the origins of roleplaying games. FATE, on the other hand, is deeply narrative-driven, encouraging its users to do only as much world-building as they need to generate cool characters and drive their stories forward. Definitely worth considering for someone like me, who tends to fling himself down the world-building rabbit-hole to the exclusion of actually writing and publishing stories.

Unfortunately, while I understand GURPS inside and out, FATE is a pretty different approach to the problem of world-building and story prep. I’ve had trouble in the past wrapping my head around how it works. In the last few weeks, though, I’ve made a concerted effort to force myself to go through FATE‘s world-building and character-creation processes, with one of my literary projects in mind (the gritty-fantasy setting I’m calling The Curse of Steel). The results are starting to feel fairly promising. More about that over the next few days, I think.

None of which is to say that you won’t be seeing anything more from me about GURPS in the future. Still, if this experiment pans out, I may end up doing a lot of literary prep work with FATE instead. I might then come back and write things up in GURPS terms, but only after I’ve made good progress with a story that’s on track for publication.

It has also not escaped my notice that it would be a lot easier for me to self-publish material for FATE than to do the same for GURPS. Self-publishing GURPS-based material for profit certainly isn’t impossible, and I do have a long (if rather stale) history as a published GURPS author if I wanted to make a proposal to Steve Jackson Games. On the other hand, the FATE system is available under an Open Gaming License or a Creative Commons license. To be explored if and when I have something that might be worth publishing.

2018 in Review

January 1, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I remember the night that I very nearly turned my back on writing for good. I abandoned my writing blog, shut down my Facebook and Twitter accounts, put away every project I was working on at the time and didn’t even think about any of them for months. One of my best fan-fiction stories, in particular, got an enormous hiatus. Tuesday, 8 November 2016.

It wasn’t just the election and the results of that, although that certainly did feel like a blow. I’d been getting increasingly frustrated with what I was doing as a writer, too.

Story after story was almost getting into the short-fiction markets, getting immediate attention from lead editors who were sending me non-boilerplate feedback, and yet I couldn’t actually seem to close the deal and sell something. The best opportunity I seemed to have gotten was from a literary “contest” that vanished like a thief in the night, claiming the rights to my story but never actually doing anything with it. Even my fan-fiction was getting less and less of a response, although at least people seemed to still be reading it . . . silently. It was beginning to look as if the height of my creative career would be a handful (as in, less than five) nominating votes for the Campbell Award one year.

In short, I wasn’t in a very good place even before my fellow countrymen chose to elect the most manifestly corrupt and unfit candidate in a century to our highest office. After that, I pretty much lost all interest in creating anything. For months I went silent. I concentrated on my family and my day job, went weeks at a time without writing a word. It didn’t help that the Sharrukin’s Palace domain name lapsed and some domain squatters grabbed it for a year. The thought of starting a writing blog over from scratch just made me tired.

I got better, of course. I eventually finished the fan-fiction story I had abandoned in mid-stream (with an ending I would never have written before, but which I think is actually superior to what I originally had in mind). I started working on other stories again, off and on. I picked up the Architect of Worlds project again and started researching and revising that.

I suppose it helped that, although the world has been going down a lot of dark and very dangerous paths in the past couple of years, the worst has not happened. Come on, I’m a student of history and a speculative-fiction writer. I imagined a lot of things that – well, let’s be honest, they may yet come to pass. But they haven’t yet, and there are signs that a lot of decent people are pissed off and starting to fight back. So I began to feel creative again.

In March of this year, the Sharrukin’s Palace domain escaped the grubby paws of those domain squatters who had grabbed it. I pounced on it and brought it back into my own control. By April, I was ready to start this iteration of my writing blog. I self-published a novelette, and at least started a few other writing projects before I settled on the one I’m currently working. I did a bunch of new work on Architect of Worlds.

In short, I’m back in business. There’s some balance back in my life, between my family, my day job, my health, and the chance to do creative work. Let’s hope that lasts.

So, with respect to this blog, let’s look at the top ten posts for 2018:

None of that counts the large plurality of visits to the blog (about 45%), which just hit the home page and scroll down from there.

I can probably explain most of these results by observing that posts which get linked from Reddit seem to do well. So do GURPS-related posts that get linked from Doug Cole’s Gaming Ballistic blog – thanks, Doug! Still, I keep getting perennial visitors to the site looking for the Architect of Worlds project. Also, the biggest worked example of worldbuilding that I did all year also keeps getting hits months later.

Noted and logged – I’ll have to see if I can push Architect forward in 2019, and do some more extended examples. But tomorrow is the big day to look forward and maybe make some resolutions, so I’ll come back then.

In the meantime, I hope the coming year is fruitful and productive for all of us.

Sharrukin's Palace

Building fantastic worlds of the mind

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