Category Archives: NaGaDeMon

Somnium

NaGaDeMon, Voyagers, , ,

The setting formerly known as “Voyagers” now has an official name.

I spent a long, long time debating this (and I am sure I really got on the nerves of the few people I bothered with the big naming question) before settling on “Somnium”.

Somnium is Latin for “The Dream” – appropriate for a science fiction setting that deals with the – probably overly optimistic – assumption that we will discover an FTL drive and colonize the galaxy.

It was also the title of a book written by Johannes Kepler (yes, the Kepler) which describes a voyage to the moon. Written in the 1600s, the book is more of a fantasy story from our modern point of view – but it was meant as a serious work, and ultimately could be described as one of the first works of Science Fiction.

It will likely be next to impossible to get a good domain name (and so on) for Somnium – I already checked – but the situation isn’t much better with anything else I came up with. And quite honestly I am getting tired of referring to it as “My Science Fiction Universe”. 🙂

More on NaGa DeMon:

Here we are – NaGa DeMon Day 3. The entire thing is still unsuitable for actual use, but a picture of where we’re going is slowly emerging.

I spent way too much time today on other things (I will shamefully admit to finally getting that last level for my World of Warcraft character; which took about six hours) and thus started fairly late. I’ve probably worked 3-4h on this today, and I will continue working after I post this – but since Nov 3rd is over, I thought I should post today’s update.

I do think I found a “method” that works for me – it’s a combination of brainstorming and patching in bits and pieces one by one and in a decidedly non-linear fashion. I expect that I will end up with a collection of rules that “kinda work”, but do not mesh perfectly; balancing and fine tuning is a second step, to be done later.

Today’s file:

More on NaGa DeMon:

I’ve started slowly, mostly because I had other things to do.

Most of my time spent, so far, has been on research – I already had some notes, and I haven’t incorporated everything in this very basic first document either, but anyway, it’s a start.

I’ve decided that I will upload the state of my document every time I post a status update to my blog. I encourage you to download it and very much would welcome feedback, but don’t expect anything “usable” for a while.

See also:

 

Naga Demon

NaGaDeMon, , , , ,

I usually take part in NaNoWriMo in November. However, this year I decided I should do something a little different: Naga Demon.

Naga Demon is the “National Game Design Month”. The goal is to create a game, and play it – even if you do it by yourself.

That’s much more reasonable than trying to write 1667 words – on average – every day after work.

My Goals are, specifically:

  • Write star ship construction rules
  • Write star system generation rules
  • Write trade system rules
  • Run a small tramp freighter through a small star cluster until she made a fortune or runs out of money…

And yes, those are all things I can use for the development of my science fiction setting. As a big bonus… I will try to finally decide on a name for the setting.