As well as writing random tables and articles here at Rand Roll, I also create random generators at Chaos Gen.
[Photo by Pawel Nolbert on Unsplash]
The most recent project over there is a long-term one on creating generators by environments. The first one of these is the Sea.
Why the Sea
I wanted to build great generators for fantasy settings, and to focus decided to pick one of my six environment. The theory being it would be easier to create for a niche and generators would have more impact and utility if they were specific.
After a poll sea was the winner, which is fine as most players love anything with ships, pirates and ports.
Generators
So I've been creating Sea -Themed Generators, some of which are specific to the sea terrain such as Fantasy Ship Name and Fantasy Ship.
Then there are some such as Rumours and Plot Hooks and Quick Fantasy NPC which have sea added as an environment to an existing ones.
Then the are generators such as Fantasy Sea Encounters which are new and will act as templates for Fantasy City Encounters and Fantasy Wilderness Encounters.
These have all been built with the Fantasy Sea Tool in mind, which is still in development and needs some user interface (and other) improvements!
Supporting Articles
As well as building out generators Rand Roll has some Sea-related articles, mostly random tables. There are also guides for Sea-related Random Tools and Fantasy Sea PDFs.
The other environments will be supported in a similar fashion.
The Themes
One idea is also to have themes that can be applied across all the environments. Ones that change the generators and shift the tone or genre. Themes such as Horror, Faerie and Frost.
So a theme and an environment could be combined to have a set of generators for Sea Horror, Frost-themed Underground and Faerie Wilderness...
I've started work on the Horror theme and this should be my next focus!
The Terrains
Next are the terrains that were originally built for the D&D Encounters Generator. These have been adapted to fantasy versions (as seen in Fantasy Location) and a set of each will be used for relevant generators in an environment.
For Sea these are Coastal, (Open) Sea and Underwater as seen in Sea Encounters. I'm considering adding Island and Port to these as other terrains.
The Ancestries
Then some generators have ancestries. I will be adding these and deciding what ones would be useful. Whether to have all the fantasy ancestries (such as dwarf and elf) or focus on ones which make sense for sea adventures. This would include humans and then particulars such as tritons, merfolk, crabfolk and sea elves.
Finishing Up
So this is what's going on for building random generators at Chaos Gen.
Any sea tools requests?
