Status Report (23 April 2024)

April 23, 2024 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Looking forward to the next few days, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, so I’m in the midst of some rather aggressive prioritizing.

Since September, I’ve been involved with a big course-development project at the office, one which has been shattering every barrier that would normally allow me to avoid office work in the evenings and over weekends. This is the biggest course-development project I’ve ever been involved with – one which I would normally have said required 18-24 months of research and development before starting the pilot offering – and we’re having to pull it together in a fraction of that time. So that’s item #1.

Item #2 is the university courses I signed up for last summer, on the assumption that my established work-life balance was going to hold and I would have plenty of time to study . . . yeah, that hasn’t turned out as expected. My last set of exams came back with lower marks than I was willing to accept. I have two exams due at the end of April, and finals due at the end of May, and I am feeling a wee bit under-prepared.

Item #3 is Architect of Worlds, for which (good news!) I now have final edits in hand from Ken Burnside. Unfortunately, that means (bad news!) I need to get those final edits implemented and a release draft back to Ken ASAP so we can finally get the book out the door, right when #1 and #2 above are already demanding a big chunk of my energy.

None of this rises to the level of existential crisis, but I need to prioritize and manage my time a lot more aggressively than usual for the next couple of weeks.

This afternoon, I pulled together an interim draft of the Human Destiny setting bible and RPG sourcebook, and sent that to my patrons as a free update. I now expect to set that project aside for at least the next 10-14 days while I knock out other tasks.

I’ve got a commitment to appear on a Traveller podcast on 1 May, but aside from that I think I’m going to be limiting my social media time for about that long too. Don’t expect any posts here and only minimal noise on Facebook, and my May planning message may be later than usual as a result.

Hopefully by about 8 May I’ll be in much better shape, and I’ll have some good news to report, especially about Architect of Worlds.

A Choice of Game Mechanics

October 28, 2023 Sharrukin 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 . . .

Echoes

July 1, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

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.

A Prized Possession

June 28, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

While doing some post-flood cleaning and packing in the basement today, I came across a neat item: the one and only exchange of correspondence I ever had with Poul Anderson.

I generally do not engage in fanac. I don’t go to many conventions and I don’t pester my favored authors with my presence. I can count on one hand the number of times a well-known creative has ever been prevailed upon to give me even a moment’s attention. This was an exception, and all the more valuable to me as such.

Back in the late 1990s, I had a contract to write GURPS Traveller: First In, the sourcebook for the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service. A big chunk of that book was going to consist of my update to the old Traveller Book 6 world-building rules – the first (but not the last) attempt I ever made to design plausible new world-building systems for a game.

A lot of my inspiration for world-building had always come from Poul Anderson. He was always famous as one of the SF authors who took the time to make his planetary environments exotic but also scientifically plausible. Read, well, just about any of his Technic History stories if you don’t believe me. I would honestly have put him on a par with Hal Clement in that field.

So when I got to write this book, I asked to do something unusual: I wanted to make a small dedication on the title page. GURPS books generally have never had dedications, but in this case I was allowed to make an exception, so long as Mr. Anderson was cool with it.

So I wrote him a concise, polite letter (yes, a letter, this was back in the 1990s after all) explaining the project and asking for his permission. In due course, back came the self-addressed, stamped envelope with his even more concise and gracious agreement. So the book got its dedication.

At the time, Mr. Anderson was getting along in years, and he passed away a year or so after the book came out. I’m told, however, that a GURPS Traveller fan out in California reached him with a copy of the book at one of his last convention appearances. He got a lengthy opportunity to see the dedication and leaf through the book. The phrase “like a kid in a candy store” was included in the after-action report that got back to me.

We never know just how we might manage to touch people with our work.

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

February 8, 2023 Sharrukin 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.

The OGL and the Palace

January 8, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

There’s been a serious mess evolving in the indie-creator space over the fate of Wizards of the Coast’s Open Gaming License (OGL). It appears, due to leaked language from the upcoming new version of the license, that not only is it going to be more restrictive in the future, there’s a good chance that older versions of it are going to be revoked or de-authorized in some fashion. This has a lot of independent publishers and creators in a bind. The OGL is over twenty years old at this point, and a lot of publishers, a lot of livelihoods, have been founded upon it.

I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had anything published specifically under the OGL, and my plans moving forward are only minimally affected by any changes to that license. So I’m not going to offer any opinion about the potential change, other than to hope that my fellow indie creators can weather the storm. This post is just a note about where I think my own work may be affected by what’s about to happen.

First off, Architect of Worlds will be completely unaffected. That book is game-system-independent to begin with, and doesn’t rely on anything but my personal research and game-design work. I don’t expect any change in when that book gets released – later this year, exactly when depending on how long it takes me to to edit and lay out the final version.

One of my long-term projects probably will be affected by what Wizards is doing, if only indirectly. The Human Destiny space-opera setting was tentatively going to be my next big tabletop project after Architect was released. My plan was to release it as a Cepheus Engine product . . . but the problem is that Cepheus Engine relies on the previous version of the OGL and derives from the Mongoose Press edition of Traveller. If that version of the OGL goes away, the status of Cepheus Engine becomes uncertain even if Mongoose takes no hostile action against it.

As I understand it, the major Cepheus Engine publishers (Samardan Press, Independence Games, and so on) are already aware of the potential issue and are rapidly developing contingency plans. By the time I’m ready to start working on something other than Architect, the dust may very well have settled and there will be a way-forward for Human Destiny as a Cepheus Engine product as planned. I’m not going to fret about it, since there’s nothing I can do except wait patiently for the outcome.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking hard about releasing another tabletop setting – based on my Danassos setting, with the working title of Fourth Millennium – as a Cypher System product under the open license offered by Monte Cook Games. If worse comes to worst, that may move to the front of my queue, or I may consider moving Human Destiny to that venue as well.

For now, though, I’m just watching developments and putting off making any decisions until I see how things shake out. It’s important to remember that no one has actually seen the new version of the OGL yet. This may be a tempest in a teapot . . . although given a lifetime’s experience with how corporate entities deal with stakeholders who don’t actually own shares of stock, I’m not sanguine.

2022 in Review

January 2, 2023 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

For all the chaos out in the world at large, 2022 was a decent year for me as a part-time creative and blogger. Traffic to this blog continues steady, although there wasn’t quite as much as during the previous year. I still have a couple dozen patrons who are supporting my work.

I also managed several major accomplishments this year. In particular, I finished writing the first full draft of Architect of Worlds in 2022 – not bad for a project I’ve been working on for over six years at this point. There’s a near-certain chance I’ll have that book ready for release sometime in 2023.

Meanwhile, I did some work on the Human Destiny setting, putting together early partial drafts of the core book and the Atlas of the Human Protectorate. These seem likely to be tabletop RPG releases at some point, most likely under the Cepheus Engine system. Once Architect of Worlds is released, this is likely to be a good candidate for more attention.

I also revived an old novel project, Twice-Crowned, and got perhaps 40% of the first draft of that written. That’s another good candidate for more progress in the coming year, especially since its alternate-historical fantasy setting has been growing on me at a rapid pace. I may start writing that up as another tabletop RPG setting in the coming year, most likely as a Cypher System RPG under Monte Cook Games’ creator program.

Meanwhile, I got a round dozen book reviews done. I seem to be a success at that – I’ve been able to push out a review every month like clockwork for a couple of years now, and those reviews seem to be bringing at least a little attention to my other work too.

One thing I didn’t do much of this year is short fiction. I did push a couple of short items to this site as free stories, but those were mostly old writing being given a new venue. I’ve got several concepts for new short fiction that I want to work on soon, if I can get Architect moving toward release.

The top ten posts for 2022 turn out to be:

Interesting that most of the high-traffic posts all had to do with Architect, although I’m not overly surprised at that. A couple of my book reviews, a couple of status reports, and a side project (the Space: 2049 setting that I’m playing with). Fairly typical.

My objectives for the coming year should be pretty straightforward. I want to get Architect ready for release, and that currently involves teaching myself Adobe InDesign and some basic book-design principles. I want to make progress with at least one novel-length project, and maybe write a few pieces of shorter fiction. And once some of that is well in hand, I may start looking at publishing one of my settings as a tabletop RPG book. Plenty to keep me busy, that’s for sure.

Human Destiny: Technology Levels

May 22, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Here’s a small sample of material for the Human Destiny setting and game book that’s slowly taking shape. In the Cepheus Engine and related tabletop games, there’s often a system of “technology levels” that helps characterize what kind of gear and weapons one might expect to find on a given world. The concept has its problems, but it’s a quick shorthand that’s useful for game purposes. Since Human Destiny is eventually going to be published as a Cepheus Engine game, it seems useful to put together a set of “tech level” tables for the setting.

Here’s a first very rough draft for that section of the Human Destiny sourcebook.

Technology Levels in the Human Destiny Setting

The Khedai Hegemony maintains a sophisticated scheme for classifying the technological and social progress of emerging civilizations. The following system of “tech levels” is a (vastly simplified) shorthand for the Hegemony’s scheme.

General Technology

As is the standard in any Cepheus Engine game, Technology Level or Tech Level is a measure of the social, scientific, and industrial progress of a given world or society. In Hegemony documents, each TL has an evocative descriptor, and can be associated with an approximate era in human history.

TL	Descriptor	Approximate Date or Typical World
0	Era of Stone Tools	Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic society
1	Era of Metal Tools	3000 BCE
2	Era of Exploration	1500 CE
3	Era of Mechanization	1750 CE
4	Era of Electricity	1900 CE
5	Era of Radio	1930 CE
6	Era of Atomic Power	1950 CE
7	Era of Space Exploration	1970 CE
8	Era of Information	1990 CE
9	Era of Crisis	2020 CE
10 (A)	Low Interstellar Society	Minor human colony world or outpost
11 (B)	Low Interstellar Society	Major human colony world or outpost
12 (C)	Average Interstellar Society	Maximum level for the Human Protectorate
13 (D)	Average Interstellar Society	Maximum level for a second-tier client society
14 (E)	High Interstellar Society	Maximum level for a first-tier client society
15 (F)	High Interstellar Society	Maximum level for the Khedai Hegemony as a whole

It may not be immediately obvious, but the Hegemony’s scheme for classifying technological progress includes two singularities, each of which creates a discontinuity in the above table.

The normal pattern for any newly evolving technological civilization is to progress from TL 0, passing through the higher levels in order, finally reaching some maximum level of social and technological progress. At this point the civilization invariably suffers an existential crisis that, at a minimum, forces all its component societies back to some lower TL. This may happen multiple times before the sapient species in question is finally driven into extinction. The highest point of independent development is almost never higher than TL 9. In fact, civilizations that reach TL 9 on their own almost always suffer particularly deadly collapses, likely to cause immediate species extinction – hence the term “Era of Crisis.”

The transition from TL 9 to TL A represents the first discontinuity or singularity in the scheme. Very few civilizations manage to pass the Era of Crisis on their own. Almost all societies that survive the transition and attain interstellar status do so only because an older civilization intervenes, as the Khedai Hegemony did with humanity.

Under the Praxis observed by the Khedai Hegemony, newly discovered sapient societies at TL 0-3 are observed from a distance under a strict non-interference policy. Societies at TL 4-9 are subject to close observation, and possibly annexation if (as in almost all cases) they appear unlikely to survive on their own.

The interstellar levels that follow (TL A through TL F) do not represent a hierarchy of new technologies that appear one after the other in a progressive fashion. Instead, they represent an array of mature technologies, all millions of years old, which are all available throughout the Hegemony. The TL of a world which falls in this range represents the kind of technology that is widely available on that world, because it is locally manufactured and can be supported by existing infrastructure. Items from a higher TL will also be available, but possibly at a higher cost in social credit, or with specific limitations under the Praxis.

Humans know nothing about any technologies above TL F. Humans may speculate, and the khedai doubtless know what technologies might be possible, but under the Praxis such possibilities are cloaked in silence. A few humans suspect that this silence conceals a second discontinuity or singularity, beyond which even the Hegemony dares not go.

Energy Technologies

The Hegemony’s scheme for classifying technologies is most strongly determined by a society’s ability to harness and direct energy to carry out the work of civilization.

TL	Typical Developments
0	Muscle power Domesticated animals Slave labor
1	Hydromechanical power Water wheels
2	Wind power Windmills
3	Steam power Exploitation of fossil fuels (coal) Crude electrical transmission and storage
4	Widespread use of electrical power Exploitation of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas) Oil refining to produce high-quality fuels Hydroelectric power
5	Rural electrification Urban power grids
6	Nuclear fission reactors Regional power grids
7	Increasing use of solar power Continental power grids
8	Mass application of renewable energy
9	Crude “smart grids” Possible abandonment of fossil fuels
10 (A)	Advanced “smart grids” Advanced fission power Superconducting power transmission Hyper-efficient power cells Solar power satellites Complete abandonment of fossil fuels
11 (B)	Nuclear fusion reactors
12 (C)	Advanced fusion power
13 (D)	Antimatter generation and transport
14 (E)	Advanced antimatter power Portable fusion power Catalyzed fusion
15 (F)	Miniaturized fusion power

Communications and Information

This category covers technologies for generating, transmitting, storing, and applying information. It also includes various forms of artificial intelligence and artificial sapience.

TL	Typical Developments
0	Oral communication
1	Written communication Printing press (block printing) Crude cryptography
2	Printing press (movable type) Advanced cryptography (manual)
3	Telegraph Early telephones
4	Teletype Widespread telephone networks Advanced cryptography (electromechanical)
5	Radio broadcasting Massive special-purpose computing devices
6	Television broadcasting Massive general-purpose computing devices Information theory
7	Early packet-switched networks Personal computers Industrial automation Advanced cryptography (digital) Public-key cryptography
8	Global Internet Advanced personal computers Advanced ICS/SCADA systems Large-scale public-key infrastructures
9	Miniaturized personal computers Early natural-language interfaces Early automatic translation Sophisticated robots and drones “Cloud” computing Crude quantum computation
10 (A)	Advanced natural-language interfaces Advanced automatic translation Cybershells Ubiquitous computing Large-scale quantum computation
11 (B)	Sophisticated personal assistants Advanced expert systems Advanced cybershells Sophisticated personality emulation
12 (C)	Early Virtual Sapience systems Fully Turing-capable systems Undirected machine learning “City minds”
13 (D)	Advanced Virtual Sapience systems
14 (E)	Early Artificial Sapience systems Proof-of-consciousness systems “World minds”
15 (F)	Advanced Artificial Sapience systems Transapience threshold

Environmental

This category covers technologies that can alter or maintain planetary environments. It also covers common developments in environmental awareness – the process by which a civilization learns how its own activities can impact the environment upon which it relies for support.

TL	Typical Developments
0	Agriculture and pastoralism Early trade networks Forest clearing Overhunting Megafaunal extinction
1	Early cities Basic aqueducts and sanitation Advanced trade networks Continental empires
2	Global trade networks Transcontinental empires and colonization
3	Indoor plumbing Advanced sanitation Large-scale use of fossil fuels Large-scale habitat destruction begins
4	Super-cities (>1 million) Large-scale water treatment Sophontogenic climate change begins
5	Super-cities (>10 million)
6	Megalopolitan regions (>50 million) “Green Revolution” in agriculture Awareness of global harms from pollution
7	Megalopolitan regions (>100 million) Sophontogenic mass extinction begins Awareness of sophontogenic climate change
8	Gene-modified crop species Awareness of sophontogenic mass extinction
9	Crude geoengineering Civilizational collapse
10 (A)	Organic urban reserves Advanced geoengineering Climate and ecological remediation De-extinction
11 (B)	Domed cities Artificial species to fill ecological niches Type I (Mars) terraforming
12 (C)	Advanced climate and ecological remediation “Biome minds” monitor wild ecosystems
13 (D)	Type II (Venus, Mercury, Luna) terraforming
14 (E)	“World minds” monitor global ecosystems
15 (F)	Type III (extremal) terraforming

Medical

This category covers medical and biological technologies.

TL	Typical Developments
0	Herbal remedies Crude surgery and prosthetics
1	Diagnostic process Basic understanding of anatomy
2	Advanced understanding of anatomy Crude immunization techniques
3	Germ theory and bacteriology Epidemiology Antiseptic surgery Advanced anesthesia Crude psychiatry
4	Antibiotics X-rays and other internal imaging Public health measures Mass vaccination
5	Blood transfusions Discovery of transplant rejection
6	Eradication of some infectious diseases Discovery of the structure of DNA
7	Theories of molecular evolution Crude genetic engineering Advanced prosthetics
8	Crude gene therapies Simple genetically modified organisms Crude sense-replacement implants
9	Advanced sense-replacement implants Crude artificial organs
10 (A)	Advanced therapeutic gene modification Extensively engineered organisms Full-function artificial organs Advanced geriatrics Effective psychiatry
11 (B)	Artificial plant and animal species Simple pantropic engineering
12 (C)	Nanotech therapies Brain transplants Personality recording (cyber ghosts) Advanced pantropic engineering (germ-line)
13 (D)	Full-body prosthetics (“bioroid” bodies)
14 (E)	Biological immortality Full personality uploading (cyber immortality)
15 (F)	Cyber transcendence

Surface Transport

This category covers technologies for transport on or near a planetary surface.

TL	Typical Developments
0	Long-distance travel by foot Domestic animals (riding, beasts of burden)
1	Crude wheeled vehicles Rowed watercraft Early sailed watercraft
2	Advanced wheeled vehicles Blue-water sailing ships
3	Steam engines Railroads Steamships
4	Internal combustion engines Early automobiles Early aircraft
5	Widespread automobiles Local highway systems Jet aircraft Containerized shipping
6	Large nuclear-powered vehicles Continental highway systems Supersonic aircraft Global standards in containerization
7	Early maglev systems
8	High-speed maglev systems
9	Early “self-driving” vehicles
10 (A)	Early gravitic transport Advanced “self-driving” vehicles Regional and continental hyperloop
11 (B)	Advanced gravitic transport Transcontinental hyperloop
12 (C)	Beanstalk interface
13 (D)
14 (E)
15 (F)

Space Transport

This category covers technologies for transport and artificial stations in interplanetary or interstellar space.

TL	Typical Developments
0
1
2
3
4
5	Sounding rockets
6	Orbital rockets Early interplanetary probes
7	Manned spacecraft Advanced interplanetary probes
8	Reusable shuttles Large-scale interface transport Space telescopes Small orbital stations (constant resupply)
9	Crude interstellar probes Manned interplanetary outposts Moderate orbital stations (constant resupply)
10 (A)	Early gravitic (reactionless) drives Artificial gravity Interplanetary colonization Large and self-sufficient orbital stations Planetoid habitats
11 (B)	Advanced gravitic drives “Space cities”
12 (C)	Slow FTL (Alcubierre) drives Interstellar colonization
13 (D)	Medium FTL drives Planetary “ring cities”
14 (E)	Fast FTL drives
15 (F)	Starbridge (wormhole) construction

Heavy Weaponry

This category covers weapon technologies for large-scale military use, as well as military applications of some other technological categories.

TL	Typical Developments
0
1	Battering ram Torsion-powered war engines War chariot War galley
2	Bombards Bronze and iron cannon Crude rocket artillery Blue-water warships
3	Artillery Rocket artillery Heavy machine guns Steam-powered warships Reconnaissance balloons
4	Crude chemical and biological weapons Crude military aircraft
5	Atomic weapons Long-range ballistic missiles Advanced chemical and biological weapons Advanced military aircraft
6	Thermonuclear weapons Transcontinental-range ballistic missiles Nuclear-powered warships
7
8	Early applications of cyberwarfare
9	Full integration of cyber into kinetic warfare Extensive use of drones and unmanned vehicles Heavy mass-driver weapons and railguns
10 (A)	Advanced cyberwarfare Nanotech weapons (“devourer clouds”) Advanced mass-driver weapons and railguns Heavy laser cannon
11 (B)	Gravitic artillery Plasma cannon Neural suppression field (“stunner”) weapons
12 (C)	Fine-scale remote stunners Nuclear fission suppression systems
13 (D)	Fusion-temperature plasma cannon X-ray laser cannon
14 (E)
15 (F)	Gamma-ray laser cannon

Personal Weaponry

This category covers weapon technologies for individual use.

TL	Typical Developments
0	Clubs and cudgels Stone-tipped spears Bow and arrow Hide and leather armor
1	Bronze and iron swords Metal spearheads and arrowheads Longbow, composite bow, and crossbow Bronze and iron armor Ring and scale mail
2	Matchlock and wheellock firearms
3	Flintlock firearms Rifled firearms Repeating firearms
4	Cartridge ammunition Light machine guns
5	Advanced rifled firearms
6	Submachine guns
7	Grenade launchers Advanced body armor (ballistic fabrics)
8	Crude “smart weapons”
9	Crude mass-driver or “gauss” weapons
10 (A)	Advanced gauss weapons
11 (B)	Gravitic weapons Personal laser weapons
12 (C)	Personal plasma weapons Personal stunner weapons
13 (D)
14 (E)	Personal fusion weapons Personal X-ray laser weapons
15 (F)

Human Destiny: The Careers List

January 11, 2022 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

Here’s another teaser for the Cepheus Engine hack I’m putting together, for the new version of the Human Destiny sourcebook. This is part of the character design rules – the draft list of available “careers” for characters to indulge in during the lifepath generation process.

Again, this list is kind of atypical for a Cepheus Engine game. A few of the careers here are somewhat analogous to the ones you’ll find in the classic space-opera RPG that the engine emulates. Others are not – again, Human Destiny stories are likely to be heavily social-interaction-oriented, in a context of post-scarcity economics and a strong interstellar state. That sets different parameters (and constraints) on the kind of “adventures” that are likely to happen.

Careers List

Activist – Individual who pursues a cause, agitating for social or political change.
Artist – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by producing and selling works of art or handicraft.
Athlete – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by taking part in one or more competitive sports.
Bureaucrat – Official in an organized bureaucracy, either under the Hegemony or in an éthnos, charged with following the details of administrative process.
Citizen – Individual who subsists almost entirely on the Citizen’s Allowance, and who spends most of their time on entertainment or socializing.
Colonist – Individual who has settled on a more-or-less Earthlike (or terraformed) world and works to support the human community there.
Counselor – Individual who provides psychological care or social services.
Dissident – Individual who has rejected Hegemony society, but still uses some technology and lives in a Free Zone.
Ecological Reclamation Service –Member of the Hegemony’s scientific corps, overseeing wilderness reserves to support and protect the natural ecology.
Entertainer – Individual who pursues celebrity status and supplements the Citizen’s Allowance by performing before an audience.
Feral – Individual who has escaped the Hegemony entirely, by rejecting all technology and living in the deep wilderness.
Guard Service – Member of the Hegemony’s paramilitary force, enforcing the Praxis on planetary surfaces, also (rarely) carrying out annexation against pre-stellar civilizations.
Influencer – Individual who advocates for ideas, products, or services, primarily on the global information grid.
Interstellar Service – Member of the Hegemony’s interstellar paramilitary force, carrying out missions involving peacekeeping, enforcement of the Praxis, and exploration of deep space.
Mediator – Individual who provides negotiation or conflict-resolution services.
Physician – Individual who provides medical care.
Rogue – Individual who frequently engages in deception and subterfuge, whether in violation of the Praxis or not.
Scholar – Individual who is engaged in and has expert knowledge of a science, or some similar formal body of organized knowledge. Also, anyone attending or teaching at an institution of higher learning.
Service Specialist – Individual who provides personal service to others, most often in the hospitality or leisure industries.
Spacer – Individual who works aboard a deep-space outpost or colony, usually on an asteroid or moon.
Technician – Individual who is skilled in designing, building, maintaining, or repairing complex technological systems.

Now that I’ve blocked this out, the rest of the character generation rules should follow without much trouble. We’ll see how much progress I’m able to make over the next week or two.

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