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Echoes

Echoes

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While I continue rooting through my basement, boxing up the last scraps of small items I don’t want to discard, I’m coming across some interesting items.

Back in the 1995-2005 timeframe, I kept many handwritten notes in small notebooks. At the time a lot of my creative thinking happened at the office, or in other places where I didn’t have access to my computer or the Internet, so handwritten notes were very useful. Apparently I still have all of those notebooks, salted away on low shelves or in boxes that haven’t been opened in many years; very few of these got water-damaged in the recent disaster. So, for example, just today I found:

  • An extensive set of notes titled “Life after Steve Jackson Games,” in which I started planning an independent creative career. Most of that plan doesn’t seem to have survived contact with reality, but a few of its features do seem to have been implemented.
  • Huge piles of notes from when I was helping to develop setting material for GURPS Traveller, including the Interstellar Wars setting. More piles of notes that eventually went into Transhuman Space.
  • My own version of the Aldebaran Sector for Traveller, along with a contract (never completed) to write a GURPS Traveller sourcebook titled Grand Frontiers.
  • Notes and hardcopy of the rules for the Game of Empire system I developed for realm-level play in Traveller. This is the game that I refereed for a bunch of GURPS Traveller fans about 2000, developing a ton of background information (including months’ worth of Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society news items) for the Solomani Rim.
  • Notes for a new generic RPG system. Apparently I was already thinking in terms of developing my own rules mechanics so as to publish game material without running into licensing issues. Probably never going to be developed now, but still interesting.
  • Notes for a realm-management game set in Bronze Age Greece. I think this did get deployed in a GURPS campaign I was running back in the day, although one of my players reacted so badly to the system in its first session that the campaign disbanded almost immediately afterward.
  • Extensive notes for at least three genre settings. One these eventually gave rise to my first complete original novel (the unpublishable one). Another looks very much like an early version of my Human Destiny space opera setting. A third was a fantasy setting I had forgotten about entirely and might now think about revisiting.
  • Extensive musings on philosophy and theology. I’m almost afraid to re-read these in detail. I’m a cheerful solitary regarding such matters, so it doesn’t concern me that my ideas aren’t in lockstep with any extant school of thought. Still, I suspect the me of 2023 might find the me of circa 2000 kind of hard to take.

Quite the treasure trove. Hard to say whether any of it will ever see the light of day again – it’s not as if I don’t have enough creative work to do already – but it’s still interesting reading. All of it’s going in boxes to be preserved.

Looking Backward: Game of Empire

Looking Backward: Game of Empire

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One of the more interesting phases of my creative career was my involvement with the Traveller tabletop roleplaying game. Between 1999 and 2005, I wrote, co-authored, or edited at least seven books for the GURPS Traveller product line. In fact, for much of that time, I was effectively the backup Line Editor, assisting Loren K. Wiseman in that capacity, and even taking over entirely for a few months at one point. It was a neat experience; I kind of miss it even today.

In 2000, I was writing the Solomani Rim sector book for GURPS Traveller. I was also helping Loren to produce an online edition of Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (JTAS), the venerable Traveller fan magazine. One thing I did in that period was to help Loren wrangle Traveller News Service (TNS) entries, little scraps of “current events” from the Third Imperium setting that were meant to maintain the game’s meta-plot and suggest interesting adventures.

There was a side project I undertook, relevant to all of that activity: a set of rules with the working title of Game of Empire. This was a set of Traveller meta-rules, designed to allow “movers and shakers” roleplaying across a region of space. Instead of playing ordinary Imperial citizens, players could take on the role of very senior nobles, megacorporate executives, planetary political leaders, rebel-faction commanders, and so on. The actions and decisions they carried out would affect whole worlds. There was some resemblance to other Traveller products such as Pocket Empires or Dynasties, although the scale and emphasis were a bit different.

As part of the project, I wrote up a scenario, titled The Alderamin Scramble. The premise was that an Imperial duke’s title had fallen vacant in the Solomani Rim sector, and a number of notables were in a position to compete for an appointment to that seat. There were a lot of other events in the scenario – at least two local wars, a visit from Empress Iolanthe to the Rim, and so on.

I recruited 20 players from the JTAS message boards, and we spent several months “playtesting” the ruleset and the Alderamin Scramble scenario. It was a lot of fun – and along the way, we generated dozens of potential TNS items. I think most of the TNS entries from the in-game years 1119 through 1122 came out of that one game.

I often thought about building Game of Empire into something that could be published. I did write a second edition of the ruleset, based on our experience with the playtest, and thought about running more games with that. Unfortunately, with one thing and another, further development never happened before GURPS Traveller started dying on the vine a few years later.

In fact, I somehow misplaced my copy of the game’s files at some point. Fortunately, in 2017, I happened to be talking with Keith Alan Johnson when he mentioned he had a complete copy of both versions of the rules, the Alderamin Scramble scenario, and a bunch of his notes from the playtest. He was generous enough to bundle the whole package up and send it to me.

At the time, I still didn’t have any place to publish the game, but that may be changing. There’s an “open source” version of Traveller in existence now (a game called Cepheus Engine) and several independent publishers have released material through that venue. I’m already exploring ways to release other game material, as for example through DriveThruRPG. So a few days ago I got the notion of reviving this old project.

Yesterday I made a post on the Traveller Facebook group, describing the project and its history, and asking whether the audience would be interested. The response was a pretty resounding yes – so this certainly looks like something that would be worth moving to the front burner. I already have a lot on my plate for the rest of this month, but I may be spending odd moments looking at the old material and letting my subconscious mull over ways to improve and add to it.

New Creative Directions

New Creative Directions

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It’s not the end of the year yet – that being when I usually take stock and make plans for upcoming creative work – but a few things have happened recently that may turn out to be productive.

The Obvious Task: The Curse of Steel is finished in the first draft. I’ll be spending the next few months on a second-draft rewrite of the novel, with a planned milestone of having it ready for publication in the spring. After that, I’ll be getting started on the second novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands.

Preparing for Patreon: Now, as one element of preparing for publication, I’ve been thinking about re-opening my Patreon campaign, which has been shut down for several years. Hopefully, that can help me gather an audience for the novel(s), as well as raise a little money to help pay for professional cover art or editorial services. With the novel series underway, I certainly won’t have any problem producing material that patrons can enjoy for the foreseeable future.

World-Building Material for Patrons: However, while working on the novel series, I’ve been coming up with a lot of world-building material: maps, constructed language, cultural descriptions, character writeups, and so on. Most of that material hasn’t been posted here. I imagine some of my readers would be interested in it, either on its own or as support for tabletop gaming.

The stumbling block here is that when I frame my own world-building notes in terms of a tabletop game, the game system I normally use is GURPS. Steve Jackson Games is fairly strict about licensing the GURPS system for third-party publishers – there’s no Open Gaming License for it, for example. It’s possible to work with them to get a license, and several publishers have done so, but for someone like me who would just be publishing material for a small audience via Patreon, that’s not worthwhile.

Fortunately, a solution came to me a few days ago: publish game-ready material using a “generic” character description format of my own design, one which could easily be converted to GURPS – or to any number of other game systems, for that matter. That way I can publish the material for patrons and still avoid any danger of infringing on SJG’s online policy.

Just as a trial balloon, I’ve started pulling together the design I have in mind, and it’s surprisingly simple. I suspect I could publish a reference document, under a Creative Commons license, that’s no more than a dozen pages long. So that looks like it’s going to be part of the strategy.

Some New Simulations for Evaluation: Entirely unconnected to the above, I received a shipment from Sierra Madre Games earlier this week – two games that I ordered many months ago and that have finally been released.

Bios: Origins (Second Edition) is the final game in Phil Eklund’s Bios trilogy, which began with Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna. This game picks up where Megafauna left off – at the point where the primitive human species (or some other pre-sapient species on an alien world) first attains a spark of consciousness. It’s a Civ-like game, which traces the history of a world from the Paleolithic all the way to the dawn of the Space Age.

As with Phil’s other games, this has oodles of thematic interest, and I suspect it could be used rather handily as a world-building tool. You may recall that I did a series of “world-building by simulation” articles a while back, using Genesis and Megafauna to design an alien world and its dominant sentient species. Now I think I’m going to tinker a bit with Origins and see if I can turn it to similar purposes. There may be a fair number of blog posts about that over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Pax Transhumanity is a game by Phil Eklund’s son, Matt Eklund. It’s a thematic simulation of future history – the period over the next century or so, during which technology is likely to completely transform human society (again, still, as always). It fits in well with the Transhuman Space setting I helped design for Steve Jackson Games back in the day.

I’ve been waiting for Pax Transhumanity for a long time, hoping to use it to re-inspire me for another of my creative projects: the “Human Destiny” setting, in which humanity becomes part of a polyspecific interstellar community over the next couple of centuries.

The Human Destiny stories started off reasonably well – I actually published one of them via Amazon a while ago – but I ran into a brick wall with them. Largely because, in the current concept for the setting, human beings have very little agency! They’re the passive subjects of an alien empire, which came to manage Earth and human destiny because we proved unable to succeed on our own.

Okay, I will admit that I’m fairly pessimistic about human prospects. My evaluation of my species is that we’re just smart enough to get ourselves into a world of difficulty, but not smart enough to save ourselves from the consequences. That doesn’t make for very hopeful or interesting storytelling, though.

So for a long time, I’ve been trying to find ways to convince myself anew that humanity actually has a hopeful future, preferably without divine intervention or helpful aliens to save us from our own folly. I want to develop a fictional world in which we muddle through and eventually manage to solve the problems we cause for ourselves. Going back and re-reading Transhuman Space has helped a little, since that’s exactly the assumption we made for that setting. Tinkering with Pax Transhumanity might help too.

All of which means that I might be re-working the Human Destiny setting over the next few months. More material for this blog, the Patreon, and eventual publication, hopefully.

Architect of Worlds: I still need to get back to work on the Architect of Worlds project, of course – that’s been stalled for a lot longer than I originally planned. Even so, every once in awhile someone comes across it and gets good use out of it, even in its incomplete state. One of these days I’ll have to set everything else aside and just get the next big section written . . .

Hmm. This is reading a lot like a “prospects for the new year” post, isn’t it? Even if the above list is all I work on, that’s more than enough to keep me busy for months. I suppose that’s okay. When the muse calls, you answer, no matter what the calendar says!