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Toward a Second Edition of “Architect of Worlds”

Toward a Second Edition of “Architect of Worlds”

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Since Architect of Worlds was published in 2024, the book has held up pretty well. We’ve gone through seven minor-version releases, each of which has corrected minor errors or made patches to the design sequence. “Minor” as measured by the fact that we haven’t had to repaginate anything – I think the biggest tranche of new text so far was four short sentences long. Here’s a link to the current errata list.

Science marches on, of course, and in any case many of the models described in Architect of Worlds are deliberately simplified to some degree for ease of use. While interacting with readers, and especially while working with Ad Astra Games on other projects, I’ve found myself making notes about ways to improve and add to those models.

For example, I’m currently supporting a long-term world-building project for Ad Astra Games – updates to their Ten Worlds science-fiction setting – that is already motivating new research. The “Ten Worlds” of that setting are often only Earthlike by courtesy; they tend to have odd features that make them poor copies of long-lost Earth. Which, of course, means they often manifest special cases that fall outside the usual design parameters of the Architect of Worlds sequence. I’m currently doing research to help put solid scientific justification behind the Ten Worlds planetary designs, where possible, and that’s providing fertile ground for possible improvements to the Architect models.

Eventually (and by that I would estimate 2-3 years from now) I’m going to have enough new, refined, improved models that a significantly new design sequence is likely to be called for. That will lead to a Second Edition of the book. I’ll likely make note of some of those potential changes in this space, just to keep readers up to date on what they might expect in that Second Edition.

So far, I’ve identified three good candidates for new modeling:

Tweaks to the design of planetary systems (Steps Nine through Twelve): The Architect design sequence as written doesn’t quite cover all the exoplanetary systems we know about today, not in fine-grained detail.

For example, the putative exoplanets for Tau Ceti (assuming those actually exist) are remarkably massive and the current design sequence has a hard time matching them.

Meanwhile, the well-understood TRAPPIST-1 planetary system doesn’t quite fit – given the masses of the known terrestrial planets in that system, Architect implies there should be at least a few gas giants as well, and we haven’t detected those. Further research seems to be indicated, to find ways to modify the existing sequence to better accommodate the special cases we’ve seen.

New features for the atmospheric-retention model, to better handle hydrodynamic escape due to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation (Steps Twenty-Two and Twenty-Six): There’s a provision in the current edition (added very late in the design process) that attempts to model the way EUV radiation drives off portions of a terrestrial world’s primordial atmosphere. It’s not a terribly elegant provision, and it’s probably too harsh on some of the special cases.

Meanwhile, it occurs to me that modeling hydrodynamic atmospheric depletion could also be extended to the case of ongoing atmosphere loss for worlds circling flare stars, which can continue to generate EUV bursts for billions of years. So this is a good candidate for a more fleshed-out model. Probably involving a more nuanced approach to computing a world’s M-number.

For example, we might compute a “young primary star” M-number that measures its early EUV output and mostly just affects whether the world retains primordial hydrogen and helium. Then a “sustained M-number” that mostly models simple thermal escape, but which also takes into account the continued EUV output of a flare-star primary.

More sophisticated modeling of atmospheric greenhouse effect (Step Thirty): The existing model for final atmospheric composition and greenhouse effect is actually fairly sophisticated as-is, but even so it does simplify a few factors away.

For example, we normally don’t think of the diatomic molecular gases in Earth’s atmosphere (the nitrogen and oxygen) as being significant for the greenhouse effect, and the current edition of Architect ignores them entirely. However, for worlds with denser atmospheres (such as “super-Earths”), collisions between air molecules become significant in causing greater absorption of far-infrared radiation and therefore promoting greenhouse effect. This makes another good candidate for improvements to the existing model – probably the biggest challenge I’ve come across so far, because real-world mathematical modeling of atmospheric greenhouse effect tends to be very complex.

There – that should give you some idea as to the kind of subjects I’m working on for that eventual new edition of the book. Watch this space for more updates, which I suspect will be very occasional at first, but will become more frequent as the new edition comes closer to being a reality.

A "family tree" of famous cyberneticists in the "Star Trek" fictional universe.
A Mentorship Chain

A Mentorship Chain

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There’s a bit of worldbuilding that often comes up when you’re working in a rich setting. Sometimes you’ll want to trace master-student or mentor-protégé chains, so you can see schools of thought and who’s likely to have had the most influence on whose philosophy.

If I wanted to work in the Star Wars universe, for example, I might want to trace links between Jedi masters and their padawans. In fact, there’s a very famous chain in the canon universe, stretching five “generations” (Yoda -> Dooku -> Qui-Gon Jinn -> Obi-Wan Kenobi -> Anakin Skywalker -> Ahsoka). If I was writing wuxia fiction, I might want to trace lines of succession for the leadership of various martial-arts schools. And so on.

Today, since I’m planning the next “season” for my Star Trek: Lower Decks fan-fiction writing, I had occasion to do some research and map out just such a mentorship chain. In this case, for “important cyberneticists.” The result is the attached “family tree,” which combines both alpha canon and some plot-relevant decisions of my own. Took about 90 minutes of work to produce, including sketching out the chart in Affinity Photo.

I won’t explain every item on this tree – Star Trek fans may recognize some or all of the names, and possibly there will be some raised eyebrows at some of the links I’ve established for my own continuity. Still, this can serve as a small example of the worldbuilding technique.

The “Great Lands” Master Map

The “Great Lands” Master Map

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Okay, here’s another map for the “Great Lands” setting. This one is focused more closely on the Great Lands themselves – that is, proto-Europe. The map was produced using Wonderdraft, with a carefully selected excerpt of the world map applied as a tracing image.

You can see that Europe hasn’t been fully assembled yet – with Africa still moving northward and rotating slightly counter-clockwise, the Italian and Balkan peninsulas haven’t merged in with the main portion of the continent. You can also see that the Atlantic Ocean is a bit narrower in this epoch – that’s a piece of Greenland in the far northwest, and the Americas aren’t too far off the western edge of the map.

The “Sea Kingdom” is an ahistorical bit, a subcontinent springing up along the mid-Atlantic ridge. I need a Númenor-analogue, so there it is.

The most notable feature of this pseudo-Eocene world is the climate. The planet is a lot warmer and less arid than we’re accustomed to, and sea level is quite a bit higher. The Great Lands have a humid subtropical climate all the way up into parts of what will eventually be Scandinavia and Russia. Warm, wet summers, cool winters with occasional snow, and the natural biome is either dense deciduous forest or highland prairie. Only in the very far north do you start getting a humid continental climate, with cool summers and bitterly cold winters.

People living in the Great Lands are not going to look or dress like medieval Europeans – they’re going to be generally olive to dark brown in complexion, and they’ll tend to dress pretty lightly in the summertime. I suspect the Tremara (the pseudo-Indo-European people that my protagonists belong to) are going to rather resemble Indians (as in, people from the Indian subcontinent, not Native Americans).

This part of the world will be home to several hominid species at once, each analogous to one of the Standard Fantasy Races found in (e.g.) Dungeons & Dragons. “Common-folk” (humans) can be found just about everywhere on this map. “Elder-folk” (elves) mostly stick to the western Great Lands, and keep to themselves. “Smith-folk” (dwarves) set up holdfasts wherever there’s copper, tin, or iron ore to be found, especially in hilly or mountainous regions. “Sea-folk” (halflings) come from a set of tropical islands far to the east, although a fair number of them have traveled on Sea-Kingdom ships to settle in the Great Lands. “Nomad-folk” or skatoi (orcs) mostly hang out in the colder northern regions, although they like to go raiding into the Great Lands on land or by sea.

Developing lots of neat ideas for this new version of the setting. More to come!

New Maps for “Great Lands” Setting

New Maps for “Great Lands” Setting

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A few years ago, I did a bunch of worldbuilding for an Iron Age fantasy setting that I call “the Great Lands.” I even wrote a full-length novel set there, which got self-published and is currently still available in ebook format on Amazon: The Curse of Steel.

The novel got almost no engagement in its time, and the sequel I had started ran into a plot block, so I eventually set the whole project aside. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about reviving it – reworking the worldbuilding, pulling the novel down and doing a minor rewrite before republishing it on Royal Road or a similar outlet, and so on.

An early step in the worldbuilding part of the project was to build a new “historical atlas” to settle the back-story of the setting. Which meant, among other things, revising the old master world map. At which point I ran into a snag.

The problem is, I’m too picky when it comes to my worldbuilding. I have to be able to believe in the world, which means I have to pay attention to the earth-sciences part of it, even if none of that is ever going to be too obvious in the finished stories. I know the techniques for developing a constructed world, starting with the plate tectonics and working my way up through the landforms and climate. Yet I’ve never been satisfied with the results when I do that. The worlds I build end up looking too . . . too bland.

I’ve also experimented with random planetary generators – there are plenty of those available, if you know where to look – but none of those come up to my standards. They always end up being too coarse-grained in their details, or if they’re fine-grained they give us naturalistic-looking worlds that make no sense if you examine them more closely. Nobody seems up to the challenge of simulating plate tectonics for a randomly-generated Earthlike world with any degree of fidelity.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been tinkering with worlds, sometimes getting to the point of a world map to start with before throwing the whole thing out, sometimes not even getting that far. Until I had An Idea: if one wants to build a world that’s much like Earth, that clearly evolved under the same physical regime, but isn’t actually our Earth . . . one thing we can do is look at Earth of the distant past.

My original design for the Great Lands involved a Europe-like subcontinent where much of the action would take place. Easy enough. To the south of this, a “Sailor’s Sea” that would allow easy travel from west to east, and then another continent where exotic creatures and cultures might dwell. More continents off in the distance, which might or might not ever become significant to the story.

What I realized was that Earth was actually like that once . . . back in the Eocene Era, before the continent of Africa moved a bit further north and started colliding with Europe and Asia. In that time, what would eventually become the Mediterranean Sea still connected freely both with the (narrower) Atlantic Ocean to the west, and to the Tethys Ocean to the east, an ocean which would eventually become the Indian Ocean once India itself finished making its way north to collide with Asia.

Okay, suppose I work with Earth in the Eocene, about 50 million years before the present. Is it possible to build decent world maps of that era?

Turns out we can. Let me briefly describe my workflow, with pointers to where you can lay hands on similar data and tools if you’d like to fiddle with Earth’s deep past in similar fashion.

The primary resource here is the PALEOMAP Project, work done by the prominent geologist Christopher Scotese. The link will take you to a paper he produced in 2018, describing a set of DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) that he and his colleagues have laboriously assembled for the entire planet Earth in different past eras. This is a monumental data set, with over 110 different maps stretching over half a billion years into the past. There’s a link in the paper that will give you access to the entire data set.

The PALEOMAP models are in a specific file format (NetCDF) that’s in common use in the earth-sciences community, but which I needed specific tools to work with. There’s a NetCDF viewer called Panoply that’s very good for reading the individual files in the PALEOMAP corpus and visualizing the results, but by itself that wasn’t fine-grained enough. I needed to convert the NetCDF files into a different file format like GeoTIFF, so it could be processed by professional cartography software like QGIS.

Fortunately, I was able to locate MyGeodata, a online utility that’s designed to convert geolocation data from one format to another. I was able to convert the two PALEOMAP data files I was most interested in to GeoTIFF with no difficulty. It cost me a few dollars – the size of the datasets were above the site’s threshold for free use – but the results were superb.

I was able to load a GeoTIFF file for the Eocene period (50 million years before present) into QGIS, and work with that to develop a nicely colored elevation map of Earth in the appropriate era. Output from that went into Affinity Photo, and a couple of hours later I had the completed “master world map” at the head of this post.

You should be able to see the differences between Eocene Earth and our present day. The Atlantic Ocean is narrower, and none of the continents have quite reached their present-day positions. The Tethys Ocean is still there, full of islands and island chains that will make it a nice “Sailor’s Sea.” The sea level is noticeably higher than in the present – the Eocene was a rather warm period in Earth’s history, with very little permanent glaciation. Even Antarctica doesn’t have much in the way of ice caps yet. I suspect if I run with that, the “Great Lands” (proto-Europe) are going to be subtropical – but that’s okay.

I’ve added one feature that didn’t exist in our own Earth’s past – an island subcontinent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, straddling the mid-ocean ridge. Kind of like Iceland, if it had appeared a few million years earlier and was a different shape. That’s going to be the “Sea Kingdom” in the fantasy setting I’m building, the current highest point of human civilization and the source of world-spanning oceanic adventures.

Okay, so I have a starting point for rebuilding “the Great Lands,” and I ought to be able to proceed from there. Chalked up some neat experience with working with geolocation data and professional-caliber cartography tools, too. Fun!

Symphony of Cultures

Symphony of Cultures

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I have a contract in hand for this project, and the design is starting to come together nicely (although there is a ton of work to be done), so it’s about time that I pulled the tarp off of it.

As of this month, I’m working on (part of) a new book, with the working title of Symphony of Cultures. This is conceptually a “sequel” to Architect of Worlds, and it’s essentially going to be a book of tools and design sequences for building alien species and alien cultures for interstellar fiction. Ad Astra Games will be publishing it. The objective is to have it ready for release in about a year, in time for next summer’s big conventions. We’re aiming for a book that’s about the same length and heft as Architect of Worlds – that is, about 192 pages of rules, worksheets, and scientific/historical/literary background.

I’m not the sole author for this one. Ken Burnside intends to write at least a short section. We also have a third collaborator who has both gaming chops and considerable relevant expertise in evolutionary biology – honestly, they’re likely to end up writing more of the final draft than I do.

Prior art that might be relevant includes the various Traveller animal-design rules, the old Digest Group Publications release Grand Census, the alien-design rules in GURPS Uplift, and the Civilization tabletop and video game franchises.

The intention is to have a “short” design sequence, something a writer or gamer could complete in an hour or two, generating a “planet of the week” for a piece of fiction. There’s also going to be a “long” design sequence, that would take a lot more work but would help the reader generate the whole evolutionary and cultural history of an alien society in detail. That “long” sequence is where a lot of the scientific and historical mojo is going to be applied.

At the moment I’m drafting an initial design for a major portion of the “long” design sequence, and giving some thought to what the “short” sequence might look like. I’m hoping we can actually start writing big chunks of material by this fall. We may be looking for beta readers and “playtesters” at some point, so feel free to drop me a line if you might be interested in that. I probably won’t be posting portions of the draft here, as I did during development of Architect of Worlds. We’re on a much shorter development cycle for this one, and it has a publisher from day one, so we’ll be working through Ad Astra’s usual playtesting pipeline.

Should be an interesting project, though, and I’m looking forward to making it come together.

Automation for “Architect of Worlds”

Automation for “Architect of Worlds”

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It took us a lot longer than it probably should have – I can attest that other things kept grabbing higher priority – but Ad Astra Games and I have agreed on a general policy for anyone who would like to build a computer application to implement some or all of the Architect of Worlds design sequence.

The policy is sitting in my Google Drive, at this link. Ken Burnside and I have agreed on what’s in this document.

You’ll notice that Ken is interested in hosting a full implementation of Architect of Worlds on the Ad Astra Games site, as a convenience for writers and gamers who might want to use the design sequences without having to plow through the book by hand. Developers who would like to talk to Ken about submitting a design proposal are welcome to email him at Ad Astra Games – be sure to use the subject line “Architect of Worlds Automation Design Proposal.”

Notes on the Structure of Interstellar Civilizations

Notes on the Structure of Interstellar Civilizations

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I’ve just published a PDF document to my Kofi page, free for current subscribers:

Notes on the Structure of Interstellar Civilizations

This is a collection of assumptions, a bit of mathematical modeling, and lots of commentary on the prevalence of interstellar cultures in the Human Destiny setting. Even if you’re not interested in that setting per se, it may be of some interest as an example of deliberate world-building on a very grand scale.

There’s going to be a follow-on project, involving making some maps of the Human Protectorate’s primary volume, and of the immediate galactic neighborhood around Sol in the Human Destiny universe. Not sure if I’ll turn to that immediately, but it’s in the critical path for my project to re-think that setting, so probably sooner rather than later.

Interesting Results Regarding Planet “Ejection”

Interesting Results Regarding Planet “Ejection”

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Just came across an interesting paper which seems to be exciting some comment: “Properties of Free Floating Planets Ejected through Planet-Planet Scattering.”

The abstract suggests that most planetary systems eject a few planets in the first billion years or so after their formation, with the ejected planets becoming “rogue” or “free-floating” planets in interstellar space.

The current Architect of Worlds models do allow for some ejection of planets in the formation process, especially in the case of a “Nice Event” that scrambles the orbits of core-accretion planets in the outer system. This paper seems to suggest that the process is a bit more common and aggressive than the current Architect models would suggest. I’m bookmarking this paper for close reading later – it’s a good candidate for being taken into account in a putative second edition of Architect.

Neat Website for Interstellar Mapping

Neat Website for Interstellar Mapping

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I recently came across a neat website by Kevin Jardine: Galaxy Map.

It’s an odd site. It’s not clear how it’s all organized. It looks as if the site’s owner planned to write a book about mapping our galactic neighborhood, but the project got abandoned at some point. Nevertheless there’s a lot of interesting data and some gorgeous maps there, if you dig around a bit for them. In particular, Mr. Jardine has used the Gaia data tranches to do some really interesting mapping of relative star densities, the location of clusters and major nebulae, and the location of super-bright stars.

The most immediately useful page on the site appears to be at Galaxy Map Resources, but there’s also a collection of maps at Galaxy Map Posters that includes the one I included at the top of this post.

Really neat material there, if you’re at all interested in writing near-solar neighborhood interstellar fiction.