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That’s right, I’m going to design my own RPG.

It’s going to be a process, and certainly take more time to consider all the various issues that crop up. As such, I will be moving the design posts to Saturdays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I will begin posting another writing project, Noriama.

As with most of my stories, the idea that struck me first was a retelling, in this case a futuristic look at the vanishing Roanoke colony. What if the first human colony in space suddenly vanished? I had considered putting the colony on Ganymede or Io or some easy in-system rock, but the more research I did, the more I realized that, if we were a rational species, we wouldn’t bother with building an inter-system colony that used people.

Consider, why spend all the time and energy worrying about building a survivable habitat on another planet? Robots can be our eyes and hands on other planets much more safely and efficiently. Overpopulation isn’t a good reason either: building a sea-habitat involves the same kind of engineering without the added expense and risk of space-travel, and even if that wasn’t the case, releaving population pressure is only possible if emigration is greater than population growth…not easy on a planet of over seven billion.

So I shifted focus to the nearby colonizable exo-planets, and found a whole new set of problems. The more research I did, the more I realized that doing a hard Sci-Fi story that connected Earth and a colony in another solar-system was a bit absurd. They’re just too far away for one to ever be really influenced by the other.

So I started wondering what could connect these two planets? Ultimately, just a common ancestry…but what is that when compared to the vast reaches of space? What happens when you find yourself confronted with a puzzle that has no answer? What does being “human” mean?

I won’t say my oeuvre doesn’t have some common threads. I’ve had to work some things out, and writing is how my odd brain does it.