Browsed by
Tag: tabletop games

Photograph of a completed boardgame, "Mega Empires," portraying the alternate-historical evolution of civilizations in Europe and the Near East through the early Iron Age.
Planning for July 2026

Planning for July 2026

Comments 0 Comment

June was a month of ups and downs. I did accomplish quite a bit last month, although I struggled a bit at the very end of my academic year, and not all of the planned projects got completed. So, on to July . . .

University Studies

I stumbled right at the finish line for my courses in 2025-2026. The final exam for my mathematics course was 100% of the grade for the course overall, and I simply ran out of time on it, so the highest possible score I could have earned was a 90%. Annoying, given that I didn’t score lower than a 95% on any assignment throughout the course – if any of those assignments counted toward my final grade, I would be pretty confident of the result, but they didn’t. So this may be the first course I fail to pass “with distinction.” Which isn’t a disaster – it’s not like I’ve failed the course entirely, and missing a “with distinction” on one course won’t prevent me from starting on my graduate work when that comes around. Still, it’s annoying that I may have that blot on my transcript.

At any rate, I’m done for the next two months, until I start looking at my courses for the 2026-2027 academic year in early September.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I actually didn’t get much done on my current story, “The Country of Silence,” in June. At present I’m three chapters in, out of what will probably be five or six chapters. At least the exercise gave me the opportunity to (attempt to) read William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and then actually read James Stoddard’s epitome of the novel. I should be able to finish my story in early July, and then get started on the next story in the series.

The objective for July is to finish and post “The Country of Silence.”

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

I spent a big chunk of June researching improvements to the Architect of Worlds design sequence, mostly having to do with flare stars, atmospheric retention, and atmospheric greenhouse effect. At the moment I’ve got about 5,000 words of notional “second edition” material, which has already been applied to one of the worlds in the Ten Worlds setting of Ad Astra Games. In July I’m going to pivot back to working on the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures.

The objectives for July are:

  • Finish version 0.5 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of the book, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

Portion of the game map at the end of an 18player game of "Mega Empires," displaying the situation among the civilizations around the Indian Ocean.

Many hours in June were spent on an alternate-history-generating experiment for my Great Lands Iron Age fantasy setting. Specifically, I used the tabletop game Mega Empires to build a potential back story for the setting. This was a big project, requiring me to set up the game and play 18 (!) positions against one another, taking notes the whole time.

(In case you’re not familiar with tabletop games lore, Mega Empires is the current edition of the classic Avalon Hill game Civilization, with decades of polishing and a much-expanded map. In fact, the publisher is currently working on even further expansions of the game as far as China and Japan, which could theoretically permit up to 30 (!!) players to participate at once. That would be far too much for my available space, so I’m content with the alternate history I was able to sketch out with the existing pieces of the mega-game.)

I’m actually quite pleased with how this project turned out, giving me material for the Great Lands back story that I’ll probably spend weeks or months analyzing and fleshing out.

As before, the next step remains construction of a revised “historical atlas” for the setting, which I can make available both on my Kofi page and on World Anvil.

Now that I’m finished with the “Great Lands” setting, I have another tabletop experiment I want to roll out, in support of my space-operatic Human Destiny universe. More about that in the coming months.

Four Pioneers

Four Pioneers

Comments 0 Comment

Mongoose Publishing is in the process of producing a new Traveller-derived RPG, called Pioneer, set in the near future and centered around a New Space Age in which player characters (called “Pioneers”) are engaged in the development and colonization of space. Written by Sandy Antunes, it’s very much on the “hard science fiction” end of the spectrum.

For those of us who backed the project, a pre-release draft of the Pioneer core book was made available a few days ago, and I’ve been poring through that ever since.

First impressions: this looks like it’s going to be a very neat game, and I’m looking forward to making use of the finished product. I might be developing some Pioneer adventures for future convention visits!

On the other hand, it really needs a copy-editing pass before final release, and I suspect it’s going to be a tough game to referee unless you’re already comfortable with some space science. The core book tries to present both an engaging RPG and a primer on space science and engineering, and it may be falling between two stools in the process. On the other hand, the final release is apparently going to include two full campaign books, so that might help get potential referees over that hump. We’ll have to see how it turns out.

In the meantime, I spent some time today putting the Pioneer character generation sequence through its paces, and I ended up with a team of four ready-to-play Pioneers. These are loosely inspired by my own “Human Destiny” universe, although I don’t plan on taking these specific versions of the characters as canon.

Dr. John “Jack” Carter

Age 38 (born 1992) – current residence Baltimore, Maryland, USA
STR 8 (+0), DEX 9 (+1), END 9 (+1), INT 13 (+2), EDU 13 (+2), SOC 8 (+0)
Skills: Athletics-0, Charm-0, Computers-2, Engineer-0, Explosives-0, Heavy Machinery-0, Investigate-1, Language-1 (Spanish), Media-1, Medic-0, Navigation-1, Perception-1, Persuade-1, Science-4 (Life), Space Suit-1, Survival-1, Zero-G-1
Social Assets: Rival x2
Benefits: 540 Influence, Lab

Jack Carter graduated from the University of Tennessee in 2014, and earned his PhD in biology from Oxford University in 2018. He has earned widespread renown and multiple awards for excellence in the sciences, and is recognized as a world-class expert in life support technology and the adaptation of biological organisms to long-term space travel.

Dr. Carter currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and also does commercial research for several space-industry firms. He is a close personal friend of Nathan Walker and is a likely candidate for Walker’s growing space ventures.

Besides, with a name like that, he’s doomed to be selected for an eventual Mars expedition . . .

Major Melissa Chen, USAF (retired)

Age 34 (born 1996) – current residence Houston, Texas, USA
STR 5 (-1), DEX 9 (+1), END 6 (+0), INT 10 (+1), EDU 11 (+1), SOC 6 (+0)
Skills: Charm-0, Combat-2, Computers-2, Electronics-2, Heavy Machinery-0, Language-1 (Mandarin), Leadership-1, Navigation-1, Orbital Mechanics-1, Perception-0, Pilot-1, Profession-0, Remote Operation-1, Science-1 (Planetary), Space Suit-1, Survival-1, Zero-G-1
Social Assets: None
Benefits: 80 Influence, Secret Clearance, Advanced Tech

Melissa Chen attended the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs, where she earned recognition for both academic and leadership excellence. Despite facing systemic prejudice for being a woman, and a second-generation immigrant whose parents came from a rival nation, she had an outstanding military career which ended in a nomination for astronaut training. She recently retired from the service in order to pursue long-time ambitions in space.

Ms. Chen has been married to Robert Mitchell since 2020.

Robert Mitchell

Age 42 (born 1988) – current residence Houston, Texas, USA
STR 7 (+0), DEX 9 (+1), END 8 (+0), INT 12 (+2), EDU 7 (+0), SOC 3 (-1)
Skills: Admin-1, Advocate-1, Athletics-1, Charm-2, Computers-1, Deception-0, Electronics-3, Engineer-2 (Electrical), Language-1 (Mandarin), Leadership-2, Mechanic-1, Pilot-1, Profession-1 (Roughneck), Streetwise-2
Social Assets: Ally, Contact x2
Benefits: 120 Influence, Plane

Robert Mitchell was born to a very poor family, and never had the opportunity to gain much formal education. However, he has spent his life working twice as hard as anyone around him, and educating himself with every available resource. The result has been a successful career as a networking specialist, working his way up from freelance contractor, to team leader, to head of engineering for medium-to-large firms. Much of his work has been adjacent to the growing space industry, where he has many contacts and potential allies now that he is consciously aiming for a role as a Pioneer.

Mr. Mitchell has, among other things, taught himself to be a skilled backpacker and small-aircraft pilot. His occasional vlogs about his expeditions into deep wilderness have made him a minor social-media celebrity.

Mr. Mitchell has been married to Melissa Chen since 2020.

Nathan Walker

Age 30 (born 2000) – current residence Palo Alto, California, USA
STR 6 (+0), DEX 8 (+0), END 6 (+0), INT 9 (+1), EDU 10 (+1), SOC 12 (+2)
Skills: Admin-1, Advocate-2, Charm-1, Computers-2, Deception-0, Electronics-1, Explosives-0, Jack-of-all-Trades-1, Language-1 (Russian), Media-2, Orbital Mechanics-1, Survival-1
Social Assets: Ally, Enemy
Benefits: 200 Influence, Board Position

Nathan Walker has two very important assets: he was born into a lot of money, and he has an immense talent for loudly claiming credit for successful ventures (while moving silently away from unsuccessful ones). Space is his latest hobby, and he has enormous ambitions for his new startup venture (Ares Enterprises). He hasn’t quite reached the position of being able to carry out his own launches and missions, but his money and his media presence have gotten his foot in the door with both national and commercial space ventures.

Mr. Walker and Dr. Carter are close friends. Mr. Walker is also acquainted with Ms. Chen, who led the rescue mission when one of his highly publicized adventures went badly in 2024.

Status Report (17 May 2025)

Status Report (17 May 2025)

Comments 1 comment

This is the first update to my writing blog in over two months, and I’ve got a lot to discuss.

Where I’ve Been

My absence over the past few months can be tied back to the results of last year’s elections here in the United States. I have plenty more to say about that, you may be sure, but not in this space – this blog is solely for my creative work and isn’t intended as a current-events commentary. Still, the immediate impact of those elections on my personal and professional life was profound. I was, after all, employed by the US federal government at the time.

Suffice it to day that late in January, my wife and I looked at our finances, and realized that it would in fact be feasible for me to retire now, rather than three or four years from now as was my original plan. Watching what was already happening elsewhere in the federal government, what was already happening in my own piece of it, we decided that was the best move to make. I put in for retirement, and as of today (17 May 2025) that’s in effect.

However, that meant I had less than four months to finish one last really big project for my office. This at a time when almost daily, major changes were being imposed on my workplace that made actually doing that work more and more difficult.

I managed to get it done – that final project was completed two days before my retirement – but at the cost of almost all my creative production from about the end of February. After taking care of my other commitments, I just didn’t have the time or the emotional resources to focus on creative work at the end of each day.

So that’s why I haven’t updated this blog, or my Kofi page, or most of my other online presence, since early March.

Fortunately, that dry spell is over. I’m now retired, and I have no plan to look for a new full-time job anytime soon. Which means I now have the time – and, once I’ve adjusted to the new state of affairs, the energy – to get busy with my own projects once again.

In short: I’m back.

Creative Projects

So, in which creative projects do I intend to start investing some of my newly available time?

Architect of Worlds

At the moment I’m mostly in maintenance mode for Architect of Worlds. I’ve started collecting some notes for an eventual second edition of the book, but it may be a few years before I feel prepared to seriously start work on that. In the meantime, Ken Burnside and I keep collecting errata and releasing new minor updates to the book.

Ken and I also need to have a discussion about possible automation for the design sequences in the book. In particular, whether we want to work with someone to produce software that can be sold, or whether we want to take a different approach. That discussion is months overdue, and there are people who have done great work producing candidate software that have been in limbo because I just haven’t had the time to give the matter my full attention. Time to get that figured out.

Meanwhile, I think I have enough material to start producing at least one or two blog posts a month on new research or extra “rules” for Architect of Worlds. Special cases, new design sequences for additional detail, worked examples, all of those are possible.

The “Human Destiny” Universe

The Human Destiny setting is my primary space-opera universe under development.

Before my hiatus, I was working on using Architect of Worlds to produce short write-ups for specific star systems in the Human Destiny universe, and publishing those via my Kofi page. I’d like to get started with that once more, and hopefully get up to producing at least one new writeup per month. All this material will eventually go into an “atlas of human space” that might be published as a complete book.

I also want to get back to serious design work on the Human Destiny tabletop RPG, using some game system that has a third-party-creator-friendly licensing scheme. Most likely candidates are Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying engine, and the Modiphius 2d20 engine.

Finally, I have three or four new pieces of fiction in this setting at various stages of development. Plus a couple of previously published works that I’m considering taking down, re-working, and republishing on a more creator-friendly platform. (Self-publishing on Amazon certainly makes money for Amazon, but the available evidence suggests it doesn’t do much for most authors.) Those stories are likely to appear as I find my hindbrain has finished processing them.

Writing Fan-Fiction

The one creative outlet I did manage to pursue over the past few months has been writing some fan-fiction, specifically Star Trek: Lower Decks fan-fiction. That’s been so much fun (not to mention useful therapy for stressful times) that I’m likely to continue with it. The stories I’ve written thus far are all available on Archive of Our Own: Lower Decks Continues.

The portion of my subconscious mind that I call “my muse” also handed me another insanely ambitious fan-fiction idea recently: write a sequel to the classic Arthur C. Clarke novel The City and the Stars. As often happens, I keep telling my muse to drop the idea, and she keeps ignoring me and handing me concept after concept in support of it. I suspect I’m going to have to write the thing just to get her to shut up about it.

Other Projects

There’s also my Fourth Millennium historical-fantasy setting, which got a fair amount of my attention last year and will probably rise back to the top of the queue at some point.

One project that’s long overdue: over the past couple of years, I’ve purchased several tabletop games that I’ve just never had time to bring to the table. Now that most of my days are going to have plenty of free hours, that’s going on the agenda. Some of those titles are nicely evocative and thematic, and they may well suggest some ideas for stories. I won’t know until I’ve tried them out . . .

Finally, I’m still working on a second undergraduate degree, and eventually a master’s degree, from the Open University. That’s going to continue, and in fact over the next 2-3 weeks it will take up a significant chunk of time – final assignments and exams are coming up. By next fall I’ll likely be enrolled in a couple of new courses. Still, with my day job no longer a factor, I expect I’ll be able to be a better student and still get a lot more creative work done.

Current Status

So there it is – I’m on the cusp of a major realignment in my time and creative work. I plan to spend what’s left of May just adjusting to my new status, working on my university courses, and starting to build some new habits. You may see some new work from me before the first of June, but I’m not prepared to make any promises.

About the beginning of June, though, you can expect to see the monthly planning message resume, and I’ll hopefully be producing new items on a regular basis for the first time since early this year.

My thanks for everyone’s patience. Looking forward to the new adventure . . .

Planning for September 2024

Planning for September 2024

Comments 0 Comment

I spent most of August on the first tranche of writing and cartography for Fourth 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.

Fourth Millennium: Rough Draft Outline

Fourth Millennium: Rough Draft Outline

Comments 0 Comment

For general interest, here’s a first cut at an outline for the Fourth Millennium core book. This is going to be my working outline while I start writing sections of the rough draft. Naturally, this outline will be subject to change while I develop the project.

As a review: this is planned to be a Basic Roleplaying (BRP) sourcebook, relying on the BRP Universal Game Engine book under the ORC license. It will be the first of (possibly) several sourcebooks detailing the Fourth Millennium setting. Fourth Millennium is a universe centered on the Mediterranean region of Earth’s classical antiquity, but with an alternate history and fantastic elements built into the setting.

Fourth Millennium (Core Book)

  • Introduction
  • The True Kosmos
    • On the Shadow Kosmos
    • On the Reckoning of Years
    • How We Arrived Here
      • The Kretan Diaspora
      • The Athenian Hegemony
      • Alexandros the Great
      • Successors of Alexandros
    • Lands of the Hellenes
      • Kingdom of the Seleukids (Europe)
        • League of Korinth
        • Bosporan Kingdom
      • Kingdom of the Temenids (Asia)
        • Kingdom of Bithynia
        • Kingdom of Pontus
        • Kingdom of Galatia
      • Ptolemaic Kingdom (Egypt)
        • Kingdom of Judea
        • Kingdom of Nabataea
        • Matriarchy of Danassos
        • Republic of Karkhedon
        • Kingdom of Numidia
      • Republic of Rhodos
      • The Lost Kingdoms
    • The Great Rivals
      • Republic of Rome
      • Kingdom of the Parthians
      • Kingdom of Armenia
    • The Barbarian Peoples
      • Kelts
      • Thrakians
      • Sarmatians
      • Arabs
      • Nubians
      • Libyans
  • Adventurers
    • Getting Started
    • Procedure
    • Step 1: Homeland
    • Step 2: Family History
    • Step 3: Characteristics
    • Step 4: Base Skills
    • Step 5: Occupations
    • Step 6: Personal Skill Bonuses
    • Step 7: Wealth and Equipment
    • Step 8: Other Information
  • Game System
  • Skills
  • Combat
  • Passions, Traits, and Reputation
    • Passions
    • Traits
    • Areté
    • Reputation
    • A Hero for the Ages
  • How to Be a Hellene
    • Hellenes, Hellenists, and Barbarians
    • The Hellenic Personality
    • Speaking the Hellenic Language
    • Worshiping the Hellenic Gods
    • Participating in Hellenic Exercise and Sports
    • Appreciating Hellenic Literature and Theatre
    • Studying Hellenic Philosophy and Science
    • Fighting like a Hellene
    • Women in the Hellenic Kingdoms
  • The Working of Wonders
    • Humans and the Gods
      • Gods of the Hellenic World
      • Public Cults: Prayer and Sacrifice
      • Mystery Cults: Initiation and Enlightenment
      • Philosophical Schools: The Examined Life
      • Being a Priest or Priestess
      • Omens, Astrology, and Divination
      • God-Touched Men and Women
    • Spirits and the Spirit World
      • Spirits and Spirit Allies
      • Summoning and Binding Spirits
      • Catalog of Spirits
    • Mageia
      • High Mageia (Theurgy)
      • Low Mageia (Goetia)
      • Catalog of Spells
    • Powers of the Mind
      • Philosophical Schools
      • Being a Philosopher
      • Catalog of Thaúmata
  • Wealth and Equipment
    • Coinage
    • Standard of Living
    • Households and Retinues
    • Property and Investments
    • Goods and Services
  • Between Adventures
    • Experience
    • Training and Research
    • Increasing Characteristics
    • The Winter Phase
    • Passing the Torch
  • Bestiary
  • Library of Adventure Components
Planning for August 2024

Planning for August 2024

Comments 0 Comment

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.

A Hero for the John Carter of Mars RPG

A Hero for the John Carter of Mars RPG

Comments 0 Comment

As of today, I’m suddenly enjoying an outbreak of freedom. I’ve finished my work on university courses for this academic year, and all my major creative projects with deadlines are done too. I still have a pile of work to do for the office, but other than that I’m remarkably uncommitted for the next few months.

So this evening I decided to let my muse pester me a bit, and sat down to tinker with the John Carter of Mars RPG from Modiphius. What follows is a character who appeared unbidden in the back of my mind a few days ago. I’m still trying to decide what to do with him. Some Edgar Rice Burroughs fan-fiction? Probably not, but we’ll see if my muse will let me leave this Verginian on the shelf . . .

Marcus Verginius

Disciplined Earthborn Soldier

Marcus Verginius is a very old man, although he does not know how old he is, for he remembers no childhood and has not aged as other men do. His earliest memories are of a farm in the Latin hills, in the time of the last war against Carthage. Whether he was born there or simply remembers living there long ago, he cannot be certain.

For as long as he can remember, Marcus has been a soldier, serving in the legions of the Roman Republic in war after war. Most recently, he was primus pilus and then praefectus castrorum in Legio XXVII, one of the legions raised by C. Julius Caesar for his war against the Pompeian faction. After Caesar left Egypt, the legion remained behind to support the rule of Rome’s ally, Queen Cleopatra VII.

A few months later, while leading a punitive expedition against Egyptian brigands, Marcus vanished and was never seen again (at least on Earth). Instead, after a bizarre adventure, Marcus found himself naked and alone on a strange world: on Barsoom, over 1900 Earth-years before the arrival of John Carter.

Attributes

  • Daring: 7
  • Cunning: 4
  • Empathy: 3
  • Might: 8
  • Passion: 6
  • Reason: 6

Stress Trackers

  • Confusion: 6
  • Fear: 7
  • Injury: 8

Talents

Battle Valor (Grade 1)

You are a true warrior and steadfast soldier, at home in the chaos and carnage of war and always willing to meet your fate with sword and pistol in hand.

  • Circumstance: When suffering Fear damage in combat.
  • Effect: You may ignore the first 2 points of stress inflicted to your Fear stress track taken during combat. You suffer Fear damage normally after this during a combat scene or from other situations.

Break the Line (Grade 2)

Your skill with a sword is such that no lesser foe can hope to stand against you. In past battles, you have often been the first to break through an enemy’s line or shield-wall.

  • Circumstance: When wielding a sword.
  • Effect: You automatically defeat 2 minions as part of your action. You may spend additional Momentum to defeat more at the cost of 1 Momentum per additional minion.

Earthborn Strength (Grade 3)

You are tenacious and your Earthborn strength and years of experience give you a substantial edge in battle.

  • Circumstance: In melee combat.
  • Effect: You can always use Might for melee attack and defense and you do an additional 1 die of damage with melee attacks.

Leaps and Bounds (Grade 2)

Your Earthborn muscles allow you to leap great distances and perform great feats of strength while on Barsoom.

  • Circumstance: When moving on Barsoom and planets with similar gravity.
  • Effect: You may close one range category automatically, ignoring any obstacles or intervening terrain as long as you have clearance and space to leap between your starting point and destination. You may spend 1 Momentum to move an additional range category.

Logical Orator (Grade 2)

You have the benefits of a top-notch Greek education, and are accomplished at using both reason and rhetoric to convince others.

  • Circumstance: When attempting to persuade or convince an audience.
  • Effect: You can always use Reason to aid in a persuasive attempt. In addition, you can roll 1 bonus d20 on the test.

Flaw

Code of Honor

You lose 3 Momentum if you break your word, refuse to defend the innocent form harm, or otherwise act dishonorably.

Renown and Accolades

Renown: 0

A Choice of Game Mechanics

A Choice of Game Mechanics

Comments 3 comments

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 . . .

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

Comments 3 comments
“Battle of Pydna 168 BCE,” by Peter Connolly

While I continue to make incremental progress on Architect of Worlds and Twice-Crowned, I also keep thinking about what’s likely to be my next big tabletop RPG project, beginning later this year. That’s a full-fledged historical-fantasy game, probably published under the Cypher System, with the working title of Fourth Millennium.

The premise is that this is the ancient Western world, centered around the Mediterranean basin, but it’s not exactly the world we see in our history books. There are fantastic elements: spirits that can be bargained with, gods who may or may not be kindly disposed toward mortals, magic that works more often than not, strange creatures that lurk in the wilderness beyond the borders of civilization. It’s also an alternate history, with several points of divergence: a survival of Minoan civilization, a Hellenic world that didn’t commit suicide in the fifth century BCE with quite so much short-sighted enthusiasm, an Alexandrian οἰκουμένη that managed to survive its founder’s death. The setting is divided between two incipient world-empires and a whole host of minor kingdoms and barbarian peoples, each with their own distinctive flavor.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the “canonical adventure” for the setting. My past experience with RPG design tells me that this is really important. Potential players and game-masters need to be clear as to what they can expect to do in a setting. Dungeons & Dragons centers around the dungeon crawl. Traveller centers around doing odd jobs to survive on the fringes of interstellar society. Transhuman Space, when we first developed it, was a lovely rich setting that didn’t have a clear answer for “what do the characters do?” and that handicapped it for a long time.

So what will player characters in Fourth Millennium be doing? I think that boils down to the motto for the setting – something that may end up being the core book’s subtitle:

The future is in your hands.

The idea is that player characters will be thoroughly involved in history as it unfolds in this alternative world. They’ll start out as agents for powerful people – an ambitious Roman senator, a powerful post-Minoan priestess-queen, a provincial governor in the Alexandrian empire, that sort of setup. At first they’ll be carrying out missions for their patron – accumulating rewards of wealth and treasure, sure, but also gathering social standing and authority. Eventually they’ll become more independent, becoming movers and shakers in their own right. They’ll feel as if they’re making a mark on the future of the world – although, to be sure, Fate and the gods will have their own say.

So yeah, fighting monsters, but more often human foes: cutpurses and assassins, pirates, brigands, barbarian raiders. Exploring the uncivilized wilderness, traveling in strange foreign lands. Solving mysteries, making scientific discoveries, writing books that everyone wants to read. Making brilliant speeches, intriguing to discredit or eliminate political rivals, persuading people to vote one way or another. Making a fortune in trade or loot, or just collecting the revenue from big land-holdings. Fighting in wars, even commanding armies. Winning elections, holding political office, governing whole provinces. Eventually reaching the top of the social pyramid in whatever republic, kingdom, or empire you call your own. The end-point of a successful long-term campaign might be to gather such fame and glory that people will still be talking about you at the end of the Fourth Millennium.

One major inspiration here might be games like Pendragon or Paladin – games that aren’t just richly imagined settings, but structured campaigns that encourage play across years and even generations.

I know, I know. Ambitious as all hell, especially for a one-person development shop. Well, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. And you never know, maybe the Muses are thinking kindly of me.

Fourth Millennium

Fourth Millennium

Comments 0 Comment
Alexandros III of Makedon, called “The Great,” first Great King of the Argead dynasty (2702-2735 EK) (Image by Arienne King, original found here)

By the reckoning of years used in the Danassan Hegemony, the date is 3000 Ἔτος Κόσμου, the three thousandth year since the creation of the world. A new millennium is at hand, an age of prosperous cities and growing empires, new gods and ancient mysteries, science and darkest magic. It seems likely to be an age of conflict as well. Ambitious generals and kings struggle for power, and barbarian peoples look with envy on the wealth and sophistication of civilized lands. What history will reveal next, not even the gods can know for sure.

Fourth Millennium has been conceived as a game setting, derived from some of my own fiction: short stories set in the Greek “Heroic Age” as well as the novel-in-progress Twice-Crowned and its eventual sequels. It’s grown past its literary beginnings, though, taking on shape as a rich alternate-historical fantasy world.

Fourth Millennium echoes the Mediterranean world of our own history, in the first century before the Common Era . . . but fate has taken its own turns here. An offshoot of Minoan civilization survived, creating a neo-Hellenic culture in which women hold religious and political power. The Peloponnesian War may have taken place, but its outcome was less viciously harmful to the Hellenic civilization at its peak. Alexander the Great may have died young, but his son survived and came out on top of the civil wars that followed his death. The Roman Republic is on the rise, but it faces tough competition in the East, in the form of an Hellenistic world that is stronger and more unified.

Adventurers can come from a variety of origins: Greeks of several varieties, Romans and other Latins, Celts, Germans, Berbers, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Judeans, Persians, and many more. They may be warriors and soldiers, oracles and seers, legates and senators, or philosophers and scientists. There will be a variety of possible campaign structures: military stories, politics and intrigue, high-stakes commercial ventures, mysteries, exploration, possibly all of these at once.

The concept in my head is for a Cypher System game, published under the Monte Cook Games open license. I can already see the broad outlines of the game, and a lot of details that will fit the setting. I’m still debating whether to write one book or two here – there may be so much setting detail, so much to suggest a variety of structures for campaigns and adventures, that it won’t all fit in one volume.

Best guess is that I’ll be pulling together notes for Fourth Millennium while I work on getting Architect of Worlds out the door in the first half of this year. I might post a few fragments and notes here, or push them to my patrons as small freebies. Once Architect is finished, assuming my muse is still engaged by then, serious work on this project is likely to get under way.

Have to say, the more I think about this project the more excited I am for it. The ancient Mediterranean world has been a personal fascination for over half my life; it will be nice to get back to it as a game designer. Not to mention I’ve learned a lot since I wrote GURPS Greece, coming up on thirty years ago . . .