For many thousands of years, the Great Lands remained divided. The early Smith-folk had the northern continent to themselves, while the Common-folk spread across the southern continent. The two land-masses approached one another in the narrows of what would one day be called the Sailor’s Sea, but there was no land bridge to facilitate interaction. Only at the height of the glacial age did the two peoples finally come into sustained contact.
In the north, the Smith-folk had evolved a distinctive way of life. A few bands wandered far and wide across the northern continent, following a primitive hunter-gatherer existence. Others gathered in specific upland areas, alpine valleys or mountain slopes that proved especially congenial. There, they used their growing skills with spirit-magic to build and support extended communities. Hundreds of people might live in close proximity, staying in the same area for years at a time, supporting skilled specialists in the arts of tool-making and spirit-binding. These early tribal communities were the first seeds of the Smith-folk holdfasts of later millennia.
The Smith-folk had long since been aware of the southern continent, but it was not until the Last Glacial Maximum (about 25,000 years before Krava’s time) that some of them found a way across the narrows. Overcoming their natural aversion to the sea, enough tribes made the crossing to establish two new communities on the southern continent. There, they came into contact with the Common-folk, leading to trade and the exchange of ideas. The southern Smith-folk tribes soon became the largest and wealthiest of their kind.
From their new neighbors, the Common-folk learned of the vast new lands to the north. Some of them soon began to venture their own crossings of the narrow sea. It was a slow process, taking many centuries, but over time the Common-folk became well established on the northern continent. Some of them turned west, living in caves and sheltered coastal areas, mostly living on fish, shellfish, and small game. Others, more ambitious, turned north or east, hunting the megafauna of the plains. When the Ice began to retreat, tribes of the Common-folk were there to take advantage . . .
While I do world-building for my fantasy novel-in-progress (The Curse of Steel), one frustrating feature of the process is that I have a hard time keeping all of my ideas for the back-history straight.
Now that I’ve managed to finish a world-overview map that I’m happy with, the idea came to me to build a series of “historical atlas” maps, some taking in the whole continent-scale view, others narrower in scope. Inspiration comes from sources like Colin McEvedy’s Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, which is full of nice, clean schematic maps describing the Western world through late antiquity. Here I’ve decided to try my own hand in the same style, using some color instead of David Woodroffe’s extensive use of cross-hatching.
The earliest history of the Great Lands begins about 100,000 years before the time of Krava the Swift.
At this time, the world had been enjoying a long period of warm climates, with almost no glacial ice and forests reaching up into the polar regions. The planet was inhabited by a humanoid species, the “Elder Folk” (Homo antecessor). These people were small and gracile, not very bright by modern standards, but capable of simple language, tool use, and some exploitation of naturally occurring fire. They had evolved in the southern continent of the Great Lands over a million years before, pursuing a flexible hunter-gatherer lifestyle that permitted them to spread across much of the planet.
Now a new evolutionary challenge was about to arise, one that the Elder Folk were ill-equipped to meet: the resurgence of a deep glacial age, longer and more bitter than any that had come before. As the climate shifted and ice began to move south, the Elder Folk were driven before it. Many of the scattered bands perished, unable to adapt to the new conditions.
It was at this juncture that something intervened, rescuing thousands of the Elder Folk from the western regions of the Great Lands. The rescued people were moved across the sea, and then into the oceans of heaven, to live among some benevolent spirits or gods. There they grew and changed over many generations, someday to return to the world in a new guise.
The survivors who remained behind adapted or died out. At least three new human species appeared over the tens of thousands of years of the Ice Age, all descended from the Elder Folk.
In the northern continent, the people who would one day be called the “Smith-folk” (Homo faber) appeared. These people were taller than their ancestors, and much more robust, stocky, tough, and very strong. Even early in their history they had a gift for making, for adapting the natural materials they found into useful tools. They also had an unusual relationship with spirits of the natural world. They learned to capture spirits, bargain with them, and bind them into made things to produce powerful artifacts of enchantment. All of these new skills gave the Smith-folk the chance to survive the worst that the Ice Age world could do to them. They preferred the hills and mountain slopes, where they could hunt both beasts and spirits, and where they eventually learned to find the ores of useful metal.
In the southern continent, the “Common Folk” of later eras (Homo sapiens, the analogues of our own humanity) arose in the sahel zone south of the great desert. The Common Folk grew even taller than their northern cousins, but not as robust or strong. They failed to develop the same spiritual gifts, tending to fear spirits rather than think of them as partners or servants. On the other hand, their capability for abstract thought and spoken language was more sophisticated, destined to help them develop the richest cultures on the planet. Slowly, they spread along the coasts of the southern continent, keeping away from the heart of the desert.
Far away in the east, another population of Elder Folk survivors evolved in a different direction. Amid a rich archipelago, the “Island-folk” (Homo insularum) grew small and nimble, but also bright and quick of mind, the better to hunt the abundant game (and avoid larger predators). The Islanders remained far distant from the rest of the world, to appear in a far distant era.
All four of these survivor species grew in isolation, as the abandoned Elder Folk populations dwindled and became extinct. Not for many thousands of years would they all come into contact, in the centuries leading up to Krava’s time . . .
Lately I’ve been working on back-history and geography for The Curse of Steel, and for the EIDOLON-based world-pack I’m writing for parallel publication. This has caused me to experience greater and greater frustration with the world map I built last fall . . . so yesterday I bit the bullet and got to work revising that.
Fortunately, the Wonderdraft tool makes this kind of work very easy. As of this evening, here’s the result – a full Version 2.0 of the Great Lands map:
This is a big step forward! Next I’m going to be using this map as the basis for a kind of “historical atlas,” a series of schematic images that will help me nail down the historical timeline. Some of those may end up going in the world-pack too, but we’ll see how well they turn out. If this does nothing more than help me visualize how Krava’s world evolved, mission accomplished.
Just a quick post to report on how things are going here.
We’re all in lockdown, with my son the only one who’s still leaving the house for work each day. He works at a small factory that supports the food-delivery industry; as you can imagine, they’re doing an absolutely booming business right now. He’s earning lots of overtime, and he and I joke that he’s the only one in the family that’s really “essential” at the moment. At least my job is secure for when things start getting back to normal, and I’m still getting paid in full for the duration. We have plenty of savings in any case, so as long as money remains good in the first place, we should be able to weather the storm.
The psychological toll seems more acute. I have plenty to do, and my son has his work and his online friends. On the other hand, my wife misses her classes and social contacts, and I think my daughter is going slowly mad, stuck in the house without her usual busy school schedule.
For my part, I’ve been having the usual upper-respiratory issues that always hit me, when the dogwood and maple trees do their thing every spring. I’ve been watching my symptoms like a hawk, and taking my temperature regularly, but so far I haven’t seen any reason to push the panic button. All that means is that I’m in a constant state of low-level apprehension rather than mortal terror, but if that’s the worst I have to live with over the next few months, I count myself blessed. A lot of people are having it far worse.
As for the creative work which is the normal reason for this blog, I’ve been nicely productive ever since I came home. I’ve been working on a more extended system for designing Iron Age villages, an expansion of the “extended character” work I’ve posted about recently. That, in turn, is helping me to visualize the social setting of The Curse of Steel much more completely. If and when I start the second-draft rewrite – which may now be a matter of days – I think I’ll have a much better picture to draw upon.
Meanwhile, I’m also working on the first draft for the EIDOLON “core book,” the basic character-description rule set that I’ll be self-publishing as a basis for releasing world-building material for the game market. I’m also working on the Tremara “culture book” that’s likely to be the first major release for the EIDOLON system. There’s still plenty of work to do on both items, but there’s real progress.
I think April may be the first month that my Patreon campaign gets started again; I’ll have enough new material that patrons might find interesting or useful. If you’re interested in signing up as my patron, please have a visit to my creator page and drop a pledge. Thanks!
My employer has sent me home for what may be the next couple of months, since I’m in a “high-risk” category for COVID-19 (over 50 and with a chronic health condition that might complicate if I come down with the disease). So here’s a great opportunity to work on EIDOLON and some of the world-building for The Curse of Steel. I may be posting a lot more frequently for a while . . .
For today, here are some notes I’ve put together over the past few days. Here I’m starting to puzzle out how the EIDOLON “extended character” will work in practice. I’m working with the home society for The Curse of Steel here – the Tremara or “Mighty Folk,” a tribal Iron Age culture somewhat reminiscent of pre-Roman Celts. These notes aren’t polished rules material, but if you refer to last week’s post you may get some insight into what I’m working on here.
In Tremara society, the smallest monetary unit is the copper
penny (cp). A copper penny is roughly the value of a pound of barley.
As a practical matter, most Tremara tribes don’t coin copper
pennies. Most transactions at that level are handled through barter or exchange
of favors. The most common coin in circulation is the silver penny (sp),
which is worth 12 cp. Very wealthy Tremara sometimes use gold coins for big
transactions; these are either obtained in foreign trade or minted by the richest
tribes. The gold piece (gp) is worth 20 sp or 240 cp.
Tremara agriculture is based largely upon barley. A bushel
of barley weighs about 48 pounds, and so is worth about 4 sp.
Assume an average person requires 600 pounds of barley per year. This constitutes a subsistence diet, without much variety or luxury, but enough to support a healthy life. This comes to 600 cp per year or 50 cp per month. Assume another 10 cp per month for other expenses (clothing, tools, maintenance of housing, and so on). Hence the bare minimum for subsistence living will be 60 cp (5 sp) per month, or 720 cp (60 sp) per year.
Proposed rule for Social Standing in EIDOLON:
In any EIDOLON setting, the benchmark figure for Social Standing is a cost-of-living equal to the bare minimum for subsistence living in that setting. Social Standing for any individual equals log-2 of (his personal cost-of-living expenses, divided by the benchmark figure), rounded to the nearest integer.
Social Standing can be modified by conditions of legal or social privilege, although these modifiers will not normally amount to more than plus or minus 1.
Farming in the Iron Age
Tremara Agriculture
Tremara characters can own several Assets related to agriculture:
Crop Land (measured in acres) – cleared flat
land of good quality that can be used to raise barley. Only half of the Crop
Land is planted each year, the other half being left fallow.
Pasture (measured in acres) – cleared land
that doesn’t have to be flat or of the best quality, which is set aside for grazing.
Can also include land left forested for pigs to forage.
Horses
Cattle
Small Animals – some combination of sheep,
goats, and pigs.
These Assets are operated by three classes of Workers:
Farmers – a character serving as a Farmer
must have the Professional Skill Farmer at +2 or better.
Herdsmen – a character serving as a
Herdsman must have the Professional Skill Herdsman at +2 or better. Each
Herdsman is assumed to work with a pair of dogs trained for animal handling.
Farm Laborers – a character serving as a
Farm Laborer needs no specific Professional Skill, but must have Strength,
Dexterity, Vitality, and Intelligence at +0 or better. A Farm Laborer provides
unskilled labor, which is often seasonal in nature (grain harvest, shearing,
milking, herding pigs, and so on). Farm Laborers may be slaves.
Agricultural Assets must be supported as follows, or else
they can produce no profits:
One Farmer for every 24 acres of Crop Land
(round up)
One Farm Laborer for every 12 acres of Crop Land
(round up)
One Cattle for every 6 acres of Crop Land (round
up)
One Herdsman for every 80 Horses or Cattle, or for
every 120 Small Animals (combine fractions and then round up)
Farm animals must be supported by Pasture: 0.5 acres of
Pasture for every Small Animal, and 4 acres of Pasture for every Horse or
Cattle. Any animals not supported by Pasture are lost.
Each year, Agricultural Assets will produce profits:
Per acre of Crop Land: 210 cp (350 pounds of
barley, of which 140 pounds must be set aside for next year’s planting)
Per Horse: 150 cp (loan or sale of animals, possibly
stud fees)
Per Cattle: 100 cp (milk, leather, meat)
Per Small Animal: 20 cp (milk, wool, leather,
meat)
Each year, the farm workers must be paid:
Per Farmer: 2,700 cp
Per Herdsman: 1,800 cp
Per Farm Laborer: 900 cp
Example: A Prosperous Farmer
An independent Tremara land-holder maintains his own small
farming settlement:
48 acres of Crop Land
60 acres of Pasture
12 Cattle
24 Small Animals
The land-holder himself is a Farmer. His wife and eldest son serve as Farm Laborers, without needing to be paid (they are supported by his profits). He has also hired a second Farmer and a Herdsman as farm-hands, and he owns two slaves who serve as additional Farm Laborers. All his labor requirements are met. He has enough Cattle to support his Crop Land.
The land-holder’s farm produces 11,760 cp per year (10,080 cp in profit from the barley harvest, 1,200 cp from the Cattle, and 480 cp from the Small Animals). He must pay his labor 6,300 cp per year (2,700 cp for the Farmer, 1,800 cp for the Herdsman, and 1,800 cp for the two Farm Laborers). He makes a clear profit of 5,460 cp per year. Divided among himself and his four dependents (including his elderly mother and a daughter too young to work), this comes to 1,092 cp per year per person. His Social Standing rounds up to +1.
Example: A Chariot-Lord
A Tremara chariot-lord owns three small farming villages,
scattered across several miles of countryside. These amount to the following
Assets:
1,000 acres of Crop Land
1,400 acres of Pasture
40 Horses
260 Cattle
400 Small Animals
None of the chariot-lord’s personal Company (his household)
are working as Farmers, Herdsmen, or Farm Laborers. He needs 42 Farmers, 84
Farm Laborers, and 8 Herdsmen to maintain his lands. He has more than enough
Cattle to support his Crop Land.
The chariot-lord’s lands produce 250,000 cp per year (210,000 cp in the barley harvest, 6,000 cp from his Horses, 26,000 cp from his Cattle, and 8,000 cp from his Small Animals). He must pay 203,400 cp per year for labor (113,400 cp for his Farmers, 75,600 cp for his Farm Laborers, and 14,400 cp for his Herdsmen). His annual profits are 46,600 cp. Divided among himself and three dependents (wife and two children), this comes to 11,650 cp per year per person. This chariot-lord’s Social Standing rounds off to +4.
Some final comments:
So far, I’ve been working mostly on the left-hand side of the diagram in last week’s post: the income and profits generated by a character’s Assets and Workers. I haven’t done too much yet on the right-hand side: the hirelings and support staff that can make a wealthy character’s life better. I’ll need to develop both sides before I can lay out what a wealthy Tremara chariot-lord’s household really looks like! More on that as my enforced vacation continues.
As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been working on a way to not just model individual characters in the EIDOLON ruleset, but to model their social connections. The idea is to have a simple set of rules that I can use to describe the intricate web of relationships that any character will have, as a member of a complex society.
I think I may be getting close to what I want. Consider the following diagram:
A model for the extended character in EIDOLON
You’ll notice a certain confusion of vocabulary here; I’m not sure yet what words would be best to describe the various components of this model. Here’s the idea, though.
At the top, we have the extended character itself. Perhaps this is a single individual, perhaps it includes that person and some of her partners and dependents. Or perhaps it’s a group of unrelated characters who have agreed to throw in their fortunes together: an adventuring party, the officers of a mercenary band, the crew of a privately held starship, und so weiter. In any case, all the Members (or Household, or Company, or whatever term makes sense in the setting) will share their finances equally, sharing the same social standing score once the model is complete.
On the left, we have various forms of Income. Some of this may be External Income – simple pay for the professional occupations of the Members, say. On the other hand, the Members may also own certain Assets, pieces of wealth-producing property. Most likely these Assets will require some kind of labor to actually produce their own Income. A medieval lord will need peasants to farm his land, an ancient tycoon needs slaves to operate his mines, a starship captain needs crewmen to run his ship. These workers, employees, or vassals will be paid for their labor, but by working on the Assets they produce Income for the owners, in the form of profit.
Income is on the left, outgo on the right. The Members will probably spend some of their resources on simple consumption – food, clothing, housing, luxury goods, entertainment, all at whatever level they can afford. They may also have people hired to provide them with personal service: a wealthy woman’s impeccable butler, a warlord’s kept courtesan, a personal clerk or physician, whatever might be available and appropriate in the setting. These hirelings or henchmen are also paid, but they produce no Income or Profit, they simply work to improve the quality of life for the Members.
The Members have to make sure the books balance – they can’t spend more on luxuries and personal service than they bring in! Any given setting book written under EIDOLON would lay out various structures like this, with rules for various Assets and how they would have to be worked, and lists of available workers and henchmen.
Here’s one simple result of this system: the Social Standing score of all the Members depends solely on the amount spent on Consumption and Staff. I’m taking an almost Veblenist approach here, claiming that status in almost any society is strongly correlated to the level of conspicuous consumption. Not a bad assumption, I think, for most RPG worlds and fictional universes.
There’s one more neat feature of this model: it’s possible to nest it. The character(s) who make up one set of Members may be getting paid for their services by someone higher up. Likewise, each of the workers or henchmen that one character pays may be keeping her own Household at a lower level.
For example, I’ve started to work out the details here using features of Tremara society, the setting of The Curse of Steel. A given Tremara chariot-warrior will own many hundreds of acres of cleared land, with peasants to manage his herds of cattle and horses and raise an annual crop of barley. If we wanted to zoom in on those peasants, then each peasant household could be described at finer detail using this same model. Meanwhile, the spearmen, bards, and other specialists who live in the lord’s hall and provide service for him could also have families, dependents, or property of their own.
This is a model I think I can use extensively in worldbuilding work, in a variety of settings; it should make an interesting innovation for the EIDOLON ruleset. Progress!
I’ve gotten kind of stuck, and it’s affecting three separate projects at once. I suppose it’s another example of the world-building rabbit hole that I tend to fall into. Although in this case, if I may mix a metaphor, I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Before I dig deep into the second-draft rewrite of The Curse of Steel, I want to revise my earlier, rather sketchy, world-building work about Krava’s home society. That should help me ground the story better in the details of her situation: a noble warrior’s only child, who suddenly inherits his lands and possessions at the same moment that she becomes a leading figure in her tribe. There are a lot of moments in the story where Krava deals with money, with groups of warriors, with chains of command and fealty . . . and it would be good to have a better image of how her tribal society (the Tremara, or “Mighty Folk”) organize such things.
The more I think about that, the more time I’ve spent turning some of my previous bits of world-building and game design over in my head, most notably the analysis I did of ancient Greek society in GURPS terms. Earlier this month, I spent a week or so on a similar analysis of Tremara economics and social structure – how many peasant families are needed to support one chariot-driving warrior, and so on.
That did help me get a more realistic picture of population sizes and social stratification in Tremara culture, so that helped. But then, my mind tripped and fell down the rabbit hole. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about something for the EIDOLON project. (As a reminder, EIDOLON is the not-quite-a-full-RPG I’m designing, a universal character description system that should be easily convertible to any other published RPG rule-set, so I can publish world-building material in a game-agnostic manner.)
The idea is that an individual character isn’t just a collection of aptitudes and skills. She’s going to have a place in society, a role, a specific status in the social hierarchy. Most RPGs tend to gloss over this factor. Characters tend to be socially unpinned, wandering adventurers without ties to the community around them, even in settings that ostensibly involve dense social structures.
GURPS at least attempts to account for social standing, with a set of character traits like Wealth, Social Status, Rank, Social Regard, Social Stigma, and so on. It still tends to treat characters in isolation, each one’s place in society always independent of every other’s. For example, a GURPS character has a Cost of Living that’s tied to his Social Status, but that’s highly abstracted. A socially prominent character probably has many other characters working to support his rank and status, but GURPS just elides all that into a monthly expenditure.
So it occurred to me: why not have rules in EIDOLON to support the description of characters (or groups of characters) who have extensive social capital? Instead of just having a bare-bones “wealth” trait, or a simple ranking of social status, why not lay out exactly what that means?
So, for example, take a prominent noble warrior in Krava’s world, such as her father Derga at the beginning of The Curse of Steel. Considered as an adventurer, Derga has a lot of gear and equipment that go with him when he travels: fine clothes, some armor, weapons, a chariot and a team of ponies to draw it, all of the finest quality. Considered as a lord, however, Derga has a lot of things that wouldn’t go on a typical RPG’s character sheet: agricultural land, herds of cattle and horses, a fine mead-hall to live in. He also has the people that are loyal to him and are needed to support his assets and lifestyle: subordinate chariot warriors, spearmen, craftsmen to maintain all his goods, someone to manage his household while he’s away, all the peasant families who work his land, and so on. Meanwhile, Krava herself is Derga’s dependent – she gains benefit from all of his holdings and wealth, even if she doesn’t control them yet.
So I’m working on a set of rules and techniques that EIDOLON can use to describe a situation like that. Since EIDOLON is intended to be a “universal” system, of course, I’m hoping the framework will be extensible to cover a variety of situations: adventuring or mercenary companies, commercial starship crew, modern small businesses, and so on. Any situation in which characters have enough social status and wealth to have assets, property, and hirelings to help maintain it all.
I think I’m getting close to a first-draft design for all this. Once that’s done, I can do a lot of the detailed world-building for Krava’s setting, which in turn will give me material for the first EIDOLON “setting book,” and will also let me get started on the second draft for The Curse of Steel.
It’s annoying when my different projects get tangled up, as if I had discovered unexpected dependencies in an elaborate Gantt chart. Should be productive in the long run, though.
One of the things I’ve been working on is a minor reworking of the Tremara language that appears in The Curse of Steel. Mostly I’m just choosing a few word-roots differently for aesthetic reasons, and tweaking the word-formation rules so that I’m not applying the Pūnct’uatìon Sh’akër quite so liberally.
I’m also working through some translations from English, since that’s a good way to develop more vocabulary and try out the syntax and grammar. Here’s an example, which was much more complex than I expected it to be, although I’m pleased with the result. As a small challenge for you, see if you can identify the original text.
Kadir ganari tíveta, anara tar dranet. Náraië tar steret, velo tar athemeta plemet, iu kesë tíveta aseneti.Bravam lókosar ganari genana dun, tan sendi ganari verdun, iu kesi sendenti argeni verdónemo.Geni pereta vergan va, tan geni revsova areg. Kun náraië tar asenet, tan kun poten, tan kun naren, athemë plemeti va. Asenet.
It’s working, I think. A little more of this, and then I need to generate a few dozen new personal names. The character names in the draft are a little repetitive.
Storyboarding the back story for The Curse of Steel
Meanwhile, the most important project I have underway is the novel I finished in the rough draft last year: The Curse of Steel.
Here’s a short synopsis that I put together for Books & Buzz back in November:
The Curse of Steel is the story of a young woman from an Iron Age “barbarian” culture, not quite identical to any culture from our own history, but most like the Celtic or Germanic tribal kingdoms of the pre-Roman period.
At the beginning of the story, Krava is an ordinary warrior of her tribe, serving as her father’s charioteer and bodyguard while he travels to visit friends. Suddenly her father is killed in an unexpected battle, leaving her alone and far from home. Soon afterward, she comes into possession of an ancient and powerful weapon, and she also learns that she is descended from the gods of her people.
Krava quickly grows into the role of a classical hero: a skilled and resourceful warrior who proves her worth in violent action, motivated by a craving for fame and esteem, and often arrogant or foolhardy. Think of Achilles, or Cuchulainn from Irish mythology. Krava’s own culture admires such behavior, and for a while she enjoys her new status, but in the end the results are a disaster for herself and everyone around her. At the end of this first story, she has matured a little; she departs on a quest to repair the harm she has done, and find a more sustainable way of life for herself and her people.
The rough draft – what I sometimes call the “plot draft,” in which I mark out the broad outlines of character, setting, and plot – is finished. The story is readable now, but it’s not very tight. Over the next few months, I intend to do an almost complete rewrite in the second draft, to fine-tune the story and bring the themes and dramatic beats into clear focus.
If all goes according to plan, The Curse of Steel will be self-published sometime this summer, after which I’ll get started on the second novel in the series. The working title for that one is The Sunlit Lands.
My patrons will see sections of the revised draft as I work on it, and those at the second or third level of patronage will get a free e-book copy of the finished novel once it’s published.
Well, this has been a year. Twelve months of doing my best to pass by the madness that seems to be sweeping the world, keep my family prospering, excel at my day job, and keep making progress on my creative projects. With some success, as it turned out.
Let’s be honest, this is the year a lot of things seemed to come together, as I built workflows I could use to set up and finish creative projects. I designed my first full constructed language, one which is actually usable for literary work. I drew up several maps. I hacked my brain in such a way that I could do world-building work in service to an actual story for a change.
I managed to write (at least in the first draft) my first mature, full-length, original, publishable novel: The Curse of Steel. That’s a pretty big deal.
So while 2019 wasn’t altogether sunshine and roses, I do feel as if I’m in a reasonably good place in my creative life. Still more work to be done, to be sure, but I’m more confident that I once was.
This blog seems to have reflected that. I’m still not sure who is reading this thing regularly – most of you don’t have a lot to say – but traffic keeps growing, slowly by steadily. The top ten (new) posts for this year were:
As usual, about 40% of the hits on the blog just start at the home page and go from there. There’s also a lot of perennial interest in some of my old Architect of Worlds posts from 2018, as well as that extended exercise in world-building I carried out based on the Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna games. That’s always in the back of my mind as I consider what to work on next.
As always, let’s hope that the coming year is prosperous and productive for all of us . . . and that the world manages to hang onto sanity in the coming months.
