A Character Sheet

December 5, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Making good progress on the proposed Cortex Prime sourcebook for the Human Destiny universe. The character rules, in particular, are pretty much done in a rough draft. To test them out, I worked up a character sheet for my usual protagonist in those stories: Aminata Ndoye, the young woman from Senegal who is destined to be the first human starship captain.

What follows is pretty crude – Cortex Prime normally emphasizes the use of well-designed “character files” and this is just text – but it should get the idea across.

A bit of notation: anywhere I have a number in parentheses, that indicates a character trait that contributes one die of that size to the player’s dice pool. So, for example, “(6)” means that trait contributes a 6-sided die. Cortex Prime builds dice pools out of 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, and 12-sided dice, and the bigger the die the more likely it is to produce a good result.

Aminata Ndoye

Student at the École supérieure de l’astronautique in Toulouse, province of Midi de la France.

Stands 168 centimeters tall, masses about 60 kilograms, age 17 Earth years. Her skin tone is deep brown, her eyes are such a dark brown as to be almost black, and her hair is black and cut very short.

Aminata is invariably cool, collected, and rational. She has already demonstrated courage and decisiveness, even under pressure. It is rare for her to lose her temper or otherwise display uncontrolled emotion, and she deals with others with calm, unshakeable courtesy. Strangers often find it difficult to get to know her, as she is something of a workaholic and appears to have little sense of fun or humor.

Distinctions

(8) Devoted Sunni Muslim

Islam is just as important to me as science when I try to make sense of the world around me.

Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
Spend a PP to step up a Value when you reconnect with your core identity.

(8) Going to the Stars Someday

Nothing and no one will keep me tied down to the Earth.

Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
Spend a PP to reroll your dice when the test or contest is in direct pursuit of your core ambition.

(8) Life is an Equation to be Solved

It’s all about figuring out the unknown variables.

Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
Spend a PP to double your Skill die when you embrace your personal style.

Values

(8) Sympátheia
(10) Logismós
(6) Prónoia
(6) Prokopé
(6) Andreía
(4) Evexía

Relationships

(10) The Hegemony (Gold card)
(6) Valérie Chauvin
(6) Nguyen Thi Mai

Skills

(6) Influence
(8) Know
- (6) Astronomy
(6) Move
(6) Notice
(6) Operate
(6) Play
(6) Survive

Resources

None

Some commentary, for the Cortex-unaware among my readers:

Distinctions are core pieces of a character’s identity. It’s expected that just about any test or contest the character gets into will involve one of their Distinctions.

Values are kind of like “attributes,” but they measure the character’s commitment to certain ethical or philosophical principles. I’m taking a small risk here by defining six Values for characters and naming them in a language most players won’t know (Classical Greek). I’m hoping to convey the alien-ness of the values system that people in this universe are trying to live under.

In this case, Aminata’s higher Values indicate that she’s good at understanding other sentient beings, empathizing with them, and persuading them. She’s very good at rational thinking and taking an objective viewpoint. On the other hand, her main weakness is evexía, which means something like “hygiene,” “self-awareness,” or “self-care” – she’s a bit of a workaholic, and tends to throw herself into problems without taking proper care of her own needs.

Relationships are ties the character has to other people or institutions. In this case, Aminata has a very strong Relationship with the Hegemony, the alien empire humans live under in this universe. She has an unusual level of privilege under Hegemony law. She also has Relationships with two other students at the “space academy” where she is currently studying.

Skills should be fairly straightforward. Cortex Prime encourages creators to name Skills with simple action verbs, to help make it clear when one of them comes into play. I’ve drawn up a list of Skills that’s a little longer than the default one in the core book, but for a space-opera setting that should work well.

Here, Aminata is just starting out at said “space academy,” where she and her fellow students are going to spend several years going through a grueling schedule of academic study and physical training. It occurs to me that Cortex Prime would have no trouble supporting a series of game sessions based on that situation . . .

A Vignette

December 2, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Another piece of the Introduction for the Human Destiny sourcebook I’m writing. I intended to include a short fictional vignette, but rather than write a new piece I decided to just grab the first page or so of “Pilgrimage,” a novelette I’ve already published in that universe. Hey, it’s my copyrighted material, I can use it if I want to.

“Pilgrimage” is available at this link on Amazon.

Aminata Ndoye emerged from a taxi outside the front gate of her home, in the arondissement of Mermoz-Sacré-Cœur, on a quiet street not far from the sea. As the taxi chirped and drove itself away, she looked carefully up and down the street. Sure enough, she spotted the first of her admirers, in a little park across the street and about half a block away. Three men, standing in the shade of an acacia tree, doing their best not to be too obvious about watching her.

She turned a cold shoulder to the men, waved a hand at the gate to unlock it, and hurried inside.

“Hello, little bird.”

Aminata glanced up, surprised.

A man sat at ease in the shade of the front porch, a cup of coffee in his hand. He was big, not tall but powerfully built, still resembling the wrestler he had been in his youth. His face was long, narrow, and very dark, with close-cropped black hair and a neatly trimmed beard that had just started to show a little silver. He wore a kaftan in deep blue, and a white kufi cap. He rose when he saw Aminata, setting his coffee down on a side table.

“Father!” Aminata hurried forward to greet him. “We weren’t expecting you home for weeks. Is everything all right?”

“Fine, fine,” said Ibrahim Ndoye. He returned Aminata’s embrace and gave her a warm smile. “Everything is in place for the rainy season, and Dr. Guèye has the reserve well in hand. I decided to give myself a few days off, and Supervisor Veshati agreed, so here I am.”

“I’m glad.” Aminata sobered. “Something has happened. I only learned about it an hour ago. I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with it with only Mother’s help.”

“Oh?”

Aminata hesitated. “It’s not something that we should discuss outdoors, Father.”

Ibrahim cocked an eyebrow at his daughter. “Very mysterious. Let’s go inside, then.”

They stepped up and through the door of their house, into the cool peace of the front hallway, where Ibrahim took off his kufi and set it on a side table. Aminata found words had abandoned her. She simply opened her tablet, called up the pertinent message, and handed the device to her father. Ibrahim read it with grave attention, giving no sign of surprise except for a sudden leap of his eyebrows.

“Truly?” he murmured when he had finished, handing the tablet back to Aminata. “A gold card?”

She only nodded, overwhelmed for a moment.

Immediately after Aminata’s sixteenth birthday, her primary education finished, she had undergone a week-long battery of assessments. A genetic assay. A rather invasive medical examination. Trials of her strength, speed, and coordination. Tests of cognitive ability and academic achievement. Extensive psychological evaluations, some of them under stress.

Every human on Earth went through the same process, as he or she approached adulthood. The stakes were very high. Nine out of ten humans spent their entire lives subsisting on the austere comforts of the Citizen’s Allowance. Nine out of ten of the rest might find work, but only under the direct supervision of foreigners. Only one in a thousand would ever earn gold-card citizenship: the elite of conquered humanity.

The process had other implications as well, which Aminata took very personally.

“A gold card,” she said at last. “Our benevolent lords and masters have decreed that I may have as many as five children. Now I’ll have men following me everywhere. I think there are some outside even now, watching the house. Not to mention that I’ve already gotten dozens of messages from complete strangers.”

“Some of them will be men of good family,” Ibrahim pointed out. “Men with worthwhile jobs and real status. You’ll get the chance to pick and choose.”

“That’s not at the top of my priority list, Father.”

Ibrahim cocked a skeptical eyebrow at her. “You don’t want a family of your own? Children?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “Someday. After I’ve seen and done something that will be worth passing on to them.”

He nodded gravely, pleased. “That’s very sensible, little bird. Perhaps it’s one reason why the Hegemony assigned you gold-card status to begin with.”

“Who knows what the khedai value in humans?”

“We can make a few guesses, based on the content of the examinations. Sound genes and healthy bodies. Intelligence. Sanity. The ability to live and work with beings who look different, have different customs, even think differently.” Ibrahim smiled. “All of which you have. Your mother and I never doubted you would do well.”

“They’re breeding us to be good subjects for their empire,” said Aminata, a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Like cattle, who never get to leave the field and see anything of the real world.”

For the first time, Ibrahim gave his daughter a look of disapproval. “They aren’t bad rulers. We saw much worse before the Conquest.”

“At least then, our rulers were human.”

The Elevator Pitch

December 1, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Here’s a chunk of the growing draft for the Human Destiny Sourcebook. This is a piece of the Introduction, an “elevator pitch” for the book and the setting it will describe.

In the middle of the Twenty-First Century, the age-old question of “are we alone in the universe?” got a sudden and very emphatic answer.

Earth was in bad shape at the time. Global depression, ecological collapse, runaway climate change, and half a dozen regional wars – one of them nuclear – had thrown the world into chaos. Civilization seemed to be on the brink of total failure, and many wondered whether the human species itself would survive.

Then the khedai came.

The khedai were the overlords of a vast interstellar empire, the Hegemony: tens of thousands of worlds, trillions of sentient beings, all living in relative peace and prosperity. They first became aware of Earth just after the turn of the century. At once, they began planning to intervene before we humans could finish rendering our home world uninhabitable. They sent a fleet to Sol and began building the infrastructure they would need.

Thirty years later, just as a few humans were becoming aware that something strange was happening in the outer solar system, the Hegemony finally made its move. The invasion of Earth began in September of 2044, and it was over in less than six months. The khedai called it the Fifth Rimward Intervention, and they considered it a minor skirmish on the frontiers of their empire. Humans called it simply the Conquest.

The khedai were certainly imperialists, but they turned out to be surprisingly benevolent overlords. The resources of Earth and the solar system were not plundered. In fact, the Hegemony worked to rebuild shattered ecosystems, restoring much of Earth’s natural beauty and health. Humans were not enslaved. In fact, most humans found themselves enjoying a higher standard of living than ever before, without having to work for any of it. The Hegemony enforced a system of laws that most humans found reasonable, and they did so with majestic impartiality.

The khedai have always claimed that they came to Earth only to save humanity from its self-destructive nature. They claim to mean us no harm, and they express a wish to see us someday become mature citizens of the galaxy.

Even so, for two hundred years many humans have resented the Hegemony. They feel that the human species has been forced to give up its freedom and its ambitions in exchange for a false security – the life of animals on exhibit in a zoo. Dissent and passive resistance continue to the present day.

In recent years, however, there are signs that the Hegemony’s policy toward humans may be about to change. More humans have been elevated to positions of authority in the cities of Earth. More humans have been encouraged to move to the colonies on Luna, on Mars, and elsewhere in the solar system. More humans have been permitted to travel to other stars. A few humans have been selected to serve aboard Hegemony starships, as crewmen and even as officers.

It is the middle of the Twenty-Third Century on Conquered Earth, and you are one of those exceptional humans. You stand out in a crowd. You have dreams and aspirations that can’t be denied. Whether it’s a quest for a meaningful life on Earth, a career of hard work in the colonies, or a vision of exploring the stars, you have only to step up to the challenge.

The galaxy doesn’t belong to humans, but that doesn’t mean you can’t earn a place in it.

The Human Destiny Sourcebook

November 26, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Plans for December

November 25, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decisions, Decisions

November 14, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 3 comments

A planned part of my creative strategy is not just to write stories and novels, but also to integrate the world-building elements of those projects into tabletop game material that I can also sell. Basically offering myself a license to my own IP, and self-publishing game material via DriveThruRPG or a similar outlet.

That suggests framing that creative material within a genre-agnostic game system. After all, my two primary creative projects involve heroic alternate-world fantasy (The Curse of Steel and its sequels) and relatively hard-SF space opera (the Human Destiny setting). Any game system that could cover both is not going to be strongly bound to any existing setting or genre.

So the question arises: do I build such a system of my own, or do I find an existing one that works for me and has friendly licensing terms?

I have been gathering design notes for a personally owned game system, under the working title of EIDOLON. There would certainly be no licensing issues there. On the other hand, time spent designing a completely new tabletop game is time I’m not writing. Also, a completely new game system would start with zero market presence. Why should anyone buy such a product, when they would almost certainly have to convert the material to their favorite system before using it?

GURPS is certainly a possibility. I’ve been a GURPS player (and writer, and editor) for many years. Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since I did any work for Steve Jackson Games, so I’m no longer in close contact. In any case, the GURPS licensing terms are pretty strict. Far from impossible to work with – I’m certainly aware of other creators who have published their own GURPS material for sale – but maybe more trouble than it’s worth for what I’m planning to do.

I’ve considered using FATE Core, which certainly fits the criteria (setting- and genre-agnostic, and very congenial licensing terms). Unfortunately, that system is a little too rules-light for my taste. I’ve never quite been able to wrap my brain around how it works in play, so writing material for it feels like a bit more of a challenge than I’m after. I may just need a little more crunch in my game rules.

I’ve glanced at a few other systems over the past couple of years – notably the Genesys system from Fantasy Flight Games – but nothing has quite hit the sweet spot I’m looking for.

Now I see that there’s a new edition of the Cortex system out – the Cortex Prime core rules. These were Kickstarted back in 2017 and have just been released to the public.

Cortex Prime doesn’t look like a playable game right out of the box, so much as it is a toolkit for constructing playable games. Well, that’s true for systems like GURPS or FATE as well, so that’s certainly not a drawback. Reading through the core book, I’m getting a good feeling for the system’s crunchiness and flexibility. Previous editions of Cortex have carried fairly generous licensing terms, and the current publisher seems interested in following suit.

Hmm. I may have to contact them and see if this would be a good fit for what I want to do. If it does work out, then EIDOLON may go on the back burner. Or off the stove entirely.

A Bit of Insight

October 22, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 8 comments

I think I may have finally gotten myself unblocked with respect to one of my long-term creative projects. The project in question is the Human Destiny setting.

The premise is that sometime in the middle of the 21st century, an interstellar civilization arrives in the Sol system and (without much effort) conquers humanity. It’s a strangely benign sort of conquest, though. The aliens don’t have any interest in us as slaves, nor are they motivated by a desire to take the solar system’s natural resources for their own benefit. Their goals seem mostly to involve . . . nannying us. Their laws are fairly strict, backed up by almost-universal surveillance, but enforcement seems to be non-violent, completely incorruptible, and even-handed. Meanwhile, all of us are provided a standard of living better than ever before, without anyone being required to work for any of it.

Naturally, a lot of humans resent all this mightily, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. The longer-term question is why all this has happened. What motivates the aliens?

I’ve written and published a couple of stories in this setting: “Pilgrimage” and “Guanahani.” I have two or three more stories in my development pile too. I’m fairly sure there’s a robust series, maybe even a few novels, in there. Yet, even after years of cogitation, I’ve never been able to get the idea to launch.

The main problem is that the setting does away with a lot of human agency just by its premise. Great, the aliens have come along and solved a lot of our problems, including many of the ones driven by human conflict and misbehavior. There are certainly stories left to be told, but a lot of the writer’s tools for plot and character development are set aside already.

It’s probably telling that almost all the stories I’ve written in this setting so far involve breakdowns of the alien surveillance apparatus. It’s kind of like Star Trek‘s transporters – they’re so useful for short-circuiting plots that a writer often has to justify taking them off-line before a story can happen.

There’s also the aliens’ motivation. They’re here because they want us to survive and evolve into the kind of species that actually can play a role on the galactic stage. That means human psychology needs to change. We need to learn to live with each other and tolerate the Other, we need to get better at understanding and preserving the big systems that keep us alive, we need to start thinking on much larger scales in both space and time.

So how do I write stories about that, in which the aliens demonstrate their motivations through conflict and plot rather than by simply telling the reader what’s up?

I was idly thinking about this the other day – a lot of my creative work happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else entirely. Then my mind made a connection with what I was doing with my hands and my forebrain at the time.

I was idly playing a game on my iPad, you see.

Terraforming Mars has been out for several years as a tabletop game, and now has a pretty good adaptation as a mobile app as well. It’s one of those wonderfully thematic board games that does such a superb job of making a complex subject playable and interesting to the layman.

Terraforming Mars assumes an era of exploration and colonization throughout the solar system, starting either late in this century or sometime in the next. The centerpiece of that era is a generations-long project to, as it says on the tin, terraform Mars – transform that planet into an at least marginally habitable world, where human beings can live freely with little or no life-support equipment.

Well. Suddenly I could see a lot of possible context for the Human Destiny setting, Suppose the aliens, aside from simply providing a decent quality of life for most humans, also opened the door for this kind of expansion into the solar system? If humans could settle on Mars, cooperate with each other in a project that might not pay off for many human lifetimes, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for some of us to demonstrate the citizen-of-the-galaxy mindset the aliens are looking for?

Right away, my brain started working on ways to get my character Aminata Ndoye – the protagonist of “Pilgrimage” and a few of the not-yet-published stories – involved in Martian terraforming and solar-system expansion. That in turn gave me a whole raft of new ideas about the Human Destiny setting as a whole.

All of which is to say that I might be turning back to that project, finally. My creative plate is rather full at the moment, between working on my Krava stories, and Architect of Worlds, and wanting to flesh out the EIDOLON game system a bit more. Still, as 2020 winds down I think I might be able to revisit the Human Destiny setting, rework the core documentation for that, and start making some of that information available. Readers of this blog, and my patrons over on Patreon, can expect to see some results from that over the next couple of months.

“Fermi’s Nightmare” Article Now Available on Sharrukin’s Worlds

June 1, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

One of the few blog entries I’ve ever written that I thought was worth preserving was titled “Fermi’s Nightmare.” This was a brief examination of a corollary to a well-known observation made by Enrico Fermi back in the 1950s. For the last few years, that’s been hosted over at the Sharrukin’s Archive site. As of today, I’ve moved it into a static page on this blog. It should be visible in the Pages sidebar on the right.

At this point, the only thing still sitting at Sharrukin’s Archive that isn’t available anywhere else is some draft material for the Human Destiny setting. Fairly soon, I may either move that content over here, or simply decide to take it offline until I do some redesign of the setting. To be honest, there are things about the current concept that have me seriously blocked – I’ve been struggling for a couple of years to produce more stories for it than the one I’ve published.

Either way, expect the Sharrukin’s Archive site to come down entirely as soon as I’ve figured out what to do with the remaining material.

Status Report (9 February 2019)

February 9, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I’m still plugging away on Twice-Crowned, although I seem to have lost some of my momentum on that project. I may spend a few days working on other items so as to stay fresh, then get back to the novel.

In particular, I’ve taken the first steps to move all of my archived content out of the Sharrukin’s Archive site and into this WordPress framework. For the moment, all I have is a parent page (visible on the sidebar to the right, under the “Sharrukin’s Worlds” link). I plan to hang several child pages from that, each covering a specific project or setting that I have in the process of development. For example:

The most recent draft sections for Architect of Worlds
Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for the Human Destiny space-opera setting
Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for Ancient Greece and the Danassos historical-fantasy setting
Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for the Tanûr planetary-romance setting
World-building articles I’ve written that aren’t tied to a specific setting
Any new projects that rise to the point of active development

This should give interested parties a chance to look at the content I’ve developed without having to dig through months of blog posts. It should also be far easier to maintain than the Sharrukin’s Archive site, which is frankly a royal pain in the nether regions to do anything with. Finally, I suspect this kind of structure might also be a convenient way to collect content on the way to developing books for publication via Amazon or a game-centered platform like RPGNow. Watch this space for further developments.

2019: Looking Forward

January 3, 2019 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

So I’ve long since gotten out of the habit of making New Year’s resolutions. For one thing, life is too unpredictable to nail down that way, and for another, it takes more than a line on the calendar to change habits. Still, the first few days of the year is a good time to at least try and make a few plans.

I’ve got a fairly crowded agenda for my day job, where I have several course-development projects lined up for the coming calendar year. I’ll also be “on the platform” to lecture more than I was last year. So there’s one irony: out of all my writing output for the year, most of it won’t be fictional and isn’t likely to be mentioned here.

Meanwhile, I’m taking steps to improve my health in the coming year. I’m an overweight guy in my fifties, and a controlled diabetic as well, and that means I have to pay a certain amount of attention to personal maintenance. At least, I do if I want to live long enough to enjoy a few years of retirement, subject as always to the whims of our lords and masters downtown.

Recently I resumed my membership at a local gym, and while I’m never going to be slim and athletic again, I hope to build up a bit of strength in my legs and maybe lose a few pounds. Possibly more productive is a suggestion my podiatrist made, not long ago. Apparently there exist compact elliptical machines that are ideal for putting under a desk, so you can be working your legs and burning calories even while you sit at a computer. I’ve got one on order for my home office, and if that works out I may order a second one to take to work.

As far as creative writing goes:

First priority is going to be producing the first draft for the current novel-length project, a pseudo-Hellenic alternate-history fantasy with the working title of Twice-Crowned. As of this evening, I’ve got close to 11 kilowords down, which should finish one long chapter. The total length of the story will probably be about 120 kilowords in rough draft, and I’m hoping to have that finished by summer. Whether I’ll get the novel actually self-published this calendar year depends on how much revision it needs.
Second priority is going to be getting at least one Aminata Ndoye story out the door, and possibly another short piece as well.
Third priority is to get back to Architect of Worlds and push that project forward through another big section. I want to revisit some of the material I’ve already written – the model doesn’t seem to be handling “super-Earths” very well yet – but the main objective will be to write the section that describes individual planets in some detail. If I can get that finished and tested, the main “game mechanics” sections of the book will be done.
Fourth priority is to finish a couple of fan-fiction projects. In particular, I’ve got a Silmarillion fan-fiction piece that got started and looked promising, but which has been on hiatus for a while so I can work on those other bullet items. There’s also a Dragon Age story that I abandoned in 2018 but that won’t quite let go of my imagination, so I may go back to that at some point. Of course, all of this is subject to Zeigler’s Iron Law of Prioritization: “Any item that falls to fourth on the priority list will never be completed.” I can hope for an exception.
Fifth, any continued blogging I may find to do on worldbuilding, writing, or the state of my muse.

Another thing I’m considering is shutting down the Sharrukin’s Archive part of this site, in favor of just placing any “persistent” items in this WordPress framework as permanent pages. Honestly, the Archive as it’s structured is an enormous pain in the ass to maintain, and I’ve never managed to populate it as densely as I originally planned.

Honestly, that seems like enough to keep me busy for the next few months. Watch this space for progress reports.

Sharrukin's Palace

Building fantastic worlds of the mind

Browsed by
Tag: human destiny