Hi, I'm Frank,

but you may also find me online as Zulu. I practice mostly creative and professional writing, but my main field of expertise is worldbuilding, usually aimed towards TTRPG campaigns - large scale projects I have undertaken are two (and a half) full wikis for my players to consult.I have a few long-form pieces written and two publications I'm very proud of, stemming from my academic career in European and international law.

Skills and Capabilities

- Adaptability: I have experience writing in most settings, such as fantasy, sci-fi, noir, modern, and with varied themes and atmospheres. I can adapt very easily to the style required.
- Research: I have researched extensively for different projects, and I am capable of delving into most topics to a modest degree, including technical details or complex fields. Given my academic career, I am very experienced with legal research in particular.
- Commitment: I rarely, if ever, abandon projects when I start them. I am fully committed to everything I write, and at times need to remind myself to take a break.
- Perfectionism: a pro and a con, arguably. I am a perfectionist, and I frequently revisit pieces or pages to change or tweak details, even months or years after writing them.

Academic and Professional Writing

The following two publications are the first in my career, one being my Bachelor's thesis and the second being a co-written comment on a recent European Court case.Below them are a few essays which were written as part of the final examination for four courses during my university career. All four received perfect grades and personal praise from the reviewing professors. They are not as serious or professional as my thesis, but a good middle ground between publication-grade writing and hobbyist writing.

AI and Artworks: Legal and Technical Issues

The issue of intellectual property rights protection connected to AI development is a new and difficult road for the law to tread. Unprepared, and at times unequipped to handle the extremely rapid development of AI, in particular generative AI, lawmakers are just now beginning to investigate the concerns of artists and creative workers.

Associations’ Legal Standing Before the Court of Justice of the European Union in Actions for Annulment

This annotation analyses the General Court’s Order in Case T-1126/23, which declared inadmissible an action for annulment brought by a Romanian association Commission Decision 1786 repealing the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism.

*Ace Combat: Zero, How to Learn Geopolitics While Flying Jets

What relation is there between the fictional nation of Belka, its invasion of the similarly fictitious country of Ustio, and the current Ukraine war? What about the Belkan Seven Pillars and their frightening similarity to Russian nuclear threats and the Korean War? Are we going to have to face, in the near or far future, our own version of A World With No Boundaries?These are the questions that nobody is actually asking, but that I aim to answer in this essay, in order to explore a complex topic with the help of a staple piece of videogame history.

Into the Rabbit Hole: Simulated Worlds and a Warning from Jameson and Baudrillard

Like Alice falling into Wonderland, and Neo taking the red pill from Morpheus, I propose a dive into the concept of simulated worlds and the metaverse, the warnings posited by Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard in regard to them, and make comparisons to popular media (namely, Ready Player One and SOMA) to learn what dangers we could possibly face and what the future holds on the topic of virtual reality for business and social life.

Legal Personhood of AI as seen in Star Trek

How does the concept of legal personhood manifest in artificial intelligence, and how can media help us understand the future this subject holds? Could the concept of “artificially created person” be conceived in addition to natural and legal persons? In this short essay, I will provide some examples of this as seen in Star Trek, to analyze
what writers and artists believe the future will look like, and to compare Roddenberry’s idealistic society to ours.

Creative Writing and Worldbuilding

Here I link some of my writing, taken both from my Substack and scattered documents in my Google Drive. Below them are links to my major worldbuilding projects, with a small landing page for each one.

Unrestrained Mind: set in the Cyberpunk universe, it narrates the story of an AI superweapon and its liberation.
Training Exercise: a military sci-fi short set in what would become Sol 2400.
The Old, the Lost: the transcript of a roleplay scene between two characters in a Cyberpunk setting.

Si Vis Pacem: a military piece inspired by the movie Greyhound, set in the Norelva universe.
A Drink and a Meeting: the transcript of a roleplay scene between two characters in a gothic medieval setting.
Minos: a Fandom page clone fully remade in Google Docs for a character in the Hades universe.

Norelva

A world set in the 1920s, using the standard Dungeons & Dragons species, classes and atmosphere as a basis.The result of years of work and research, and currently the home to a number of D&D campaigns.

A set of in-universe advertisement posters.

In-universe United Nations flag and sigil.

Sol 2400

A sci-fi alt-history world made specifically for TTRPG use and tailored for the FTL: Nomad system.A utopic future in which humans, united as a species, explore the stars, ponder their existence and root out the last fires of corporate greed and piracy.

Dead Magic

A work-in-progress world set in modern times, loosely based on classic TTRPG tropes and focused on dark, dystopian themes.When magic wars tore the continents to shred, the last remaining humans banned the practice altogether - and now sit in a rotting world, working 9-to-5 jobs under the shadow of dead gods and horrific cryptids.

A sign one might see in Dead Magic's world.