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The Human Destiny Sourcebook

The Human Destiny Sourcebook

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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

Plans for December

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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

Decisions, Decisions

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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

A Bit of Insight

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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

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

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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)

Status Report (9 February 2019)

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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

2019: Looking Forward

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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.

Status Report (31 October 2018)

Status Report (31 October 2018)

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It’s been a quiet month. I’m slowly emerging from the utter shutdown of creative effort that sometimes comes when a really good new video game comes out (see my review of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey from a couple of weeks ago). Now that I’m about finished with that distraction for the time being, I’m getting back into some world-building work and writing.

One effect of this recent immersion into all things Greek has been the possible revival of a very old project. Close to twenty years ago, my first attempt at writing an original novel stalled out when I ran out of plot about 30% of the way in. That novel was, by an odd not-quite-coincidence, an alternate-historical fantasy piece set in the classical Hellenic period. In the last few weeks I’ve realized that I may actually have what I need to get through that old blockage – maybe I can finally write that novel after all. Still thinking about that and gathering some notes.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten back to assembling setting notes for the Human Destiny stories, and may be publishing revised versions of some of those notes here soon. I’m also re-reading the draft novella In the House of War with an eye toward rewriting and publishing that.

So, in general, things are moving again.

Modeling Galactic History (Wrap-up)

Modeling Galactic History (Wrap-up)

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This post is a little math-heavy, and yet I’ve left out a few explicit steps here and there. Consider this a wrap-up of the posts I made a few weeks back, laying out the assumptions I’ve made with respect to the prevalence of interstellar cultures in the galaxy.

Assumption #1: In the solar neighborhood, there exists about one stellar system for every 300 cubic light-years of space. Stellar systems average about 1.2 stars each.

Assumption #2: There exists one habitable world for every 16 stellar systems, or about one habitable world for every 4800 cubic light-years of space.

Commentary: As I remarked before, these are based on HIPPARCOS data for the solar neighborhood, with some educated guesswork as to how many very dim red dwarfs are not properly accounted for by HIPPARCOS. The Architect of Worlds draft design sequence was used to generate planetary systems for a large sample of the solar neighborhood, which yielded a rough estimate for the prevalence of habitable worlds.

Assumption #3: On any given habitable world, a sentient tool-using civilization will appear about once every 500 million years.

Commentary: Based on the experience of Earth as our one data point (one sentient tool-using civilization – that we know of – since the Earth became habitable back in the Devonian era).

Assumption #4: Left to themselves, sentient tool-using civilizations have a 75% chance of an average lifespan of about 12,400 years, remaining in a pre-industrial status, followed by extinction. They have a 25% chance of an average lifespan of about 12,800 years, attaining industrial status late in that period, followed by extinction. The probability of a sentient tool-using civilization attaining interstellar capability on its own is vanishingly small.

Commentary: This is one of the foundational assumptions of the Human Destiny setting, and a partial solution to the Fermi Paradox. Effectively, I’m arguing for a set of “Great Filters.” Most civilizations never reach an industrial era before falling to some natural disaster. The few that do almost invariably destroy themselves.

Result: Assuming no interstellar-capable civilizations appear, then at any given time there should be about one tool-using civilization for every 40,000 habitable worlds.

Assumption #4: The first culture to attain interstellar capability filled up the galaxy in a short period of time (<< 250,000 years) and gave rise to an era of pan-galactic civilization which lasted several hundred million years. This period is usually called the “era of the Precursors” today.

Assumption #5: The Precursor meta-civilization collapsed in an era of pan-galactic conflict. The winning (or surviving) Precursor faction gave rise to a meta-civilization called the Synarchy, which has carefully limited the growth of all subsequent interstellar-capable cultures. The Synarchy “cultivates” the galaxy by recruiting new interstellar-capable cultures as its proxies.

Assumption #6: Once a civilization has attained interstellar capability under the Synarchy or one of its proxies, its average lifespan after that point is about 250,000 years.

Assumption #7: The Synarchy normally permits one of its proxies, together with its client cultures, to occupy no more than about 25,000 habitable worlds. This allocation is divided between the proxy and its clients, with the expectation that the proxy itself may occupy no more than 5,000 habitable worlds, and each client culture may occupy no more than 1,000 habitable worlds. Within those constraints, a given proxy culture has broad discretion as to how to manage the volume of space under its supervision.

Commentary: More foundational assumptions. The specific numbers have been set to lead to a model which permits many small interstellar societies to exist at the same time in the galaxy. More to the point, aside from the very first “Precursor” civilization, no culture has ever had the opportunity to overrun the galaxy. The Synarchy values variety and acts to prevent such runaway growth.

Results: The policies maintained by any given Synarchy proxy can be characterized by several variables.

  • M, the number of habitable worlds considered to be within the proxy’s supervised volume. In a typical case, many or even most of these worlds will be maintained in a “fallow” condition, unoccupied and waiting for the appearance of a naturally evolved tool-using civilization.
  • N, the number of client cultures normally maintained by the proxy at any given time (can be any value but is generally <= 20).
  • KP, the number of habitable worlds occupied by the proxy (must be < 5,000).
  • KS, the average number of habitable worlds occupied by client cultures (must be < 1,000).

We observe that if RE is the rate of extinction of client cultures, then:

R_E=N/250,000

To maintain a steady state, the proxy must have a rate of uplift RU equal to RE. The rate of uplift is dependent upon M and the proxy’s level of selectivity when choosing candidate cultures to uplift. Some typical values are:

  • If the proxy uplifts no candidate cultures, then R_U=0 , N=0 , and M can be any value < 5,000.
  • If the proxy uplifts all candidate cultures which reach the industrial era, then  R_U=M/2,000,000,000 and M\approx8,000\times N .
  • If the proxy uplifts all candidate cultures, even at a pre-industrial level, then
  •  R_U=M/500,000,000 and M\approx2,000\times N .
  • If the proxy seeks out pre-sentient species for uplift, then RU is undetermined but possibly as large as  R_U=M/50,000,000 , which would imply M\geq200\times N .

Assumption #8: The volumes of space occupied by a proxy culture or by one of its clients will tend to obey the following guidelines.

  • The supervised volume of a proxy culture is likely to be a compact volume of space, such as a sphere with radius roughly equal to \sqrt[3]{1,150\times K} . A habitable world which drifts away from that volume will no longer be monitored, and any civilization which arises there will be on its own.
  • The volume occupied by a given culture will not be compact, since stellar drift and the requirement to leave certain habitable worlds “fallow” will create gaps and voids. If K is the number of habitable worlds currently occupied by a culture, and A is its age as an interstellar-capable civilization, then as a rough estimate its occupied space will be bounded by a sphere of radius S, where:

S>\sqrt[3]{1,150\times K}+\frac{A}{6,000}

  • The first term in that estimate is related to the size of the compact volume that might contain the appropriate number of habitable worlds, while the second term is related to the scattering of stellar systems over time due to their different space velocities.
  • This last estimate may be reduced if the culture in question practices migration, moving populations back toward the core as their stellar systems drift too far away. Most proxy cultures will engage in this kind of behavior. Otherwise, some of their occupied systems would tend to drift out of the supervised volume over time.

Assumption #9: For at least the last 600 million years, and until quite recently, Sol and Earth have not fallen within the volume of supervision of any Synarchy proxy culture.

Results: Within the past 600 million years, the 25,000 nearest habitable worlds to Sol would have given rise to 30,000 tool-using civilizations. This suggests that without intervention and uplift, the probability for any one tool-using civilization to attain interstellar capability is no greater than about 1 in 60,000.

Combining this with the galactic-history model developed earlier, we find that:

  • The Precursor civilization most likely appeared 9.8 billion years ago, and the era of great galactic conflicts was about 9.4 billion years ago.
  • Today, depending on the typical lifespan of a proxy culture (probably longer than the quarter-million years of a client civilization), there are likely to be several thousand such proxies in the galaxy at any given time.

Another result is that it would be very unusual for more than one proxy culture to appear independently in the same galactic neighborhood at the same time. However, it may be possible for client civilizations to “graduate” to independent proxy status rather than “ascension” or voluntary extinction. Proxy cultures might be thought of as reproducing by “budding” during periods of stability. Also, when the proxy eventually passes on, it may reproduce by “spawning” some of its last few client civilizations into independent proxy status.

Khedai Hegemony Reference Map Complete

Khedai Hegemony Reference Map Complete

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Well, this map stretched my technique a little further than before, but after quite a bit of research and development, and a couple dozen hours of painstaking Photoshop work, it’s done. I now have a reference map for the galactic neighborhood of the Khedai Hegemony, covering a decent chunk of the Orion Spur in the process.

Here’s a thumbnail for the new map:

As before, this is a pretty hefty file, so you might do well to download it and view it locally. Alternatively, here’s a link to the pertinent page in my DeviantArt gallery.

This was world-building with a purpose! Not only did this exercise give me a new reference map for our galactic neighborhood, on a larger scale than I had ever done before, but it drove me to build a definitive model for interstellar cultures that I can continue to use later. I also came up with at least a high-concept description for over a dozen alien civilizations that I can now use in my stories.

In fact, once I get my notes collated and write down all the conceptual material that’s floating around in my head, I may have the basis for a fairly complete world-book for GURPS or some similar tabletop game. Between this map and the previous one, I have capsule descriptions for dozens of star systems, and by the time I’ve fleshed out all sixteen or so cultures I’ll have plenty of alien character templates. I may need to confer with the folks at Steve Jackson Games and see what the current limits are for publishing anything using GURPS language. It’s been a while since I was on their editorial staff, so their policies may have changed. At the very least, I ought to be able to post all of the pertinent material to the web for free.

Short term goal, though, is to buckle down and produce a publishable version of the novella In the House of War. With this map, I now have a much better idea where everything is, and what sort of aliens Aminata is likely to encounter during her first ventures out into the galaxy.

Real progress. Feels good.