More Character Portraits

Time for a few more portraits from Eve Online's forums stolen borrowed for RPG goodness. As usual they're a mix of good, bad, and indifferent. There's a long standing tradition of What's the avatar above you thinking? threads on the forums, these were all taken from one of those threads.

Are you sure you want to do that?

Apparently I ask this question too much. I was cleaning up an old mailbox from my Moria game and came across one of the email post-session discussions we had. In the context of figuring out why the group sometimes took a long time to decide on a course of action, my use of this phrase came up. One of the players said it pretty much stopped the group in its decision-making tracks. I was pretty surprised by that reaction, and came back with why I used that particular turn of phrase. I usually say it for one of three reasons:

Random Tables - Update

I've been adding more tables to the random stuff generator. I figured it was time for a full listing of what's there. Most of these are pretty complete. The ones in need of the most work are the demonic creatures generator and the modern residences generator. Here's the full listing:

• Modern Vehicles - Cars, motorcycles, trucks, and various oddball things you might see on the highway. There are generators available for individual vehicle categories or a random selection from all types.
• Modern Residences - Brief descriptions of houses, apartments, condos, and other homes. Each includes a few notes about the interior, exterior, and / or locale. Useful for on the fly scene setup.
• Demonic Creatures - Nasty beasts with fangs and fish heads and tentacles and... well you get the picture. Just descriptions for now.
• Dungeon Doors - Doors, complete with locks and traps.
• Dungeon Junk - Random bits and pieces of garbage to give some color to that empty room.
• Dungeon Noises - An assortment of random creaks, groans, and squeaks. What was that?
• Card Hands - Sets of four five- and seven-card hands dealt from a standard deck of playing cards.

More to come.

Treasure Generator Update

I updated the random treasure generator I've been working on today. It now has at least some data for all entries and is generating a wondrously random range of weird magic stuff. I also rounded out the armor and weapon tables, so entries should be functionally complete.

I also threw together a small collection of other random generators: modern vehicles, fantasy map descriptions, and modern residences (WIP).

Let me know what you think!

Randomness Revisited

A few days ago I wrote about the random treasure generator I was working on. This is just a brief followup to let folks know it's mostly done. Mostly.

Randomness

A long time ago, I had an Amiga 1000. Being both a gamer and a programmer, I spent some time playing around with various game-related programs. One of them was a text processor that read various table-like files and produced randomized results from them. Time moved on, and the Amiga went the way of the dinosaur and dodo, to be replaced by a PC running Windows and another running FreeBSD. Once again I did a bunch of messing about with table-driven randomizers and ported the old Amiga code over to new OSes and new languages.

The latest incarnation is written in PHP, and I just finished the beta version. The first test page is now up, a random treasure generator for D&D-like fantasy RPGs. If you have a few minutes, please stop by and give it a spin. Feedback welcome of course.

Link: http://www.pbegames.com/treasury/

Natural Beauty... OF DEATH

Saw this posted up on G+, figured I would share. Five awesome, deadly sites that you can visit in person, and die.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19705_the-5-most-spectacular-landscapes-earth-that-murder-you.html

Time to build a nice set of outdoor scenarios for these.