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Thinking about “Fourth Millennium”

Thinking about “Fourth Millennium”

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 . . .)

A Choice of Game Mechanics

A Choice of Game Mechanics

As of today, the initial layout of Architect of Worlds is finished – all of the final-draft text has been dropped into InDesign and laid out on the pages. In fact, given that there are a couple more days before the end of October, I’ve gone ahead and dropped the “Fine-Tuning World Climate” material into the book as well. I’m going to try to get that laid out before I produce an end-of-month PDF for my patrons.

This is a really big milestone. My planning message for November will detail the work that remains to be done, but the bulk of the final editorial work is finished. From here to the release version is a short distance, relatively speaking.

So today, I’m taking a break from Architect to consider some of the projects I might take up afterward. In particular, the possibility of producing one or more RPG sourcebooks tied to my personal literary settings. These include:

  • The Human Destiny: Interstellar science fiction, positioned somewhere between moderately hard SF and conservative space opera, essentially a pastiche of Star Trek in a universe where human beings are decidedly not the dominant culture.
  • Fourth Millennium: Alternate-historical fantasy set in and around the ancient Mediterranean, a world in which Hellenistic civilization is dominant and (at least some of) the gods are real and active in human affairs.
  • The Great Lands: Iron-Age fantasy reminiscent of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, in which heroic demigods struggle for glory and the survival of their people.

Of the three, I suspect The Human Destiny and Fourth Millennium are most likely to come to fruition. I do want to do more with The Great Lands, but that setting has been getting a lot less interest from the potential audience, so I’m a bit less motivated to push it forward.

One question that keeps coming up is how these settings might best be translated into tabletop RPG material – in particular, what game system might be the best choice for me to work with and publish under?

My first choice, of course, would be GURPS. I’ve got plenty of experience writing for various editions of GURPS – no fewer than 17 full-length books for which I was sole author, co-author, contributor, or editor would argue for that. To this day I’m fond of the system, and I’m quite convinced that any of my personal settings would translate well into it. Not least because I suspect a lot of GURPS idioms have embedded themselves into my personal world-building style.

The problem is that GURPS doesn’t have any form of open license. It’s certainly possible to write and sell third-party GURPS material. Douglas Cole of Gaming Ballistic, for example, has managed a small but successful product line tied to Dungeon Fantasy. As someone with a long track record of both freelance and on-the-payroll work for SJG, I could probably do the same. The barrier to entry would be steep, though, and probably not something at which a one-man development shop working around the constraints of a day job could succeed.

A few years back, I briefly considered writing my own RPG system. You can probably find a few references to the Eidolon system in old posts here. I eventually set that idea aside, because frankly the market is already absolutely glutted with RPG game systems. Anything I publish along these lines is going to be very marginal to begin with; tying it to an idiosyncratic game system would reduce the audience size from “few” to “none.”

I considered the new Cortex Prime system, and even wrote up a bunch of Human Destiny material for it. I still like that system, but the promised creator-friendly licensing scheme never materialized, so I had to set that aside too.

I thought about publishing Human Destiny under the OGL, possibly by way of Cepheus Engine, but the blowup over the OGL at the beginning of this calendar year kind of scotched that notion. I have absolutely no interest in building a dependency into any of my work that Wizards of the Coast could yank out from under me at any time. There was some talk of placing Cepheus Engine on a different licensing basis, possibly with cooperation from Mongoose Publishing, but I’m not sure how that shook out. I’m still kind of leery. Besides, I’m not entirely convinced that the Traveller-like mechanics of Cepheus Engine would quite fit the Human Destiny setting.

More recently I’ve been looking at Monte Cook’s Cypher, and Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (BRP), both of which are available under very creator-friendly licensing terms.

Cypher is perhaps a little more streamlined than I like in a tabletop system, but it seems to have a bigger and growing audience. Monte Cook Games has been pushing it hard this year, especially after the OGL debacle. Cypher is available under its own open license, and the System Reference Document (SRD) is pretty extensive.

On the other hand, Basic Role Playing is an established and very solid system, more GURPS-like than most of the others. It’s been applied to a variety of settings over the years, and I think some of its mechanics would fit my settings very nicely. It’s not clear how much of an audience it has outside the very popular Pendragon, Runequest and Call of Cthulhu games. BRP used to be under a fairly restrictive open license – the SRD included almost nothing but the core task-resolution mechanic – but the most recent release of the engine includes more mechanics, and is apparently going to be placed under the much broader ORC license.

None of this is urgent yet; it’s going to be a while yet before Architect is finally out the door and I can turn to the next big project. Still, that seems to be the current state of play. I need a tabletop game system that will be a good fit for the settings I want to write, which has at least some established audience, and which exists under a licensing scheme for which I won’t have to be a full-time developer and marketer to succeed. It’s encouraging that the intersection of those three sets doesn’t appear to be quite empty . . .

Planning for October 2023

Planning for October 2023

It never rains but it pours. I had hoped for September to be a really productive month, and I did get some good work done, but it was one thing after the other getting in the way. Our HVAC system went out in mid-month, which left us sweltering for a few days until we had everything replaced.

Then, no sooner did that get resolved, than I had a nasty flare-up of kidney stone that’s still not cleared up. Kind of hard to concentrate on any work – for your day job or your side hustle – when you’re subject at any moment to feeling like there’s a knife buried in your back.

Still, I managed to get another big chunk of Architect of Worlds laid out, and I did most of the work to write a new section of material about modeling local surface temperatures. I think I’m within striking distance of having the entire layout finished in rough draft, so that’s the primary objective for the month of October.

So here’s the plan for this month:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Finish writing new material to streamline the estimation of variations in local climate (originally Step Thirty-Two in the design sequence).
    • Architect of Worlds: Complete the initial layout of the book.
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Continue work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.
    • Fan Fiction: Continue to write a Runequest-based story of at least novella length.

As far as releases for my patrons are concerned: I expect a free update of the growing Architect release draft – in fact, this is likely to be the final free update for that project before the book is released. If I produce enough new prose for Twice-Crowned or the Runequest story, I may offer partial drafts of those as a reward too (charged for Twice-Crowned, free for the Runequest story).

Planning for September 2023

Planning for September 2023

This will be the first more-or-less-normal planning message since June, given the last three months were massively disrupted by the basement-flooding incident we had late in that month. We’re still working to recover. In particular, my personal and work space is still kind of tucked in around a lot of unpacked boxes and furniture that hasn’t been returned to its usual place. On the other hand, I can get to my bed, my bookshelves, and my workstation, and there’s a good chance I’ll be able to set up at least one of my two game-and-other-project tables this weekend. One step at a time.

Meanwhile, as of late August I had actually finished editing and laying out Architect of Worlds through the end of the main design sequence. That’s a huge milestone, leaving me with only about 50-60 pages yet to polish up and lay out, and the remaining sections aren’t likely to need as much finicky attention. Much easier to do layout when you’re not working around tables and mathematical formulae on every page!

Meanwhile, I’ve been slowly writing new material for Twice-Crowned. My muse has also provoked me into an active side project to write . . . something fan-fiction-like, set in the fictional world of Glorantha that appears in the Runequest roleplaying game. So I’m producing a little bit of new prose fiction as I go, even while I try to remain focused on getting Architect ready for its formal release later this year.

So here’s the plan for September:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Write new material to streamline the estimation of variations in local climate (originally Step Thirty-Two in the design sequence).
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Plan to finish through page 152 (out of approximately 180), or the end of the Special Cases in World-Building section. May continue past that point if time remains in the month.
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Continue work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.
    • Fan Fiction: Continue to write a Runequest-based story of at least novella length.

As far as releases for my patrons are concerned: I expect a free update of the growing Architect release draft. If I produce enough new prose for the Runequest story, I may offer a partial draft of that as a free reward too. There won’t be a charged release this month, and probably won’t be any until fairly late this year, while I concentrate on getting Architect of Worlds ready for release.