I had a different post planned for tonight. Let me just say ‘I hate mail merge’ and leave it at that for tonight. Since that plan didn’t come through, I figured I might as well post the data I was trying to merge. 2025-02-18 Replaced the full tables with excerpts. …
In a recent post I documented my random table roller, prompted by my exploration of Seventh Sanctum files. As part of that exploration, I found several features I’d never considered. While I did not think of those features myself, I’m not above stealing interesting ideas. Masking Entries Seventh Sanctum vocabulary …
Ben Robbins’s Microscope is one of the major inspirations for Making History. I really like the structure and process, and I’ve added another element: ages. Between ages, the world changes. In Microscope terms, each age has a different palette. That is, different things are excluded and different things cannot be …
I feel like this series got off to a good start, but stalled right away. One post! So, time to get back to it. Yes, I recognize I’m jumping around from topic to topic, but I’m okay with that. Right now I feel there’s more to gain by touching many …
So I don’t forget, again… here are some notes about the syntax of a random table roller I wrote around 1997, 1998. This random table roller was inspired by a random text generator I found in college called ‘BNF’. Data files for this program had a syntax based on Backus-Naur …
My last post gives a d86 table of actors and their actions. I had to exclude many words because they were for roles that do not have ‘actions’. How does one ‘king’? Can one be said to be ‘kinging’? ‘Kinging’ doesn’t even pass spell check! Of course, in English you …
Most name generators I’ve found connect syllables in ways that hopefully make sense, or are at least pronounceable. Some are thematic, based on names from certain cultures. Others lean on pulp naming conventions, as Tome of Adventure Design does. These serve their purpose, in that they give me labels for …
The major premise of my Seekers of Lore campaign is that during the Age of Amorphia, much was lost. Objects, places, magic, and even deities, all have been… misplaced. Okay, the deities actually left. The shattering of Paradise means they were no longer capable of making the prime plane stable …
I’ve put a lot of time into making pantheons. The process is straightforward but a full pantheon is time-consuming. Small gods should be easy enough to create at need. Their limited power and expected scope means I want them to be easy to write. Normally I’d expect to have a …
Another topic I’ve overlooked is ‘small gods’: semi-divine entities that can be focus of faith at local levels. In most roleplaying games, it seems deities are omnipresent, if not omniscient and omnipotent. It would suck to play an adventuring cleric who can’t do their thing because they’re too far from …
