[CMG] Lexus - Dwellings Vol I : NEW REVIEW!

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Creative Mountain Games' new generator the Lexus - Dwellings Vol I has been reviewed at the d20 Magazine Rack

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Here comes another excellent generator from Creative Mountain Games to help you quickly come up with the parameters of a dwelling on the fly or during game prep. This combines the simple effectiveness of javascript, HTML and frames to allow for quick and ready generation of Dwellings. From a cave to a mansion, simply click a few buttons to find the size, construction materials, types of rooms, and what's inside. This gives you the furniture, lighting and all manner of miscellaneous items with a few easy steps. There's even a few buttons to generate the overall quality of the building and its furnishings.

Simply build the dwelling based on easily chosen parameters by clicking on the buttons to the right. Lexus - Dwellings Vol. I creates the output on the lefthand side of your screen for easy highlighting, copying and pasting during game prep. If you're a laptop DM, you can simply use this generator on the fly to fill out a community during gameplay.

Best yet, just as with the Lexus - Unlimited Titles generator, once you've purchased your Lexus - Dwellings Vol I generator all future revisions are part of the package and sent to you free!

Available at RPGNow.com by clicking here!

I love this little program! I typically spend way too much time in game prep coming up with descriptions for the buildings I think the PCs might want to enter...and of course those are the buildings they don't go in. Clearly I need to let this program do the work on the fly for me. Geez, at this rate, I will easily make my goal of being a Laptop DM by the end of September.

I hope you'll make us a tavern generator next, Mark! Who's in the bar and what's on the menu are two of the features I'd like to see. Oh, and the tavern name, of course.

Let me echo BC's recommendation. This is a great little utility for adventure prep, since it generates the stuff that I find difficult to do: flavor text and description.

Basically, it's an html utility that generates building descriptions and contents. You click on the appropriate buttons (some, all or none), and the building description is built up item-by-item, which you can then cut-and-paste into your adventure document.

Options are: Size (Small, medium, large); Type of Construction (wealthy, common, poor, special), Features & Furniture (Common Room, Kitchen, Dining Hall, Bedroom, Library), Additional Items in room (Common Room, Kitchen, Dining Hall, Bedroom, Library, Hallway, closet, cellar, attic), and General quality (Wealthy, common, poor).

Here's an example of the output:

Here sits a long-forgotten steading with a tiny common room, a kitchen, a large bedroom and a side space used as a bedroom.

Formed with small light green limestone blocks (with partial pine flooring) and modest enhancement.

- Common room features and furniture include a fireplace, an enormous, stone common table, numerous stone benches and additional lighting by small candles.

- Kitchen features and furniture include an accomodating fireplace used for an oven, an undersized, wooden table used for food preparation, quite a lot of cabinets for storage and extra lighting supplied by a wagon wheel chandelier.

- Bedroom features and furniture include a great bed, a new dresser, a locked closet, a stone writing desk with a solid chair and illumination from smoky candles.

- The dining hall features and furniture are a paltry fireplace with a tiny, wooden dining table, many stone chairs and added illumination from an intricate chandelier.

- - Items in the common room include a potted plant, a buff sandstone figurine, a cloth cap, a child's toy and a hammer.

- - Items in the kitchen include pots, pans, plates, utensils, a number of candles., a shadowwood figurine, a bowl, a bottle of perfume and a used toothpick.

- - Items in this bedroom include a stick, a dark red alabaster framed picture, an empty jar, an empty keg, a dress and a bright red jerkin.

- - Items in the dining hall include a potted plant, a buff limestone figurine, a cloth cap, a chart of the tides and a crowbar.

- - Items in the cellar include miscellaneous clothing (including a torn pair of breeches), miscellaneous tools (including a wood-handled saw), a wooden holy symbol, a buff limestone statue, a shelf on one wall, a saddle, a document with rules for a tournament and a shoulder belt.

- - Items in the attic include miscellaneous clothing (including an old tunic), miscellaneous tools, a small crate, a potted plant, a buff limestone figurine, a cloth cap, a chart of the tides, a crowbar and a foppish hat.

(The quality of the home is slightly worse than customary and the furnishings are economical.)

Click to expand...

About all it's lacking is a map generator.

I see a great compilation of html DM's tools in CMG's future

This is a very cool bit of software. It's an incredible tool to help add flavor to rooms. For those of you who play or DM in on-line campaigns, you can easily copy and paste the results into posts, emails, or chatroom browsers. When I was editing through the code, I found it very easy to use.

What's even more wonderful, the product is easily upgradeable. i would not be surprised to see another version of this in the near future.

...Shadeus

CMG Lead Editor

This is really cool. It really is a nice little utility for at the gaming table. Especially when one has players that enjoy say "So, what does the third building on the left look like?"

I'm glad that everyone is enjoying this utility so much. It's certainly one of the handiest things I've ever created!

First off, may I say that there are lots of great things about Dwellings.

These are not some of them:

Type of Dwelling

* Here's a creative shack with almost two rooms and a closet with an unhinged door.

* Here's a loyal cabin with a solitary room and nothing more of note.

* Here's an amiable cave with a single open space and an open hole in the roof for a chimney.

I love it when dwelling places have personality... perhaps not that much personality, though.

It's all a matter of the phrasing. Perhaps "It looks like it is inhabited by a creative person" as an addendum would work better. Adding a touch of personality to a place is a good idea, though... it hints at the demeanour of the inhabitants.

Type of Construction

* Created with piecemeal mohogany granite blocks (with uneven dirt floors) and amateur enhancement.

What is "piecemeal mohogany granite blocks", by the way? (The correct spelling is "mahogany" - is this two entries that have been squashed together by mistake?)

* Built with daub and wattle walls (with uneven dirt floors) and novice ornamentation.

Hmm...

This one is great:

"Assembled by noble engineers with walls and floors of colossal white sandstone slabs and archaic trimming while aided by fiendish henchmen."

Suddenly I have a dungeon complex idea...

The other parts of it I found were really useful.

Features and Furniture

- Kitchen features and furniture include a narrow fireplace used for an oven, a sizable, stone table used for food preparation, quite a few shelves for storage and extra lighting supplied by several lanterns.

- The dining hall features and furniture are a dominating fireplace with a huge dining table, cozy chairs and added illumination from candles.

- The library features and furniture include a lot of shelves, merely a few books, numerous stone chairs, a short, stone table and reading light from a central fireplace.

These are great. I love this sort of detail, and it's a pain to think it up.

Additional Items in Rooms

- - Items in the kitchen include pots, pans, plates, utensils, a rocking chair, a pink marble figurine, a club, a contract and an arrow.

- - Items in the attic include miscellaneous clothing (including an old cloak), miscellaneous tools, a box of small stones, a musical instrument, a copper statuette, a plate with some scraps of food, a love letter, a receipt for goods sold and a long, yellow sash.

The items can be a real grab-bag. They often need editing, but I think they're very good value.

General Quality

(The quality of the home is leaky and the furnishings are poor.)

(The quality of the home is the greatest and the furnishings are renown.)

Renown? "of renowned quality", perhaps. I'm just glad to see that it's not "of reknown".

All in all, this is something that is extremely useful for the DM who is running an urban adventure, or perhaps an unusual dungeon. With a little imagination, some of the descriptions would easily give inspiration for description of the rooms of leaders in dungeon complexes.

Well done!

Wow--praise everywhere, I feel like anything I'd say would just cheapen all of this other glowing comments! But really, it's well deserved. I like these little generator things a ton, and they really do work well. Playing in a city campaign for any amount of time becomes very hard to do, especially if there are buildings that are entered frequently and at random--why hurt your head trying to be overly creative on things like that when you can have a nifty generator do it for you! Use you creativity to throw some more nefarious tactics against your PCs in combat, some more devious plots that they must thwart.

My one complaint is that it doesn't work to well on the small screen of a PocketPC... only two of the three frames are even visible on the screen. The third frame is simply missing... However, since Mark is an incredibly cool guy, he's going to try and fiddle around with the generator and get something that works well for a PocketPC!

Pick this one up--it's a keeper!

Thank you, Trev.

NEW REVIEW!

Creative Mountain Games' new generator the Lexus - Dwellings Vol I has been reviewed at the d20 Magazine Rack