NaGa DeMon, NaNoWriMo and Scrivener

No, we’re not talking about demonic snake-like people from Indian mythology here. Nathan Russel, the guy who created the awesome FU RPG among other things, had a great idea. Why not take the idea from the National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) an bring it to the game table? So this year he challenges all of us to design a game in one month. This November will not just be NaNoWriMo but also Naga DeMon! And of course, the latter sounds much cooler! 😉

Of course there are a few rules (it wouldn’t be fun without those!):

• Create the game in November
• Finish the game in November
• Play the game in November
• Talk about your experience

By the way, the NaGa DeMon is not just about pen & paper RPGs. If you want to create a boardgame, wargame, cardgame or even a computer game, you can do so and it’s still part of the official NaGa DeMon! I am basically working on some game design project all the time, but perhaps I will use this event to see a project through next month!

And there’s one more thing. For a while I have followed the development of the Windows version of Scrivener. Scrivener is software that was initially developed for Mac only that was meant as a tool for writers. I think explaining all the features of this software would definitely be beyond the scope of this post, so it’s perhaps best you check out the official website for more details. What I have been wondering for a while now was if you could use Scrivener to help you in game design, too. And November may actually be my chance to do so!

You can get a special NaNoWriMo Trial Edition of Scrivener for free that you can use until December 7th. And if you are among the NaNoWriMo winners you’ll get a 50% discount on the full version of Scrivener. And even if you don’t manage to churn out a novel of 50,000 words next month, you still get a 20% discount  by entering “NANOWRIMO” as coupon code at the purchase! 🙂

But there’s more. I actually found a very interesting blog post on “Population: One” today, that shows how you can use Scrivener for RPG Writing. If you are interested in using Scrivener for NaGa DeMon, you definitely should check the article out.