eigengrausgenerator
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How do you use Eigengrau's Generator?
🕑 Added 2020-06-05 01:16:49 +0000 UTCI was thinking about how I should improve the generator recently, and realised that it might be useful to share how I use the generator, and also hear how other people are using it.
I have essentially three different use cases.
1) The most simple is when the party has reached a stop-over town, and I need to roll up some characters for them to interact with- they're tired, have damaged equipment, and need to stock up on potions, sell items, etc. This is where Eigengrau's Generator really shines- I take a random town, and use whatever happens to be relevant. Nine times out of ten, I can get a good thirty minutes to an hour of play time out of their interactions with the town, the shopkeepers and owners of taverns, etc, and the markets.
2) For more elaborate set pieces that are more than just 'one off' stop-overs, I use Eigengrau's Generator as a base. I copy+paste (but now, with the hash function, I just make a note of the hash) the relevant info and buildings into a OneNote file, and add notes and modifications as necessary.
This is a time-saving measure, as I don't think any of the players really care about the specifics of the taverns, they want a certain amount of uniqueness and interest, but still expect it to be a tavern, at the end of the day. If I decide that I want to go against the grain of that, and make it really unique, then I'm not going to bother trying to finagle the Generator into conforming- I'm just going to write out what I want it to say.
3) For serious, edge-case scenarios, I can modify the raw values to get exactly what I want. Cloning the repository, I can edit things such as racial demographics and economic ideologies to conform to something that fits what I'm after.
Eigengrau's Generator is defensively coded in such a way that you can typically pass attributes about just about anything, which will override the "random" values. This is especially useful for when you are anticipating your players spending a long time in an area that is way outside of the norm.
An example of that use case was when my players ventured into Orcish territory, which was a fascist religious pacifist (read: they still did looting and killing, but in a very specific way; killing out on raids was not okay, whereas torturing captured prisoners was A-O Good) subculture. Involved a bit of prodding around in the ways that various files are created, but produced a fairly reliable orcish settlement.
It's always super useful to hear how other people use the generator, and how they would like to use the Generator; I'm certainly not the be-all, end-all of how to use it, I use it in a couple ways that work for me, but the tool ideally should work for more people. So, how do you use the generator? Is there anything that you wish that it could do, that you think it should be able to do?
Comments
I've been using it in a couple of ways recently. For the main towns in the campaign I already have a good idea of what I want there and who the important characters are, but I use it to generate people to answer questions like "who else is staying at the inn that evening" or "who do they meet at the bakery while getting scones". For other towns, I'm thinking of them more as plot locations ("this is where a farmer's pet baby ankheg has disappeared") so I'll use it to generate buildings and people that the characters will visit, like taverns, and copy and paste interesting output into my campaign OneNote notebook.
