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Human Destiny: The Careers List

Human Destiny: The Careers List

Here’s another teaser for the Cepheus Engine hack I’m putting together, for the new version of the Human Destiny sourcebook. This is part of the character design rules – the draft list of available “careers” for characters to indulge in during the lifepath generation process.

Again, this list is kind of atypical for a Cepheus Engine game. A few of the careers here are somewhat analogous to the ones you’ll find in the classic space-opera RPG that the engine emulates. Others are not – again, Human Destiny stories are likely to be heavily social-interaction-oriented, in a context of post-scarcity economics and a strong interstellar state. That sets different parameters (and constraints) on the kind of “adventures” that are likely to happen.

Careers List

  • Activist – Individual who pursues a cause, agitating for social or political change.
  • Artist – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by producing and selling works of art or handicraft.
  • Athlete – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by taking part in one or more competitive sports.
  • Bureaucrat – Official in an organized bureaucracy, either under the Hegemony or in an éthnos, charged with following the details of administrative process.
  • Citizen – Individual who subsists almost entirely on the Citizen’s Allowance, and who spends most of their time on entertainment or socializing.
  • Colonist – Individual who has settled on a more-or-less Earthlike (or terraformed) world and works to support the human community there.
  • Counselor – Individual who provides psychological care or social services.
  • Dissident – Individual who has rejected Hegemony society, but still uses some technology and lives in a Free Zone.
  • Ecological Reclamation Service –Member of the Hegemony’s scientific corps, overseeing wilderness reserves to support and protect the natural ecology.
  • Entertainer – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by performing before an audience.
  • Feral – Individual who has escaped the Hegemony entirely, by rejecting all technology and living in the deep wilderness.
  • Guard Service – Member of the Hegemony’s paramilitary force, enforcing the Praxis on planetary surfaces, also (rarely) carrying out annexation against pre-stellar civilizations.
  • Influencer – Individual who advocates for ideas, products, or services, primarily on the global information grid.
  • Interstellar Service – Member of the Hegemony’s interstellar paramilitary force, carrying out missions involving peacekeeping, enforcement of the Praxis, and exploration of deep space.
  • Mediator – Individual who provides negotiation or conflict-resolution services.
  • Physician – Individual who provides medical care.
  • Rogue – Individual who frequently engages in deception and subterfuge, whether in violation of the Praxis or not.
  • Scholar – Individual who is engaged in and has expert knowledge of a science, or some similar formal body of organized knowledge. Also, anyone attending or teaching at an institution of higher learning.
  • Service Specialist – Individual who provides personal service to others, most often in the hospitality or leisure industries.
  • Spacer – Individual who works aboard a deep-space outpost or colony, usually on an asteroid or moon.
  • Technician – Individual who is skilled in designing, building, maintaining, or repairing complex technological systems.

Now that I’ve blocked this out, the rest of the character generation rules should follow without much trouble. We’ll see how much progress I’m able to make over the next week or two.

Human Destiny: the Skill List

Human Destiny: the Skill List

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

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.