It was a dark and stormy night...
Omri stood at the base of the statue gazing up at the face of his goddess. He could hear the sounds of fighting approaching the church. “What would you have me do?” His communion with the goddess was interrupted as the main doors to the church were quickly opened and slammed shut. “They’re almost here,” [...]
This post is running a little behind as I’ve been swamped with end of semester projects. One down, two to go. Next week’s post might get impacted as well. My last two articles (one, two), part of the November RPG blog carnival, talked about the unexpected in Void Jump travel. In this article I want [...]
My last post on Void Sickness along with reading Mike Bourke’s second portal article (I’m still a week behind but I’m catching up!), got me thinking about another aspect of Void travel that I like to use but which I don’t see talked that much about: where you come out on the other end. And [...]
In this installment we start adding bells and whistles to the star map generation process I described in my earlier posts (part 1, part 2). Specifically, drawing connections between star systems and labeling them with the distances. It’s been a while since I posted on this particular topic as I simply haven’t had a chance [...]
I’ve mentioned the community designed Spacer RPG in a previous post. In that G+ community, the call went out for building star maps for the game. As an astronomer, I wanted to take a stab at creating a “realistic” map, by which I mean something built on actual stellar statistics and such. I had most [...]
If you’ve been following my twitter feed (@dagorym), you’ll have noticed that I’ve been tweeting a lot using the #NewHorizons and #PlutoFlyby hashtags about the New Horizons mission to Pluto. By the time you’re reading this the closest approach encounter will be over, although we may not have the first images back yet. Needless to [...]
In my post on calculating planetary orbital periods, I mentioned that I might do a post on determining the mass of the planet. Well, here it is. And like that process, it sounds a lot harder than it really is. So let’s dive in. What’s Needed In order to calculate the mass of your planet [...]
In my previous article on determining the current season, I showed that you needed to know the length of the world’s year in order to track the season. But what if you don’t know the length of the year. Maybe you’ve got a setting book that gives the orbital distance but not the year length, [...]
This month’s RPG Blog carnival is being hosted by Phil over at Tales of a GM and the topic is Summerland – topics related to the season of summer. In reading through his post, I realized that dealing with seasons was not something I usually did or even thought about when running a game. There [...]
It’s 2:15 am and I’m up running a telescope observing a potential transiting extrasolar planet. Actually I’m observing my second target of the night and the transit is supposedly starting even as I type this line. I’ve been up since 4am yesterday and in the intervening 22 hours have written an 11-page paper for one [...]