Orphan of the Stars: City Stats as Capital

In my previous post, I noted that physical capital can provide a basis for political power.  To represent this, I settled on Bill Stoddard's GURPS City Stats.

This represents the planetary lord maintaining his planet's infrastructure and expanding his power by expanding his industrial, commercial or population base.  Naturally, City Stats focus on cities, while I'm focusing on planets, but while this abstracts the gargantuan nature of planets a bit, it works well enough for my purposes.

Naturally, you can reversen engineer my material to work with actual cities (You'll have to adjust some of the costs, though)

Orphans of the Stars: Meditations on Politics

The first thing we chose to focus on, and what this series will devote all of its attention to, is politics.  I wrote the following post as a way of explaining the directions we could go, and how I saw politics. Eventually, it should be noted, that my client chose for extreme political systems, which means politics-as-wargame, which is what the final document looks at.

Orphan of the Stars: Iteration 1 Notes

This week I take a break from Psi-Wars to present: Orphan of the Stars

At the year's end (in the heart of Iteration 5 for Psi-Wars), someone approached me to write up some setting material for them, one inspired by a mixture of Dune, GURPS Biotech and, especially, a deep political gameplay.  That last is the focus of my work on Orphan of the Stars, and today, I present the Iteration 1 notes that I cobbled together based on his request, an outline of where I saw development going.

Like Psi-Wars, Iteration 1 for Orphan of the Stars, which wasn't even called Orphan of the Stars at the time, is a basic outline of how to make it work with as little work as possible, though in this case it was more of a discussion of my thoughts and where my patron could go in his own direction if he chose not to retain my services.  Thus, you can see it as a sort of guiding document.

State of the Blog: June

This post is a bit early, though I suppose given my preference for posting on Thursdays, it fits.  I wanted to take a second and talk about what's up, what isn't, and what the blog might look like over the next couple of months.

First and foremost, as anyone will children already knew, my ambition for maintaining my writing after the birth of my son was... ambitious.  I have had entire days where all of my hours were working, eating and taking care of him.  He's honestly not so bad, most of the time, but sometimes, I simply have no time to write, and when I do, I'm so exhausted that it's difficult to find focus.  That doesn't mean I've stopped, of course, but the breakneck pace of 4 posts a week, plus a patreon post, is turning out to be a bit much.  That, paired with losing my lead time to Orphan of the Stars, means I need a break to catch up.

So here's the plan.

Orphans of the Stars

If Orphans is going to slow me down then, by god, it's also going to be what gives me a break.  The fellow who commissioned the work also gave me permission to do with it what I pleased: it's my work, he just commissioned it.  What I have, in addition to the document itself, is my personal design journal, and my thoughts on why it worked when other works haven't.  Over the next two weeks, I'm going to share this material with you, culminating in a Patreon exclusive access to the Orphans of the Stars rules for political gameplay, which will be available to all $5 patrons for June only.

This document breaks down Boardroom and Curia and various City Stat works to create an extremely detailed look at playing a "domain management" campaign.  I've designed it for a sort of "cut down" version of running planets, but in principle I think you could use its lessons for more down-to-earth games.

This will come with a change to my Patreon payment policy: currently, when you pledge, you are not charged.  Only at the beginning of the month do you get charged. Technically, that means you can pledge, access my material, and then delete your pledge, and never pay.  I've only had one person do this in the entire time I've run my Patreon, but I'd rather forestall it happening in the future, and I think you get enough material from my patreon to be worth the jump.  I also think most people don't realize that this is the case, and assume they get charged as soon as they join!  Now, this will actually be true.

I'll make the change on the 31st.  If you want to join, I recommend waiting until the 1st of June!

The Houses of the Alliance

As of this moment, I have got between 10 to 20k words on the Houses alone, and I need even more. What I thought might be simple has turned into something larger than the Empire, because I need to discuss an entire government's worth of organizations plus the very distinct character options that noble houses present.  So it's not that I have nothing, it's just that what I have hasn't been polished off yet.  I think you guys will enjoy them, though they represent a distinct shift in tone from Star Wars.  It looks to be about 2 months worth of posts, at this point, but we'll see.

I will hopefully release this after I finish up with my Orphan of the Stars posts.  It should come as a big chunk to all $3+ patrons, and then the rest of you will see it post-by-post on the blog.

The History of Tech

I know I promised it this month, but the outtakes of my work turned into Tech Week, so hopefully that'll mollify everyone.  I'm still hard and work on this, it's just that it turned out to be more work than I expected!  It also turned out to be very useful to my work on the houses, as they're steeped in ancient tradition.  Hopefully, I can finish it and release it as a series on my Patreon (pricing TBD).

And Beyond!

So that's it.  I've been able to maintain some pacing, but not as much as I would like.  I want to thank everyone for their patience, and I hope to see you next month!

Tech Week 4: Explosives Revisted (A Patreon Post)

It's Tech Week! Based on feedback or elements that have come up as I've worked on setting design, I've come up with some additional details on technology that I've been using to refine my material from the third iteration. Eventually, I'd like to separate the tech material off into its own little book, but there's still quite some work before I can do that.

Why is this on Patreon and not on my blog? Well, first, I don't want to interfere with the flow of my setting material and, second, this gets a little rambling and acts as something of a design journal.

Today, I revisit explosives. This may seem an odd choice, but explosives and infrastructure have a symbiotic relationship in the action genre. How many charges do you need to take out a factory? What sort of bombs are at your disposal? When I worked on the insurgency, I realized how important this was, and so I offer a thorough study of appropriate explosives and their impact on the Psi-Wars world, including 5 sample structures you can destroy!

This post is available to all $1+ patrons.  If you're patron check it out!  If you're not, I'd love to have you.

Tech Week Part 3: Infotech Revisited (A Patreon Post)

It's Tech Week! Based on feedback or elements that have come up as I've worked on setting design, I've come up with some additional details on technology that I've been using to refine my material from the third iteration. Eventually, I'd like to separate the tech material off into its own little book, but there's still quite some work before I can do that.

Why is this on Patreon and not on my blog? Well, first, I don't want to interfere with the flow of my setting material and, second, this gets a little rambling and acts as something of a design journal.

Today, I revisit infotech. So far, I've just breezed past computers and used default assumptions for sensory technology. With this post, I dive deeper into what I really want out of my sensors, computers and what interstellar commuication infrastructure looks like.

This post is available to all $1+ patrons.  If you're not already a patron, I'd love to have you!

Tech Week Part 2: Armor Revisited (A Patreon Post)

It's Tech Week! Based on feedback or elements that have come up as I've worked on setting design, I've come up with some additional details on technology that I've been using to refine my material from the third iteration. Eventually, I'd like to separate the tech material off into its own little book, but there's still quite some work before I can do that.

Why is this on Patreon and not on my blog? Well, first, I don't want to interfere with the flow of my setting material and, second, this gets a little rambling and acts as something of a design journal.

Today, I revisit armor. Action stories love fist fights, which make no sense in GURPS when fighting guys with armor, and the realism of this is questionable. Today, I look at some optional house rules to fix that, and then I dive deeper into the armor design systems offered in various Pyramid articles, including rules for using Battleweave and Cerablate Resin with them.

This is available to all $1+ Patrons.  If you're a patron, check it out!  If you're not, I'd love to have you.