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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

My secret to writing the Wild North

The problem with writing Sandbox Fantasy settings is that you have a two to three dozen good ideas and about three times more locales to write up. In comes the random generators. You don't use them blindly but rather roll until an idea pops into your head. Being a programmer I coded up some of the generators to make hundreds of rolls.

You can download it from here. Just unzip it into a empty folder. CORRECTION it needs .NET Framework 2.0 not 3.5 which you can download from here. I forget that Visual Studio 2008 allows targeting different framework versions. So those of you with Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 can run this utility.

Note you may have this already so try running the utility first.



The four tables I coded are
  1. The Treasure Tables from Original D&D
  2. Ruins from Judges Guild
  3. Islands from Mazes and Minotaurs
  4. Strongholds from Original D&D
To use the software just click on the button and the result will appear in two boxes. The second box you can select the text and copy it by pressing then C at the same time. After that you can paste it anywhere you like. If you get a blank result that means no treasure was rolled this time.

For the treasure tables you will need to select the treasure type from the combo box on the left.

Coding up the treasure table generator was the most painful of the lot. Full of special exceptions and conditional rolls. Also had to code in the generation of magic sword!.

If you want the source code you can email. This software isn't meant to compete against Tablesmith and other generic generator but a quick and dirty utility to help get my writing done. The ruins were the first things I did hence the name Ruin Generator.

Enjoy
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10 comments:

  1. TimeshadowsJuly 22, 2009 at 12:02 PM

    Well, maybe if i 'upgrade' to XP from W2k I'll be able to use it.
    --It looks nice, though. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gothridge ManorJuly 22, 2009 at 5:21 PM

    Hey Rob, I could not get it to run.

    ReplyDelete
  3. K. BaileyJuly 23, 2009 at 12:15 AM

    I got a deathly crash trying to make a Desert Treasure...

    For this sort of thing I find JavaScript embedded in an html page is quick, simple, and hugely portable.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Robert ConleyJuly 23, 2009 at 12:19 AM

    So you had it running selected A(Desert) clicked Treasure and it crashed?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Robert ConleyJuly 23, 2009 at 12:45 AM

    Thanks alot K. Bailey now you got me mucking around with Javascript ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Friar DeepJuly 27, 2009 at 3:24 PM

    Great Job. I love it. I can't wait to use it for my uncomming hex-crawl.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Robert ConleyJuly 29, 2009 at 12:03 AM

    glad you got it work and enjoy it.

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  8. UnknownApril 14, 2018 at 1:41 PM

    This seems like it awards a lot of treasure. How would I use it for 1-4 level adventurers?

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  9. Robert ConleyApril 15, 2018 at 4:49 PM

    +Trek Eriksson, well first off the treasure types are meant for when the monsters are in their lair. So while Goblins get Type D, it is for a group of 40 to 400. For Ghouls they get Type B but again it is for a group of 2 to 24.

    So what I would do it is roll it up and then divide it proportionally if the monsters are found in a small group.

    ReplyDelete
  10. UnknownApril 15, 2018 at 5:02 PM

    Ok thank you! I had one other question about good tables to use to come up with ideas for lairs and ruins.

    ReplyDelete