My Random Inn Generator already did a hopefully decent job of generating floorplans and menus.  But in the past couple of days, I’ve made some major upgrades to the Random Inn/Tavern Generator. I’ve added a random rumor generator and a random staff & patron generator.

The random rumor generator takes a bunch of random rumors I posted here and here previously and includes a few more.  It also substitutes random names in each rumor, if there are any people mentioned by name in a given rumor. But I already see ways to make that better. (Basically randomize parts of the rumors so most rumors may have multiple variations. Right now the 60+ rumors only vary by names mentioned.)

But the staff & patron generator is even more interesting. (I hope.) Of course, more options always help (particularly the short backgrounds and character notes) but this gives a one line description of everyone in the inn, and there are several parameters you may set such as the number of bartenders, wait staff and tables of patrons.  Then for each of those categories you may set the percent chance each is a non-commoner and what the minimum and maximum levels (if they are not commoners) are for each group.

It is very loosely OGL 3.5 based, but it should be trivial to convert it to any other D&D variant and I think most people could easily convert the staff & patrons to other systems they know well..

Here’s the main link: Random Inn/Tavern Generator

Then look for the links near the top of the page to the rumors, staff & patrons, and the menu generator mentioned above.

Despite going off on tangents like the Random Dungeon Generator project or writing here, progress on Dungeonographer (dungeon mapping software) continues.  A video clip demo has been posted to the Dungeonographer site.  Keep in mind the software is still pre-alpha, so it has many rough edges and incomplete features.

[Note: this is reposted from late last week.  I had just switched servers and it seems that many people were still pointed to the old server.  Therefore many didn't see this update when first posted.]

I just finished off the first cut of the last major new feature in Dungeonographer: Shapes.  In Dungeonographer, you will be able to draw circles/ovals or polygons in a similar way to drawing lines in Hexographer. (Of course, you can draw lines in Dungeonographer as well.)  For polygons, you will be able to set the width of the border, the texture or color of the border and the fill and set the opacity of the fill.  Circles/ovals allow for all of those settings as well as an ability to specify partial circles and how a partial circle is closed.

Shapes are essential to dungeon maps because they answer two common needs:

• You may have round rooms or even a round tower.
• You may have irregularly shaped rooms or an entire cavern complex.

As I said, this was the last major new feature that I needed to implement before alpha testing can begin but there are some smaller (but many are still fairly big) things that need to be completed first:

• Finish the default/built-in set of icons. (If you’ve seen the prior preview, you’ll know there are two sets of icons–one is semi-realistic for battlemats, and the second is “simple” for classic/GM maps.)
• Allow lines to be textured.  This feature allows for walls that look like rock or wood in the semi-realistic mode.
• Allow a feature to be moved.  Currently in my development version if you place a door, chair, bed, etc., in the wrong spot you’ll have to remove it and re-add it.
• Create a texture chooser component.  In some places (like the fill or border of a shape, a line that is supposed to be a wall, etc.) you may choose a texture.  It will be nice to see them instead of just relying on the name.
• There are two or three other minor things, but this should give you an idea of where things stand.

Hopefully in just a couple of weeks alpha testing can begin!

Also: What should be the default set of icons?  Too many icons will cause the program’s download size to be huge.  But too few will make it less useful. (Of course people will be able to add their own graphics.  Even the free version in this case will allow some arbitrary graphics to be imported.)  That said, the current list is:

• Chairs: wood and metal
• Tables: wood and metal, circle and rectangle and rectangular w/benches (6 total)
• Doors: wood and metal, single and double (4 total)
• More doors: secret, one-way, false metal and false wood
• Crate, barrel
• Privy, washbasin
• Fireplace
• Window
• Beds: single and double, wooden and “futuristic” (?)  (4 total)

Please post feedback on the icons or anything else you see!

If you’ve determined that a given hex has some “Ruins” the following chart will give you some ideas of what those ruins may have in store. You may want to roll/pick multiple options from the last column:

Using the chart, if one rolls a 4, a 10, a 12, and a 4 (so we have two factions) one would get: a mostly intact but half underwater city that has been mostly ransacked but may still hold a few treasures.  It has a number of trolls and orcs to contend with.   From that jumping off point, you could sketch a quick map of a half underwater city and develop a reason why the orcs and trolls are there, what treasures may still exist, if there are any traps or secret areas, etc.  Crawling goodness.

Despite going off on tangents like the Random Dungeon Generator project or writing here, progress on Dungeonographer (dungeon mapping software) continues.  A video clip demo has been posted to the Dungeonographer site.  Keep in mind the software is still pre-alpha, so it has many rough edges and incomplete features.

I just finished off the first cut of the last major new feature in Dungeonographer: Shapes.  In Dungeonographer, you will be able to draw circles/ovals or polygons in a similar way to drawing lines in Hexographer. (Of course, you can draw lines in Dungeonographer as well.)  For polygons, you will be able to set the width of the border, the texture or color of the border and the fill and set the opacity of the fill.  Circles/ovals allow for all of those settings as well as an ability to specify partial circles and how a partial circle is closed.

Shapes are essential to dungeon maps because they answer two common needs:

• You may have round rooms or even a round tower.
• You may have irregularly shaped rooms or an entire cavern complex.

As I said, this was the last major new feature that I needed to implement before alpha testing can begin but there are some smaller (but many are still fairly big) things that need to be completed first:

• Finish the default/built-in set of icons. (If you’ve seen the prior preview, you’ll know there are two sets of icons–one is semi-realistic for battlemats, and the second is “simple” for classic/GM maps.)
• Allow lines to be textured.  This feature allows for walls that look like rock or wood in the semi-realistic mode.
• Allow a feature to be moved.  Currently in my development version if you place a door, chair, bed, etc., in the wrong spot you’ll have to remove it and re-add it.
• Create a texture chooser component.  In some places (like the fill or border of a shape, a line that is supposed to be a wall, etc.) you may choose a texture.  It will be nice to see them instead of just relying on the name.
• There are two or three other minor things, but this should give you an idea of where things stand.

Hopefully in just a couple of weeks alpha testing can begin!

Also: What should be the default set of icons?  Too many icons will cause the program’s download size to be huge.  But too few will make it less useful. (Of course people will be able to add their own graphics.  Even the free version in this case will allow some arbitrary graphics to be imported.)  That said, the current list is:

• Chairs: wood and metal
• Tables: wood and metal, circle and rectangle and rectangular w/benches (6 total)
• Doors: wood and metal, single and double (4 total)
• More doors: secret, one-way, false metal and false wood
• Crate, barrel
• Privy, washbasin
• Fireplace
• Window
• Beds: single and double, wooden and “futuristic” (?)  (4 total)

Please post feedback on the icons or anything else you see!

Portion of a random dungeon from the Inkwell Ideas generator including a few cavern tiles.

About a week ago I unveiled my own tile-based random dungeon generator.  Now one of the promised improvements is ready: cavern tiles.  They are still a little simplistic (I’ll be adding more variety) but one of the nice things about these is the tile-joining scheme tends to keep a couple of cavern tiles grouped together.

Also note that right now the cavern tiles are shaded where there is solid rock.  I think that helps make the tiles more clear so all of them will get that effect soon.

As I said, more tiles will be coming and I’m still working up a way to stock the dungeon.  But now back to work on Dungeonographer. (Which has been updated a good bit over the past week and I’ll post an update here in a few more days.)

Portion of a random dungeon.

It has been a pretty big week here.  There was an update about Dungeonographer (dungeon mapping software) on Tuesday.  Yesterday a whole new wilderness icon set done by Kevin Chenevert/RedKobold was posted. Now there is a new tile-based random dungeon generator.

The random dungeon generator has some notes below the dungeon in creates.  But to head off any questions, here they are:

• This tile generator has multiple curent join points between tile sides. Currently, tiles can be joined by one opening/corridor in the middle of a side, two corridors equally spaced out on a side or no join points on a side.
• More join points are possible and will be added in the months to come.
• Cavern tiles will also be added in the months to come. There will likely even be a way to make part of the random dungeon (several contiguous tiles) cavern tiles–or even most or the entire dungeon! (Instead of having a lone tile or partial tile with cavern features.
• More variety will be added to the tiles. (These may be added a little at a time.)
• There will also probably be ways to control the mix of the tiles.
• Dungeon stocking will also be coming in the next few months. (I write this in June 2010, but I have other projects that I need to give more of my attention. Dungeon stocking a tiled random dungeon seemed pretty hard initially but I have an approach in mind that should do at least half the work for a GM.)

So this is one of the projects keeping me from finishing Dungeonographer.  (Sometimes one’s muse forces you in a direction that you know is keeping you from other things.  But it has to be followed, at least to some degree.)  Now that the random dungeon generator has been released (albeit as a .6 version or thereabouts) it should be easier to put time where it should go.

Alpha testing of Dungeonographer is a little less than month away (I hope, life schedule and other projects permitting) but I want to share a couple of the special features of Dungeonographer via samples.

Sample result of Dungeonographer's One Page Dungeon Wizard. (Click to enlarge.)

One-Page-Dungeon Wizard

The first sample is an exported screenshot of a web page from Dungeonographer that is the result of the “One-Page-Dungeon Wizard” Export feature. (Click on it to see the high quality full size version.)

Basically, you give it the scale of your map (how many squares per inch) and how many dots per inch (dpi) you wish the image to be and it will save your dungeon in a one page dungeon format.  The wizard saves an image of your dungeon design and saves your notes as a web page with the image embedded.

As you can see, the example mostly has placeholder/dummy text.  (I’ve been so busy working on the software that I wasn’t trying to put together a fully fleshed out dungeon yet.)  But this should give you a good idea of the feature.

Depending on how much text you have in your notes, you can try to re-size the text to fit on one page  in your browser by checking “print preview” in the browser and increasing or decreasing the font size.  If you know some html (most everyone does these days) you can modify the page even more or you can load it into a web page editing program.

This sample shows the “classic” icon set.  I plan to make it easy to switch these black icons to blue icons to match the look of the classic 80′s modules.  A similar feature to switch icon colors exists in Hexographer, and I think it can be made a little better.

All of the built-in/default icons of Dungeonographer will have two versions:

• The classic set mentioned above that is reminiscent of modules published “back in the day.”
• A semi-realistic set suitable for use when exporting the map (or parts of the map) for printing a battlemat.

Example of exporting a portion of a map as a battlemat. (Click to enlarge.)

Battlemat Maker

Which leads to the next sample image.  (Click on it to see the high quality full size version.) The image to the left was created by using a feature that lets you print an enlarged version of a portion of a map to make a battlemat.  So you can select each portion (room, corridor, intersection) of a map and print them out and reassemble them to make a complete battlemat.  Or just the areas that may have battles.  In most cases I believe you’ll want to make high quality 300dpi 1″ squares for use as battlemats with miniatures.

This area is centered on the intersection where a battle may be planned.

There are several floor types, wall styles, chairs, and tables.  This example shows just one wall, chair style, table and floor tile.

To use this feature, instead of exporting the entire map as a PNG image, there is an “File” menu option to export an area as a PNG image.  Once you choose that a dialog appears telling you to select the area on the map by clicking one corner of the area you want on the map and dragging to the opposite corner of the area you want.  A box appears showing you the area you selected.  Then as with the one-page-dungeon wizard you set the number of squares per inch and the image quality (dots-per-inch).  Finally click save and it prompts you for a location and filename for the file then it saves the image.

Once you have an image, print it in using your favorite image viewer tool.  Native printing will be coming to Dungeonographer, but I don’t know for sure if it will happen before the alpha testing begins.

Schedule

As mentioned above, I hope to start alpha testing in a little under a month.  Two or three weeks ago I had a list of about 30 things to do, and the list is now down to 20 although a few things were added while working on them.  (For the record I wasn’t just doing the easiest things!)   Not all of the 20 remaining items need to be finished before alpha testing begins, but most of them do need to be wrapped up first.

Please post any thoughts or constructive criticism.  I plan to do another Dungeonographer preview in a week or two.

Simple geomorph in the style I plan to use.

Lately I’ve been thinking about dungeon geomorphs.  Hack/ has a great tile geomorph based dungeon generator.  A few other writers have been posting new geomorph tiles in other styles and have been posting interesting ways to use them.

I’ve long thought about doing my own dungeon generator based on geomorph tiles, which led to the Random Inn Generator project, but I also don’t want to just do something someone else is doing unless I can put a different spin on it.  And I think I’ve got an idea, even though I’m only going to fall behind on my other projects.

Here is what I think I can do differently:

• It seems that most tiles all have a single join point in the center of each side.  This makes it easy to see where the tiles join and it limits the options to a small degree.  I think I’ve identified a way to allow for any number of squares on each side to be join points and to allow the algorithm putting the tiles together to smartly assemble a dungeon level based on these restrictions.
• I also have a way to rotate the tiles en masse so I can do one design for each tile and rotate them all 3 times automagically with a tool that will also rename it appropriately so the algorithm can correctly place it.
• Although tile based random dungeon generators are almost impossible to stock (determine which rooms have which monsters and traps) I think I can do something that does at least half the work for the user.

So expect to see a new tool soon!

Those of you who like Hexographer may know that I’ve been working up a Dungeon mapping equivalent called “Dungeonographer” over the past two months.  It was something that I had considered for months, but when I received my 8th request within a week for “a tool like Hexographer to make dungeons,” I thought it was time.

And that’s not to say that work has stopped on Hexographer.  Absolutely not.  Many of the features in the last release of Hexographer were things that were needed and written for Dungeonographer, but those features made sense in Hexographer as well. (For example, having multiple features in a hex was something I wanted in Hexographer, but it was needed in Dungeonographer because any given square may have a chair, table, door, or some combination of all of those features.)  Likewise many of the features I’ve been working on for Dungeonographer will be tested and tweaked for use in Hexographer.

The two programs  share some of the same code, so I can write a new feature for one of the tools and if the feature also fits the purpose of the other tool it can usually be added fairly easily to the other tool now.  (Of course, the ability to do that came at a price where I had to spend some time “refactoring.”  Refactoring is what programmers call the process of making code that already works better in some way: more generic, faster, simpler, easier to test, etc.)  In this case I had some objects that were hexagon specific and I made generic versions of those objects that had all the functionality that applied whether something was a hexagon or a square. Then I extended the generic objects and made new objects that inherited the generic functionality but had code specific for Dungeonographer or Hexographer. If I didn’t explain that well I apologize.  In short: changes had to be made so that upgrades to Dungeonographer could be easily applied to Hexographer and vice versa.

So with all that out of the way, about a week and a half ago I had a list of about 30 things that I still need to do for Dungeonographer.  I finished 10 of them, but then I added 2 new issues.  Based on that progress and after examining each of the remaining issues I’m estimating alpha testing will begin in four to six weeks.  That is somewhat dependent on what other tasks pop up and any outside forces, but it includes some padding for those possible delays.  I think I’ll have some screenshots in the next week.  I’m still being coy about some of the special features in Dungeonographer, but I think I’ve found a way to make most people happy with the software’s approach and results.

Great Comet of 1577 (Woodcut by Jiri Daschitzsky)

Last night when I came home there was a dead snake on the sidewalk with no visible reason why it was dead.  As I walked it back to the woods to throw it away I came across a baby bird in the middle of the backyard.  It opened its beak when I got near it, but otherwise it wouldn’t move.

This all got me to thinking about omens, so I thought I should put up a chart of random omens.  Maybe you’re foretelling some event and some of these omens will fit or maybe you have some other reason describe them in an adventure.  Or maybe you just want to add one randomly to throw the players off track or to describe something that happened on an otherwise uneventful day.

Notes:

• As always, these random charts present ideas in a quick way that allows for random determination.  But if you want to pick one that best fits the situation or if the random result isn’t appropriate, go ahead and pick an option or adjust the random result.
• I’d love to get to 20 event types, so if you have suggestions for more, please post.
• If you like random charts, there are a lot of them here at Inkwell Ideas: random potion descriptions; charts of effects of expired potions; random location names based on various languages (UK English, Chinese, Indian, Native American) are just a few examples.