All over the place

Been a while since my last update, and I've been working on a lot of random stuff.

Abulafia is on a new webhost (the name is growing on me, once I memorized it), and the speed has improved nicely. Unfortunately, the move kind of derailed me and I haven't worked on my project there since.

I wrote up a high level history for the area, but I found it kind of trite and boring. Eladrin get kicked out by tieflings who take over the humans in the area. They eventually fall, and a good human empire springs up in its place. I'm going to go back over that and make things a little more gray. I also had the 4e origins (as much as we know) of the eladrin/elves and tieflings worked in to the history, but that probably isn't necessary. I want to make the tieflings less evil and the humans more ambiguous. I want the tiefling empire ("dominion" sounded good) to be the founding force of "modern" civilization in the area.

I'm also trying to figure out the scale and map I want to work in. I don't want to make it too large to deal with, or too small to be quickly outgrown. I'm also seeing the need to fill in other surrounding countries, but I can alleviate some of that feeling by working on the nobilities lands within the Empire. I need to start looking at example maps. Fortunately, I've been collecting digital maps for quite some time, so I'll either just steal one or use it as inspiration.

The last two days I've been playing with Inkscape, a free vector-based drawing program, similar to Adobe Illustrator. It's a really neat program and is very powerful, but there's a learning curve. I'm also not much of an artist and I don't have a pen tablet, and that makes working in it a little harder. Anyway, Inkscape has a couple of nice features that work great for map creation. You can draw a shape or a line, then "fractalize" it, which means it becomes randomly jittered, which is perfect for terrain. The clone/duplicate object feature is pretty good too. If I make a terrain symbol, I can clone it and put them all over the place. If you clone something and change the original, all the clones change as well, so you can update everything simultaneously. You can also find features like that in some of the "real" mapping programs, but I also want to learn Inkscape for fun.

Hopefully with this nice down time for Christmas, I can get some more work done on the game.

Abulafia

I've been contributing to Abulafia for the last few days, ever since I realized that the generators on that site were perfect for creating interesting and unique loot. I've had the idea of a complex treasure generator kicking around in my head for a long, long time. Imagine my surprise when I found that Abulafia already did what I wanted, and that someone had already done 90% of the work.

Abulafia's generators typically create natural text descriptions. Jewelry is a good example. Here are some examples:

• A platinum costume mask, with the image of a scarab beetle.
• A matching pair of Magically Treated Platinum toe rings, each with the coat of arms of a city, nation, or other location and set with 3 Jargoons. It appears to be of Wood Elven make.
• A electrum breastplate, with the symbol of Servants of the Dark Lord (a pentagram).
• A bronze comb inlaid with giant crab chitin.
• A copper knife handle with the image of a diving falcon and set with a Feldspar. Much of the piece's value comes from the fact that it is obviously quite old.
• A mammoth ivory sickle, etched with a twisting, vine-like pattern and set with a Malachite. It is of ancient workmanship.

Imagine a player cracking open a chest of pirate treasure and finding that list instead of "5000 sp, 1000 gp, and 2 diamonds." Treasure like this generates adventure hooks without even trying. The site had already secured a permanent place in my GM's Notebook, but once I get my own stuff in there, it'll be a must-have.

The generator tables are all housed in regular MediaWiki pages, making them really easy to edit. You have to Edit a page to get a look at the generator tables for a page. Since you need an account to edit, here's an example. A generator looks something like this: (I had to replace angle brackets with curly braces so it would display correctly.)

{sgdisplay iterations="5"}A [main]
{/sgdisplay}

{sgtable}
;main
5,[JewelryMaterial] [Item][Predicate]
1,matching pair of [JewelryMaterial] [Item]s, each [Predicate]

;Predicate
4, set with a [Utility.GemType]. [Craftsmanship]
3, set with [Dice.2d6] [Utility.GemType]s. [Craftsmanship]
4, [Design]. [Craftsmanship]
2, [Design] and set with a [Utility.GemType]. [Craftsmanship]
2, [Design] and set with [Dice.2d6] [Utility.GemType]s. [Craftsmanship]
4, with [Utility.Symbols]. [Craftsmanship]
2, with [Utility.Symbols] and set with a [Utility.GemType]. [Craftsmanship]
2, with [Utility.Symbols] and set with [Dice.1d12] [Utility.GemType]s. [Craftsmanship]
2, with the inscription "[Inscriptions.main]" written in [Inscriptions.Language]. [Craftsmanship]
2, with the inscription "[Inscriptions.main]" written in [Inscriptions.Language] and set with [Dice.2d6] [Utility.GemType]s. [Craftsmanship]

...
{/sgtable}

This might seem complex, but if you've ever worked with computer language grammar or parsers, it's very intuitive and powerful. Basically, any time you see an item in single brackets, like [main], it gets replaced by a result from the table with that name. You can freely mix text and table names within a table. The numbers indicate the relative frequency that an item will be chosen.

So from the initial call of A [main] it could become :

1. A [JewelryMaterial] [Item][Predicate]
2. A gold [Item][Predicate]
3. A gold bracelet [Predicate]
4. A gold bracelet set with a [Utility.GemType]. [Craftsmanship]
5. A gold bracelet set with a [Utility.SemiPrecious]. [Craftsmanship]
6. A gold bracelet set with a Spinel. [Craftsmanship]
7. A gold bracelet set with a Spinel. It is of exquisite workmanship.

[Utility.GemType] is just a list of other tables that contain gems, so it was replaced with a call to one of the other tables. It also happens to be on another page, which is very convenient for making multiple generators that all reference the same sets of tables.

The SGDISPLAY tags are how you call the generator to display items. SGTABLE indicates the beginning of the generator tables and the items in single brackets are references to table names. The actual tables start with a semicolon followed by the table name. Each line after the table name starts with a number that indicates the relative frequency of the item, so on the [main] table you're 5 times more likely to get a result of [JewelryMaterial] [Item][Predicate] than you are to get matching pair of [JewelryMaterial] [Item]s, each [Predicate]. The comma indicates the beginning of the text or table names.

The hardest part of making the tables is choosing exactly how to phrase each chunk so that you get a readable result. It's possible to get results like "A Adamantine cloak pin" and "A matching pair of pair of spectacles", and there's not an easy way to fix it. Still, if you can overlook little glitches like that, Abulafia can be an incredible resource

Right now you might notice that you can't sign up for an account or edit Abulafia (the generators are still working). The database of the site has been locked so that the owner can move it to another web host, hopefully a faster one. I'm not sure how long it will take, but Dave (the owner) warns that it could take several days.

GM's Notebook, pt 3

I've been fiddling with Google Spreadsheets, but it looks like it's not sufficient for my needs. It's slow, the toolbars take up too much space, and it doesn't look like I can do some of the useful randomization features I can in Excel. Excel is faster and I can customize it more too, so I think I'll go with that for now.

I also took a step back and changed sources. I'm using Kate Monk's Onomastikon for most of my names now. It has some unfortunate formatting problems with some names, like Arabic, but it's good for the most part. Plus, since a lot of the names are divided by source, I can leave out sets of names I'm not interested in, like Biblical names. I realized I don't care about name meanings, so I removed those.

I started gathering Romanian and Arabic names, for the Tiefling and Elven areas, respectively. I had to fall back on 20000-names.com for readable Arabic names. I also made a simple combination generator for them: FirstName RelationshipConnector FirstName Connector PlaceName. This produces full names like Sa'Id ibn Faiz al Aqabâ or Hana bint Farah el Fugayrâ. Not historically accurate, but perfect for my needs. (I envision my elves like the Valenar of Eberron. Skilled warriors and horsemen who venerate their ancestors.)

Right now, I have 5 random names generated for each of the following: Empire (German based) male, female, surname, city name, the same for Tiefling (Romanian based) and full names and city names for Elven (Arabic based).

When looking for Arabic city names I found the Geonames site. It's a great resource for this kind of thing. There's only a few city names for each country, but I grabbed them from multiple sources. It's also got multi-language glossaries and a ton of other similar things. I grabbed the months of the year in German.

I've added some Spanish and Maori names too, but I haven't decided who they will apply to. I also grabbed some random text generated by a Barsoomian name generator. I'm thinking those will make good intelligent monster names. I need some goblin/orc names, but I haven't found a source that's right yet. I tossed in some links in the sheet to other random generators on Abulafia, just so they're available when I need them.