human destiny

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.

Aminata Ndoye

March 17, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Here’s a first cut at a Human Destiny character under the evolving Basic Roleplaying (BRP) design. This is my occasional protagonist, Aminata Ndoye, as she first appears in the novelette “Pilgrimage.” At this point she is sixteen years old, having just finished her primary education, and she is starting to consider what she plans to do with her life.

Aminata Ndoye

Female human, age 16
Height 1.72 m, mass 60 kg
Deep brown skin, dark brown eyes, close-cropped black hair, solid athletic build
Resident of Dakar, Haute-Guinée du Nord
Mixed Wolof and Egyptian Arab descent
Sunni Muslim with Sufi influences
Social Standing: 22% (Gold card)

Characteristics

STR 13 (Effort roll 65%)
CON 14 (Stamina roll 70%)
SIZ 12
INT 17 (Idea roll 85%)
POW 12 (Luck roll 60%)
DEX 16 (Agility roll 80%)
CHA 13 (Charm roll 65%)
EDU 11 (Knowledge roll 55%)

Damage Modifier: +1d4
Hit Points: 13
Fatigue Points: 27
Power Points: 12
Experience Bonus: +9%
Movement (MOV): 10 units/round

Skills

Only those skills that have been improved from their default value (based on skill base values and category bonuses) are specifically listed here.

Communication Skills (+9%)
- Language
  - Wolof (native) 90%
  - Arabic 40%
  - French 60%
- Persuade 50%
Manipulation Skills (+10%)
Mental Skills (+8%)
- Knowledge (Literature) 20%
- Science (Astronomy) 30%
- Technical (Computer Use) 40%
Perception Skills (+10%)
Physical Skills (+7%)
- Pilot (Small Aircraft) 30%
Combat Skills (+10%)

Personality Traits

Sympátheia – 60% kosmos, 40% khaos
Logismós – 70% kosmos, 30% khaos
Prónoia – 50% kosmos, 50% khaos
Prokopé – 50% kosmos, 50% khaos
Andreía – 70% kosmos, 30% khaos
Evexía – 50% kosmos, 50% khaos

General Commentary

In my opinion, this exercise didn’t turn out too badly. It took me maybe an hour to draw up this character, and that’s with me being out of practice with BRP character design and without a paper character sheet to work with.

At this point in her life Aminata is clearly very talented and she has started to develop some skills, but she is far from being a world-class expert on anything. She’s just the equivalent of a precocious high-school student, after all. Her personality traits seem reasonable – Aminata tends to be cool and rational, but she has a sympathetic streak, and she’s also quite brave in a tight situation.

This would be a good example of a very young Human Destiny character with exceptional characteristic rolls, just starting out on an adventuring career. I’m thinking that the character-design rules are on the right track so far.

An Unexpected Opportunity

March 6, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

This was announced yesterday: a contest for indie designers who are working with the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) engine.

Normally I dislike creative contests. My experience with literary contests in particular has been invariably bad. I’ve lost control over some of my work in exchange for promises of publication or other opportunities that never materialized. I no longer pay any attention to literary contests, and I don’t advise anyone else to enter them either.

Game design contests are usually more well-founded, and my experience with those hasn’t been so negative. I participated in (e.g.) the design contest that eventually gave rise to the Eberron setting for D&D, and that went well even if I didn’t make the short-list. Of course, my usual problem is that I almost never have the right project under way when a contest is announced, so – given how many irons I usually have in the fire at any given time – I rarely have a good shot at producing a viable entry in time.

This one looks like an exception. Chaosium has already placed their BRP engine under the ORC license, making it available for indie designers under very friendly terms. Now they have just announced a design challenge for BRP, with a planned short-list of 10 entries and pretty substantial cash prizes.

Oh, look, and here I have an (admittedly early and incomplete) draft for a BRP-based game. To which I had already planned on devoting most of my creative time over the next few months.

I think I know what I’ll be doing between now and the end of May.

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.

Status Report (28 February 2024)

February 28, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

Just a quick note, especially for my patrons.

I’m coming down to the wire, but I think I’ll be able to release a new interim draft of the Human Destiny setting bible and tabletop RPG sourcebook by the end of this month. This includes a fair amount of new and substantially revised material, in particular a first rough cut at the Basic Roleplaying-driven character design rules.

This means you can expect a charged release by sometime tomorrow, 29 February. This is the first charged release for my patrons in about a year.

Meanwhile, Ken Burnside and I are still working to wrap up final edits for Architect of Worlds, and I’m hoping the ebooks will be available before too much longer. I beg a little more patience, please.

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.

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.

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.

Rethinking the Human Destiny

November 4, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

A big part of my creative process involves all the work that happens entirely in my head, usually while the “active” work is happening on a completely different project. Some of that has been happening over the past couple of months, while the bulk of my time was devoted to Architect of Worlds. The target has been my Human Destiny universe.

The Human Destiny is an extended meditation on what our future might look like in a universe that is very much not designed for human pre-eminence. Humans reach the stars, but only as clients of a far older, far larger, and far more powerful extraterrestrial society. Stories written so far in this setting seem to fall into two categories:

Stories set right around “the Conquest,” the time (currently set about twenty years from now) when the aliens arrive and very quickly reduce Earth to a client state. Published stories in this set include “Guanahani” and “Roanoke.”
Stories set about two hundred years after the Conquest, at a time when human beings are first being permitted to explore and settle worlds outside our own planetary system. Most of these center around the character of Aminata Ndoye, a young woman from what we now know as Senegal, who is one of the first humans to earn an officer’s position in the alien “interstellar service.” If and when I write a Human Destiny game sourcebook, it will probably be set in this era. Published stories in this set include “Pilgrimage” and In the House of War.

So far, the Human Destiny setting has been best described as “Star Trek meets David Brin’s Uplift novels.” The “Hegemony” that conquers Earth is non-human and rather paternalistic, but it’s also generally benign. Kind of like a Trek Federation that means well to its citizens but decidedly does not have a non-interference directive.

What I’ve been wrestling with is the technological assumptions of the setting.

To put the problem shortly: I think the technologies I’ve assumed so far have turned out to be at odds with the core themes of the setting, and I’m moving toward the decision to re-think that technological base from scratch. Which may mean rewriting a lot of the existing fiction, but may also give me good hooks for new stories in the future, so on that basis it may be a wash.

The executive summary is that I’ve been assuming a very Star Trek-like technological base. Magical normal-space and FTL drives, technical control of gravitational forces, the sort of tech that allows for cheap and easy space travel. Yet the themes I want to build into the setting are that the universe is vast, that intelligent beings on the human scale can easily get lost in it, that thriving on that stage requires a mindset that thinks into the distance in both space and time. Star Trek, for all its virtues, rarely offered that kind of perspective. It’s the Age of Sail in space, with exotic but fundamentally human cultures in every port. Jim Kirk needed to be cosmopolitan, but he rarely had to think far above the human level to succeed.

One oeuvre that I really appreciate, that I think hits some of the same themes I’m looking for, can be found in the late works of Poul Anderson. I’m thinking here of some of the novels he wrote in the last decade of his life, starting with The Boat of a Million Years, moving through his Harvest of Stars tetralogy, and ending with the magnificent Starfarers.

All these novels lean toward “hard” SF, mostly sticking to space travel that’s still tied to the rocket equation even if the engines are really advanced, avoiding FTL travel entirely. The stars are hard to reach in these stories, and it’s never clear that human beings are at all suited for life on that stage. Some humans decide not to try, huddling at home on Earth and rarely looking up. Others worry that humans are going to be eclipsed by other forms of life – mechanical or alien – that can thrive on the cosmic scale. Yet in these stories, some humans do manage to keep themselves relevant, finding ways to seek out free and worthwhile lives even out among the stars.

Yeah. I don’t know if it’s the undeniable influence that Anderson has had on my creative work all along, but those are very nearly the same themes I want to build into the Human Destiny. So the worldbuilding needs to match.

So I’ve been thinking about turning the “hard SF” dial up quite a bit, and working out what the implications might be for the setting as a whole. In particular, what will the vast, old, alien Hegemony look like if they don’t fly Star Trek-style starships? What will their conquest of Earth look like? How will Aminata Ndoye’s career be different, if she can’t fly a few hundred parsecs and back and still find her family and her home town more or less as she left them?

Lots to think about here, and I don’t pretend to have everything worked out yet, but once Architect of Worlds is out the door this may be where I’ll be spending some worldbuilding time.

A Choice of Game Mechanics

October 28, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 3 comments

As of today, the initial layout of Architect of Worlds is finished – all of the final-draft text has been dropped into InDesign and laid out on the pages. In fact, given that there are a couple more days before the end of October, I’ve gone ahead and dropped the “Fine-Tuning World Climate” material into the book as well. I’m going to try to get that laid out before I produce an end-of-month PDF for my patrons.

This is a really big milestone. My planning message for November will detail the work that remains to be done, but the bulk of the final editorial work is finished. From here to the release version is a short distance, relatively speaking.

So today, I’m taking a break from Architect to consider some of the projects I might take up afterward. In particular, the possibility of producing one or more RPG sourcebooks tied to my personal literary settings. These include:

The Human Destiny: Interstellar science fiction, positioned somewhere between moderately hard SF and conservative space opera, essentially a pastiche of Star Trek in a universe where human beings are decidedly not the dominant culture.
Fourth Millennium: Alternate-historical fantasy set in and around the ancient Mediterranean, a world in which Hellenistic civilization is dominant and (at least some of) the gods are real and active in human affairs.
The Great Lands: Iron-Age fantasy reminiscent of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, in which heroic demigods struggle for glory and the survival of their people.

Of the three, I suspect The Human Destiny and Fourth Millennium are most likely to come to fruition. I do want to do more with The Great Lands, but that setting has been getting a lot less interest from the potential audience, so I’m a bit less motivated to push it forward.

One question that keeps coming up is how these settings might best be translated into tabletop RPG material – in particular, what game system might be the best choice for me to work with and publish under?

My first choice, of course, would be GURPS. I’ve got plenty of experience writing for various editions of GURPS – no fewer than 17 full-length books for which I was sole author, co-author, contributor, or editor would argue for that. To this day I’m fond of the system, and I’m quite convinced that any of my personal settings would translate well into it. Not least because I suspect a lot of GURPS idioms have embedded themselves into my personal world-building style.

The problem is that GURPS doesn’t have any form of open license. It’s certainly possible to write and sell third-party GURPS material. Douglas Cole of Gaming Ballistic, for example, has managed a small but successful product line tied to Dungeon Fantasy. As someone with a long track record of both freelance and on-the-payroll work for SJG, I could probably do the same. The barrier to entry would be steep, though, and probably not something at which a one-man development shop working around the constraints of a day job could succeed.

A few years back, I briefly considered writing my own RPG system. You can probably find a few references to the Eidolon system in old posts here. I eventually set that idea aside, because frankly the market is already absolutely glutted with RPG game systems. Anything I publish along these lines is going to be very marginal to begin with; tying it to an idiosyncratic game system would reduce the audience size from “few” to “none.”

I considered the new Cortex Prime system, and even wrote up a bunch of Human Destiny material for it. I still like that system, but the promised creator-friendly licensing scheme never materialized, so I had to set that aside too.

I thought about publishing Human Destiny under the OGL, possibly by way of Cepheus Engine, but the blowup over the OGL at the beginning of this calendar year kind of scotched that notion. I have absolutely no interest in building a dependency into any of my work that Wizards of the Coast could yank out from under me at any time. There was some talk of placing Cepheus Engine on a different licensing basis, possibly with cooperation from Mongoose Publishing, but I’m not sure how that shook out. I’m still kind of leery. Besides, I’m not entirely convinced that the Traveller-like mechanics of Cepheus Engine would quite fit the Human Destiny setting.

More recently I’ve been looking at Monte Cook’s Cypher, and Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (BRP), both of which are available under very creator-friendly licensing terms.

Cypher is perhaps a little more streamlined than I like in a tabletop system, but it seems to have a bigger and growing audience. Monte Cook Games has been pushing it hard this year, especially after the OGL debacle. Cypher is available under its own open license, and the System Reference Document (SRD) is pretty extensive.

On the other hand, Basic Role Playing is an established and very solid system, more GURPS-like than most of the others. It’s been applied to a variety of settings over the years, and I think some of its mechanics would fit my settings very nicely. It’s not clear how much of an audience it has outside the very popular Pendragon, Runequest and Call of Cthulhu games. BRP used to be under a fairly restrictive open license – the SRD included almost nothing but the core task-resolution mechanic – but the most recent release of the engine includes more mechanics, and is apparently going to be placed under the much broader ORC license.

None of this is urgent yet; it’s going to be a while yet before Architect is finally out the door and I can turn to the next big project. Still, that seems to be the current state of play. I need a tabletop game system that will be a good fit for the settings I want to write, which has at least some established audience, and which exists under a licensing scheme for which I won’t have to be a full-time developer and marketer to succeed. It’s encouraging that the intersection of those three sets doesn’t appear to be quite empty . . .