1. The draft of Shards of Tomorrow is plugging along. The draft is 38 pages without illustrations, any creature stat blocks, a starter adventure, or some of the background material I still want to write. At this point, we're talking at least 48 pages for the core rules, considering I have almost 30 illustrations done. 64 is not out of the realm of possibility (but again, not chasing page counts... just taking a status check).
2. This post might come off as cynical, and I don't mean for it to. In the last few weeks, I have seen the best of my family, friends, and the various communities I belong to, as people offer support, friendship, food, rides, encouraging texts... I am in a great place right now (other than the 8" incision across my throat and radiation hanging over my head), but that doesn't change the truth of this post, and its relevance to world building.
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Because people are stupid, petty, selfish, and superstitious. We see outliers. Kansas City Chiefs fans donated over 300k to a Buffalo Bills charity after last week's game. Outliers happen. I am living amid outliers. But the general truth holds. And this truth deeply impacts worldbuilding.
Why doesn't every starship have light-powered drives? Because it is expensive to produce them, and it's hard, and you aren't going to make enough money from one of those drives to justify the cost. Nobody is going to develop one to explore the stars, or to build faster medical transports, or to increase the response time of interplanetary militias. It's not worth it. However, we're lucky that two rich guilders have a bet going, and one of them has a million credits on the line if he can win a race against a meteor, and he thinks a light drive might be the thing that puts him over the edge. His selfish pursuit of winning a bet may lead to an upgrade in technology. We just have to cross our fingers that the other guy doesn't cancel the bet. It's our only hope.
When I read The Good Earth for the first time maybe 15 years ago, I was rooting for the main character. I saw that he started the story in poverty, under the thumb of a petty, cruel landlord. He had it hard. But he was noble, and he was going to turn his life around. And I believed he could do it, largely because he was Chinese, and I was American, and I already knew that Americans were pretty awful in general, but maybe a Chinese man living a hundred years ago was better than the people I saw around me. Nope. By the end of the novel, he's using opium and has taken a second wife; he treats his faithful first wife like trash and takes advantage of his own workers.
Because people are gonna people.
So every time I come up with a story element for the worldbuilding portion of the program, I follow it up with 'how did they f*** this up?' A platoon of angelic creatures from another galaxy came to bring life and hope to this cluster? Mm. Let's kill them and take their stuff. We have an armada that can unite the cluster? Let's use it to isolate planets from each other and milk the locals for every last credit.
The trick with this is that there is very little 'true evil'. Yes, there are the Hitlers, and they are bad news. They are pathological. But there are a lot of Trumps (sorry, not sorry) who are just selfish and greedy and they look at everything as a grift, and everyone as a mark. And, as the last several years have proven, there are a lot of willing marks.
It's my fundamental objection to conspiracy theories in general. At some point, a conspiracy theory assumes that people are smart and can keep it together for long periods of time. It assumes that the guy in charge of monitoring my every activity won't get bored and start playing the snake game or see how his fantasy football team is doing instead.
What could we do with 3 billion hours of human investment? We could probably end world hunger. Or we could make sure every veteran had a home to live in. We could re-build the water system in Flint, Michigan. Or, we could play Fornite.
Cause humans gonna human. And other species, even if they are not human, are going to respond like humans do. They might be bound by superstitions or traditions or cultural differences, but they are still going to follow the path of least resistance eventually. It's why we love dogs but do memes about cats. Dogs are noble and kind-hearted. Cats are us - we want to take a nap, have a full food bowl, and wake people up at 3 in the morning because chaos is more fun than not chaos.
This idea influences my writing as well. In the story I'm working on, Kirby finds another sentient computer system for the first time in 800 years, and one of his first thoughts is that he better be able to take this thing out if it becomes a competitor. Kirby is a good bot. He's programmed to do the right thing. But if it's him or another bot, it's not a question. He's taking that mother down.
The older I get, the harder it is to separate my appraisal of humanity from my fictional ideas, especially in the superhero genre. I've found myself drawn to "pulp era" low-powered heroics, as it seems easier to deal with a world where a guy in a cat suit boxes Nazis alongside his buddy who wears a gas mask and uses a knockout gas gun, than to imagine a world where all these high-powered abilities and super-advanced tech haven't been abused and/or changed out world beyond recognition :)
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