This post should have come out yesterday but life has been quite crazy for me the last few days (and weeks really).

Looking Back

For the most part I accomplished everything I set out to do. I got the Sathar Cave System and Hum Calendar published as well as the updated engine data for the new starship construction system. What I didn’t get to at all, once, again, is the Pursale ship for the Ghost Ship Osiris module.

Most of my spare time this last month was eaten up by working on the Frontier Explorer. So much so that my buffer of articles has been completely used up and I’m writing this one a day late. The good news is that the issue is almost done.

The other thing that suffered a bit this last month, especially toward the end, was the Frontier Timeline posts on Twitter. There were a few days that I was so busy that posting the event (or two) for those days completely slipped my mind and they didn’t get posted until the next day. The summary post with all the events from the last month will be coming out tomorrow along with the updated comprehensive document (which is starting to get quite large. This month saw the beginning of the end in the the Saurian sector of space as the sathar begin their final push to eliminate the Saurians.

Looking Forward

The end of April will mark the first full year of my blog. I’m amazed it’s been that long already and I’m very grateful to all my readers and supporters. Toward the end of the month or possibly in early May I’ll do a “year in review” post. The exact timing is a little uncertain as I’ll be traveling during that time frame. Early May is my 25th wedding anniversary and my wife and I will be gone starting in late April on a two week vacation including a 7 day cruise where I will have little to no internet access. So we’ll see what I can get queued up before I leave.

While not directly related to the blog, April will see the publication of issue 24 of the Frontier Explorer. I’ll be sure to post a link here when it is available.

As I already mentioned, tomorrow will see the next Detailed Frontier Timeline post. Beyond that I’m not really sure what the month will bring. I think that regardless of how far I get, I’ll be posting at least the sketches of the Pursale ship as that will give me some incentive to get back to that project. I also have some setting “fluff” pieces that have been on my mind for a while that I might flesh out and publish.

On the starship construction system, I now think I have everything I need to have it work as a replacement for the standard system in Star Frontiers. There are some other tweaks I want to make to the system but it is otherwise good to go. I think I’ll start publishing the details specs for a number of standard ships from the game in the new system as I work on cleaning up the write-up of the system.

I also think that I now have everything for the Death at Rosegard adventure as well and it’s time for me to fully write that up. I’m sure I’ll discover lots of little bits and pieces I’ve left off as I go so that may take some time to finish.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is designing one or more small, introductory adventures for Star Frontiers. Something that can take someone completely unfamiliar with the game and walk them through the basic game mechanics. I’m thinking at least two small adventures: the first a solo introductory adventure for someone completely new to the game, and the second a simple adventure that can be used to introduce others to the core of the game. The idea is still percolating in my brain but the beginnings might happen this month. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Once again thank you to everyone reading the blog and especially to those supporting me on Patron. I really appreciate the feedback and support you provide.

For those of you that read these “state of the Frontier” posts, you probably realize that my plans got turned all upside down this month. The plan was to focus on Ghost Ship Osiris and the Death at Rosegard adventures with maybe some other items in the background. Well, the background jumped to foreground and then the month was over.

Looking Back

I had intended to work on the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure but for the most part that didn’t happen. I did get some initial sketches done of the Pursale ship. But I’m not completely happy with them and they definitely need some work.

Death at Rosegard didn’t even get touched. I honestly don’t think I even thought about it this month. I have now added it to my list of draft posts, however, and so it will be bugging me to get it finished now when I look at active projects.

What did come to the forefront was the beginning of the “Create a Star System” series. Triggered by a couple of posts I made on the timeline project, that series got stuck in my brain and seriously worked on. This month we got the details on creating the system data and actually drawing the map (including a video of the drawing process). The drawing of the map didn’t take as long as I expected but it took me a lot longer to actually do the write-up in the posts than I was anticipating.

I also posted a short bit on my new starship construction system covering hull types, armor, and sensors systems. Those are the last of the pieces of the system that differ significantly from the standard starship components in the core Star Frontiers Knight Hawks rules. I’ve been thinking about the system and realize I need a little bit more work on the engines so there is one more post on that before I can pull it all together.

Behind the scenes, the timeline project continues unabated. I also started working on pulling the next issue of the Frontier Explorer together, more on a management side, but things are progressing.

Looking Forward

So what’s in store for this month? We’ll start the month off with the now usual timeline post. I have entries for half the days this month (up through the 12th and a few random days after that) plus about half of April as well. So at some point in the next week or so I’ll be sitting down to flesh out the rest of the events happening over the next 30-60 days in the Frontier. We’re still a bit away from the massive Sathar fleets showing up in the Frontier but the activity is starting to heat up.

Now that I missed it last month, I plan on getting the sathar inhabited cave system finished and out this month. It really just needs some work cleaning up the map so I really don’t have an excuse.

After that, I intend to finish up the “Building a Star System” series with the Fochrik system’s calendar. That will wrap up that series for now.

I’m not sure what the 4th post of the month will be. Most likely it will be the last little bit about the engines in the new starship construction system. I’ll be working on the Pursale ship but I don’t know that I’ll have anything ready to go on that before the month is out unless I do a post just about the sketches and general design. Or it could be that something else grabs my interest and I run with that. We’ll see where it falls out.

The other thing I’ll be working on behind the scenes are the Frontier Explorer and another fanzine. There will be a big push on my part this month to get the next issue of the Frontier Explorer ready since we plan on releasing it in April. Keep your eyes on the magazine’s website for more details as they come out. We have all the articles we need, we just need to finish polishing our new layout. I’ve also been asked to head up another fanzine, this one more focused on general OSR topics and probably more fantasy focused. It’s in its infant stages but I have a big team and plan on leveraging my Frontier Explorer experience to put them to work and minimize what I need to do. More director than front-line worker bee. There will be more information on that in the coming months as well.

I think that’s it for now. I had a good month and am looking forward to a busy but exciting March. See you all around the Frontier.

I seem to have gotten into a pretty good rhythm of posting this month by getting a post out on every Tuesday. I’m going to try to keep to that schedule going forward. I’m not sure I will be able to add to that schedule (see the big announcement below) but hope to not fall below that.

Looking Back

I actually managed to meet all of my expected targets this month. The big one was getting the next section of the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure – Osiris Under Siege – finished. The full text went out to my Patreon supporters on the 18th with the post going up here on the 22nd.

Along the way we got the Laco Sand Dragon, which I mentioned in last month’s “state of the Frontier” post and finally got to use in my on-line game last Friday, the post on the Clarion calendar system, and one post on the starship construction system.

That calendar system post came completely out of the blue as I was working on the timeline project. The starship construction system post was originally going to go out the day the calendar system post dropped but I wanted to post the calendar system immediately. That will probably be a recurring theme for those construction system posts. I’m using them primarily as filler when I have a slow week. Although if I get a lot of requests, they might get a higher priority. Similarly for the calendar post. I had a lot of fun doing that one and think I might work out the calendars (and in some cases system details) for all of the systems in the Frontier. Let me know what you think.

Looking Forward

The next step for the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure is to design the alien craft that is embedded in the center of the Osiris asteroid. That may take a while as it’s a fairly big ship. I hope to have that design done, probably as the last post of the month.

I need to get back to finishing up the Murder at Rosegard adventure as well. You’ll probably see a post on the sathar inhabited cave system for that adventure which really is the last location map (I think) I need. Otherwise, there is a lot of writing to put together all the bits and pieces I’ve posted into a coherent package.

You’ll probably get another starship construction post at some point in the month together with the update on the Frontier Timeline. I have a few other ideas for posts included a requested post on how I make system maps, a discussion on starship construction in the Frontier, and some thoughts on Spacefleet crews. Those last three are just ideas with nothing really concrete written as of yet but if you’re interested in me fleshing them out, let me know and I’ll bump them up on the priority list.

But Wait …

I mentioned at the top of the post that I had a big announcement. Starting in February I am officially relaunching the Frontier Explorer fan magazine.

The first new issue will probably come out in April, exactly one year after it would have come out if WotC had not asked me to put it on hold. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past year and given all that has happened and the information I’ve received from WotC, it’s time to get the magazine back up and running.

I might get started on this and have to stop, but as of now, I’ve told WotC of my intention to restart it and they haven’t told me that I can’t. So keep an eye out here and on the Frontier Explorer website for more details as I work out the plans going forward. I’m hoping to get some more community involvement in the production of the magazine and broaden its scope but we’ll have to see how that pans out.

And that’s it for now. Things are moving along nicely and I hope you are still enjoying the content being produced. Feel free to share suggestions, questions, or ideas in the comment section

Happy New Year’s Eve! I thought about doing an “end of the year” recap but decided that I’ll save those types of retrospectives for the anniversaries of the site going live, so you’ll see that post in late April/early May. For this post I’m just going to look at December.

Looking Back

If you look back at my State of the Frontier post from November, you’ll notice immediately that I only finished half of what I had hoped to do, namely the PGC Records Vault adventure location. I actually got exactly zero work done on the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure.

There were a couple of reasons for that. First, the records vault project ended up taking a lot more time than I had anticipated. As I’ve said before, it always surprises me how much work it takes to turn my notes and ideas in to a finished form that I feel is usable by others. Maybe I’m putting to much detail into things. You’ll have to let me know.

Another issue was the holiday season. All the extra activities that go on this time of the year definitely cut into the time I have to spend on these projects. I need to remember that fact for future years and either build up a backlog of posts, plan lots of small things, or just accept the fact that I’m not going to get much done in December.

The final struggle I have with getting the Ghost Ship Osiris project done is that on a fundamental level it doesn’t call to me as strongly as some of the other projects. While I’m a fan of FrontierSpace, it just doesn’t hold the same place in my heart as Star Frontiers. So it’s often easy for me to put that project on hold when a Star Frontiers related one pops up. And it just goes to show that I’m not really doing this for the money since of all the projects I’m working on that one is a commercial project that will generate some revenue.

I have managed to keep the Star Frontiers timeline going as posts from @StarFrontiers on Twitter. That project will continue foward for several more years regardless of what happens otherwise. I’ve been having fun with that. Some of the posts this last month were activities from the online game I’ve been running. Unfortunately, the December sessions of that game fell victim to holiday activity conflicts and the timeline has caught up and passed the players so unless they manage to get in a some serious time jumps, their activities won’t be showing up any more.

Looking Forward

So what is coming up in January? We’ll start the year off with an update of the timeline, posting all the events of the last month which include the first of the events occurring in sathar space.

Then I’m going to buckle down and work on Ghost Ship Osiris. I’m all caught up on my Star Frontiers projects, or at least they are at a good stopping point so I can focus on this. At the very least, I want to finish the room descriptions and describe what happens when the PCs arrive at the outpost for the first time. I don’t think I’ll get much past that in January as I start teaching a class at the local university that will take up some of my free time.

While I’m working on the Outpost Osiris description, I won’t have much to post until its finished. In the intervening time I have a little critter I cooked up for my on-line game that I’ll be sharing. Additionally, several people have expressed interest in seeing more of my starship construction system so I’ll be posting bits of that for people to comment on as well.

I’m sure something else will come up to distract me but I’ll try to keep to this plan and only add more stuff rather than swap things out. I might actually get my play by post game started this month but we’ll have to see. If you have any thoughts or ideas as to things you’d like me to work on and post here, let me know in the comments below.

I think I’m going to start doing these updates at the end of every month just to let everyone know how things are going.  I tend to spend a bit of time each day working on projects but that doesn’t always translate into material I can immediately post here on the blog.  This is way to let you know of progress even if it isn’t visible.

This last month mostly got absorbed into the “Other Projects” category.  I did manage to work a little bit on the Ghost Ship Osiris module but not as much as I had planned.  I got some of the write-up of Outpost Osiris done but not very much.  I hope to be finishing that up next week and will at least post the various room descriptions once it’s done.

So let’s recap November.

Starting a New Game

The obvious work was all the starship designs I created and posted here on the blog.  Those are all going to be possible starting ships for a new play-by-post game I’ll be starting up at some point (hopefully soon).  If you would be interested in playing in that game, you can find the forums where we’ll be playing it on the Star Frontiers Network site. The game is called Void Jumpers.  If you want to play, create and account and post in the sign-up thread.

As I was working on those ships and getting the Void Jumpers game set up, I realized that for that game, and my on-line game “A New Can of Worms”, I needed a bit more background.  Both games are set against the backdrop of the Second Sathar War and both start before the actual fighting begins.  I realized that I needed (wanted really) a rough outline of the sathar plan, logistics, and timeline of events for the way I see the battles playing out.  (For those familiar with the Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space supplement, I don’t use that timeline but do use some of the background information in it.)  That led me down a few different paths.

Expanded Frontier Map

The first was to update and digitize my Expanded Frontier map which I’ve already posted.  What isn’t showing on that map is all the jump routes the sathar have through the region and the location of some points of interest in the sathar controlled space on the map.  It’s on my old hand-drawn version and I spent some time making sure all of that information is on layers on my digital version that I can turn on and off to create various version of that map.  At some point in the future I’ll post the version of the map with all the juicy details.  But that may be a while.

Beginning a Detailed Frontier Timeline

The next thing I started on was creating a timeline of major and minor events that would be happening throughout the Frontier as the games progressed.  Things like sathar attacks, Frontier events, and even things that the PCs do that are newsworthy.

As part of this I’ve rolled some of the events of the printed modules into the timeline I’m developing.  I’ll probably tweak that a bit in the future to roll all of the adventures into a campaign but for now I’m keeping them disjointed. 

The outcome of this is that I thought it would be fun to post one event (and sometimes more) each day in an on-going timeline.  I started doing that a couple of weeks ago on Twitter.  If you follow @StarFrontiers on Twitter you’ll receive each day, in addition the the random starting character that I’ve been posting for a long while now, a news snippet from around the Frontier. 

It’s currently near the end of Frontier Year 59.  Some of the things posted will be events related to the backdrop of the campaign, some will be things the PCs do, and others will just be general fluff items if nothing major is happening that day.  We’ll see how long that keeps up.  It’s actually a bit of a challenge to come up with a new item every single day.  My plan is to post regular summaries of those items here if you don’t follow along on Twitter.  I’ll probably post those once a month.

Sathar Starship Construction

Finally, as I started to work on the timeline, I realized that to get the timing of the Sathar attacks on the Frontier, I needed to have a good handle on their starship production and the travel times between the various locations.  I had the travel times (or could figure them out) from the Expanded Frontier map, but I needed a realistic production schedule and starship construction capacity for the Sathar.

I actually knew where their starship construction centers were from my old hand-drawn Expanded Frontier map.  What I needed was capacities and production schedules.  I had an initial idea for that and started working out a production schedule.  Somewhere along the way I messed up my arithmetic and something wasn’t working.  So I tried it again, using a spreadsheet and got it working but the ship mix wasn’t what I liked.  At this point I realized that I was going to be trying several different combinations to tweak the ship distribution and doing it by hand each time would be a bit tedious.  So my “lazy” programmer persona kicked in – if you have to do it more than once, write a program!

Luckily, I already had most of what I needed written as I had written a program (back in 2013) to simulate starship construction in the various starship construction centers (SCCs) in the Frontier.  I used this for an article I wrote in 2014 for the Frontier Explorer (issue 10) where I explored how many ships the SCCs could actually support.  I was able to reuse some of that code to create the sathar SCCs and run the simulation.  Now instead of a few hours, I could work out the results in a few minutes.  I was able to tweak the capacities and production schedules for the beginning of the timeline to match what I wanted.  I’ll use it going forward to keep track of what is going on as more capacity is added or the PCs discover and eliminate production capacity (e.g. the Beyond the Frontier modules).  Right now it just gives me totals but I can then track what ships are where separately.  Or maybe I’ll add some code to do that as well.

In any case, if you’re interested in seeing the code, it is written in Python and I’ve put it up in a public GitHub repository where you can examine or download it if you want. Also included is the code for the simulation that I ran for that Frontier Explorer article.  There’s not really any documentation besides the code itself so if you’re poking around and have questions, feel free to contact me.

As an aside, if you poke around there in GitHub a bit, you’ll also find the code for my Second Sathar War (SSW) game that implements both the Knight Hawks tactical board game and the Second Sathar War strategic game.  It’s not quite complete (e.g. no repair turns, and no seeker missiles yet) but it works and compile on both Windows and Linux.  If you just want to play with the game and don’t care about the code, you can find a download package, with some user documentation on the Star Frontiers Network site.  That’s another project I will probably be coming back to at some point.

Future Plans

So that’s what kept me busy last month. What’s coming up in December?

I’ve already mentioned the timeline summary.  I also plan on spending more time on Ghost Ship Osiris this month.  In fact, I’ll be starting on that again on the 1st.  Once I get the description of all the rooms written (you’ve already seen the maps) I’ll post those up.  My plan is get the section of the adventure that takes place in the Outpost done by the end of the year.  The complete version of that will be going out to my Patreon supporters once it is ready.

You can also expect to see a write-up of an adventure location.  I just finished the maps yesterday and plan on using it in my on-line game tonight unless my players decide to take a left turn.  As soon as they see it, I’ll be posting those maps on-line along with a description of the various rooms in the location.  Look for that mid-month.

That’s what I know about for sure.  There will probably be other things that pop up to grab my interest as well but I’m hoping to stay more focused this month. That’s your peak behind the scenes and a bit of a gaze ahead as to what to expect.  If you have questions or comments, feel free to let me know below.