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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Just a very quick note, for folks who aren’t my patrons and don’t follow me on Facebook. Earlier today, I released a new interim draft of the world-design sequence document from Architect of Worlds. It’s available for free on the Architect of Worlds page on this site.
This is probably the last version of this material I’ll be releasing for free – other sections of the book are exclusive for my patrons, and the book itself is slowly moving toward being ready for final draft and release. I’m kind of hoping that 2022 is the year I finally finish this project.
Still, if you’re interested in this kind of scientific geekery, feel free to have a look.
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.
In some ways, 2021 was a pretty good year at the Palace. The blog has been growing steadily every year since I resumed it in 2018, and 2021 was no exception. We got several thousand distinct views, which isn’t bad for a non-themed, meandering blog by a part-time creative. On the Patreon side of things, I’ve reached almost two dozen active patrons. I’m not sure yet, but I think income from my original work is approaching the level that I make on the long tail from my tabletop industry period years back. Not a bad milestone, even if it’s still orders of magnitude short of “quit the day job” money.
This was the first full year after I started cross-posting to social media. It was also the first full year since I started posting one or two reviews per month of self-published or indie fiction. Those no doubt helped.
As usual, the main factors holding me back are the part-time nature of my work, and the fact that I likely have too many distinct projects under way. Those items make it hard for me to hit major milestones. For example, it’s been over a year since my debut novel, The Curse of Steel, was released – yet the sequel, The Sunlit Lands, is still not nearly complete in first draft. I started a space-opera novel, Second Dawn, for Kindle Vella but that project has been stalled too. My main non-fiction project, Architect of Worlds, made significant progress but still isn’t close to being finished.
My creative style seems to work for me – I don’t get completely blocked very often, and I usually make progress on something every month. I worry that it demands patience from my readers, though.
Anyway. I usually take this opportunity to look back on the top-ten new posts from the previous year. This year looks kind of different on that score. My book reviews are clearly driving some traffic, and when I can connect my work to the popular RPG Traveller, that seems to bring a lot of clicks. Something to keep in mind.
Overall, I think my goals for the coming year are going to involve two meta-objectives: to make progress on all of my outstanding projects, and at the same time to finish one of the book-length items. The best candidates for the latter are Architect of Worlds and The Sunlit Lands. Still, we’ll have to see how things go.
I’ve been working on a Cepheus Engine kitbash for my Human Destiny setting bible and game.
One thing that became obvious fairly quickly is that the usual skill sets for Cepheus Engine, as derived from Traveller, may not work well in this setting. The typical premise in the older games is a band of misfit characters trying to make a living through some combination of troubleshooting, mercenary work, or tramp-freighter trade. Those are a lot less likely in Human Destiny stories, which are more likely to be heavily social-interaction-oriented in the context of post-scarcity economics and a fairly strong interstellar state. Think Star Trek or the Culture, rather than Firefly or The Expanse.
So here’s the tentative skill set for the new game. I anticipate task and conflict mechanics to work in a standard manner for Cepheus Engine, but this is distinct enough from the SRD that the game will certainly be presented as “An Alternate Cepheus Engine Universe.”
Incidentally, I spent a lot of time reviewing other science-fiction games in my library to remind myself how this was done elsewhere. It’s actually rather amusing how many games, published across four decades of time, have taken very similar approaches to this problem . . .
Tentative Skill List
Artistic Skills
Fine Arts (Specializes to Architecture, Body Art, Calligraphy, Drawing, Interior Decorating, Musical Composition, Photography, Poetry, Pottery, Sculpting, Video Production, Virtual Production, Woodworking, or Writing)
Handicrafts (Specializes to Basket Weaving, Brewing, Blacksmith, Bookbinding, Carpentry, Cooking, Gardening, Glassblowing, Jeweler, Leatherworking, Masonry, Needlework, Sewing, Winemaking, or Woodworking)
Performing Arts (Specializes to Acting, Dancing, Singing, or a specific musical instrument)
Athletic Skills
Athletics
Free Fall
Observation
Riding
Sports (Specializes to a specific sport)
Stealth
Unarmed Combat
Interpersonal Skills
Carousing
Debate
Deception
Diplomacy
Games (Specializes to Gambler, Virtual Gamer, or a specific game)
Instruction
Interrogation
Leadership
Negotiation
Personal Service
Persuasion
Public Speaking
Operations Skills
Battle Dress
Demolitions
System Operations (Specializes to Comms, Computers, Security, Sensors, or Telepresence)
Vacc Suit
Outdoor Skills
Animal Handling
Navigation
Survival
Tracking
Professional Skills
Admin
Broker
Forensics
Law
Medicine
Memetics
Politics
Profession (Specializes to a specific career)
Protocol
Strategy
Streetwise
Tactics
Scientific Skills
Research
Science (Specializes to Anthropology, Archaeology, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Ecology, Economics, Geology, History, Linguistics, Literature, Mathematics, Metallurgy, Meteorology, Paleontology, Philosophy, Physics, Physiology, Planetology, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Theology, or Xenology)
Starship Skills
Astrogation
Engineering (Specializes to Drive, Life Support, or Power Plant)
Gunnery (Specializes to Bay Weapon, Orbital Bombardment, Spinal Mount Weapon, or Turret Weapon)
Pilot
Technical Skills
Civil Engineering
Construction
Cybernetics
Electronics
Gravitics
Mechanics
Vehicle Skills
Air Vehicles (Specializes to Airship, Grav Aircraft, Rotor Aircraft, or Winged Aircraft)
Ground Vehicles (Specializes to Cycle, Hovercraft, Tracked Vehicle, or Wheeled Vehicle)
Water Vehicles (Specializes to Motor Ship, Sailing Ship, Small Craft, or Submarine)
Weapon Skills
Guns (Specializes to Archaic Guns, Energy Guns, Gravitic Guns, and Stun Guns)
Heavy Weapons
Melee Weapons (Specializes to Fencing Weapons, Impact Weapons, Knives, Staves, or Swords)
Missile Weapons (Specializes to Bows or Crossbows)
Current status of the project: I had vaguely hoped to have a new partial rough draft for my patrons by the end of December, with the character rules more or less finished, but designing this list took a lot longer than I expected.
I’ll have my formal “planning for January” blog post in a few days, but I suspect my main efforts for next month will involve finishing this game-design task so I can push a version 0.4 draft to my patrons, and possibly writing a new Human Destiny novelette. A murder mystery, oddly enough, although murders are vanishingly rare in the Human Destiny setting . . .
One of my ongoing projects is to create a combination “setting bible” and tabletop RPG sourcebook for the Human Destiny setting. The idea is to codify the setting for myself, and also to make a little money while cross-marketing it to gamers.
The problem all along has been to find the right vehicle – that is, the right game system – for the RPG side of the project. There’s a continuum of potential options here.
At one end of the spectrum, I could design my own game system from scratch. I’ve done a little work in this direction, producing the fragmentary EIDOLON game system. The advantage there is that I would have creative freedom, and could avoid infringing on anyone else’s intellectual property. The drawback is that yet another original game system, one that doesn’t have any external support, acts as a barrier to potential players.
At the other end of the spectrum, I could license an existing and well-known game system and produce an independently published sourcebook for that. GURPS would be an obvious choice, given my publication history, but I’ve also considered a few other systems. For most of the past year, I’ve leaned toward Cortex Prime as a good choice, on the assumption that Fandom’s eventual licensing schemes would be congenial. In general, the advantage of working with an existing game system is that the finished product would be familiar to many potential players, and would have significant ancillary support.
The drawback of using an existing system – and this is a big one – is that most of the best choices have fairly restrictive licensing schemes. I’m a one-man creative operation with a fairly low tolerance for risk. I’m just not interested in a plan that would require me to hire a development staff and try to crowd-fund with a budget of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s why I’ve never seriously considered trying to get a GURPS license, for example. I know people have made a good go of that, but it’s not within my reach.
Recently the folks at Fandom announced their upcoming non-commercial and commercial licenses for Cortex Prime. I can’t speak to how other Cortex fans have reacted to that announcement. From my own perspective only, it looks as if what I would want to do with the system falls between two stools. Non-commercial license means no money at all. Commercial license looks as if it would informally require the development-staff-and-crowdfunding avenue.
Back to the drawing board. Fortunately, there’s another “sweet spot” on that continuum I mentioned earlier. That involves working with a system that’s covered under the Open Game License (OGL).
The OGL is a legal framework which was first established by Wizards of the Coast back in 2000, originally covering the “3.5 edition” of Dungeons & Dragons. Since then, a lot of indie publishers have produced material for a variety of game systems under the OGL.
Working under the OGL, you can use any game mechanics that a publisher has placed under the “Open Content” category, adding your own tweaks to the mechanics and your own new rules systems, and publish the result. There are some legal requirements – you have to include a copy of the OGL in your book, and you can’t expressly claim that your product is associated with the original game. Those aren’t onerous requirements, and they don’t push a project into the staff-and-crowdfunding zone. Plenty of one-man or small-team projects have succeeded under the OGL.
Meanwhile, under the OGL you can also designate your own intellectual property – information about a setting, most often – as “Product Identity” which is still protected by copyright. Which is exactly what I would want to do for game material based on any of my created settings or published fiction.
Right now I’m specifically looking at the fact that the popular SF game Traveller has at least one edition published under the OGL. There’s also a Traveller emulation under its own OGL structure, published as the Cepheus Engine RPG. There’s a whole cottage industry of indie publishers producing material under the Cepheus Engine banner, and some of that material is moving out into a variety of genres. There are Cepheus Engine-based games for hard-SF, swords & sorcery, Old West, and other settings.
The Human Destiny setting isn’t all that Traveller-like in some respects, but I suspect it wouldn’t be all that difficult to produce a Cepheus Engine hack that would do a good job of it. I might even be able to bring in some mechanics from EIDOLON – the two systems aren’t radically different and might hybridize well.
So that’s the current plan for the Human Destiny sourcebook: to rework it as a Cepheus Engine hack and start moving toward independent publication under the OGL. First step in the plan is to start working on the character design rules. I hope to have at least a partial draft of those available as a free release for my patrons by the end of December.
