RPG Evolution - The AI GM: Worldbuilding with Dwarf Fortress

It can be daunting to create a campaign setting with a rich history. Fortunately, AI can do it for you.

Leave it to the Dwarves​

A critical component of any D&D campaign is the history of the world, which can set the stage for epic quests and adventures. While creating a campaign history can be a daunting task, the game Dwarf Fortress can be used to generate a detailed history that can be exported and used in a D&D campaign.

This in itself isn't surprising. Dwarf Fortress, inspired by D&D, has been around long enough to be a major influence on Minecraft, which just closed the recursive loop by incorporating D&D into Minecraft.

Dwarf Fortress is a simulation game that simulates a fantasy world, complete with history, politics, and conflicts. The game generates a detailed history of the world, including the rise and fall of civilizations, wars, and natural disasters. Using this history as a basis, DMs can create a rich campaign world. Here's how.

Step 1: Download Dwarf Fortress​

Dwarf Fortress is a free game that can be downloaded from the Bay 12 Games website. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you want your own world and not a randomly generated one created by the game, you'll also need PerfectWorldDF. There are several ways to customize the world to more accurately represent your campaign world, including weather patterns and geographical features.

Step 2: Generate a World​

Once you have downloaded Dwarf Fortress, launch the game and select the "Create New World" option. The game will generate a new world, complete with history, geography, and civilizations. You can also determine how many years you'd like to run the simulator. I ran it for the maximum, a thousand years.

Step 3: Export the World's History​

To export the world's history, select the "Legends" option from the main menu. This will display a detailed history of the world, including information on civilizations, wars, and historical figures. To export the history, select the "Export Legends" option, and save the file to your computer. If you choose, you can generate up to 1,000 years of history, although it will use up considerable CPU resources to do so.

Step 4: Convert the Exported File​

The exported file is in a format that is not easily readable or usable in a D&D campaign. Therefore, you will need to convert it to a more usable format. One option is to use a tool like Legends Viewer, which can convert the exported file into a more readable format, including HTML or text.

The legends viewer has multiple sections, including Arts & Crafts, Infrastructure, Geography, Warfare, Other, Historical Figures, and Civs & Entites. If you run the program for the equivalent of a thousand years, you could spend hours browsing all the outcomes.

• Geography describes different biomes like the Azure Dune, which includes three monasteries, a tomb, and a camp throughout its long history.There are entire landmasses, mountains, and rivers named throughout the world's history.
• Warfare shows the victors and losers of conflicts, including the names of every character who died or was wounded. They're broken out into battles, conquerings, and raids.
• Civs and Entities details civilizations by species, including new forms of goverment and religion. Historical Figures includes major named characters, which can range from necromancers (a common type in Dwarf Fortress) to Deities, Dragons, and Natural Forces.
• Arts & Crafts covers everything else. Written content includes everything from choreography to essays, manuals to musical compositions, poems to short stories. Every items has an author and a name. Because Dwarf Fortress randomly generates results, including names, you can get some very interesting results. Eastunited the Violet Tongues (known in dwarvish as "Zuselbongnguk Goxasnam") is a legendary iron low boot that was created in Hellwalked by an unknown creature in the year 104 and was last seen offered by the human Sana Feastpoints to the human necromancer Iddim Empiresflashes in the year 341. And don't even get me started on Jackalcrazy, a legendary pair of pants (technically, tigerfish bone greaves).

Step 5: Use the History in Your Campaign​

Once you have converted the exported file, you can use it to create a detailed history for your D&D campaign. The history can be used to create factions, cities, and events that can form the basis of quests and adventures. Additionally, the history can flesh out your own campaign world's gaps.

There are several quirks that come with using the game as history. As mentioned above, it uses a random naming convention that doesn't always translate well to fantasy campaigns. Using some of these names results in phrases like "Snackelbows."

Not all species are represented, so there aren't gnomes for example. Moreover, the high fertility rate of goblins means they inevitably take over. By the end of my thousand year history, goblins accounted for 21.17% of the population, followed by cave swallows (20.63%), bats (20.49%), cave spiders (13.09%), and weirdly, elves (4.64%). In case you're wondering, dwarves have it tough in Dwarf Fortress; it's hard to tell but they may have been eliminated completely by the end of the history, or at least small enough to be grouped under Other (8.47%).

But what you get from Dwarf Fortress is enormous. The fate of every character is mapped out, including creatures and monsters of a variety of types, who they encounter, breed, and die. They generate books and songs, all of them named, along with deities they venerate. There's so much to pick and choose from that you can easily discard what doesn't make sense and take what you like.

Although it's not commonly thought of as a form of AI, Dwarf Fortress is one of the few game simulations that's so accessible you can use it to engage a variety of ways, from writing fiction to fleshing out of your campaign world.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Isn't worldbuilding one of the most interesting and enjoyable aspects of GMing? I honestly don't get why someone would want to offload that creative work to algorithms.

 

[GMMichael]

And here I thought donjon did it all! This is pretty awesome, and definitely more of a "program" than "AI."

Isn't worldbuilding one of the most interesting and enjoyable aspects of GMing? I honestly don't get why someone would want to offload that creative work to algorithms.

Maybe history isn't all that creative? You could almost call it a pattern (or dare I say, predictable?): community grows, butts up against another community. 2 communities join by agreement or by war. Repeat process.

I haven't read as much as I should, but I'm assuming that's mostly what Fire and Blood (or House of the Dragon) is like. Luckily for us, GRR Martin digs a little deeper and writes in the dramatic details - the family betrayals, the nuclear weapon dragon involvement, the secret plots. I'd much rather spend my world-building time adding the drama than coming up with yet another town name, ruler name, and the dates of the next war they got into.

 

[ccooke]

Isn't worldbuilding one of the most interesting and enjoyable aspects of GMing? I honestly don't get why someone would want to offload that creative work to algorithms.

Not for everyone, and not all the time. Huge numbers of DMs run campaigns written by other people, after all.

I usually run in worlds of my own making, but doing that takes time and effort, and there is a limit to how many I can run concurrently - so when some coworkers wanted to pkay, I ended up running Lost Mine for them, then Curse of Strahd.

Using Dwarf Fortress for ideas seems like an interesting idea.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I feel like the important step of statting up fish to be the most buff creatures in the universe, capable of dragging elephants into the water and skeletonizing them in seconds, and sponges that slay nations by inspiring their rage and then tanking every attack until everyone dies of exhaustion has been missed.

Yes, that was one sentence. I am proud of my child.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Maybe history isn't all that creative? You could almost call it a pattern (or dare I say, predictable?): community grows, butts up against another community. 2 communities join by agreement or by war. Repeat process.

I haven't read as much as I should, but I'm assuming that's mostly what Fire and Blood (or House of the Dragon) is like. Luckily for us, GRR Martin digs a little deeper and writes in the dramatic details - the family betrayals, the nuclear weapon dragon involvement, the secret plots. I'd much rather spend my world-building time adding the drama than coming up with yet another town name, ruler name, and the dates of the next war they got into.

For sure, basically no player is going to sit down and read a GM's vast treatise about the history whatever setting they're playing in. Players want to know what they can interact with. To that end, if they don't care about the precise chronology of such and such town's involvement in one of a hundred pointless wars, and you, the GM, also don't care...then why bother generating those details at all? Just focus on what everyone's actually excited to engage with.

Verisimilitude isn't worth everyone just shrugging at pointless details, yet feeling obligated to look up and talk about stuff that not only isn't of interest, but that were just spit out by a program. Love to play games where we're just going through the motions...

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Not for everyone, and not all the time. Huge numbers of DMs run campaigns written by other people, after all.

I usually run in worlds of my own making, but doing that takes time and effort, and there is a limit to how many I can run concurrently - so when some coworkers wanted to pkay, I ended up running Lost Mine for them, then Curse of Strahd.

You're right, I was being a jerk with that comment. I should have said that world-building can be one of the most interesting and enjoyable aspects. But I think one of the appeals of a great published adventure or campaign is when you appreciate what the writer(s) came up with, and how their worldbuilding might showcase or enhance a scenario's themes.

Similarly, a well-written set of random tables can spark a GM's imagination, creating surprising bits of worldbuilding in the moment.

Both of those approaches seem very different and more interesting to me than having a computer spit out a bunch of detailed information that, again, I don't think anyone at the table will care about (especially if everyone knows how it was generated).

 

[Lord_Blacksteel]

"Huge numbers of DMs run campaigns written by other people, after all."

Yes, PEOPLE.

Not programs, not video games, not AI. The whole point of RPGs is a creative exercise between people. Why not let an AI create the world? Why not then let an AI DM run the game? Why not then let AI's play the game? Then you can go off and do something else having saved yourself the drudgery of playing an actual RPG!

If you want a computer to run everything while you just play there are quite a few MMORPGs out there that do this now. You can play solo, with friends, or with complete strangers.

And no, many times you don't need a lengthy, wordy, detailed history of the campaign world to play a game in it. But if the players and the GM don't care about that stuff then how does having an AI write it save you anything? Just don't bother with it and fill in details as needed.

 

[Zaukrie]

Only a few posts in, and it's half judging people for how they have fun.

 

[Clint_L]

People don't like what I like! They are having badwrongfun!

I like world-building, or riffing on someone else's creation and adding my own stuff. Recently, I have also enjoyed playing with Chat GPT and getting it to do rapid iterations on MY ideas for my D&D campaign. If an AI-generated world works for someone, I say bless!

AI-assisted content is only going to proliferate as creators keep pushing boundaries and see what they can make that they couldn't before. As always, there will be folks declaring that it is all wrong and not really art and so-forth (c.f. pop art, rock and roll, hip-hop, etc.), but creators will just keep ignoring them and making new things.