A few post-Christmas freebies

Well the holiday season is mostly over – but I’ve spotted a couple of leftover goodies at the bottom of the ol’ bag of holding! Let’s drag them out and see what we’ve got.

– Floor tiles and fantasy buildings: Courtesy of Billiam Babble (who himself creates some excellent floor tiles of his own that are not all free but well worth what he’s charging) is a link to the Black Ronin Roleplaying Games website, which has a bunch of free dungeon floortiles, sci-fi floor tiles, and fantasy wargame buildings that are yours for a click.  If you like what you see and get some use out of it, consider buying some of their other products (only two are available at present – river tiles and street tiles – and they are very reasonably priced) and keeping an eye on them for upcoming releases.

– Character development: Someone on Google+ asked about tables that you can use to build backstory and life events for characters, and I mentioned the  Central Casting books which usually provide some very crazy results, but are a goldmine for ideas. While searching for a link for more info, I discovered that all three books in the series are available (legally) for free on scribd – Heroes of Legend, Heroes Now!, and Heroes for Tomorrow. You can read each online or download them as TXT or PDF files. Start rolling on tables and making notes the way Jacquays intended, or just leaf through them and see what catches your eye – either way, you’ll get a more colorful, interesting character in the end. (EDIT: My friend Marques asked if Central Casting: Dungeons was also available, and it is! I didn’t even know that one existed, and it looks like a pretty neat supplement for fleshing out a dungeon crawl. Grab it, too!)  (Sorry guys, looks like these aren’t legal after all. My apologies to the authors and publishers.)

– Lastly, there’s this marvelous thing – Dave’s Mapper, a widget that spits out random hand-drawn dungeons. You can make a dungeon from a mix of different artists, or narrow it down to a few or even just one, then export the result to PNG to print out and stock with monsters, traps, and treasure. It’s a lot of fun to play with.

Enjoy, and I’ll be back soon to talk about this year’s New Year, New Game project!

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The Absurdly Detailed Town Generator

I found this on Reddit’s RPG section recently: An “absurdly detailed” town generator at mathemagician.net. Just tell it the size of town you’d like to generate, plug in some racial profile percentages, and it spits out a list of randomly generated details – members of the town guard, citizens (including adventurers and commoners), names of businesses, and more. Each business is given a staff (and in the case of taverns, a list of regular patrons, including the time of day they are likely to be there), and each character gets a one-line summary of their race, class, level, and two character traits.

Some of the business names end up sounding a little weird (and always seem to follow a two-word format), and there doesn’t seem to be a way to view/download all of the data in one piece (rather than clicking every link and saving each page that comes up).  But it’s still a lot of fun to play with, and great for making a quick list of citizens to help populate a fantasy town or city.

 

The bilbereous seminicance of an ancecial bridene.

soybomb.com/tricks/words is a little gadget that creates random pronounceable nonsense words based on real words in the English language.  Here’s a list of words that it made for me:

immerreration	pinostupon	bilbereous	alizesenlay	costaft
convilizes	ovelestancess	vageords	specamplier	dimnassympeth
picauth	nopung	digingentrice	actinimbing	restowins
malfunden	bearties	ablety	cleari	farmatuter
gonsiverlest	prodwondi	sariologa	cognized	rectivittic
seminicance	bustraticarbon	crosphys	mospecue	beyingslavoid
calindacery	vinisharchared	boyfrian	lawrapprop	tempasts
constreas	fighossplancy	prolater	nishintentian	thostravieth
resser	ancecial	decoolitier	ecution	downtroseviers
belitt	destirvits	ceippermings	criplicilly	bridene

You should totally generate a thousand or so of these words, put ’em into a text file, print them out, and put a copy in your roleplaying folder for those times when you need a genuine-sounding word to describe something that doesn’t really exist.

I know I’m gonna.

 

The Brainstormer!

What’s that, you say? You’re trying to come up with an idea for an adventure, and all you need is an adjective, noun, and a story complication?

Well then, you should give Andrew Bosley’s Brainstormer wheel gadget thingy a spin! Click the “Random” button in the center, and you could get something like:

self sacrifice – Egyptian – wagon

Which, with a little bit of applied brainstorming, could turn into something like:

a devoted and self-sacrificing archaeologist has gone missing while investigating the remains of some ancient Egyptian cattle wagons

…or…

a resurrected Egyptian mummy driving around in a stolen station wagon is terrorizing the neighborhood, and the PCs may have to skip their prom night in order to bring a stop to this evil.

…or something entirely different. Give it a try!

 

A nifty sci-fi name generator

…and since it seems that I’m making up for my lack of posting by tossing up links I find with StumbleUpon, here’s a nifty sci-fi name generator that will give you a list of names in seven categories (cyberpunk, space, Crest of the Stars, Cthulhu Mythos, Serenity, Star Trek, and Star Wars) and many different sub-categories under each:

SciFi Name Generator – http://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/name/

Here’s a sample of what it spat out for me for Space – Locations:

The Waurill Industrial Complex on Irra
The Jenoxium Mines of Pemphredo IV
The Ruins of Ilon City on 4663 Dou Xiu VII
The Living City of Kaferran
The Sicyl Station orbiting Hyldemoer
The Lital Military Base above Ashima
The Vanik Military Base above 4219 Circini VI
The Yeman Military Outpost on Graneang
The Niii Hakucti Colony
The Conian Military Outpost on Micrillan

And a list generated from Cthulhu Mythos – Unspeakable Names:

Ynga-Xothlabho
Glanath
Bha-Akehot
Ugha-Rhulhuggo
Tanithast
Ghat-Yuratho
Sha-Nyarloigua
Glyehoadre
Adda-Rlegoth
Addanonia

Since I’ve always been a little rough at coming up with appropriate names on the spot, sometimes I’ll generate a bunch of names with a program like this, cut and paste them into a Word doc, and print them out for future reference. Having it in paper (rather than making it up off of the top of my head) adds to the illusion that a casual reference to an NPC or location could be crucial to the story – and could even inspire me to make it so, if the mood hits me.

Have fun!

 

Geomorphs!

Yeah, I warned you about the erratic posting, didn’t I?

Here’s a nifty gadget I discovered on StumbleUpon today – Dyson’s Random Morph Map! Just let it know how wide you’d like your dungeon to be and how many squares to fill, and you’ll get an instantly generated dungeon map, just waiting to be populated!