I seem to be in the midst of an extended hiatus in my creative life: since late September I’ve been working on support for gaming conventions rather than large-scale projects.
Travellercon was pretty successful. I sat on two panel discussions and ran a GURPS Traveller: The Interstellar Wars adventure for a full table. I didn’t run myself into the ground, I had a good time, and I got to meet a lot of people in person who had just been names on the Internet before.
Ironically, one of the people I met at Travellercon was on the programming committee for another convention: Philcon 2024, set to take place 22-24 November. As of right now, I’m scheduled to sit on three panels at Philcon – one of them a solo workshop on “Worldbuilding 101” – and run two games in the evenings. So no sooner did I get finished with one convention, than I had taken on a bunch of prep work for another.
This isn’t a problem. I’m obliged to attend (and promote Architect of Worlds at) two conventions this year anyway. It gets me back into the more public side of tabletop game design and SF literature, after a very long time away. Still, it means I’m working on those short-term projects rather than any of my longer-term ones. I have several items I need to get back to, as soon as my schedule loosens up a bit after Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, I’m giving serious thought to re-organizing and re-prioritizing my creative work even after I finish with Philcon.
Part of this is that I’ve just about determined that I’m going to be shutting down my Patreon campaign soon. At this point, my patrons may be able to expect a free release or two in November or December . . . but that may be the end of it. There are a number of reasons for this, but the three most significant are:
Now that Architect of Worlds is finished and on the market, it may be a long time before I have another large-scale project that will help me make consistent monthly releases.
In any case, I’m seeing a lot of patrons cancelling their subscriptions now that Architect is done, or signing up only for free subscriptions, or signing up and then cancelling in less than a month. Which reinforces that what I’ve been doing on Patreon since the Architect release is probably not holding people’s interest.
Meanwhile, Patreon is showing signs of enshittification. They’ve already deprecated the payment model I’ve preferred since Day One, and I keep seeing signs of increasingly arbitrary behavior and reduced customer support from them. It may be time to move away from a service which seems to be responding more to the needs of venture capitalists than its customers.
The plan at present is to migrate over to Kofi (“buy me a coffee”). I’ll have my page set up to permit people to make one-time donations, or to sign up for a monthly support subscription (with the understanding that I will not necessarily be releasing any significant “rewards” on a monthly basis). There will also be a store-front, where I’ll be selling PDF and EPUB e-books of my fiction, and maybe a few game-design items. Regular supporters will get steep discounts on these. I’ll make interim drafts of big projects available for free as well – but those will be taken down if and when they lead to published products.
I’m not sure when the transition will be taking place – it depends on how quickly I can get a few more pieces of fiction into my store-front so there’s a substantial amount of material in place. Almost certainly by the end of the calendar year, though.
Another factor is that I think I want to buckle down and focus on writing more fiction over the next year or two, rather than working on big game-design projects. I’m sensing that’s where my creative energies are likely to be better spent for the immediate future.
So yeah, some changes in the weather are approaching.
I spent most of August on the first tranche of writing and cartography forFourth Millennium, and ended up with about 10,000 words of new material (and a snazzy master map for the setting). That all went out to my patrons on 31 August, so that hit my marks for the month. Which means several of my “front burner” items for August have actually been completed.
September is going to be a bit different. I have an obligation to run two events at Travellercon 2024 in October, so I need to focus on preparing for those.
One is going to be an Architect of Worlds “world-building workshop.” Up to six Traveller players and I are going to take four hours to work out a complete, Traveller-compatible planetary system using the Architect rules. I’ll need to do some prep work to make sure that runs smoothly and keeps the participants engaged, considering I won’t have a full-on computer on hand. After the convention is over, I’ll be writing up that planetary system in detail and sharing that with the workshop participants.
The other event will be a GURPS Traveller: The Interstellar Wars scenario . . . which will be the first time I’ve run any RPG for strangers in over twenty years. Yeah, that’s going to call for plenty of prep time too.
So I suspect most of my creative time in September will be taken up getting ready for the convention. My patrons can expect there to be no charged release for the month of September, although at some point after the con I may share my results of the two events as patron rewards.
Meanwhile, I’m working on a project to rescue a lot of my old fiction and republish it in forms that I can sell on my Kofi shop, once that opens up. As of today I’ve finished polishing up one novelette, incidentally working out the workflow for future items. This will be an “as time permits” project throughout the next 2-3 months, most likely.
So here’s the formal list for September:
Front Burner:
Travellercon: Finish designing the scenario for the adventure “Raid on Markidu.”
Travellercon: Complete setup work for the Architect of Worlds world-building workshop.
Back Burner:
Fourth Millennium: Write a gazetteer of major regions in the setting, tied to the master map.
Architect of Worlds: Finish setting up the page(s) for the book on this site.
Architect of Worlds: Start making at least one post per month (errata, edge cases, new material) supporting the book.
Publishing: Continue polishing and reformatting legacy fiction for publication via Kofi, as time permits.
More news as the month unwinds, no doubt. I hope to get back to Fourth Millennium as my primary project after the convention, in mid-October.
For general interest, here’s a first cut at an outline for the Fourth Millennium core book. This is going to be my working outline while I start writing sections of the rough draft. Naturally, this outline will be subject to change while I develop the project.
As a review: this is planned to be a Basic Roleplaying (BRP) sourcebook, relying on the BRP Universal Game Engine book under the ORC license. It will be the first of (possibly) several sourcebooks detailing the Fourth Millennium setting. Fourth Millennium is a universe centered on the Mediterranean region of Earth’s classical antiquity, but with an alternate history and fantastic elements built into the setting.
I spent most of July building out the alternate-historical timeline for Fourth Millennium, by playing through several of my tabletop historical-simulation games and compiling logs of the results. That effort is basically complete, although it didn’t generate much finished material so I didn’t have a patron release for July.
August is going to be a different matter!
I plan to spend most of this month on Fourth Millennium again, and this time I have a specific plan in mind, which will likely result in some solid material for my patrons and readers. I also need to do some maintenance work for Architect of Worlds, and get started on some prep work for Travellercon in early October. All that is more than enough for the next few weeks, so some of my other projects are going to be pushed off the raft for the time being.
So here’s the list for the coming month:
Front Burner:
Fourth Millennium: Produce an initial outline for the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
Fourth Millennium: Write a summary of the alternate history.
Fourth Millennium: Produce a master map for the setting, covering the Mediterranean world with terrain features, political borders, and the most significant cities all marked.
Fourth Millennium: Write a gazetteer of major regions in the setting, tied to the master map.
Architect of Worlds: Finish setting up the page(s) for the book on this site.
Architect of Worlds: Start making at least one post per month (errata, edge cases, new material) supporting the book.
Back Burner:
Travellercon: Begin designing the scenario for the adventure “Raid on Markidu.”
Travellercon: Begin setup work for the Architect of Worlds world-building workshop.
All this work for Fourth Millennium is very likely to amount to more than enough new material for me to consider making a charged release for my patrons, so look out for that at the end of August. Meanwhile, the material I produce for Travellercon will also be a patron release at some point, whether part of a free or charged release remains to be seen.
Looks like it’s going to be a very busy month. Not a problem I mind having, as long as I can keep up with my other commitments at the same time.
Quick end-of-month status report here, mostly for my patrons.
I’ve gotten a lot of interesting work done on assembling notes for the Fourth Millennium universe this month, and I think I’m about at the point of beginning to write the first interim rough draft for that sourcebook . . . but that doesn’t leave me with any significant amount of new finished material for my patrons for July. So, if it’s not clear yet, there will be no charged release for this month.
Next month I plan to be a lot more ambitious. I may have some combination of new cartography and game material in August, and a fair amount of it at that. Look for my monthly planning message this weekend, most likely, and then we’ll see how August goes.
For several weeks now, I’ve been using a sequence of tabletop simulation games to generate a big chunk of the Fourth Millennium alternate history. These have included:
Alexandros (Revised Edition), by Compass Games
Successors (Fourth Edition), by GMT Games
Sword of Rome, by GMT Games
Pax Romana, by GMT Games
In particular, the past two weeks have been devoted to running through a home-brewed scenario of Pax Romana, based on the outcomes of the previous games. I’ve been making occasional posts to Facebook detailing how the game has been going, with comments about what the alternate history looks like. For my blog readers and patrons, and to preserve that commentary for future reference, I’m going to compile all of those posts here.
So, without further ado:
July 7 (300 BCE)
Well, this evening I did manage to get Pax Romana set up, using my home-brewed alternate-historical scenario. This picks up right where my Successors and Sword of Rome runs left off, in 300 BCE.
You can see Carthage in the lower left, ready to build up its western empire. A few Romans in central Italy, set to finish their conquest of the peninsula. An alliance between the western chunk of Alexander’s empire and Magna Graecia. A few of Alexander’s satraps asserting their independence in Asia Minor. Way off in the East, we have Alexander’s son and heir partnering up with the elderly Ptolemy of Egypt to pursue a new generation’s ambitions.
Let the games begin!
July 10 (250 BCE)
Spent most of the day “teaching” an online course (i.e., monitoring student progress and grading papers), and building a slide deck for next week’s Enormous Course lesson.
I also plowed through a game-turn of Pax Romana. I’m now at the end of Game-Turn II (about 250 BCE), and there have been some interesting developments.
Given the enforced alliance at the beginning of the game between “Greece” and “The East” in my home-brewed scenario, once the two empires have divided up Asia Minor there’s really only one direction for “The East” (the main body of the Alexandrian empire) to go. That’s across North Africa to fulfill one of Alexander’s old ambitions, the conquest of Carthage.
The campaign was fortuitously timed, just as Carthage was struggling with a “slave revolt” event (entirely historical, as Carthage always had trouble with internal rebellions). I looked at the odds facing the Carthaginian army, and decided that their best bet was to fall back on the Numidian hinterland and the settlements in Spain, and let the Alexandrian army deal with the rebels. So the outnumbered Carthaginian army is more or less intact to fight another day. Still, between the Alexandrian invasion and an opportunistic campaign by the Romans in Corsica and Sardinia, Carthage has lost a lot of territory.
“Greece” (the European sector of Alexander’s empire) has been having a hard time expanding anywhere. They’ve knocked out a few barbarian tribes, but they also had to fend off a massive invasion of German barbarians from the back-end of nowhere, and the net result has been just about zero. Maybe in the next few turns they can do better – they certainly have the economic base for conquest, even if they also have a big frontier to defend.
The Roman Republic has been doing . . . not too badly, actually, mostly by carefully leaving the Alexandrians alone and snapping up territory opportunistically around the edges. They’ve had to fight some wars against Gaulish barbarians, but that gave them a chunk of southern Gaul and plenty of directions for further expansion. Once the two segments of Alexander’s empire become hostile to each other, there’s every likelihood the Romans can start playing both ends against the middle.
July 13 (175 BCE)
I really ought to be working on things for the office, but honestly I was pretty burned out this morning, so I spent the day on Pax Romana instead. The capstone scenario I need to write is still percolating in the back of my brain, so tomorrow I’ll sit down and knock out as much of it as I can.
In the Fourth Millennium universe, we’ve reached about 175 BCE, the halfway point in the simulation.
There have been some interesting developments. The entirety of Magna Graecia has changed hands, for one thing. The Greek cities in Italy are now subject to the Roman Republic, while the post-Minoan matriarchy that was ruling Sicily is now a vassal-state of the Ptolemies of Egypt.
In the far west, now that the Romans have unified Italy, they’ve drawn a new strategic objective: the conquest of Hispania. Spain has just been unified by the league of post-Carthaginian towns left behind after Carthage itself was conquered by the Ptolemies. Unfortunately the Phoenicians have maybe half the economic strength of the growing Roman state, their social stability is much worse, and their armies tend to be smaller and of lower quality than the Roman legions. I’m predicting an alternate-historical version of the Punic Wars, with much the same outcome. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Meanwhile, now that Alexander’s empire has fragmented, there’s an epic confrontation brewing in Asia Minor, between Alexander’s direct heirs and the Seleucids who are based out of the Macedonian homeland and Greece. Right now the two powers are about evenly matched, so I have to wonder if they won’t just fight each other to exhaustion. A really talented leader on one side or the other might make all the difference. Have to see how the next couple of turns go.
July 16 (125 BCE)
As I move toward finishing up with my Pax Romana run, the world is starting to look like its status in the proposed Fourth Millennium RPG. The current date is about 125 BCE, and I’ve got 75 years to go.
In the west, the Romans have dealt with the post-Carthaginian towns and a couple of barbarian invasions in Spain, and have secured the eastern and southern coasts of the peninsula. That’s about where they were about 75 years earlier in our history, after the Second Punic War. At the moment the Roman Republic is the second-most powerful of the major empires, and they’re well placed to finish the conquest of Hispania and move into first place.
There’s still a “Carthage” in the game, and it’s even managed to take back a little of its old territory from the Ptolemies, but I’m reading that as a resurgence of the kingdoms of Numidia and Mauretania. I can’t see those hanging on to their independence very long if any of the major empires find the time to look their way. At least they can act as a spoiler for a while longer.
The conflict between the pieces of Alexander’s empire has been grinding onward. The loose and often-fractured alliance between Alexander’s direct heirs and the Ptolemies of Egypt has been doing surprisingly well. The Seleucid kingdom in European Greece was hamstrung by a very badly timed civil war, and by the arrival of a “soldier of fortune” mercenary army working for Alexander’s descendants. (Pax Romana includes a “soldier of fortune” mechanic, which can disrupt things by bringing a rogue military force onto the board for a turn or so. Think Pyrrhus of Epirus, or some of the third-tier Diadochi.) As a result, the Seleucid position in Asia Minor is in full collapse, and Alexander’s heirs have just about consolidated everything up to the islands off the Ionian coast. This game allows for lots of reverses of fortune, though, so no guarantees what will happen before the end-of-game date.
I suspect I’ll be finished with this run later this week. After which I think I’m going to fire up Affinity and start a really big cartography project, the kind of thing that might end up in the eventual RPG book. Starting with a master map of the whole Mediterranean world, with maybe a few more-detailed local maps as well. I doubt any of that will be finished by the end of July, but maybe my patrons will have some pretty maps to look at in August.
July 21 (60 BCE)
Finished my Pax Romana run last night, and carefully documented the state of the world. That brings the Fourth Millennium timeline up to my planned date – about 60 BCE.
The post-Alexandrian empires have had about a century of actually getting along with each other and not going through round after round of civil wars. Which means they’ve both been able to urbanize and expand their territory. The Seleucids, in particular, have managed to do something interesting – wedged in between Rome and the Alexandrians, they’ve expanded northward into the Balkans, and the territory of the eastern Celts along the Danube River. They’ve got a whole network of military colonies in that whole region, acting as a matrix in which the Celts can be Hellenized, formed into a solid defensive line against the incursion of Germans from further north. If I can’t build that into an environment for lots of adventures, I need to turn in my badge.
Meanwhile, the Roman Republic is the biggest, most unified, and wealthiest of the major powers . . . but it’s not strong enough to fend off both wings of the post-Alexandrian empires at once. Italy is starting to seem like a morsel caught in the jaws of Hellenistic states to the north and south. In the last turn of the game, the Romans had to fend off attacks from both sides, and lost small but significant portions of territory in both directions. What’s worse, the Republic just suffered its first serious round of military reverses, with whole legions lost and its internal stability sliding – which suggests it may be in for this world’s equivalent of the bloody Social War.
In power politics, a tripod is the most unstable of structures, because the temptation is always there for two powers to gang up on the third. So in the present day of the Fourth Millennium, is the Roman Republic going to go down before the Hellenistic conquest? Or will the post-Alexandrians collapse into factional fighting (again) and give the Romans a chance to get the advantage? After all, it’s not as if the Hellenes of this era have ever managed to go very long without starting to imitate the moment-to-moment business of a bucket of crabs.
This is going to be a great setting for adventure stories and a tabletop RPG. Next step: to build some maps of the current situation, and maybe write the first gazetteer of the setting. That’s not going to be finished before the end of July, but I suspect I’ll have some neat material to show my patrons next month.
I’ve been doing a lot of back-of-my-head design work for the Fourth Millennium universe this weekend.
To recap: Fourth Millennium is an alternate-historical fantasy setting, somewhat resembling the situation in and around the Mediterranean basin in middle antiquity. There are a lot of divergences from our history: a Minoan successor state in Sicily that’s a counterweight to both Rome and Carthage, an Alexandrian empire that lasts for several generations before finally breaking apart, a Carthaginian empire that lasts much longer than the real one did, and so on. There are some subtle fantastic elements too, such as working ritual magic, the intervention of gods, and philosophical schools that open the door to special powers of body and mind.
I’ve written several pieces of fiction in this universe, and will probably write more. It’s an ideal setting for me to apply all the time I’ve spent studying the world of antiquity.
It’s also going to become a tabletop RPG setting at some point, and that’s what I’ve been spending a lot of time on over the last couple weeks.
At this point I think the canonical setup for a Fourth Millennium campaign will be a group of young but well-connected characters, firmly embedded in the social and political environment of a given civilized state. In a Hellenistic state, for example, the characters might be born to wealthy or noble families, starting out with obligations to king, home city, family, philosophical school, and so on. Characters will adventure to earn dóxa (glory) and arkhḗ (authority, social power), with the ultimate objective of “everlasting fame,” the kind of historical legacy that people will still be talking about centuries or millennia later. Adventures may involve:
Political intrigue
Fighting against brigands, pirates, barbarians, or other civilized states
Recovering treasures
Exploring strange lands
Gaining standing in a philosophical school through debates and writing learned treastises
Producing great works of art or architecture
Making scientific discoveries or inventing wonderful devices
Becoming a very important figure won’t be out of the question – a prominent strategos, a city or provincial governor, even a king or ruling queen. All of this will hopefully get game-mechanical support.
The models I’m looking toward here are in the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) arena, especially Pendragon and Runequest. I’ve already been doing some design work with BRP, and the system seems adaptable to a game such as I have in mind, so it’s a decent fit.
One neat feature did occur to me today. I suspect the “core book” for Fourth Millennium will focus on the Hellenistic kingdoms, from Sicily in the far west to the receding frontier of Alexander’s empire in the far east. Lots of focus on Hellenistic society, its structure, its customs, and so on. But if the core book does at all well, I could very easily write “splatbooks” describing other parts of the setting – the Roman Republic, the Carthginian Empire, the Parthian kingdom, Egypt (outside Alexandria and the Hellenistic core), and so on. Similar mechanics for each, but differences in character design and social structure. It would be easy, after a while, to mix cultural backgrounds and have a truly globe-trotting campaign.
I suspect I’ll be starting to outline the Fourth Millennium core book this month, and maybe even writing a few sections of the rules or setting background. We’ll see how much I have in hand by the end of July.
Incidentally, if you’re reading this post and you’re interested in seeing more about Fourth Millennium, you might consider signing up for my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/Sharrukin. Patrons get regular updates on all my creative projects, including interim drafts of books in progress. For the past couple of years, my patrons have mostly been seeing work on Architect of Worlds, but if you’re more interested in TTRPG development now might be a good time to sign up.
(Image credit: Angus McBride, cover image for Osprey Publishing, The Thracians: 700 BC-46 AD. I really wish Mr. McBride was still with us, and that I could afford to commission him for art for this project . . .)
June was a productive month. I made progress on building the Fourth Millennium timeline, especially using Notion to collect and organize all my notes. I also wrote a complete novelette, “Penthus at Bay,” from a standing start – over 15,000 words of new fiction set in the Fourth Millennium universe. All that and keeping up with my other commitments, too. Whew.
This month, I’m going to continue to focus on Fourth Millennium. I’m not planning to write any new fiction in July, unless a story idea really leaps out at me, but I’ll be continuing to push the timeline forward. I also plan to lay out the outline for the eventual Fourth Millennium setting-bible-slash-TTRPG-sourcebook, and possibly get started writing chunks of that.
Meanwhile, I have a few chores in relation to Architect of Worlds that need to be done, so that’s going on the agenda too.
Here’s the list:
Front Burner:
Fourth Millennium: Continue work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.
Fourth Millennium: Begin work to outline and write the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
Architect of Worlds: Deal with outstanding reader comments and errata, and finish setting up the page(s) for the book on this site.
Back Burner:
Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
Human Destiny: Continue rewriting and adding to the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
For my patrons: At the moment, I’m skeptical as to whether I’ll have enough genuinely new material to justify a charged release in July. Some combination of new Fourth Millennium timeline material and the first interim draft of the setting bible might reach the threshold, but we’ll see. Watch this space for status reports.
I spent the first half of June mostly working on tasks for my day job, and collecting notes for the Fourth Millennium universe. A lot of those notes are going into a specially designed Notion database. If I can figure out how to share that out in read-only form, as a flat document or as an online wiki, I’ll make it available for patrons and readers as a free release before the end of this month.
Meanwhile, earlier this week I had an inspiration for a story set in the Fourth Millennium timeline. Specifically, a story about the death of Alexander the Great and its immediate consequences, but with a number of alternate-historical details to lead the event in a different direction than happened in the Original History. I took a couple of days to work through the details in my head, and then I started writing. So far I’ve been knocking out at least a thousand words per day on that story. Best guess is that it will end up novelette length before it’s finished, and it’s likely to serve as a charged release for my patrons by the end of the month.
Progress! It’s nice to get back to work on a project that’s been lying fallow for a long time – my creative process seems to need that kind of refreshment every now and then.
May was a pretty big month. The final round of edits for Architect of Worlds is done, and the book is well and truly on the market. PDF sales are under way, and I’ve been hearing about sightings of the hardcopy book in the wild, although I haven’t personally seen it yet. I pulled together a submission package for the “Human Destiny” setting for the Chaosium design challenge. I also finished my university courses for the year, and although I haven’t seen my final grades yet, I’m reasonably confident I passed both courses “with distinction.”
That closes out one of the more demanding years I’ve ever had in my life. Starting last June I’ve had a flooded basement (which pushed me out of my usual living quarters and office space), some pretty extensive home repairs, an infestation of mice, yet another flooding incident (this time on the upper floors of the house), a nasty outbreak of office politics, and the biggest course-development project on the shortest time-scale I’ve ever had to work on. Amid all of this, it’s been a bit of a challenge to take on an aggressive course of university study and keep pushing my creative projects forward.
So, now that I’ve reached the summer of 2024 with my sanity more or less intact, I think I’m going to pivot to something different for the next few months. I’ve barely touched my Fourth Millennium or “Danassos” universe in over a year, and that’s going to make for a nice change of pace.
What will that involve? Well, I’m almost certainly going to get back to working on Twice-Crowned, my half-finished novel set in Danassos and Athens in the time of the Second Peloponnesian War. I also have a couple pieces of short fiction in the back of my mind, and I might try to get those into readable form. Finally, I think I’ll work on the Fourth Millennium back story timeline a bit, and start collecting notes for what may one day be a setting bible and tabletop RPG supplement for the universe.
None of which is to say that I’m not going to work on plausible interstellar world-building or the “Human Destiny” future history any more. Just that I feel the need to take a break from those for at least 2-3 months and see if I can make progress on some other projects.
So, here’s the planning roster for June:
Front Burner:
Fourth Millennium: Resume work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
Fourth Millennium: Resume work to rebuild the alternate-historical timeline.
Fourth Millennium: Write at least one short story set somewhere in the timeline.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Write a new Aminata Ndoye story, set when she’s about seventeen years old and attending an academy for officer candidates for the interstellar service.
Human Destiny: Continue rewriting and adding to the setting bible (BRP sourcebook).
Great Lands: Begin work to revise the geography and back history of the setting.
As far as items for my patrons go: I’m going to work hard to have at least 10,000-20,000 words of new material down by the end of June, in which case there will be a charged release for my patrons. Most likely this will consist of some new fiction, and possibly the first stab at a Fourth Millennium setting bible. Look for a Status Report or two in the course of June.
