Chartopia Perchance Building Generators

Resources for Building RPG Generators

Duncan Thomson

Creating your own generators and random tables has become more popular, with tools such as perchance and chartopia making it easier even if you aren't a programmer.

Some create tools for others to use, some do it because they want a project and some tools are solo affairs, for your own game, system or world

And in recent years there has been a rise in Solo RPGs, people running a character or group through a campaign world or set adventure. Many make use of a suite of tools for adventures, monsters and combat actions.

Chartopia

Chartopia lets you build random tables or complex random generators. It can be done with private tables or public tables. There is an ever-expanding generators specific languageand video tutorials

Resources also include the chartopia subreddit and a private discord if you support their Patreon. There are several other articles on Rand Roll.

Perchance

Perchance is a text editor with a different feel. You can see how it works from a tutorial.

Anyone can see the source for generators on perchance so they can be copied and edited by others and are a good place for collaboration.

There is a perchance commuity at reddit. Other resources include an advanced tutorial, prebuild templates and plugins

Other Options

When I was first creating generators online one of the first tools was RandomGen by orteil. It is a simple plain text tool with a quick tutorial including some tips on making random generators.

Donjon has a very simple starter for making generators using JavaScript.

If you want a system that uses random tables on Windows then look at TableMaster. It's a paid product but there is a demo under the downloads section.

If you are a coder then you have the option of using whatever language you like to use. There are many interviews with generator creators on Rand Roll to give inspiration.

RPG Generator Resources

There is an rpg generators community at reddit.

If you want to experiment with procedural generators then there is a procedural generators community on reddit. And Amit Patel has a lot to say about proc gens in a Rand Roll interview.

If you want inspiration for random generators I cover many in my Generator Guides.

For more on the theories of making random generators there is Chances Muse by Steven Savage of 7th Sanctum

If you would like to know more about learning to code (using rpg generators as a motivation) then I can recommend starting in python or JavaScript.

I use python for my own generators and the main python site has a list of resources for non-programmers

JavaScript is possibly the most used programming language in the world. Code Academy has a JavaScript beginner's course and there is another one at w3schools.

Finishing Up

Send me a message or leave a comment if you have any other resources that might be useful.

And there is also a discord channel for rand roll and chaos gen