2018-10-19 Multiverse Problems

I liked reading @Halfjack’s blog post on how to publish for a crazy multiverse/intergalactic game. What he said about Soft Horizon resonated with my Planescape experience in a previous campaign. The idea is great. The background fantastic. But the execution needs details, and art, and inspiration. I like his idea of writing follow-up stand-alone thematically linked games.

=> @Halfjack | blog post | Soft Horizon | Planescape

I think I could get into the idea for my map and description generator. I’m thinking of Skyrim. There, you walk the landscape and occasionally you find castles, towers, dungeons, camps with giants, mountain peaks with dragons, troll lairs, and when I go there, I always feel as if there is an actual story there to be found, if only I’d take the time. The bandit boss has a name and goals; the elven sorcerer residing in their dungeon has a plan, and you can involve them in your quest against the giants of this or that mountain pass.

=> map and description generator

So, I think I’d like to expand on the fractal nature of adventure. Zak said something like that when I got started on Hex Describe. I understood it as him wanting a generator that would generate details at every level from the wilderness down to the dungeon, from then political parties down to the individual hermits.

I believe there is a way to translate a vision of these adventures into building blocks which can them be codified. Yes, at first the output of these generators is formulaic and boring. But it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t come for free, that’s for sure. But a generator implemented in software, or better yet, implemented in random tables like Hex Describe, could be used by others and could survive the software using those very tables.

​#RPG ​#Indie ​#Old School