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Planning for January 2022

Planning for January 2022

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Things have been a little hectic here at the Palace lately. The period since Christmas has, ironically, been one of the busiest I’ve had at my day job in some time, with three major projects all coming to a head at the same time and demanding a lot of my attention. On top of that, throw the disruption of the worst surge since the pandemic started and our usual pattern of getting heavy snow in January, and it’s kind of been chaos. Not conducive to getting creative work done.

Still, I have a calm weekend at the moment, and it’s a good time to outline work for the rest of this month.

  • Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
    • Human Destiny: Finish a draft of the character design rules and release the first partial draft of the Human Destiny setting bible as a Cepheus Prime sourcebook.
    • Human Destiny: Finish a new novelette for eventual collection and publication.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a high-level map of terraformed Mars.
    • Human Destiny: Research and produce a timeline for the terraforming of Mars.
  • Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
    • Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
    • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
    • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
    • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
    • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release. This work may involve updating all of the worked examples, and making mathematical notation more consistent.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
    • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine)

I’m clearly focusing on the Human Destiny universe some more this month. I’ve actually worked out most of the Martian material, although it’s all scattered notes at the moment, and producing the map is proving a little more challenging than I thought. I’m making good progress on the Cepheus Engine hack for the sourcebook. Meanwhile, I’ve come across one of my older partial stories – possibly the first piece of fiction I ever wrote in the setting that eventually became Human Destiny – and it seems likely that I’ll be able to finish that fairly quickly. So that’s where the low-hanging fruit are at the moment.

For my patrons, the most likely releases this month will be the next partial rough draft of the sourcebook (free release) and the new story (charged release, if it’s long enough). As always, I’ll update as the month progresses and it’s clearer how things are going to go.

Human Destiny: the Skill List

Human Destiny: the Skill List

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I’ve been working on a Cepheus Engine kitbash for my Human Destiny setting bible and game.

One thing that became obvious fairly quickly is that the usual skill sets for Cepheus Engine, as derived from Traveller, may not work well in this setting. The typical premise in the older games is a band of misfit characters trying to make a living through some combination of troubleshooting, mercenary work, or tramp-freighter trade. Those are a lot less likely in Human Destiny stories, which are more likely to be heavily social-interaction-oriented in the context of post-scarcity economics and a fairly strong interstellar state. Think Star Trek or the Culture, rather than Firefly or The Expanse.

So here’s the tentative skill set for the new game. I anticipate task and conflict mechanics to work in a standard manner for Cepheus Engine, but this is distinct enough from the SRD that the game will certainly be presented as “An Alternate Cepheus Engine Universe.”

Incidentally, I spent a lot of time reviewing other science-fiction games in my library to remind myself how this was done elsewhere. It’s actually rather amusing how many games, published across four decades of time, have taken very similar approaches to this problem . . .

Tentative Skill List

Artistic Skills

  • Fine Arts (Specializes to Architecture, Body Art, Calligraphy, Drawing, Interior Decorating, Musical Composition, Photography, Poetry, Pottery, Sculpting, Video Production, Virtual Production, Woodworking, or Writing)
  • Handicrafts (Specializes to Basket Weaving, Brewing, Blacksmith, Bookbinding, Carpentry, Cooking, Gardening, Glassblowing, Jeweler, Leatherworking, Masonry, Needlework, Sewing, Winemaking, or Woodworking)
  • Performing Arts (Specializes to Acting, Dancing, Singing, or a specific musical instrument)

Athletic Skills

  • Athletics
  • Free Fall
  • Observation
  • Riding
  • Sports (Specializes to a specific sport)
  • Stealth
  • Unarmed Combat

Interpersonal Skills

  • Carousing
  • Debate
  • Deception
  • Diplomacy
  • Games (Specializes to Gambler, Virtual Gamer, or a specific game)
  • Instruction
  • Interrogation
  • Leadership
  • Negotiation
  • Personal Service
  • Persuasion
  • Public Speaking

Operations Skills

  • Battle Dress
  • Demolitions
  • System Operations (Specializes to Comms, Computers, Security, Sensors, or Telepresence)
  • Vacc Suit

Outdoor Skills

  • Animal Handling
  • Navigation
  • Survival
  • Tracking

Professional Skills

  • Admin
  • Broker
  • Forensics
  • Law
  • Medicine
  • Memetics
  • Politics
  • Profession (Specializes to a specific career)
  • Protocol
  • Strategy
  • Streetwise
  • Tactics

Scientific Skills

  • Research
  • Science (Specializes to Anthropology, Archaeology, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Ecology, Economics, Geology, History, Linguistics, Literature, Mathematics, Metallurgy, Meteorology, Paleontology, Philosophy, Physics, Physiology, Planetology, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Theology, or Xenology)

Starship Skills

  • Astrogation
  • Engineering (Specializes to Drive, Life Support, or Power Plant)
  • Gunnery (Specializes to Bay Weapon, Orbital Bombardment, Spinal Mount Weapon, or Turret Weapon)
  • Pilot

Technical Skills

  • Civil Engineering
  • Construction
  • Cybernetics
  • Electronics
  • Gravitics
  • Mechanics

Vehicle Skills

  • Air Vehicles (Specializes to Airship, Grav Aircraft, Rotor Aircraft, or Winged Aircraft)
  • Ground Vehicles (Specializes to Cycle, Hovercraft, Tracked Vehicle, or Wheeled Vehicle)
  • Water Vehicles (Specializes to Motor Ship, Sailing Ship, Small Craft, or Submarine)

Weapon Skills

  • Guns (Specializes to Archaic Guns, Energy Guns, Gravitic Guns, and Stun Guns)
  • Heavy Weapons
  • Melee Weapons (Specializes to Fencing Weapons, Impact Weapons, Knives, Staves, or Swords)
  • Missile Weapons (Specializes to Bows or Crossbows)

Current status of the project: I had vaguely hoped to have a new partial rough draft for my patrons by the end of December, with the character rules more or less finished, but designing this list took a lot longer than I expected.

I’ll have my formal “planning for January” blog post in a few days, but I suspect my main efforts for next month will involve finishing this game-design task so I can push a version 0.4 draft to my patrons, and possibly writing a new Human Destiny novelette. A murder mystery, oddly enough, although murders are vanishingly rare in the Human Destiny setting . . .

Rethinking the Human Destiny Setting Bible

Rethinking the Human Destiny Setting Bible

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One of my ongoing projects is to create a combination “setting bible” and tabletop RPG sourcebook for the Human Destiny setting. The idea is to codify the setting for myself, and also to make a little money while cross-marketing it to gamers.

The problem all along has been to find the right vehicle – that is, the right game system – for the RPG side of the project. There’s a continuum of potential options here.

At one end of the spectrum, I could design my own game system from scratch. I’ve done a little work in this direction, producing the fragmentary EIDOLON game system. The advantage there is that I would have creative freedom, and could avoid infringing on anyone else’s intellectual property. The drawback is that yet another original game system, one that doesn’t have any external support, acts as a barrier to potential players.

At the other end of the spectrum, I could license an existing and well-known game system and produce an independently published sourcebook for that. GURPS would be an obvious choice, given my publication history, but I’ve also considered a few other systems. For most of the past year, I’ve leaned toward Cortex Prime as a good choice, on the assumption that Fandom’s eventual licensing schemes would be congenial. In general, the advantage of working with an existing game system is that the finished product would be familiar to many potential players, and would have significant ancillary support.

The drawback of using an existing system – and this is a big one – is that most of the best choices have fairly restrictive licensing schemes. I’m a one-man creative operation with a fairly low tolerance for risk. I’m just not interested in a plan that would require me to hire a development staff and try to crowd-fund with a budget of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s why I’ve never seriously considered trying to get a GURPS license, for example. I know people have made a good go of that, but it’s not within my reach.

Recently the folks at Fandom announced their upcoming non-commercial and commercial licenses for Cortex Prime. I can’t speak to how other Cortex fans have reacted to that announcement. From my own perspective only, it looks as if what I would want to do with the system falls between two stools. Non-commercial license means no money at all. Commercial license looks as if it would informally require the development-staff-and-crowdfunding avenue.

Back to the drawing board. Fortunately, there’s another “sweet spot” on that continuum I mentioned earlier. That involves working with a system that’s covered under the Open Game License (OGL).

The OGL is a legal framework which was first established by Wizards of the Coast back in 2000, originally covering the “3.5 edition” of Dungeons & Dragons. Since then, a lot of indie publishers have produced material for a variety of game systems under the OGL.

Working under the OGL, you can use any game mechanics that a publisher has placed under the “Open Content” category, adding your own tweaks to the mechanics and your own new rules systems, and publish the result. There are some legal requirements – you have to include a copy of the OGL in your book, and you can’t expressly claim that your product is associated with the original game. Those aren’t onerous requirements, and they don’t push a project into the staff-and-crowdfunding zone. Plenty of one-man or small-team projects have succeeded under the OGL.

Meanwhile, under the OGL you can also designate your own intellectual property – information about a setting, most often – as “Product Identity” which is still protected by copyright. Which is exactly what I would want to do for game material based on any of my created settings or published fiction.

Right now I’m specifically looking at the fact that the popular SF game Traveller has at least one edition published under the OGL. There’s also a Traveller emulation under its own OGL structure, published as the Cepheus Engine RPG. There’s a whole cottage industry of indie publishers producing material under the Cepheus Engine banner, and some of that material is moving out into a variety of genres. There are Cepheus Engine-based games for hard-SF, swords & sorcery, Old West, and other settings.

The Human Destiny setting isn’t all that Traveller-like in some respects, but I suspect it wouldn’t be all that difficult to produce a Cepheus Engine hack that would do a good job of it. I might even be able to bring in some mechanics from EIDOLON – the two systems aren’t radically different and might hybridize well.

So that’s the current plan for the Human Destiny sourcebook: to rework it as a Cepheus Engine hack and start moving toward independent publication under the OGL. First step in the plan is to start working on the character design rules. I hope to have at least a partial draft of those available as a free release for my patrons by the end of December.

Planning for December 2021

Planning for December 2021

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I think I may have diagnosed the long-period creative slump I was in for most of the fall.

About mid-November, I summarily ejected an unproductive activity that had been taking up some time every day since the height of the pandemic: playing one or another MMO online. Back when I was on extended medical leave, working from home if at all, spending an hour or two a day gaming wasn’t an issue. Once I was back in the office full-time, and especially given that my workload there has stepped up a bit since the summer, it was crowding out time and energy that could have been spent on creative work. One day I decided to shut the most recent game down cold turkey – gave away all my in-game assets, closed out my account – and almost the very next day I found myself getting unblocked. We often don’t realize what’s damming the creative flow until we find the problem and patch it.

So November was yet another month with no big milestones and no major releases, but December is already looking like a big improvement. I have a Human Destiny novelette that’s well on its way to completion in first draft, and I’m making good progress on a new section of the setting bible for that universe.

So, without further ado, here’s the outline for the month of December.

  • Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
    • Human Destiny: Finish the new novelette “Roanoke” for eventual collection and publication.
    • Human Destiny: Research and produce a timeline for the terraforming of Mars in this universe.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a high-level map of terraformed Mars for the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.
    • Human Destiny: Write a few thousand more words of the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.
  • Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
    • Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
    • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
    • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
    • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
    • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release. This work may involve updating all of the worked examples, and making mathematical notation more consistent.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
    • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller.

Clearly the Human Destiny material is going to get the lion’s share of my attention this month. I should be able to finish “Roanoke” within another week or so, and that’s likely to be at least 10,000 words of new material all by itself. The setting bible is going to get a big chunk of new material as well.

Most likely, my patrons are going to get a final draft of “Roanoke” as a charged release this month, with the understanding that there’s also going to be a free update to the Human Destiny setting bible that incorporates a bunch of new material. We’ll see what else might make progress as well over the next few weeks.

Status Report (28 November 2021)

Status Report (28 November 2021)

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Well, we’re coming down to the end of the month of November, and I’m sorry to report that the honey and the biscuits are not coming out even. (Except at our Thanksgiving table, where we had a very fine feast.)

At the moment, new material adds up to about 9,000 words, most of it in the new Human Destiny story I’m working on. That’s looking as if it will come to novelette length before I’m finished with it. I also have one new chapter of The Sunlit Lands complete in first draft, and part of the next chapter. Nothing new on any other projects, alas.

In fact, that’s better than I managed in September or October, which tells me that I may have gotten the creative engine unstuck finally. It’s still not enough to reach my self-imposed threshold for a new release for my patrons. Therefore there will be no charged release for my patrons in November.

If I can keep up the current pace, however, a full release for my patrons seems very likely in December. More on that once I’ve got the decks cleared a bit and can plan for the coming month.

Status Report (20 November 2021)

Status Report (20 November 2021)

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The day job has been taking up a lot of my time and energy over the past few weeks – there’s a great stack of work I need to get knocked out at the office before it turns into a ghost town over the holidays. Still, this weekend and the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday are promising plenty of time to get creative work done.

At the moment, I’m working to get a new Human Destiny short story put together. As with “Guanahani,” this story is set on the day when the Khedai Hegemony launches its overt invasion of Earth. In this case, the story is set on Mars, where a small outpost has been struggling to survive in isolation, ever since everything went to pot back on the home world. When the aliens arrive, they give the Martian colonists a fateful choice to make . . .

I’ve also been working on new chapters of The Sunlit Lands. That’s moving too slowly for my taste, but I may have two or three new chapters finished by the end of November.

At the moment, my plan for my patrons is to release those new chapters of The Sunlit Lands and the new short story as a charged release by the end of November. That’s conditional on the new material adding up to at least 12,000-15,000 words. I may also finish polishing up a minor version update of the Human Destiny sourcebook – that will be a free patron reward if I can get to a good milestone with it.

I’ve also been reviewing yet another creative project, something I worked on several years ago and then dropped. Another fantasy novel, in this case, but more strictly historical fantasy. It’s an alternate-timeline setting, in which Classical Greece ends up developing along very different lines than in our history. I find I actually have quite a lot of notes, and a very healthy opening already written for a novel. More about that if I decide to bring it up off the back burner.

I also owe the world at least one book review before the end of the month. A few good candidates in my TBR stack, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Planning for November 2021

Planning for November 2021

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I seem to be in a long-term slump when it comes to creative effort. For a couple of months now, progress has been slow and rather scattered on all of my outstanding projects – I’ve made some progress in several areas, but no one item has moved forward enough to generate a significant milestone. Neither have I generated any new content in a big enough block to justify issuing a charged release for my patrons. About the only real milestone I hit was to publish this month’s book review.

Hard to say what’s behind this. It’s probably some mix of needing to spend most of my creative spoons on my day job, getting distracted by day-to-day concerns, and some mild dysphoria that’s making it hard to focus. The upshot is that October, like September, was something of a wash.

Yet hope springs eternal, and part of my creative discipline involves at least taking stock and laying out a plan at the beginning of each month. So here’s the plan for November.

Not much change from last month, except that I think I’m going to move a new Human Destiny short story up on the priority list – I have a concept that seems to be pushing its way to the front of my mind. Also with respect to Human Destiny, I’ve been doing a lot of research and prep work to develop a timeline for the terraforming of Mars – I think several stories in that setting will eventually be tied to that piece of it. I might push that subproject forward this month.

  • Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
    • Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
    • Human Destiny: Research and produce a timeline for the terraforming of Mars in this universe.
    • Human Destiny: Write a new short story for eventual collection and publication.
  • Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
    • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
    • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
    • Human Destiny: Write a few thousand more words of the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.
    • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
    • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release. This work may involve updating all of the worked examples, and making mathematical notation more consistent.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
    • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller.

If I can produce enough new prose between The Sunlit Lands and a Human Destiny story, that will likely be a charged release for my patrons this month. If some of the Second Priority material makes progress, I’ll likely post that to my blog and share it with my patrons for free as well. I also have a couple of good candidates for book reviews for the month of November.

Planning for October 2021

Planning for October 2021

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Well, September didn’t go according to plan on any level, but I did manage to get a few creative tasks done:

  • I produced a new minor update for the main portion of Architect of Worlds, and shared that with my patrons as a free update.
  • I finished revising “In the House of War” and published it through Amazon and a number of other outlets. The workflow for that involved the Draft2Digital service, which worked out rather nicely – I think that will be the default for future fiction releases.
  • I published a book review.

Reviewing all of the open projects, I think I’m most concerned to get some new fiction written. Second Dawn has been hanging fire at six chapters since the Kindle Vella service went live. Even worse, it’s been over a year now since The Curse of Steel was released, and I’m no closer to having the sequel finished than I was in the spring. Time to start cranking out some chapters for one or both of those!

So here’s the plan for the month of October:

  • Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”):
    • Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
    • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
    • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
    • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
    • Human Destiny: Write a few thousand more words of the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.
    • Human Destiny: Write a new short story for eventual collection and publication.
    • Krava’s Legend: More research toward improvements to my release-and-marketing workflow.
  • Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
    • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release. This work may involve updating all of the worked examples, and making mathematical notation more consistent.
    • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
    • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller.

Ideally, I’ll produce at least six chapters each of The Sunlit Lands and Second Dawn, that can be this month’s charged release for my patrons, and I’ll be able to polish and publish the Second Dawn chapters next month. If any of the Architect of Worlds documents or the Human Destiny setting bible make enough progress, those will turn into free updates. As always, I’ll want to complete one or two book reviews for self-published or indie fiction this month.

Watch this space for status reports, and if any of the above interests you, please consider signing up as a patron using the link in the sidebar.

“In the House of War” Now Available

“In the House of War” Now Available

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My Human Destiny novella, “In the House of War,” is now available from several outlets, notably Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books, with more on the way. The cover blurb:

Two hundred years ago, humanity was conquered by the alien Khedai. The aliens brought peace and prosperity, at the cost of human freedom. Some of us embrace the alien empire, others resent it, but no one can escape from it. We are forced to live in a cage the size of the world, watching others travel to the stars while we are confined to the Earth.

Aminata Ndoye is one of the few humans who have ever earned a place as an officer aboard an alien starship. On her first deep-space assignment, she finds herself in the middle of a war, fighting to preserve Khedai sovereignty over the vassal species of their empire. Unfortunately, it may not be the enemy that brings her career to an abrupt and violent end . . .

“In the House of War” is a space-opera novella, about 19,200 words in length.

This is a new direction in self-publishing for me. Until now, I’ve published exclusively through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. For a number of reasons, that’s been less than satisfactory, so this novella was published using the Draft2Digital service for layout, ebook conversion, and publication. Doing it this way means I can’t claim the higher royalties and some of the promotion techniques available via Kindle Unlimited . . . but there are some advantages in return. We’ll see how it goes.

For now, here are the requisite links:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09H58KT86

Everywhere Else: https://books2read.com/u/4Dxz8r

“In the House of War” is only available as an ebook for now, but I have some hope that by working with Draft2Digital, I’ll be able to start releasing audiobooks and paperbacks before long.

My patrons saw a final draft of “In the House of War” in August, and as of today my patrons at the $2 level and up have received free copies of the ebook files.

A Test Image

A Test Image

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Just a quick experiment with DAZ Studio and Photoshop, to put together a test image along the way to producing a cover for “In the House of War.” Here’s Aminata Ndoye in a spaceship’s corridor, in front of a large viewport.

The last time we saw Aminata was on the cover of “Pilgrimage,” when she was sixteen years old and still Earth-bound. At this point she’s in her early twenties and is serving as one of the first human officers in the Hegemony’s interstellar service. “In the House of War” is the story of her first deep-space assignment.

Of course, almost nothing in this image (aside the character herself) is as I imagine it in the story, so the final cover for the e-book isn’t going to look anything like this. The problem with building images in DAZ Studio is that you’re stuck with the assets people have gotten around to releasing for you to use. If they don’t look like what you had in mind, too bad.

Still, I wanted to get back into practice with DAZ Studio by generating a simple bit of character art, and this answers the mail. I should have the actual cover image ready to go by the weekend – I have a design in mind already.