2024 had its ups and downs, and the completion of a big project left me kind of unfocused for several months. I’d have to say it was a decent year, though.
Past as Prologue
The biggest item, of course, was the final completion and publication of Architect of Worlds, now out as a 192-page softback and PDF from Ad Astra Games. Sales have been pretty decent, resulting in probably the most profitable year for my creative life since I quit working for Steve Jackson Games about 2006.
With Architect done, I kind of flitted from one project to another for the second half of the year, making some progress on several items but never quite settling on one.
Then the US federal elections took place in November, and bang my Muse had me focusing almost entirely on the Human Destiny universe. Which was probably predictable: that universe involves a benevolent alien empire coming to conquer Earth to save us from the weight of human folly, so every time a lot of human folly happens in the world I start thinking about it again.
Meanwhile, I started a transition away from using Amazon KDP and Patreon to get my work in front of an audience, largely because Amazon has been utterly useless in that regard and Patreon has made some policy changes that don’t fit my “business” model. Instead, I’ve set up a Ko-fi page and shop and will be moving almost all of my finished work to that venue. That’s where I’ll also be releasing draft and partial material, some of it free for all subscribers, some restricted to the higher tiers.
Meanwhile, the entire calendar year had me working on the single largest curriculum-development project of my entire career, first working with a senior official, more recently independently. This is a project that will probably occupy the rest of my tenure as a civil servant, however long that may be. I’m also continuing to work toward a second undergraduate degree and (possibly) a master’s from the Open University in the UK. I’m not feeling quite as stressed as I was in late 2023, but I certainly have no difficulty filling up my days.
Looks like the most popular posts from the past year were a mix of status updates, posts about SF mapping and worldbuilding, and items related to Architect of Worlds. Which makes sense.
Looking Forward
So – objectives for the new year? I’m probably going to be focusing on Human Destiny projects for the time being, including publishing regular updates to the RPG book and (once again) trying to get some new fiction written.
In particular, I intend to publish early-draft material for the putative Atlas of the Human Protectorate, in the form of short writeups for individual worlds or star systems. The first of these, a description of the sigma Draconis star system, has already been posted to my Ko-fi shop and is free for Silver- and Gold-tier subscribers.
I also have in mind to assemble the first of several “supplements” for Architect of Worlds, laying out improvements and additions to the existing material. Look for that sometime this spring, maybe – it depends on how much I decide to include, and how long it takes to write and edit. These may or may not be released through Ad Astra Games.
In any case, new items will be appearing at my Ko-fi page and shop, some free for subscribers only, some with a modest price tag attached (but subscribers at the Silver and Gold levels will get discounts on those).
As for my social media presence, occasional long-form posts and status updates about my creative work will continue to appear here, while daily slice-of-life items and short updates will appear at my BlueSky profile. I’m also investigating Mastodon, but that hasn’t come to fruition yet. I fully expect my Facebook account will be moribund for now, and may be shut down entirely if Meta implements some of the changes they appear to be planning.
A lot depends on how things in my non-creative life go – that is, my family commitments, my day job (subject to the whims of the new US administration), and my university courses. I’m trying not to make big commitments for the coming year, and will be taking things one day at a time.
First, to address the elephant in the room. Yes, I think the people of the United States made an enormous mistake in this year’s elections, and all of us are going to suffer as a result. Eight years ago, a similar event threw me into such a state of shock that I very nearly gave up my creative life. Didn’t work on a single creative project for months, including serialized stories that had been under way before the election. I eventually got over it, but that was a big gap.
Not this time. Not sure what’s changed in my emotional balance since 2016, but in 2024 I’m not in a state of shock. Deeply angry, maybe, but not in a state of shock. And it turns out that being angry can feed your muse just as effectively as more pleasant emotions. So no hiatus this time.
Second, I spent a big chunk of the month getting ready for Philcon 2024.
Another successful convention! I sat on three panels, including delivering a solo “Worldbuilding 101” seminar to a full room. One of the two tabletop games I had written didn’t happen – it was scheduled for Friday evening, after a day of truly miserable weather that kept a lot of people at home. The other one, on Saturday evening, went off without a hitch. Meanwhile, I got to promote Architect of Worlds a bit, sold one of my author’s copies, and had some good conversations with other pros. Some people actually knew who I was without me having to run through my CV for them, which was nice.
Most importantly, I scarfed up information about several conventions coming up in 2025, all of them a bit closer to home than the two I visited this year. Definitely going to take steps to be on the program for at least some of those.
Now that my convention season for this year is over, and I’ve just about finished all the minor medical procedures I need to have done, I’m ready to get started in December with a clean slate. And there are going to be some minor changes around here.
I’ve already mentioned this, but I’m moving my main social-media presence away from Facebook and onto the new BlueSky platform. Look for me there at @jfzeigler.bsky.social. I usually post there at least once per day, so if you want day-to-day news that’s the best place to look.
Also, as I said a few days ago, I’m in the process of shutting down my Patreon site for good. My new interface, for anyone who might want to drop a little cash to support my creative work, is at the Ko-fi page for Sharrukin’s Palace.
The main tool for me to share content on Ko-fi will be the shop, which already has several e-books of my old fiction in place. I’ll be moving more existing fiction there, and posting new stories as I finish them. Subscribers at the Silver or Gold levels will get discounts on shop content. I’ll also be placing freebies on the shop, a few for all subscribers, some specifically for the Silver/Gold tiers.
Now, as to what creative projects I’ll be working on over the next few months:
My Human Destiny space-opera universe involves a vast interstellar empire that goes around saving young civilizations from their own folly. It seems to live in my head more strongly when there’s a lot of human folly in evidence around the world. Probably no surprise, then, that my muse has been focusing on it a lot over the past few weeks. So I plan to spend at least the next 3-4 months working on several Human Destiny items:
Reworking the setting bible, to match some new historical and technological assumptions, and to focus on the Star Trek-like aspects of the setting (interstellar exploration and adventure)
Reworking the core tabletop RPG rules for the setting, again for more focus on interstellar adventurers
Starting to produce Architect of Worlds-based writeups for specific star systems in the setting – in effect, starting to produce the Atlas of the Human Protectorate that I envisioned a while back
Writing some new stories!
All of those items will appear on the Ko-fi shop as they’re finished. At the moment, I think core RPG material will be free for all subscribers for now, while star system writeups will be free only for Silver/Gold tiers. New fiction will not be free, although again, Silver/Gold subscribers will get discounts on that.
For the month of December, I think the following plan will do:
Produce a writeup of the star system and planet generated during the Architect of Worlds seminar at Travellercon 2024, share that with seminar participants and post as a freebie to Ko-fi
Produce the first writeup of a star system for the Atlas of the Human Protectorate, post as a freebie for high tiers on Ko-fi
Start work on revisions to the setting bible and core RPG rules
Start (or resume) work on at least one new Human Destiny story
Continue to collect existing material for posting to Ko-fi at various levels
First two items are hard-and-fast objectives, the other three are “as time permits.” My ultimate goal is to be able to post at least two new items per month to Ko-fi, but we’ll see how events and other commitments work out.
Aside from the standard “buy me a coffee” button, there’s a shop, currently offering five e-books in PDF and EPUB formats, with more to come. For example, I’ll soon be moving all my fiction that’s been published on Amazon into the Kofi shop.
I’ve also set up Bronze, Silver, and Gold tiers for subscriptions. The major difference is that those will involve regular monthly billing, no matter how much (or how little) new content I produce in a given month.
All three subscription tiers will get you access to free exclusive content in the future. At the moment, I plan to generate new items on a monthly basis, including:
Architect of Worlds-based writeups for real-world star systems in the Human Destiny setting
New fiction
In-progress drafts of upcoming game design projects
Higher tiers will also get you modest (Silver) and steep (Gold) discounts on shop purchases.
This means some minor changes here at the WordPress blog. A lot of the “free articles and fiction” have been taken down, to be integrated into the e-book collection The Shores of Night that’s now available to a wider audience on the Kofi site. In the future, I’m going to be a bit more tight-fisted about what freebies I share here. Regular blog posts won’t be affected, however – this will continue to be my preferred place for long-form blogging about my creative work.
Meanwhile, although my Patreon supporters have already been informed, I’ll say it here too: my Patreon site is going to be shut down entirely sometime in the next couple of weeks. If you want to drop a little cash to support my creative work, that opportunity is going to be over at Kofi for the foreseeable future.
I seem to be in the midst of an extended hiatus in my creative life: since late September I’ve been working on support for gaming conventions rather than large-scale projects.
Travellercon was pretty successful. I sat on two panel discussions and ran a GURPS Traveller: The Interstellar Wars adventure for a full table. I didn’t run myself into the ground, I had a good time, and I got to meet a lot of people in person who had just been names on the Internet before.
Ironically, one of the people I met at Travellercon was on the programming committee for another convention: Philcon 2024, set to take place 22-24 November. As of right now, I’m scheduled to sit on three panels at Philcon – one of them a solo workshop on “Worldbuilding 101” – and run two games in the evenings. So no sooner did I get finished with one convention, than I had taken on a bunch of prep work for another.
This isn’t a problem. I’m obliged to attend (and promote Architect of Worlds at) two conventions this year anyway. It gets me back into the more public side of tabletop game design and SF literature, after a very long time away. Still, it means I’m working on those short-term projects rather than any of my longer-term ones. I have several items I need to get back to, as soon as my schedule loosens up a bit after Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, I’m giving serious thought to re-organizing and re-prioritizing my creative work even after I finish with Philcon.
Part of this is that I’ve just about determined that I’m going to be shutting down my Patreon campaign soon. At this point, my patrons may be able to expect a free release or two in November or December . . . but that may be the end of it. There are a number of reasons for this, but the three most significant are:
Now that Architect of Worlds is finished and on the market, it may be a long time before I have another large-scale project that will help me make consistent monthly releases.
In any case, I’m seeing a lot of patrons cancelling their subscriptions now that Architect is done, or signing up only for free subscriptions, or signing up and then cancelling in less than a month. Which reinforces that what I’ve been doing on Patreon since the Architect release is probably not holding people’s interest.
Meanwhile, Patreon is showing signs of enshittification. They’ve already deprecated the payment model I’ve preferred since Day One, and I keep seeing signs of increasingly arbitrary behavior and reduced customer support from them. It may be time to move away from a service which seems to be responding more to the needs of venture capitalists than its customers.
The plan at present is to migrate over to Kofi (“buy me a coffee”). I’ll have my page set up to permit people to make one-time donations, or to sign up for a monthly support subscription (with the understanding that I will not necessarily be releasing any significant “rewards” on a monthly basis). There will also be a store-front, where I’ll be selling PDF and EPUB e-books of my fiction, and maybe a few game-design items. Regular supporters will get steep discounts on these. I’ll make interim drafts of big projects available for free as well – but those will be taken down if and when they lead to published products.
I’m not sure when the transition will be taking place – it depends on how quickly I can get a few more pieces of fiction into my store-front so there’s a substantial amount of material in place. Almost certainly by the end of the calendar year, though.
Another factor is that I think I want to buckle down and focus on writing more fiction over the next year or two, rather than working on big game-design projects. I’m sensing that’s where my creative energies are likely to be better spent for the immediate future.
So yeah, some changes in the weather are approaching.
September was mostly about getting ready for Travellercon. I made a lot of the necessary progress for that, but there’s still a fair amount to get done and only a few days left to do it. It didn’t help that I was dealing with some minor health issues throughout September – nothing life-threatening, but several bouts of minor illness that were kind of distracting.
Between today and 10 October I need to get one last tranche of writing done for the day-job project that’s been taking up my time for over a year now, and get a bit of work done for the coming year’s courses at the Open University, and get everything squared away for Travellercon. So if you’re in my queue for any other action at the moment, you may need to cultivate patience until I get back from Lancaster in a couple of weeks.
Once Travellercon is over, I’ll have a little follow-up work to do for that, and I have some other items that need attention too. In particular, I owe some responses to the developer of a draft automation scheme for Architect of Worlds, which is looking very encouraging. My guess is that I won’t be getting back to serious work on (e.g.) Fourth Millenium until late in October. My patrons can therefore expect another month of no charged release, and we’ll re-evaluate in November.
One possibility is that I may take the second half of October and make a full-court press to get more of my back catalog of fiction edited, turned into e-books, and dropped into my Kofi site’s catalog. If I can get a good chunk of work done on that effort, I may be ready to start migrating patrons over to Kofi by sometime in November, when the subscription schemes start changing on Patreon.
No formal list of projects for this month. The above should give you a good idea what’s on my agenda at the moment, and the priority order for all of it.
I spent most of August on the first tranche of writing and cartography forFourth Millennium, and ended up with about 10,000 words of new material (and a snazzy master map for the setting). That all went out to my patrons on 31 August, so that hit my marks for the month. Which means several of my “front burner” items for August have actually been completed.
September is going to be a bit different. I have an obligation to run two events at Travellercon 2024 in October, so I need to focus on preparing for those.
One is going to be an Architect of Worlds “world-building workshop.” Up to six Traveller players and I are going to take four hours to work out a complete, Traveller-compatible planetary system using the Architect rules. I’ll need to do some prep work to make sure that runs smoothly and keeps the participants engaged, considering I won’t have a full-on computer on hand. After the convention is over, I’ll be writing up that planetary system in detail and sharing that with the workshop participants.
The other event will be a GURPS Traveller: The Interstellar Wars scenario . . . which will be the first time I’ve run any RPG for strangers in over twenty years. Yeah, that’s going to call for plenty of prep time too.
So I suspect most of my creative time in September will be taken up getting ready for the convention. My patrons can expect there to be no charged release for the month of September, although at some point after the con I may share my results of the two events as patron rewards.
Meanwhile, I’m working on a project to rescue a lot of my old fiction and republish it in forms that I can sell on my Kofi shop, once that opens up. As of today I’ve finished polishing up one novelette, incidentally working out the workflow for future items. This will be an “as time permits” project throughout the next 2-3 months, most likely.
So here’s the formal list for September:
Front Burner:
Travellercon: Finish designing the scenario for the adventure “Raid on Markidu.”
Travellercon: Complete setup work for the Architect of Worlds world-building workshop.
Back Burner:
Fourth Millennium: Write a gazetteer of major regions in the setting, tied to the master map.
Architect of Worlds: Finish setting up the page(s) for the book on this site.
Architect of Worlds: Start making at least one post per month (errata, edge cases, new material) supporting the book.
Publishing: Continue polishing and reformatting legacy fiction for publication via Kofi, as time permits.
More news as the month unwinds, no doubt. I hope to get back to Fourth Millennium as my primary project after the convention, in mid-October.
I spent most of July building out the alternate-historical timeline for Fourth Millennium, by playing through several of my tabletop historical-simulation games and compiling logs of the results. That effort is basically complete, although it didn’t generate much finished material so I didn’t have a patron release for July.
August is going to be a different matter!
I plan to spend most of this month on Fourth Millennium again, and this time I have a specific plan in mind, which will likely result in some solid material for my patrons and readers. I also need to do some maintenance work for Architect of Worlds, and get started on some prep work for Travellercon in early October. All that is more than enough for the next few weeks, so some of my other projects are going to be pushed off the raft for the time being.
So here’s the list for the coming month:
Front Burner:
Fourth Millennium: Produce an initial outline for the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
Fourth Millennium: Write a summary of the alternate history.
Fourth Millennium: Produce a master map for the setting, covering the Mediterranean world with terrain features, political borders, and the most significant cities all marked.
Fourth Millennium: Write a gazetteer of major regions in the setting, tied to the master map.
Architect of Worlds: Finish setting up the page(s) for the book on this site.
Architect of Worlds: Start making at least one post per month (errata, edge cases, new material) supporting the book.
Back Burner:
Travellercon: Begin designing the scenario for the adventure “Raid on Markidu.”
Travellercon: Begin setup work for the Architect of Worlds world-building workshop.
All this work for Fourth Millennium is very likely to amount to more than enough new material for me to consider making a charged release for my patrons, so look out for that at the end of August. Meanwhile, the material I produce for Travellercon will also be a patron release at some point, whether part of a free or charged release remains to be seen.
Looks like it’s going to be a very busy month. Not a problem I mind having, as long as I can keep up with my other commitments at the same time.
Quick end-of-month status report here, mostly for my patrons.
I’ve gotten a lot of interesting work done on assembling notes for the Fourth Millennium universe this month, and I think I’m about at the point of beginning to write the first interim rough draft for that sourcebook . . . but that doesn’t leave me with any significant amount of new finished material for my patrons for July. So, if it’s not clear yet, there will be no charged release for this month.
Next month I plan to be a lot more ambitious. I may have some combination of new cartography and game material in August, and a fair amount of it at that. Look for my monthly planning message this weekend, most likely, and then we’ll see how August goes.
For several weeks now, I’ve been using a sequence of tabletop simulation games to generate a big chunk of the Fourth Millennium alternate history. These have included:
Alexandros (Revised Edition), by Compass Games
Successors (Fourth Edition), by GMT Games
Sword of Rome, by GMT Games
Pax Romana, by GMT Games
In particular, the past two weeks have been devoted to running through a home-brewed scenario of Pax Romana, based on the outcomes of the previous games. I’ve been making occasional posts to Facebook detailing how the game has been going, with comments about what the alternate history looks like. For my blog readers and patrons, and to preserve that commentary for future reference, I’m going to compile all of those posts here.
So, without further ado:
July 7 (300 BCE)
Well, this evening I did manage to get Pax Romana set up, using my home-brewed alternate-historical scenario. This picks up right where my Successors and Sword of Rome runs left off, in 300 BCE.
You can see Carthage in the lower left, ready to build up its western empire. A few Romans in central Italy, set to finish their conquest of the peninsula. An alliance between the western chunk of Alexander’s empire and Magna Graecia. A few of Alexander’s satraps asserting their independence in Asia Minor. Way off in the East, we have Alexander’s son and heir partnering up with the elderly Ptolemy of Egypt to pursue a new generation’s ambitions.
Let the games begin!
July 10 (250 BCE)
Spent most of the day “teaching” an online course (i.e., monitoring student progress and grading papers), and building a slide deck for next week’s Enormous Course lesson.
I also plowed through a game-turn of Pax Romana. I’m now at the end of Game-Turn II (about 250 BCE), and there have been some interesting developments.
Given the enforced alliance at the beginning of the game between “Greece” and “The East” in my home-brewed scenario, once the two empires have divided up Asia Minor there’s really only one direction for “The East” (the main body of the Alexandrian empire) to go. That’s across North Africa to fulfill one of Alexander’s old ambitions, the conquest of Carthage.
The campaign was fortuitously timed, just as Carthage was struggling with a “slave revolt” event (entirely historical, as Carthage always had trouble with internal rebellions). I looked at the odds facing the Carthaginian army, and decided that their best bet was to fall back on the Numidian hinterland and the settlements in Spain, and let the Alexandrian army deal with the rebels. So the outnumbered Carthaginian army is more or less intact to fight another day. Still, between the Alexandrian invasion and an opportunistic campaign by the Romans in Corsica and Sardinia, Carthage has lost a lot of territory.
“Greece” (the European sector of Alexander’s empire) has been having a hard time expanding anywhere. They’ve knocked out a few barbarian tribes, but they also had to fend off a massive invasion of German barbarians from the back-end of nowhere, and the net result has been just about zero. Maybe in the next few turns they can do better – they certainly have the economic base for conquest, even if they also have a big frontier to defend.
The Roman Republic has been doing . . . not too badly, actually, mostly by carefully leaving the Alexandrians alone and snapping up territory opportunistically around the edges. They’ve had to fight some wars against Gaulish barbarians, but that gave them a chunk of southern Gaul and plenty of directions for further expansion. Once the two segments of Alexander’s empire become hostile to each other, there’s every likelihood the Romans can start playing both ends against the middle.
July 13 (175 BCE)
I really ought to be working on things for the office, but honestly I was pretty burned out this morning, so I spent the day on Pax Romana instead. The capstone scenario I need to write is still percolating in the back of my brain, so tomorrow I’ll sit down and knock out as much of it as I can.
In the Fourth Millennium universe, we’ve reached about 175 BCE, the halfway point in the simulation.
There have been some interesting developments. The entirety of Magna Graecia has changed hands, for one thing. The Greek cities in Italy are now subject to the Roman Republic, while the post-Minoan matriarchy that was ruling Sicily is now a vassal-state of the Ptolemies of Egypt.
In the far west, now that the Romans have unified Italy, they’ve drawn a new strategic objective: the conquest of Hispania. Spain has just been unified by the league of post-Carthaginian towns left behind after Carthage itself was conquered by the Ptolemies. Unfortunately the Phoenicians have maybe half the economic strength of the growing Roman state, their social stability is much worse, and their armies tend to be smaller and of lower quality than the Roman legions. I’m predicting an alternate-historical version of the Punic Wars, with much the same outcome. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Meanwhile, now that Alexander’s empire has fragmented, there’s an epic confrontation brewing in Asia Minor, between Alexander’s direct heirs and the Seleucids who are based out of the Macedonian homeland and Greece. Right now the two powers are about evenly matched, so I have to wonder if they won’t just fight each other to exhaustion. A really talented leader on one side or the other might make all the difference. Have to see how the next couple of turns go.
July 16 (125 BCE)
As I move toward finishing up with my Pax Romana run, the world is starting to look like its status in the proposed Fourth Millennium RPG. The current date is about 125 BCE, and I’ve got 75 years to go.
In the west, the Romans have dealt with the post-Carthaginian towns and a couple of barbarian invasions in Spain, and have secured the eastern and southern coasts of the peninsula. That’s about where they were about 75 years earlier in our history, after the Second Punic War. At the moment the Roman Republic is the second-most powerful of the major empires, and they’re well placed to finish the conquest of Hispania and move into first place.
There’s still a “Carthage” in the game, and it’s even managed to take back a little of its old territory from the Ptolemies, but I’m reading that as a resurgence of the kingdoms of Numidia and Mauretania. I can’t see those hanging on to their independence very long if any of the major empires find the time to look their way. At least they can act as a spoiler for a while longer.
The conflict between the pieces of Alexander’s empire has been grinding onward. The loose and often-fractured alliance between Alexander’s direct heirs and the Ptolemies of Egypt has been doing surprisingly well. The Seleucid kingdom in European Greece was hamstrung by a very badly timed civil war, and by the arrival of a “soldier of fortune” mercenary army working for Alexander’s descendants. (Pax Romana includes a “soldier of fortune” mechanic, which can disrupt things by bringing a rogue military force onto the board for a turn or so. Think Pyrrhus of Epirus, or some of the third-tier Diadochi.) As a result, the Seleucid position in Asia Minor is in full collapse, and Alexander’s heirs have just about consolidated everything up to the islands off the Ionian coast. This game allows for lots of reverses of fortune, though, so no guarantees what will happen before the end-of-game date.
I suspect I’ll be finished with this run later this week. After which I think I’m going to fire up Affinity and start a really big cartography project, the kind of thing that might end up in the eventual RPG book. Starting with a master map of the whole Mediterranean world, with maybe a few more-detailed local maps as well. I doubt any of that will be finished by the end of July, but maybe my patrons will have some pretty maps to look at in August.
July 21 (60 BCE)
Finished my Pax Romana run last night, and carefully documented the state of the world. That brings the Fourth Millennium timeline up to my planned date – about 60 BCE.
The post-Alexandrian empires have had about a century of actually getting along with each other and not going through round after round of civil wars. Which means they’ve both been able to urbanize and expand their territory. The Seleucids, in particular, have managed to do something interesting – wedged in between Rome and the Alexandrians, they’ve expanded northward into the Balkans, and the territory of the eastern Celts along the Danube River. They’ve got a whole network of military colonies in that whole region, acting as a matrix in which the Celts can be Hellenized, formed into a solid defensive line against the incursion of Germans from further north. If I can’t build that into an environment for lots of adventures, I need to turn in my badge.
Meanwhile, the Roman Republic is the biggest, most unified, and wealthiest of the major powers . . . but it’s not strong enough to fend off both wings of the post-Alexandrian empires at once. Italy is starting to seem like a morsel caught in the jaws of Hellenistic states to the north and south. In the last turn of the game, the Romans had to fend off attacks from both sides, and lost small but significant portions of territory in both directions. What’s worse, the Republic just suffered its first serious round of military reverses, with whole legions lost and its internal stability sliding – which suggests it may be in for this world’s equivalent of the bloody Social War.
In power politics, a tripod is the most unstable of structures, because the temptation is always there for two powers to gang up on the third. So in the present day of the Fourth Millennium, is the Roman Republic going to go down before the Hellenistic conquest? Or will the post-Alexandrians collapse into factional fighting (again) and give the Romans a chance to get the advantage? After all, it’s not as if the Hellenes of this era have ever managed to go very long without starting to imitate the moment-to-moment business of a bucket of crabs.
This is going to be a great setting for adventure stories and a tabletop RPG. Next step: to build some maps of the current situation, and maybe write the first gazetteer of the setting. That’s not going to be finished before the end of July, but I suspect I’ll have some neat material to show my patrons next month.
I’ve been doing a lot of back-of-my-head design work for the Fourth Millennium universe this weekend.
To recap: Fourth Millennium is an alternate-historical fantasy setting, somewhat resembling the situation in and around the Mediterranean basin in middle antiquity. There are a lot of divergences from our history: a Minoan successor state in Sicily that’s a counterweight to both Rome and Carthage, an Alexandrian empire that lasts for several generations before finally breaking apart, a Carthaginian empire that lasts much longer than the real one did, and so on. There are some subtle fantastic elements too, such as working ritual magic, the intervention of gods, and philosophical schools that open the door to special powers of body and mind.
I’ve written several pieces of fiction in this universe, and will probably write more. It’s an ideal setting for me to apply all the time I’ve spent studying the world of antiquity.
It’s also going to become a tabletop RPG setting at some point, and that’s what I’ve been spending a lot of time on over the last couple weeks.
At this point I think the canonical setup for a Fourth Millennium campaign will be a group of young but well-connected characters, firmly embedded in the social and political environment of a given civilized state. In a Hellenistic state, for example, the characters might be born to wealthy or noble families, starting out with obligations to king, home city, family, philosophical school, and so on. Characters will adventure to earn dóxa (glory) and arkhḗ (authority, social power), with the ultimate objective of “everlasting fame,” the kind of historical legacy that people will still be talking about centuries or millennia later. Adventures may involve:
Political intrigue
Fighting against brigands, pirates, barbarians, or other civilized states
Recovering treasures
Exploring strange lands
Gaining standing in a philosophical school through debates and writing learned treastises
Producing great works of art or architecture
Making scientific discoveries or inventing wonderful devices
Becoming a very important figure won’t be out of the question – a prominent strategos, a city or provincial governor, even a king or ruling queen. All of this will hopefully get game-mechanical support.
The models I’m looking toward here are in the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) arena, especially Pendragon and Runequest. I’ve already been doing some design work with BRP, and the system seems adaptable to a game such as I have in mind, so it’s a decent fit.
One neat feature did occur to me today. I suspect the “core book” for Fourth Millennium will focus on the Hellenistic kingdoms, from Sicily in the far west to the receding frontier of Alexander’s empire in the far east. Lots of focus on Hellenistic society, its structure, its customs, and so on. But if the core book does at all well, I could very easily write “splatbooks” describing other parts of the setting – the Roman Republic, the Carthginian Empire, the Parthian kingdom, Egypt (outside Alexandria and the Hellenistic core), and so on. Similar mechanics for each, but differences in character design and social structure. It would be easy, after a while, to mix cultural backgrounds and have a truly globe-trotting campaign.
I suspect I’ll be starting to outline the Fourth Millennium core book this month, and maybe even writing a few sections of the rules or setting background. We’ll see how much I have in hand by the end of July.
Incidentally, if you’re reading this post and you’re interested in seeing more about Fourth Millennium, you might consider signing up for my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/Sharrukin. Patrons get regular updates on all my creative projects, including interim drafts of books in progress. For the past couple of years, my patrons have mostly been seeing work on Architect of Worlds, but if you’re more interested in TTRPG development now might be a good time to sign up.
(Image credit: Angus McBride, cover image for Osprey Publishing, The Thracians: 700 BC-46 AD. I really wish Mr. McBride was still with us, and that I could afford to commission him for art for this project . . .)
