I didn’t get as much done in February as I had originally hoped, although those milestones were probably more than a little optimistic. I wrote a little bit of Twice-Crowned, and made it almost to page 40 in the layout and book design for Architect of Worlds.
The only really new element in February: I’m starting to use the documentation tool Notion to gather and collate notes for the Danassos setting. That’s really promising as a method for archiving world-building notes for a given setting – much better than my usual procedure involving a bunch of disorganized Word documents. For now, I’m using it to support work on Twice-Crowned and to prepare for work on the Fourth Millennium RPG book later this year. I also anticipate it may be a very useful tool for the Human Destiny setting – I can see using it to cleanly document Architect of Worlds designs for various star systems, for example.
So in any case, this month’s planning message is going to look a lot like last month’s, aside from some minor tweaks.
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Tentatively plan to finish through page 70 (out of approximately 180).
Second Priority:
Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
Danassos: Gather notes in Notion for an eventual Fourth Millennium book.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.
As usual, while I focus primarily on Architect, I don’t expect a charged release for my patrons this month unless I get really ambitious with the novel or some other piece of fiction. There will probably be at least one free update – the next partial interim draft of the Architect book design.
Quick note today, to discuss progress on Architect of Worlds.
Slowly but surely, I’m improving my layout skills in Adobe InDesign. In particular, I’ve developed workflows for producing chapter title pages, managing several levels of header, cleaning up font variations, producing mathematical formulae as vector images and placing them in the draft, building tables with a consistent format, and so on. It’s getting to the point where I can pretty reliably lay out a page per hour, which means I ought to be able to make at least a little progress almost every day.
The biggest change I’ve made is that I’m no longer trying to produce filler art as I go. Pages that end up with a significant amount of white space are going to be left as is for now. Once I’ve got the whole book laid out, I’ll go back and select all the filler art that’s needed. Where I need images to help support the text, those are being selected or generated and inserted into the draft along the way – that’s actually one of the things that slows me down the most.
As of this afternoon, I’ve gotten all the way to the end of “The Science of Star Maps,” or about page 31 in the integrated draft. I think I’m going to be making slow but steady progress from this point onward. My proposed milestone for the month of February (about 60 pages completed in this month alone) seems awfully optimistic, though. I’ll probably be somewhere in the range of page 35-40 by the end of this month instead.
I’ll probably continue to provide partial drafts each month for patrons to review, as free updates. Honestly, the next few months may not see much in the way of charged releases, while I work on this as my primary project.
One note, for those of you who are reviewing the incremental drafts and providing potential errata and other feedback. Right now, I’m concentrating on getting the book laid out! Any comments or proposed tweaks to the text are being heard, much appreciated, and carefully stored away, but you’re not likely to see them reflected in the draft until I’ve got the book fully laid out in rough. Once that’s done, I’ll be doing a polishing pass, to include building the table of contents and credits page, polishing up the layout, adding filler art, and making any final corrections and tweaks to the text.
Patience. We’re definitely in the home stretch on this project!
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.
January was a good month for working on Architect of Worlds. I started out planning to build a “toy” version of the book, mostly to learn Adobe InDesign techniques and have something to show off for patrons, but plans change. At the moment I’m going all-in on building the book itself, and so far I’ve finished initial layout and design for about the first 22 pages. That’s going to be the primary project for the next few months, I think.
I didn’t get a lot of other creative work done last month, and I do want to make some forward progress on something while I continue to work on Architect. In particular, I’d like to get some fiction written; it’s been a few months since I’ve produced any new stories. Best candidate right now is to write a few more chapters of Twice-Crowned.
All of which makes this month’s priorities pretty straightforward:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Tentatively plan to finish through page 60 (out of approximately 180).
Second Priority:
Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
Danassos: Gather notes for an eventual Fourth Millennium book.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.
As has been consistent for the last few months, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in odd moments while I focus primarily on Architect. There might be a charged release for my patrons this month, if I end up producing enough new items to justify that, but we’ll see how things go.
A few items to report incremental progress on today.
Layout for Architect of Worlds has started in earnest. I’m learning Adobe InDesign as I go, but I’ve already taught myself a number of techniques that will prove useful. At the moment I’ve got about 20 pages of layout roughed out, all of the “Introduction” and getting into the “Science of Star Maps” section. I had thought to build a “toy” layout using excerpts from throughout the draft, but instead I’m just forging ahead and building the final layout in full. At the end of each day’s work I export the current state of the book to a PDF and give it a once-over to catch any obvious problems. Once I have 40-50 pages finished, I’ll probably take that to a printer and make sure it looks okay on paper as well. In the meantime, I think I’ll share the interim layouts with my patrons each month so everyone can see progress.
I’ve been applying Architect to a side project – developing a planetary system for the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG. Call it a bit of playtesting for the main book, and a worked example for how it might be applied to a given game universe. Might post some of those results here over the next couple of weeks.
One thing this side project has accomplished – it’s forced me to work through the new Step Thirty-Two (Fine-Tune Climate) of the design sequence, and I find that material needs more work. It’s clumsy, it seems to provide unintuitive results, and at least one of my readers has been having trouble with it as written. So that’s high on my list of components to test and rewrite as I work on the layout. Step Twenty-Four, Geophysical Parameters, is also likely to get some polish – if only because the math in that step is very ugly at present.
Meanwhile, in odd moments I’ve been collecting notes for the eventual Fourth Millennium project, and I’m about to start reading a novel or two for the end-of-month review.
Biggest obstacle in the past week has been that my whole household has come down with some nasty seasonal crud – not the plague, apparently, just a bad cold. I’ve been severely lacking in energy and focus for the past few days. Still, I seem to be on track to have a few things to share by the end of the month. No charged releases for my patrons, but maybe a freebie or two.
Alexandros III of Makedon, called “The Great,” first Great King of the Argead dynasty (2702-2735 EK) (Image by Arienne King, original found here)
By the reckoning of years used in the Danassan Hegemony, the date is 3000 Ἔτος Κόσμου, the three thousandth year since the creation of the world. A new millennium is at hand, an age of prosperous cities and growing empires, new gods and ancient mysteries, science and darkest magic. It seems likely to be an age of conflict as well. Ambitious generals and kings struggle for power, and barbarian peoples look with envy on the wealth and sophistication of civilized lands. What history will reveal next, not even the gods can know for sure.
Fourth Millennium has been conceived as a game setting, derived from some of my own fiction: short stories set in the Greek “Heroic Age” as well as the novel-in-progress Twice-Crowned and its eventual sequels. It’s grown past its literary beginnings, though, taking on shape as a rich alternate-historical fantasy world.
Fourth Millennium echoes the Mediterranean world of our own history, in the first century before the Common Era . . . but fate has taken its own turns here. An offshoot of Minoan civilization survived, creating a neo-Hellenic culture in which women hold religious and political power. The Peloponnesian War may have taken place, but its outcome was less viciously harmful to the Hellenic civilization at its peak. Alexander the Great may have died young, but his son survived and came out on top of the civil wars that followed his death. The Roman Republic is on the rise, but it faces tough competition in the East, in the form of an Hellenistic world that is stronger and more unified.
Adventurers can come from a variety of origins: Greeks of several varieties, Romans and other Latins, Celts, Germans, Berbers, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Judeans, Persians, and many more. They may be warriors and soldiers, oracles and seers, legates and senators, or philosophers and scientists. There will be a variety of possible campaign structures: military stories, politics and intrigue, high-stakes commercial ventures, mysteries, exploration, possibly all of these at once.
The concept in my head is for a Cypher System game, published under the Monte Cook Games open license. I can already see the broad outlines of the game, and a lot of details that will fit the setting. I’m still debating whether to write one book or two here – there may be so much setting detail, so much to suggest a variety of structures for campaigns and adventures, that it won’t all fit in one volume.
Best guess is that I’ll be pulling together notes for Fourth Millennium while I work on getting Architect of Worlds out the door in the first half of this year. I might post a few fragments and notes here, or push them to my patrons as small freebies. Once Architect is finished, assuming my muse is still engaged by then, serious work on this project is likely to get under way.
Have to say, the more I think about this project the more excited I am for it. The ancient Mediterranean world has been a personal fascination for over half my life; it will be nice to get back to it as a game designer. Not to mention I’ve learned a lot since I wrote GURPS Greece, coming up on thirty years ago . . .
December went about as expected – I spent a lot of time learning Adobe InDesign and starting to plan the book design and layout for Architect of Worlds, and didn’t produce much of anything new.
At this point I think I’ve learned enough that I can at least start putting together the final design for the book. The immediate objective is going to be a “toy” version of the book, no more than 18-20 pages of excerpts from the complete draft. That won’t contain anything resembling a usable subset of the draft, but it will show off all the bits of design and layout I need to assemble: blocks of text, section headers at different levels, chapter title pages, a title page and acknowledgements page for the book as a whole, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae, filler art, and so on. The idea is to have something to show off for patrons and interested readers, while building a framework on which I can hang the whole book. That’s going to be the big project in January. Whether I’ll finish this month remains to be seen – this is a very new endeavor for me.
Meanwhile, in my spare time I’ve been playing around with my Danassos setting, the alternate-historical fantasy world in which my novel-in-progress Twice-Crowned takes place. I spent odd moments in November and December using some of my tabletop games to generate an alternate history for the setting, up through about 50 BCE. In the process, one of the Muses seems to have inspired me – I think I see how to build that setting into a very playable tabletop RPG, as well as a backdrop for more stories.
The working title for that setting book is probably going to be something like The Fourth Millennium, because the current end-date for the timeline is right around the year 3000 by the setting’s dominant reckoning. It’s got a lot of interesting features: a Mediterranean world divided between Hellenistic and Latin empires, plenty of internal conflict in each empire and the possibility of a big war between them, barbarian peoples around the fringes looking to take bites, new gods and religious movements, magic, new technologies of clockwork and steam, the possibility of monsters lurking in the shadows. It’s a world in which we could adventure at the height of the imperial era without being beholden to the actual course of ancient history. Best guess is this would make a good Cypher System game, published under Monte Cook Games’ new open license.
That’s not going to be a top priority any time soon – I’m focusing on Architect over the next few months – but it might occupy some spare cycles. Not to mention I want to make more progress on Twice-Crowned and maybe write a couple other stories in that setting.
Here’s this month’s priorities:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Finish studying book layout techniques.
Architect of Worlds: Begin setting up a “toy” design for the book.
Second Priority:
Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
Danassos: Write a short story drawn from the setting timeline.
Danassos: Produce a new interim draft of the setting timeline, and otherwise gather notes for an eventual Fourth Millennium book.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.
As before, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in odd moments while I focus primarily on Architect. It remains unlikely that any of this will amount to a charged release for my patrons this month, but there may be a couple of smaller freebies. We’ll see how the month goes.
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.
Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore
This is a rather different review than my usual. The book in question isn’t a work of fiction, it’s a coaching toolkit for would-be authors who want to write fiction.
I first came across Stant Litore when I read his book on Scriptural exegesis, Lives of Unforgetting. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was also a genre author, and that he has written a lengthy series of “toolkits” for writers. Many of these have titles of the form “Write [X] Your Readers Won’t Forget,” and for the most recent book in the series, the “X” is magic systems.
I’ll confess that when I write fantasy fiction, the notion of developing a “magic system” mildly repels me. I think of magic as wonder-working and miracle, not the kind of formal, rule-based endeavor that ought to be governed by a “system.” To my delight, this book addressed exactly that tension on the very first page, which was enough to pull me into the rest of the text.
The book is organized in a very workmanlike manner. Each section addresses a single question that the writer needs to think about when developing a magic-infused world. What is magic like, how do people in the world experience it? How do magicians experience it, and how is that different from everyone else’s understanding? How do magicians fit into the community, if they do at all? What are the personal and other costs of magic? And so on.
In each section, Stant Litore discusses the issue at hand, explaining why it’s crucial to the author’s vision for their fantasy world. He provides plenty of options and examples, quoting from well-known works of fantasy fiction. Then the section is closed out by one or more writing exercises, encouraging the reader to work through the details for their own fantasy setting. The book closes with a sample worksheet, collecting in one place all the considerations discussed throughout.
I don’t normally find books of this kind to be all that useful, but I suspect Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget is going to be an exception. I’m considering formally working through it to help flesh out the two fantasy settings in which I work. If I have any quarrel with the book in its current state, it might be that it’s too short. Just on first reading, I can see several ways to expand on what Stant Litore has done here.
Still, I suspect anyone interested in developing a fantasy setting, whether for gaming or literary purposes, will find this a useful resource. And if the quality of this book is any indication, I would seriously consider checking out the rest of the Litore Toolkits for Fiction Writers. Very highly recommended.
November saw a big milestone: the first complete rough draft of Architect of Worlds, shared with my patrons and a few selected readers on the last day of the month.
That accomplishment doesn’t mean the content of Architect has been finalized, by any means. While I don’t expect any more big changes to the “rules” mechanisms, I’m almost certainly going to polish the prose, clean up the mathematical formulae, and produce a number of graphs and diagrams to help support the text.
The big task, though, is going to be to start laying the book out for publication. Layout is a completely new skill set for me, so I expect to spend a fair amount of time mastering the basic skills before there’s substantial progress on the book. That’s where most of my creative time in December of 2022 is likely to go.
So, here’s this month’s priorities, arranged the same way as in November:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Study and master book layout techniques.
Second Priority:
Danassos: Continue work on the new rough draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
Danassos: Write a short story drawn from the setting timeline.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.
As you can see, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in between studying Adobe InDesign or examining other small-press products for layout pointers. At this point I find it kind of unlikely that any of this will amount to a charged release for my patrons this month, but there may be a couple of smaller freebies as pseudo-holiday-gifts.
Incidentally, I’ve already mentioned this elsewhere, but for my patrons and anyone else who’s interested: last month is the last time I plan to charge my patrons for any Architect of Worlds content. Any further changes to the draft are going to be incremental, in service to getting the book ready for release sometime in (hopefully the first half of) 2023. My patrons at the $2 and above can expect to get a free copy of the book if and when it’s ready.
What’s in store for Architect after it gets released? Well, I’ll almost certainly continue to keep an eye on the science as it develops, and I may write the occasional blog post here on the subject. Good chance there will be a second edition of the book in a few years, too. That endeavor isn’t going to be a “once and done” project, I suspect.
