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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galloglaich" data-source="post: 4654811" data-attributes="member: 77019">I'm a database programmer professionally, and for about 20 years I've been compiling a database of information about various pre-industrial historical cultures: material culture, art, weapons, economic and military structure, folklore, religion, military structure (including specific types of warrriors), political structure (including specific types of civil leaders, prophets, judges, sorcerers and the like) the economy - what kind of things these people bought and what they sold, and what kind of resources they had and what they made and etc. This also included tens of thousands of photographs of artifacts, (historical antiques where possible, accurate reproductions where not) transciptions of documents (such as the various eerie Grimoires of the European Renaissance) and hundreds of carefully selected photos of re-enactors wearing accurate period kit, not your run of the mill ren-faire stuff but the hard core obsessive people who are really doing it precisely right. I've used this database as a resource when I published the weapon and armor encyclopedia for The Riddle of Steel as well as some other things I've written in the RPG industry, and most recently to construct the codex. I always liked lifepath character generation ever since experiening Traveller as a kid in the early 80's, and around six or seven years ago I began to use my growing database as the basis of a sophitsitcated lifepath character generation software system, pretty much just for fun. I worked on it for about four years on and off and finally got it working how I wanted around last year. I let my friends use it to generate player characters for real games for the first time about six months ago. So using this system you can make a character from 15th Century Japan, or 3rd Century BC Gallicia, or 9th Century Norway or whatever. As you generate your character events take place, some random some due to decisions you make. You can get in legal trouble or be injured, sieze booty in a raid, get captured or exiled, etc. etc. All the countries are loosely linked together in the same geographical world so you can travel from place to place (travelling takes a lot less time if you have a horse or a boat). While generating your character you can engage in avocations (hobbies) ranging from magical research to brawling in pubs to human sacrifice. You can go buy and sell things in various markets, recieve penance for their sins in churches or wallow in drunkeness in the town pubs or public baths. When your character prints out it has a life history, it has realistic artefacts down to the smallest detail, and it has some built in flavor. For example a person who had been a butcher may have their old butcher knife and the slicing skills that go with it. Might also hate Spaniards since he was imprisoned by them for six months when he was 24. On print out, in theory, the system could translate characters into any system, 3.5 DnD, GURPS, HARN, Warhammer etc., though currently it only makes characters for my own houseruled version of D20 with the Codex combat rules. Lately I've added to this system so that I can use it as a DM's aid, to generate markets and encounters on the fly. So for example last week when my players raided a Berber caravan, I was able to instantly generate a print out of all the stuff it carried and make a handfull of suitible NPCs. Later when they went to a dwarven trading post I was able to do another print out of what was available for sale there.  So I rely on this system to provide a lot of the flavor without having to spend a huge amount of time on it (any more). Everything has a built-in internal consistency, fits in appropriately on the economic level etc. and instead of being limited to a page or two of generic artefacts from the players handbook or DMG, I have the equivalent of hundreds of pages of possible artefacts and items, all specific to various regions and periods of history. I find all the realistic kit (and having carefully thought it out way, way in advance) comes in very handy and fleshes out the world in a very nuanced way, adding to the level of immersion a great deal. I plan to expand the uses of this database now that the hard part (the lifepath character generation) is largely finished and working. G.</blockquote>

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