Every generator now offers buttons to copy the results to the clipboard or to save the results to an HTML file.
(more…)Category: News
-
Estates of the Eliari
Today, I’ve released a generator for the Estates of the Eliari module.
Back in 2022, I was curious about whether I could build a random generator for entire dungeon that made more sense than the traditional, purely-random variety, such as those that come out of Appendix A. I was also thinking about Frontier Forts of Kelnore, the 1978 supplement published by Judges Guild. That supplement had a map that you might have to modify based on a few results, such as “a 5 foot ditch was dug around the walls”.
I built a generator based on Frontier Forts it to get an idea of what it could produce. You can see how the results are relatively sparse, though I remember reading that players had fun with it when it was first available. I knew I could do something much more complex. And when I got into it, I discovered it was a lot of fun to keep coming up with alternate results. It was something like a solitaire version of the short-form improv game “New Choice” aka “Change”, where a bell rings and you must come up with a different response.
This experience is similar to that of abductive reasoning that we use when making sense of random results in TTRPGs. In fact, preparing this generator was much like the whole process in reverse because I started from one result and asked my muse to tell me about how it could be different, all the while keeping in mind the context of the other parts of the adventure location. And added challenge is making sure that one result won’t introduce a contradiction that ruins verisimilitude.
I had so much fun grinding through the possibilities, I thought others would like to join in. I posted the unfinished manuscript to the BFRPG forum, hoping for some collaboration. I didn’t get much on the creative side, so eventually built out the entire set of tables. I did benefit from the excellent editing team over there, and the module was eventually published in 2025.
Check out the loot page for more information plus links to download the module.
How useful or interesting is this kind of generator? Should I build another one? I’m open to suggestions.
-
Behold, The Beginning!
Since 2017, I’ve been running a Basic Fantasy campaign that was intended as a way to get my two sons hooked on RPGs. It was a fathers-and-kids deal that picked up a few extra adults along the way, eventually morphing into all adults when my sons got old enough. Along the way, I built a little WordPress plugin to mechanize rolling on various random tables. At first, it was stuff out of the rule book, then a few tables adapted from blogs or other games. Today, I tend to build deep, complex generators from scratch.
In a future post, I’ll talk about my process. Right now, I want to introduce the site. It collects the 60+ generators I built for emptyz.com, the site that keeps the house rules and session reports for the Tienarth’s Raiders campaign. In the future, I’m going to refactor my most ancient random generators from my personal site, leonatkinson.com. Being from 1997, it took a bit of wrench-twisting to them to run in PHP 8.
Before I do that, I will be working on a generator for my latest BFRPG “module”, Estates of the Eliari.
The entire module is a collection of lookup tables that fills out location details based on a fixed map. I’m going to make it a one-click effort to get a unique adventure.
I also plan to write about some of the existing generators and also create new ones, of course. It looks like I’m getting involved in a Traveller campaign, so I may be building generators for that game as well.