While I was fixing that, I imported a few new countries:

Kenya
Laos
Lebanon
Libya
Lithuania
Madagascar
Malaysia
Mali
Mozambique
Panama
Papau (New Guinea)
Philippines
Rwanda
Saudi Arabia

The database now contains slightly over 2 million names.

Start with an open sourced set of maps and perhaps initial stocking. Then completely rethink how monsters, treasure, and such are distributed. My first cut would be encode rooms not as just a specific location but as something with volume / square footage. Groups of rooms should form zones that are easily controlled or should be utilized as a thematic region. Zones could easily span levels if the entry/exit points are contained within them. Dungeon levels are artifacts of system design. They generally contain a specific level of creature / difficulty. While that could be modeled as a concept, I believe an intelligent stocking / disruption model would serve the same goal.

Monsters details would need to grow beyond simple statistics. The region of influence they could potentially control and the desire to do so are interesting starting points. Further, other creatures they tolerate, manipulate or seek to eradicate are far more complicated factors. A group of ogres can dominate the kobolds near an entrance but are afraid of the beholder. If they have a slave or three, how do they utilize them to defend the space they control or increase their status within the dungeon?

Monsters also have metrics for desire. Perhaps they just want to control an area or grab the loot the adventurers might otherwise get. The relationships with other denizens will drive what do on a daily basis. Fear, greed, survival, etc. might all influence what they undertake. Does the desire for treasure lead them to try to overcome something else?

Treasure and traps would be constantly changing elements. If a minotaur steals treasure from a group of adventurers, he’d would control more loot enticing the greedy residents to attack him. Monsters could use traps as deterrents to enter the zone they control or as warning systems. More intelligent creatures would employ more traps but would have to do so at the expense of other activities.

When no one is around, the dungeon would continue to evolve. Based on some fixed time scale, the creatures would continue to live. They might attack others, build stuff, or undertake other activities necessary for daily life. Every action would result in changes within the dungeon which would be reflected in the current state.

An interesting concept but adventurers are the ultimate disruptive force. Why not enable game masters to enter events such as the death of creatures, stealing of loot, disabling of traps. The changes would then cause a reaction throughout the dungeon. The propagation would then be available to others or the same GM to utilize.

The base map would be unlikely to change. Everything else would need to be available as a download in PDF form. Likely in small chunks such as a couple of levels. Coding it would be damn fun. I’m dubious as to the usefulness. Probably best left as a half-cocked idea than a major effort with no consumers.

Greetings! I want to thank you for your online AD&D generators. I particularly like the one that spits out a whole pdf of treasure results, that’s a great idea! I have a request if you’re looking for a project: a pdf generator for AD&D ability scores, Method IV (i.e. roll 12 complete sets of 3d6 in order, and choose one). That would rock. – Alex

Well Alex, you get part of the request. MethodIV is now available as a utility along with the 3 other methods. I have not made it direct to PDF yet. Still, you can use the PrintPDF button at the bottom of the results to create a PDF like all of my generators.

Hopefully that serves your immediate needs.

If you already have ideas, use them. I use name, treasure, plot and other generators to spark my imagination and to fill in holes. I also use them to alleviate tedious table consulting so games flow faster. Likewise, they can eliminate a bunch of prep time if I don’t have to look up specific elements that can be automatically calculated.

For many systems with a near infinite combination of skills/powers/feats, I find them even more useful. Random conglomerations can inspire a nifty NPC, that I would not put together because many options are mechanically non-interesting. Still, they reflect oddball combinations the game designer envisioned.

RPG’s as a whole are becoming an eclectic mixture of table-top and computerized bits. I suspect a significant portion of community expects applications to be available for complex systems. Time is always an issue in life. Personally, I have an expectation that most systems of the future should be coupled with applications which can help me deliver the best possible game to my players at the table. The desire is unrealistic for many smaller, independent systems but the big names should have those tools available as part of the game.

Am I crazy?

Greg #1 dropped me a line to say how useful the various Labyrinth Lord utilities were for tossing together an adventure. Greg’s returning to gaming due to the request of his wife to play D&D. She’s never played and he picked Labyrinth Lord as an introductory system. Greg comes from the Red & Blue era. He’s made an excellent choice of modern systems to introduce D&D to his wife. Hopefully, she’ll soon join us in the fantastic, chaotic realm of RPG enjoyment.

Greg #2, aka Gregory, sent in a feature request. He asked that I include an option in the 1E Treasure Generator to generate gems and jewelry independently of treasure type. The suggestion made complete sense. I already broke out many different elements so why not gems & jewels? Quality requests require a quality response. The feature is now included. In return, Gregory asked what he could do for me. He offered to promote the site. I countered with him buying me a beer. He won by promoting Mithril & Mages on two separate sites. Now I need to buy him a beer.

Receiving feedback from visitors energizes me to continue to improve. No matter if it is a bug report, feature request, or just a quick word of thanks/commentary.

Cheers to Greg and Gregory. May all your games be epic and the dice roll in your favor.

As are the following countries: Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, Chile, Columbia, Congo, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Iceland, India, and Israel.

Considering I used a U.S. based data source, there are a) Americanized names in the list, b) errors, and c) names in languages I cannot read. I chose to keep (c) for flavor.

(A) is an artifact of the data source. Hand assembling the list is not an option and (b) is due to the lack of updates to the data set along with crazy American ignorance. Such is life. Feel free to complain.

I tried utilizing UTF to include additional character sets. The data may be completely borked. Should that prove accurate, I’ll fix that countries effected.

The comments were correct. The Poland database was chuck full of erroneous entries, many of which with Germanic origins. I scrapped the table in favor of a source directly from Poland’s government. I’ll have to evaluate other countries derived from the GNS data at some point in the future.

Issue #8 is free for a limited time. The contents include some great material including setting materials and two mini-adventures placed within the setting. The adventures can easily be dropped into other campaigns.

I’ve been hacking through the 6600 modern occupations in the occupation generator over the last few days. The editing is tedious. Given the classification origin of the list, I expected far fewer duplicates and variants. Once done, the database for the generator will be updated, which should produce more interesting results. I may also release the pruned list as a PDF. Six thousand possible occupations is a lot more interesting than the few dozen jobs most games include as interesting character occupations. The breadth of possibilities allows for more engaging NPC’s.

As my brain tired of editing, I got distracted and started yet another random treasure generator. This one is for Adventure Conqueror King (ACKs). The system is novel in a few different ways. If you want to expose the strange tendrils of a system, translate the tables into code. I mentioned a preview link on G+. Unlike most of my generators, I’m keeping this one stand-alone so I can toss it over to the fine folks at Autarch if they find it useful. It’ll have my ‘normal’ set of ajax related dependencies. Someday I should transition to jquery.

Finally, I chose to opt out of my original opt-in for the DNDNext playtest. The playtest launched while I was on vacation. During that time, I realized I just wasn’t that interested in yet another variant of the franchise. While I am certain the designers are working hard, nothing reported to date compels me to even bother reading the materials. Large corporations are not driven not by innovation, but by the bottom line. The crazy number of badly written polls regarding the release suggest the same. Far more interesting products are available from a plethora of small gaming companies.

Next on the list was the over zealous approach to magical equipment for Non-Player Characters. The NPC code is utilized not only by the Monster Stocker but also by the NPC Generator. The original code used a fixed constant as a multiplier based on character level. The result was a lot of magic in far too many results. The replacement is an exponential function to significantly increase the odds high level NPCs have magic while eliminating many spurious results for lower levels. Additionally, the average magical bonus for equipment was changed to be more inline with charts.

Overall, the changes create far more useful results. The DM can always tweak up as desired but constant need for reduction was annoying. Erring on the low side is far more useful than being prolific.