Obviously,
what you want, as a tabletop RPG designer or GM, ultimately, is to
come up with a few good solid components to make a coherent
adventure. Sadly, even the best "adventure generator" you
find online or PDF or book you buy, can provide you with elements or
the skeleton of a framework, but the content itself, the specifics,
often do not lend themselves to combinations.
There
are good, creative designers and GMs that can work with about
anything and make awesome adventures with the strangest ingredients,
but that type of genius may not come that easy to the rest of us, me
especially. But I do want to discuss and hopefully give an example of
how this type of thing CAN be done - it IS possible, but it isn't
magic - it does take effort and some rather unintuitive conclusions
and leaps of deduction, to make a plot.
Among
other things, I've created a random plot element generator, for lack
of a better term, uncreatively titled, "22,000 Count Word
Generator", which you can find here:
http://www.peracles-rpg.com/guest/jp/toys/index.php?pagecont=22
Video version of this article
Video version of this article
The linked Youtube video version of this article is here: [LINK].
The Audio is here: [LINK]
Now first off - I created this primarily for inspiration, so in its most basic form, it just spits out random things - adjectives, nouns, whatever, in no particular order or relation. From there I tried to refine it a bit and built one option to give some structure - a person or thing, an action or verb, an event or other thing - to sort of artificially give some hierarchy of usefulness to the random words. Then I decided to make both viable, so when you generate info with it, it may give you one style, or the other. And overall, this is of variable use - you can get crap no matter what, or some may be compelling. Both are set up in the form of Acts and Scenes, with a few scenes per Act, as per the standard narrative story or plot structure. Ideally, the elements of each would make sense and tie in to others, but as it is, these designations of "Scene 2, 3" are really just suggestions.
The Audio is here: [LINK]
Now first off - I created this primarily for inspiration, so in its most basic form, it just spits out random things - adjectives, nouns, whatever, in no particular order or relation. From there I tried to refine it a bit and built one option to give some structure - a person or thing, an action or verb, an event or other thing - to sort of artificially give some hierarchy of usefulness to the random words. Then I decided to make both viable, so when you generate info with it, it may give you one style, or the other. And overall, this is of variable use - you can get crap no matter what, or some may be compelling. Both are set up in the form of Acts and Scenes, with a few scenes per Act, as per the standard narrative story or plot structure. Ideally, the elements of each would make sense and tie in to others, but as it is, these designations of "Scene 2, 3" are really just suggestions.
Let's
just start with the first page I get, and we'll see what works and
what doesn't, and what we can do with what works. Here is the first
of the result sets that my generator gives us.
