I made even further progress with my Lore25 challenge maps: a full Referee's map including Drill routes, and a Players' map with only the commonly-known stars and routes noted. On the Referee's map, the dashed lines are well-known Drill routes, while the dotted lines are forgotten and/or secret ones.
Referee's Map
Players' Map
I have progressed further in developing my Lore25 starmap for the Ishtar and Apep sectors. Now with all polities, borders, and world names marked. Note that worlds that already had Sobek(reptilian aliens) names were given the names of male Egyptian gods by Humans who did not wish to pronounce complex Sobek words. Most worlds which were unexplored by Sobek so far were given the names of Canaanite deities. The main exceptions are the nameless worlds of the Anomaly, as well as the new world names of the Liberated Worlds, Sde Prachim (formerly Laana - "Wormwood" or "Bitter Grass") and Tkuma (formerly Ba'al).
There is a good balance between polities (with their intrigue and conflicts) and independent (and sometime lost) worlds with their weirder features.
I have been dedicating the first week of the Lore25 challenge to drafting the star maps of the adjacent Ishtar and Apep Sectors into a simple, easily printable, B&W map. As this is SWN and not Traveller, the map is much simpler, simply showing dots, names, borders, and Drill routes across space rather than all the world, base, and starport types shown on a typical Traveller map.
This is the first work-in-progress of the map, showing world locations, a few major world names, and the borders of the Anomaly.
Next would be naming all worlds and designing jump routes, and finally creating a player's map where worlds without official jump routes are not shown.
Similar to my abortive attempt at the Sector23 Challenge two years ago, I wish now to undertake a new yearly challenge, hopefully to bring to completion this time! Something nice to spice up my time and get my creative world-building juices flowing.
2025's challenge, as suggested by Discord friends, will be Lore25. The challenge, as the name implies, is a world-building challenge focused on setting lore rather than mechanics; develop a setting out of whole cloth with a year's worth of lore. 1-3 paragraphs a day (365-1095 paragraphs by December 31st, 2025! At 100 or so words per paragraph, that's 36,500 to 109,500 words total!
This time I will write up a setting for Kevin Crawford's excellent Stars Without Number: Revised Edition (SWN:RE). I will keep my setting vaguely compatible with the default one presented in the SWN:RE core book, but will - of course! - strictly respect the author's intellectual property; other than very vague references to a Deluge toppling a vast Terran State, and similar points permitting such compatibility, the lore written in this setting shall be my own. The focus will be on local lore and events anyway, but the two Sectors (about the size of two Traveller Subsectors) will be easy to drop into any SWN game.
Below is the challenge's plan:
January 2025 - Universe Foundation. Starmap, system names, polities overview, species overview, cultural overview, history outline (in a 5-pagaraph style: Forgotten History, Ancient History, Classic History, Modern History, Recent Events).
February 2025 - Philosophy and Culture. Philosophies, religions, cultures, cults. Including the Sobek (agamid-reptile aliens!) sun-worshiping religion! One idea per day.
March 2025 - Astrography. Flesh the worlds; there are going to be 50 of them. So, 2 worlds a day on average. Typical SWN world description table/paragraph.
April 2025 - Technology. Beyond the SWN:RE standard, I shall endeavor to write one unique technology or technological artifact per day.
May 2025 - Characters and NPCs. One unique important NPC per day. Not necessarily with stats, as most are various leaders and groundbreaking scientists, but at least a paragraph each.
June 2025 - Factions. SWN:RE is excellent at this, and I will try to create 2-3 factions per week for 8-12 total SWN:RE-type factions with full stats and agendas.
July 2025 - Wars! The big Human-Sobek conflict, as well as smaller ones. Potentially one week to write 7 paragraphs for the Human-Sobek conflict, then 1 small conflict per day.
August 2025 - Creatures and Species. Sentient alien stats and character generation (Sobek and potentially others), plus various non-sentient critters. These are easy to create in SWN:RE.
September 2025 - Economy and Trade. One paragraph about economics per day Potentially adding trade data from SWN: Suns of Gold to each world if time and energy permit.
October 2025 - Myths and Legends. One spacers' legend per day. Such as the lost planet of Carcosa, and whatever is going on within the Anomaly.
November 2025 - Adventure Hooks. One per day. SWN:RE has excellent tools for that based on the worlds I'll create in March.
December 2025 - Review and Polishing. Editing the setting lore into one cohesive document. Who knows, it might even get published in 2026!
