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 …
Let’s get everything under one roof here, or at least, on one page. Here are my collected notes on Seventh Sanctum files, which are available for download from Seventh Sanctum. These notes collate and summarize the posts below. I have not spoken with Steven Savage, the creator of Seventh Sanctum. …
I’ve spent the last week or so exploring Seventh Sanctum data files. Ultimately they proved to be less complicated than I thought at first, but they do involve some unexpected design choices. Not my best code, I’ll admit, but for a proof of concept it’ll do. All three file formats …
The last few days, I’ve described how I understand Seventh Sanctum data files work. Of course, that’s what I think. Next step is proving it, and the easiest way I can imagine is to use the data in the files. General Strategy For this exercise I’ll be using Perl as …
I’ve described Seventh Sanctum‘s configuration files and vocabulary files in the last couple days. Today I describe the third file type, seed files. This is, I think, the most complex Seventh Sanctum file type to use. On closer examination, the syntax is not that complex, and there aren’t as many …
