This page and site are under development. It is a work in progress and this is your view behind the veil. The sections below roughly coorespond to the Main Hall but now have section icons indicating their status. If you're coming directly back here, you may want to pop out to the more proper Main Hall.
In the last month I've started and finished the Book of Names. It's pretty neat. I also added the Potion Library quite recently. I spent a crazy amount of time on the Spheres of Unusual Sizes for almost no reason. I just added a new Infinite List of Potion Shops which can include the town or owner's name. Ah, and I made just two weeks ago from scratch a brand new -- but scientific -- alignment survey assessment.
I've spent a very long time with name fragments and data dictionaries. I now have 184 name formulas. Over half are for people. I originally only intended to have People and Places. But I decided to keep things top level and added Taverns and Potion Stores to the list. I also put in Place Prefixes and Place Postfixes which I'll be working in later. The numbers have really increased a lot lately.
The taverns has 40 of those number and I do want to finish those up with some more interesting interactions with heritages when I bring in foods. However the labor flowed both ways. I had added Goblin foods and so I needed to add Goblin people names and Goblin place names... And then I decided to add two new species, the Half-Dryad playable race/species and Myxin. And those of course required people name files as well.
Having a proper workshop here has let me organize my work. I want to finish up Food which will allow me to finish up Taverns. Then I think I want to work on Characteristics. This will allow me to bring a few more things together for a person. Blix will have to wait. Then having at least people names, place names, characteristics, and some fundamental maps I can drive toward the city guidebook.
I made some nice touches on Taverns, which I then applied to "The Cartomancer's Compendium of Infinite Realms" (link).
Latest work was unplanned but interesting. I made a little micro system that lets you write notes in various fonts. Which sounds lame except there are over 100 fonts and they're varied Human, Dwarvish, and Elvish fonts. Most are over 20 years old. I had to generate a ton of modern font formats for them which required making some batch scripts and hand-holding a lot of ancient formats (like pulling apart a Mac .bmap in a .sit inside a .hqx) and somehow generating 5 more modern formats. I also put in your common color, justification, and size. And I made it able to download an image of the text with transparency to your copy-paste buffer. Or a full image download. Or sharing the URL and opening it in the page. See The Written Word below for examples or hit it unadorned here.
Well, I was looking for a font I made somewhere around 1990. It was unsurpringly "runic-inspired". It was a modern font but using strokes similar to runes. It was called "Celtech-Black81" after the Celtic heritage but with a technical edge. It had 81 symbols and some very interesting variations. Anyway it involved going through a stack of 3.5" floppies and then when that had unusable results, a stack of pulled hard drives. I found it. Unfortunately it is some ancient Font file format. I made it with a then-licensed copy of Fontographer. I downloaded various things -- open source, toolkits, etc. The only thing that can read it correctly is itself Fontographer. Unforuntately on Mac it doesn't even load more than a 20 characters or something unless I buy the several hundred dollar version. On a PC it lets me read it. It does load correctly and fully. However I can't export, convert, or save. This kinda makes me sad. It makes no economic sense to pay $499 just to save the font I created. I doubt I even built it correctly for modern use. 😢
For the past few weeks, I've been slogging through something I feel is important to my whole "character" system. It's a traits subsystem. I finally finished my first pass on the dataset. I have 984 traits. A list like that is not impossible, and honestly I should trim it down. The slog was my addition of a bunch of attributes to the traits. I'm experimenting with an archetype model system where the rule set is directed with constraints and filters around the metadata. So I end up with traits that have a frequency of occurrance, a category, an intensity, and a positive/negative characteristic. And a description of course. I then use these in the archetype definitions. It is still something I'm toying with.w
The book of names is a pretty well-oiled machine at this point. The Index Codex gives a nice view. Development Details are a little dated at this point.
This morals questionaire was fun to build. It really is pretty scientific. It will nail your alignment in 15 questions.
This really should be the next thing I buckle down on. Trait, personae, descriptions A book of characters. Characteristics: Unique Personalities for NPCs
Parts of this generator are interesting, but it is a bit too random. I may see if it's a basis for anything. Definitely quirky.
This is time-consuming, but a nice detour to the other side of my brain. 5e half-dryad and myxin done. Also created some name generators for them. Many other species left to detail.
Once I get enough weight behind my character APIs, I'll definitely want to do a Discord integration or two.
I did a fair amount of legwork for the The Dungeon Master's City Guidebook already. I just have the more interesting coding aspects. Note to self: Also remember the concept notes.
City Map has so much to offer and make better.
Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator should get a version update.
There are some procedural generators out there that make dungeons. I'm not so keen on them.
Taverns are close to done. Well the names are done. And I'm really happy with them. Especially so on the heritages and individual tavern type selectors. But I need to build out the food & menu items. Not hard. I'm not sure why I haven't knocked it out already.
Hooray. Finally made a front-end to these so they can be retrieved individually. I previously had almost all of these place names. But you only saw them occassionally when they were part of a name of a tavern or a prepositional phrase of someone's name "of" or "from" a place. All good now (link).
Enter The Potion Library to discover and steal unique potion recipes and formulae. Guests are encouraged to use the notation service.
Visit the Infinite List of Potion Shops which can include the town or owner's name.
This is a labor of love. I don't have them all myself. Books of magic in limited circulation. Transcribe all the old circulation veil manuscripts.
I kinda just like this image for books on magic.
Oh. I forgot about doing the SDL. I really should see if I could craft that. What is "that"? The Spell Description Language. Basically a programmer's extention language. The cute part is that if you fuel it with spell points of the clock cycle and damage then you just supply the primatives and language.
Given what I did with potions, I could make something semi-neat. But semi-neat has a lot of semi-bad. It might require some multi-phase procedural gen with an AI gen cleanup. Could couch it in a 5e/d20 Template.
Peruse Elvish love letters, Dwarvish bills of lading, The writings of Men, and magical symbols. Write a sample and then download it as an image or share it. Supports font color, alignment, font selection, and size. Has image download with background image. Also has option to copy image of text with transparent background to paste-buffer. Oh, and 127 fonts. And I converted them all to every font format a browser could want (.eot, .otf, .svg, .ttf, .woff, and .woff2). Ah, and I added a copy-link sharing which was more of a PITA than it should have been, but I do want those nice Unicode characters. All of this is done in a way that the fonts are not provided directly which is kinda cool. The average age of them is about 25 years old.
Update this bad boy Armoria Shields. File this under circular sad: I used to have to draw these add the dungeoneer shield. Heraldry, Coats of Arms, and Banners.
Ever consider what a giant solid ball of some mineral might weigh? This page tells you why you might want to know. The calculator gives you the weight for any size up to ten feet in diameter and for 24 metals, 20 types of wood, 60 other minerals, and 51 other materials.
The spheres are cool, but I had started on the whole underlying magic parts and it is pretty cool. I just haven't figured out how I want to use it. Making a game is a bit of a big bite to chew.
I don't know if this is something to "knock out" or not. D&DB PDF handout creator. The amount of time it takes to format stuff "just right" and for all situations...
D&DB PDF handout creator. Document Templates: Dungeoneer, Dungeoneer D&D, d20 template
Quick Non-Player Charatcer Roster
Nimble character sheet - turn into form-fillable
What do you really need right now? If it's a fully rules-as-written Fourth Edition D&D Random Dragon Generator with full specs and their treasure hoard then you're in luck! You really love 4th Edition D&D, right? Check out this spectacular specimen from April 30, 1995. There's also a slightly updated preface with dragon presets.
Activity Hooks using flavor from charater
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Try the radically earlier version of the book of names developed in 1995. It supports fifteen person name flavors.
The analog to person name generation is the ancient place generation system It was also developed in 1995. It supports fourteen customized place names.
Procedurally driven map creation is wonderful these days. There are many open source solutions and public services. Back in the early days of the Internet, real developers wrote in C. And then they had to figure out how to make a user interface. I made an interface to these Large Scale Maps, hacked the original source to make it more configurable and then let it sit there and get used hundreds of thousands of times. Then it died and I had to bring it back to life ten years later.
Zork XII
What do you need more of? Is your answer ever fake electronic dice? That's what you think of every day, right? Well back in 1995 this was semi-useful. Casting Dice. It still is kinda cool in a geeky way that it does numbers to English words.
Simple. Ancient. Probably useless. What is it? An Initiative Roller.
How many coins fit in a pouch? in a small chest? a large chest? How much does it weigh if we need to transport it? Surprisingly useful information and a tool tell you all you need to know about coin weights and measures. How many gold pieces fit in a 10" wide by 8" deep by 5" high small chest? Find out.
Why might you want a 13 month, 28 days per month fantasy calendar? Back in 1994 I thought it was a good idea for extra days off. Every 28 years.