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World-Building Exercise: St. Basil

June 2, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Here’s a bit of additional world-building for the Scorpius Reach setting, mostly done with the current draft of Architect of Worlds.

St. Basil is the fourth planet of the A component of a binary star system. Its primary star is named Emmelia. Emmelia is a typical Population I star, somewhat more massive, hotter, and brighter than Sol. It possesses a substantial family of planets.

Emmelia

Mass: 1.06 Sol
Age: 5.7 billion standard years
Metallicity: 1.0 standard
Luminosity: 1.63 Sol
Effective Temperature: 5940 K
Spectral Classification: G0V

Mazaka (Companion Star)

Mass: 0.55 Sol
Age: 5.7 billion standard years
Metallicity: 1.0 standard
Luminosity: 0.06 Sol
Effective Temperature: 3850 K
Spectral Classification: M0V
Orbital Radius: 96.8 AU
Eccentricity: 0.25 (Forbidden zone at 24.2 AU)
Orbital Period: 750.6 standard years

Planetary System Summary

Planets and other major bodies in the Emmelia star system are named after people associated with St. Basil the Great.

Orbit	Name	UPP	Notes
0.20 AU	Meletius	Y7A0000-0	Tide-locked world with a hot carbon-dioxide atmosphere. No moons.
0.36 AU	Eustathius	Y8A0000-0	Tide-locked world with a hot carbon-dioxide atmosphere. No moons.
0.62 AU	St. Macrina	Y600000-0	Hot airless world. No moons.
1.28 AU	St. Basil	C645456-8	Primary world in the system, with a thin but breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere tainted by biotoxins, a moderate amount of liquid surface water, and a temperate climate. Colony world. No moons.
1.85 AU	St. Gregory	Large GG	Spectacular ring system. One large moon, many moonlets.
3.83 AU	St. Petros	Medium GG	Moderate ring system. Two large moons, several moonlets.
7.17 AU	St. Naucratius	Small GG	Moderate ring system. One large moon, several moonlets.
11.61 AU	Julianos	YAA0000-0	Dense, bitterly cold hydrogen-helium atmosphere. No moons.

St. Basil

St. Basil is a marginally habitable world. It has a pleasant climate in limited regions of the surface, but the local ecology is somewhat incompatible with human biochemistry and airborne toxins are common.

Orbital and Rotational Parameters

Orbital Radius: 1.275 AU
Orbital Eccentricity: 0.08
Orbital Period: 12260 hours
Rotation Period: 21.50 hours
Local Day: 21 hours, 32.5 minutes
Local Year: 569.13 local days
Obliquity: 24° (unstable)
Satellites: None

Mass and Surface Gravity

Mass: 0.47 Earth
Density: 0.92 Earth (5.08 g/cc)
Radius: 5090 km
Surface Gravity: 0.74 standard

Geophysics

Geophysical Parameters: Mature plate lithosphere with mobile plate tectonics
Magnetic Field: Strong
Hydrographic Coverage: 50%

Atmosphere

Surface Atmospheric Pressure: 0.69 atm
Atmospheric Components (by Mass):
- Nitrogen 75.5%
- Oxygen 22.3%
- Carbon Dioxide 0.4%
- Argon 1.0%
- Water Vapor 0.3%
Atmospheric Scale Height: 11.6 km
Atmospheric Classification: Thin, tainted (low oxygen content, seasonal airborne toxins in regions of plentiful native vegetation)

Climate

Blackbody Temperature: 279 K
Bolometric Albedo: 0.27
Total Greenhouse Effect: 31 K
Average Surface Temperature: 289 K

Native Life

Age of Advanced Biosphere: 1.71 billion standard years
Dominant Life Forms: Sophisticated animals, both aquatic and land-based, including several pre-sentient species
Biochemical Compatibility: Poor

Human Habitation

Human Population: 50,000
Founder Groups: Eosi (100%)
Government Type: Feudal Technocracy
Law Level: 6
Starport Class: C (Routine facilities, repair yard for small ships)
Base Facilities: Scout base
Local Tech Level: 18
Trade Classifications: Non-Industrial

Notes

St. Basil is notable for its proximity to the massive gas giant planet St. Gregory. St. Basil and St. Gregory are in a stable 7:4 orbital resonance. While the gas giant’s influence stabilizes St. Basil’s orbit, it also causes the smaller planet’s rotational axis to undergo wild excursions over million-year timescales.

St. Basil is currently recovering from a mass extinction which apparently took place about two million years ago. The largest native land animals are about the size and sophistication of a domestic cat. The history of life on the planet is full of such incidents – the variability of the planet’s rotational axis means that its climate is also extremely unstable over long periods.

Native life on St. Basil is biochemically incompatible with Earth-derived life – the two can usually obtain no nutritional value from one another, and the very attempt is likely to provoke serious allergic or toxic reactions. Even the native plant life is prone to give off airborne toxins that can lead to serious illness or even death in Earth-derived animal life. The St. Basil colony tends to expand its territory by burning the native ecology to the ground, plowing the resulting carbon under, and then introducing Earth- or Eos-derived life forms. Humans venturing away from the protected colony are advised to wear filter masks and carry supplemental oxygen.

St. Basil was originally colonized in 2403, by founder groups of Chinese and Japanese origin. The original name of the colony was Guang. The Guang colony failed slowly after the Silence, with all human inhabitants deceased by 2600. The planet was rediscovered in 2833 and recolonized from Eos in 2840. St. Basil is currently organized as a semi-autonomous province of the Kingdom of Eos, ruled by a consortium of technical and scientific experts, with support from the Kingdom’s interstellar navy and scout service.

The local economy is more or less self-sufficient at a TL8 level. It is centered around scientific study of the native biosphere, which promises to produce a variety of useful pharmaceuticals. Prospectors have also recently discovered prodromoi remnants on the planet.

Planning for June 2021

May 31, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

The last few months have been very productive, and I think this pattern of posting a status report and priority list at the beginning of each month is helping. Not to mention that it’s likely to be useful information for my patrons, and anyone else who’s following my work.

May was a good month overall. I released an update to my Scorpius Reach setting bible, adding a fair amount of material to the initial draft. This gathered some good attention from the Traveller communities on Facebook and Reddit. I also released a minor-version update to the Architect of Worlds Introduction and Design Sequence document. Finally, I wrote and released the first draft of a completely new section of Architect of Worlds: the Working with Astronomical Data document.

I did not get any new fiction written, and I think I need to refocus on that in the coming month. Earlier this year I had a potential project to write and sell several stories, and for a while I was holding time and energy aside for that. Unfortunately, that seems to have fallen through, so I’m turning back to writing in my own original universes again for a while.

One very useful milestone happened this month. I’ve been developing my Scorpius Reach setting, not just as a test-bed for the Game of Empire rules, but also possibly as the backdrop for some serialized fiction to bring to market. Although the stories themselves are going to be entirely original to me, and I don’t plan to market them as anything but original fiction, there was still a potential IP problem there. I’ve been using the Traveller game rules to help develop the setting, and the “bible” for it is framed in terms of a Traveller universe. So I decided to approach Marc Miller, the owner and primary publisher of Traveller, and discuss how best to avoid stepping on his intellectual property. Once I described what I was planning to do, he immediately and graciously granted me permission to proceed without any concerns. So that’s a big potential obstacle out of the way. I plan to start writing the first Scorpius Reach serialized novel in June.

So here’s the priority list for June 2021. I’m reworking the format a little, to organize by a hierarchy of urgency first, rather than by overall project:

Top Priority, or the “this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful” level:
- Architect of Worlds: Return to improvement and polishing of the Introduction and Design Sequence document, leading to a new minor-version release.
- Krava’s Legend: Write a few more chapters of The Sunlit Lands.
- Scorpius Reach: Write the first few chapters of a serialized novel to be published via Kindle Vella.
Second Priority, or the “work on this as time permits” level:
- Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
- Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
- Krava’s Legend: Write the first short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
- Krava’s Legend: More research toward improvements to my release-and-marketing workflow.
- Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules.
Back Burner, or the “work on this only if everything else gets blocked” level:
- Human Destiny: Write a new short story for eventual collection and publication.
- Human Destiny: Write a few thousand more words of the Cortex Prime sourcebook and setting bible.

For my patrons, this month’s free releases will almost certainly include a new minor-version release of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. This month’s charged release, if there is one, will probably be a block of new fiction from the Krava’s Legend and Scorpius Reach settings. I do hope to produce some new Architect of Worlds material this month, but there probably won’t be enough of that to bundle up as a release for my patrons, so maybe look for that in July.

As always, I’ll want to complete one or two book reviews for self-published fiction this month.

Watch this space for status reports, and if any of the above interests you, please consider signing up as a patron using the link in the sidebar.

A small administrative note: I spent some time this morning cleaning up the post tags on this site, merging a few tags and making sure they had consistent format. In particular, I merged all the tags that made any reference to my high-fantasy novel series into the krava’s legend tag. I also merged the tags that referred to the various Bios-series games by Phil Eklund into the bios tag. Might make the site a little easier to navigate.

Update: The Scorpius Reach Setting

May 9, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I’ve made a bunch of updates to the “Scorpius Reach” document. It’s up to about 13,000 words now, with extensive revisions to the material I published at the end of March, and a bunch of new material as well. Still a living document, but it’s a lot closer to a final release than before, and it would probably work quite well as the setting bible for a tabletop game campaign. This is a free release for my blog readers and patrons.

Here’s a link to the current draft in PDF form: The Scorpius Reach (version 0.2).

Planning for May

May 1, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Making a post like this at the beginning of the month seems to work, at least for certain values of “work.” Insert comments about plans never surviving contact with the foe, plans being useless whereas planning is essential, that kind of thing.

Biggest change-of-plans in April involved a sudden side project for both Architect of Worlds and the “Scorpius Reach” setting. This was the “Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller” project, which ate up a lot of hours through the middle of the month. Still very productive, both by teaching me a lot of Excel Fu, and by helping me produce a document which attracted a lot of attention from Traveller fans.

So although progress on all the goals I identified at the beginning of April was a bit anemic, I’m not unhappy with how things went. I did a free minor-version release for the Architect of Worlds design sequence. I got unblocked with respect to Krava’s Legend and was able to write a few more chapters of The Sunlit Lands. I also picked up several new blog readers and patrons – welcome to all the newcomers!

Still, I think the plan for May is going to look a lot like the plan for April. As always, we’ll see how things actually go. One wrinkle is that I’m fully immunized against COVID-19 now, so I’ll be going back into the office starting Monday. That shouldn’t cripple my creative schedule – I’ve been fully on the clock, albeit working from home, for months already. Still, my daily routine is going to need some adjustment.

Here’s the agenda, more or less in order of priority:

Architect of Worlds
- Continued work on the current round of improvements to the existing design sequence.
- Possibly an additional step or two at the end of the existing design sequence, to add some new parameters related to a world’s habitability and resource value for human (or other) settlement.
- New sections for the book, on the subjects of designing maps of interstellar space and using real-world astronomical data.
Krava’s Legend
- At least another 10,000 words on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands.
- Write the first item to go into my “reader magnet,” a collection of short pieces telling some of the back story for the lead characters of Krava’s Legend. The idea is to release that widely and for free, and use it to attract readers to the novel series.
- Do more investigation toward improvements to my release-and-marketing workflow: find affordable sources for professionally done book cover art, read about techniques for book marketing on a budget that won’t take away too much time from writing, and so on.
Scorpius Reach Sector and Game of Empire
- Develop more of the sector map and setting bible.
- Develop a set of characters and a rough story outline for serialized fiction, possibly to be released on the new Kindle Vella platform.
- Begin assembling a third-edition draft of the Game of Empire rules.
Human Destiny Sourcebook
- Write a few thousand more words to fill out new sections of the partial rough draft.

Free updates for my patrons will probably include a minor-version release of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, and possibly a piece of Krava’s Legend short fiction. This month’s charged release, if there is one, will probably be a combination of additional chapters of The Sunlit Lands and some of the new material for Architect of Worlds.

I’ll also need to complete one or two book reviews this month. Fortunately I’ve found a few self-published novels by way of this blog’s contact form, which may lead to reviews.

Watch this space for status reports, and as always, if any of the above interests you, please consider signing up as a patron using the link in the sidebar.

Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller

April 17, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I’ve finished designing the first draft of an abbreviated Architect of Worlds design sequence specifically for the roleplaying game Traveller. It should be compatible with any version of Traveller that uses the standard UWP codes, including GURPS Traveller. It’s available at the following link:

Abbreviated Architect of Worlds for Traveller (27 April 2021)

It’s also available on the main Architect of Worlds page.

Unlike most of my work, this document is not entirely covered by my copyright, and I freely grant permission to share or redistribute it, so long as the attribution is not altered. I’d be interested in hearing from any Traveller referees or players who experiment with it!

Architect of Worlds: A Side Project

April 15, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

A few days ago I had a shower thought, tying together two current projects: what if I could design an “abbreviated” version of the Architect of Worlds design sequence specifically for the Traveller role-playing game? The idea would be to produce a world generation sequence that uses mechanisms similar to Classic Traveller, and is not significantly more complex or time-consuming, yet avoids the more implausible results of those rules, and is compatible with the full Architect of Worlds design sequence.

So for the past week or so, I’ve been running experiments along those lines, with considerable success. Consider this an interim report on how it’s going, with a high degree of confidence that I’ll have a finished product ready for release within a few more days. When it’s done, I’ll post it as a freebie for Traveller fans and my patrons.

One piece of this has involved a lot of work with Excel spreadsheets.

Microsoft Excel is a very good tool for what’s called “Monte Carlo” simulation. If you’re working with a complex model that has lots of moving parts, and you can’t just compute the distribution of likely outcomes, then the thing to do is run lots of random trials and look at how those turn out. Rather to my surprise, I’ve developed an Excel spreadsheet that does this for Architect of Worlds. It takes a few parameters (the mass, density, and blackbody temperature of a putative world), then it runs through a not-overly-simplified version of Architect of Worlds and spits out 1,000 random planets. Finally, it counts how many of those planets exhibit various combinations of atmosphere and surface liquid coverage. All at the touch of a button.

It’s a rather heady experience. Amazing, the amount of computational power in a simple laptop device.

Working with my Monte Carlo setup has given me all the data I need to produce that abbreviated Architect for Traveller. I’m pretty pleased with the result – it’s a bit more ornate than the original Classic Traveller world design sequence, but most of the complication has been pushed into one big lookup table. I think the meat of the final document is going to be no more than 3-4 pages long.

This side project has also led me to find a few odd cases and possible errors in the current Architect draft, so I’ve made some good progress on what’s going to be the version 0.5 alpha release. My patrons can look for that later this month as well.

Finally, I’m beginning to think I might be able to automate Architect of Worlds with another big Excel workbook. I’ve used crude spreadsheets to do some basic testing of earlier versions of the sequence . . . but I’ve learned a lot about Excel in the past week. This might be useful for any number of other projects.

Progress!

Planning for April

April 3, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

New month, new set of objectives to be attacked over the next thirty days. April is particularly notable because by the end of this month, I expect to be fully immunized against COVID-19 and therefore back in my day-job office several days a week. This month, therefore, is the last time that I’ll have quite the same level of flexibility for my creative work, at least until I retire in another decade or so. I’d like to make the most of it.

Here’s the plan, more or less in order of priority. As always, the plan at the end of the month may not look much like the plan right now.

Architect of Worlds
- Continued work on the current round of improvements to the existing design sequence.
- Possibly an additional step or two at the end of the existing design sequence, to add some new parameters related to a world’s habitability and resource value for human (or other) settlement.
- New sections for the book, on the subjects of designing maps of interstellar space and using real-world astronomical data.
Krava’s Legend
- At least another 15,000 words on the first draft of The Sunlit Lands.
- Some work to refine and improve my workflow for producing and promoting self-published novels. If I can develop a reasonable workflow, I might apply it first by re-designing The Curse of Steel and “re-launching” that book.
Human Destiny Sourcebook
- Write a few thousand more words to fill out new sections of the partial rough draft.
Scorpius Reach Sector and Game of Empire
- Develop more of the sector map and setting bible.
- Begin assembling a third-edition draft of the Game of Empire rules.

Free updates for my patrons will probably include a minor-version release of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, and possibly a new minor-version release of the Human Destiny draft sourcebook.

This month’s charged release, if there is one, will probably be a combination of the first 10-12 chapters of The Sunlit Lands and some of the new material for Architect of Worlds.

I’ll also need to complete one or two book reviews this month.

Watch this space for status reports, and as always, if any of the above interests you, please consider signing up as a patron using the link in the sidebar.

The Scorpius Reach

March 31, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I think I’ve managed to set down enough material to satisfy my muse for the moment.

Attached to this post is a PDF with a first interim partial draft of what I’m now calling my Scorpius Reach setting – part of an original universe for the Traveller roleplaying game. It’s not very well organized yet, and far from complete, but it should be enough to at least suggest the beginnings of a Traveller campaign. If anyone feels like trying it out, I would suggest a style of play that centers on exploration, free trade, or maybe a small mercenary unit. This is a very undeveloped region of space, compared to most Traveller settings.

Where this goes from here remains to be seen. I’ll probably expand on this material as more ideas come to me, although now that my muse has been pacified I do have other projects that need to take priority. If and when I get the new Game of Empire rules worked out, this setting will probably serve as a test-bed scenario for playtesting.

Here’s the promised link: The Scorpius Reach. Enjoy!

Status Report (27 March 2021)

March 28, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I swear, sometimes my muse has the attention span of a squirrel.

My plan for March was to release a new minor update to the Architect of Worlds partial draft, and then write several more chapters of The Sunlit Lands so I could send out a good-sized chunk of that as a charged release for my patrons.

Architect of Worlds did get bumped up to Version 0.4 as of last week – a bunch of tweaks, some of them substantive, many of them driven by the flood of good feedback I’ve received from Brett Evill since the beginning of the year. With that out of the way, I was all set to buckle down and concentrate on The Sunlit Lands. I expected to be finished through Chapter Six or Seven and about 20,000 words by the end of March.

Meanwhile, I posted a couple of weeks ago about an old Traveller project, the Game of Empire rules that I originally developed about twenty years ago. At some time in the near future, I intend to revisit that project and produce a new version of those rules, possibly working toward publishing them as a paid product on DriveThruRPG. I hadn’t intended to work on that just yet, though – Krava’s story was calling me!

Yet early this week, I got the first hint of an idea for a Traveller setting that could act as a test-bed for Game of Empire. It’s a “Milieu Zero” concept of sorts, a single world striving to establish a new interstellar empire after a Long Night. Every day, while I worked on projects for my day job and made progress with Krava’s story, the Traveller idea kept growing in the back of my head, grabbing hold and not letting go.

Today I sat down to try to jot down some notes and get it out of my system, so I could get back to work on Krava . . . and new material just poured out onto the page. Over 3,000 words of it since I got up this morning. Not to mention that I’ve already come up with at least two or three ideas for short fiction, attached to this setting.

Well. I know not to argue when my muse is at work. Even if I wish she were more consistent.

Apparently, by the end of March, I’m going to have something new and worth sharing, it just isn’t going to be enough of The Sunlit Lands to meet my objective. Nor will this block of new Traveller material be useful as a charged release, since I’d like to share it widely and attract some attention to the potential project.

So here’s the (revised) plan for the last few days of March:

There will be no charged release for my patrons this month. (Again.)
I should have about 5-6000 words of new Traveller material that will be posted here, shared with my patrons, and possibly shared via social media as well. This will be a free release.
I still need to finish and publish a book review for the month of March. I’ve already selected and read the book, I just need to bang out the review.

We’ll see if April goes any differently. At least I seem to have gotten out of the creative slough I was mired in for most of February and the first week or so of March. There’s a good chance I’ll be able to produce a worthwhile amount of material next month.

Looking Backward: Game of Empire

March 15, 2021 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharrukin's Palace

Building fantastic worlds of the mind

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