Sharrukin's Palace

April came down to the wire, but on the last day of the month I was able to both post a book review and push out the first section of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate.

For the month of May, I think the Top Priority item is going to be Architect of Worlds again. There’s one more section of the book I need to write from scratch, and the “special cases” section needs more love. I suspect between those two items I’ll have plenty of new material, so a combination of them is likely going to be a charged release for the month of May.

The remarkable thing is that if I can hit that mark this month, that will mean that Architect of Worlds will be more or less complete, at least in an initial rough draft. That’s quite a milestone! I think if all goes well, June may see a release of a full rough draft of Architect, all in one document, a true v1.0 for the entire project. That will be a free release for my patrons, since they’ve already seen all the individual pieces.

The book won’t be anywhere close to finished at that point – I anticipate a lot of polishing, production of diagrams and graphics, and layout before I can even consider trying to publish it – but that’s still a big step forward. I begin to think there’s a chance Architect may arrive on virtual store shelves before the end of calendar year 2022.

All that being said, here’s the formal planning list for May:

• Top Priority:
  • Architect of Worlds: Write a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings. Also carry out further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section. These two tasks are expected to give rise to a charged release, assuming they amount to at least 10,000 words of new material.
• Second Priority:
  • Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section. May lead to a free v0.2 update, or may simply be integrated into v1.0 of the complete book.
  • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
  • Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
  • Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
• Back Burner:
  • Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story.
  • Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
  • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
  • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).

For a while, I was afraid that March would be yet another month without any big block of new material to share, but then I had a remarkably productive week and was able to produce a first interim draft for the “special cases” section of Architect of Worlds. So March ended on a good note, and now I need to think about April.

I think I’m going to restructure my priority list, starting this month. Instead of listing several projects as all being “Top Priority,” I’m going to restrict myself to one project that’s going to get the lion’s share of my time in the coming month. That’s the project that seems to me most likely to produce a block of new material suitable for sharing with patrons and other readers. Everything else is going to get pushed down to “Second Priority” (projects that may get some time, but probably won’t lead to a big block of new material) or “Back Burner” (projects that I’m keeping on the docket but don’t expect to work on at all during the coming month).

For the month of April, I think the Top Priority item is going to be to work on a rough draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate, a new tabletop-oriented book that describes the late-23rd-Century universe of the Human Destiny setting. Working on that project for the first time is also going to help me make progress on several items on this month’s Second Priority list:

• Give the current (v0.8) draft of the Architect of Worlds design sequence a thorough workout, looking for possible ambiguities and bugs to be corrected, possibly leading to a v0.9 release.
• Similarly, test and improve on the “working with astronomical data” (v0.1) and “special cases in worldbuilding” (v0.1) sections of Architect, possibly leading to v0.2 releases for those.
• Also, work out how my particular take on the Cepheus Engine system is going to represent this kind of setting, which is kind of different from the usual representation (3D space, more detailed world writeups, and so on). If I come up with some results here, those may go into the interim draft of the Player’s Guide, leading toward a v0.5 release for that.

So, without further ado, here’s the formal planning list for April:

• Top Priority:
  • Human Destiny: Start compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate, meanwhile giving the Architect of Worlds material a good workout. Produce a v0.1 interim draft (at least 10,000 words) by the end of the month as a charged release.
• Second Priority:
  • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
  • Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section, possibly leading to a free v0.2 update.
  • Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section, possibly leading to a free v0.2 update.
  • Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
  • Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
• Back Burner:
  • Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
  • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
  • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).

Well, February was at least somewhat successful – I managed a major rewrite of sections of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, and released a new interim draft of that for a wide audience. I think in March I’m going to try to keep up my momentum there, and work on some new sections of the book. It would be nice if I could have the whole rough draft finished before summer, so I could work on final polish and layout and actually get the book out at last.

There’s one new development in how I’m planning to structure these projects. I’m going to break the Human Destiny setting bible into two distinct books for eventual publication under the Cepheus Engine game rules. The core setting bible itself will get the working title of the Human Destiny Player’s Guide, and then there’s going to be a separate Atlas of the Human Protectorate that provides location data and adventure seeds. My patrons will get free updates to the Player’s Guide, since I’ve already charged them for that once, but the Atlas will likely be a charged release once there’s enough material there to justify one.

Meanwhile, I really need to get unblocked on Krava’s Legend again if I can. it’s been well over a year since The Curse of Steel was published, and it needs to start getting sequels if the series is ever going to attract an audience.

Here’s the list for March:

• Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
  • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
  • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
  • Human Destiny: Start compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate, meanwhile giving the Architect of Worlds material a good workout.
  • Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
• Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
  • Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
  • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
• Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
  • Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
  • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
  • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine)

I think the top priority for a charged release will be to get the initial draft of the “special cases and additional worldbuilding topics” material finished. The other items are more likely to give rise to free updates for my patrons.

Things have been a little hectic here at the Palace lately. The period since Christmas has, ironically, been one of the busiest I’ve had at my day job in some time, with three major projects all coming to a head at the same time and demanding a lot of my attention. On top of that, throw the disruption of the worst surge since the pandemic started and our usual pattern of getting heavy snow in January, and it’s kind of been chaos. Not conducive to getting creative work done.

Still, I have a calm weekend at the moment, and it’s a good time to outline work for the rest of this month.

• Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
  • Human Destiny: Finish a draft of the character design rules and release the first partial draft of the Human Destiny setting bible as a Cepheus Prime sourcebook.
  • Human Destiny: Finish a new novelette for eventual collection and publication.
  • Human Destiny: Produce a high-level map of terraformed Mars.
  • Human Destiny: Research and produce a timeline for the terraforming of Mars.
• Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
  • Krava’s Legend: Write a few new chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
  • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
  • Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
  • Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
• Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
  • Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release. This work may involve updating all of the worked examples, and making mathematical notation more consistent.
  • Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
  • Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine)

I’m clearly focusing on the Human Destiny universe some more this month. I’ve actually worked out most of the Martian material, although it’s all scattered notes at the moment, and producing the map is proving a little more challenging than I thought. I’m making good progress on the Cepheus Engine hack for the sourcebook. Meanwhile, I’ve come across one of my older partial stories – possibly the first piece of fiction I ever wrote in the setting that eventually became Human Destiny – and it seems likely that I’ll be able to finish that fairly quickly. So that’s where the low-hanging fruit are at the moment.

For my patrons, the most likely releases this month will be the next partial rough draft of the sourcebook (free release) and the new story (charged release, if it’s long enough). As always, I’ll update as the month progresses and it’s clearer how things are going to go.